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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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This is why so much money is being pumped into AI. This is the future and our politicians are too old to understand any of it. It isn't sentience you should be worried about folks.
This is not AI. You don't need AI to create a system that does this. All you need to do is link together some customer data with pricing data.
But I don't blame you for falling for the scam. People are getting rich by pretending that AI is much more capable than it actually is. In reality, what do we have? We have systems that can generate text that sounds fairly natural but has lots of errors in it. We have systems that can generate pictures that look okay. That's about it. That's what AI has given us in the past 2 years. All of the other stuff, all of the formulas and databases and spreadsheets, that's been around for decades.
Taken too literally to this post in a vacuum, yes. Taken with the news that Kroger was thinking about dynamic pricing, don't delude yourself into thinking LLMs are the extent of what the "AI" (stupid term but let's discuss ideas and not the words) goals are. The real ultimate goal is to be able to mine the near infinite amount of consumer data available and turn that into increased profits. Dynamic pricing will be a piece of it and I believe this cartoon illustrates a piece of a complex subject in an easy to digest manner.
You and I both agree that LLMs aren't shit except for a narrow window of usefulness, mainly a distraction, and the data shows consumers don't really like "AI". So why is there still so much cash in "AI"? Maybe you think it's a market pump, but there is cash in nvda because it's undeniable GPUs will continue to be utilized in huge numbers for server farms crunching associations. There is cash in the LLM gatekeepers because those firms are large enough and far enough along the path to eventually do what filthy capitalists want with this data. First it was algorithms that prioritized engagement at any cost. Today it is LLMs. And tomorrow it is machine learning on your data and subconscious psychology in order to extract maximum profit possible from you. They've milked data-based advertising to the point of diminishing returns and the next step is to exploit us all using the data most make freely available out of convenience so that line continue to go up. I sure hope I'm wrong, but I'm a filthy fucking capitalist and don't think that's the case.
Hope to fuck we instill decent judges across this country in the coming years because honestly our best hope is to outlaw most of these practices by showing that they can't be free of unintended bias and are therefore inherently not objective enough to be used to set prices, etc. it works in a physical store but how do you prevent dynamic pricing online? Especially with an internet that looks like it will become extremely segmented