"A.I." exists to bleed us dry

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[@jerichoburg7065]

I try to teach my university students about this (for over 10 years now), and it's such a hard sell. Of course, they are starting to use generative AI (ChatGPT) to write their papers, and for them, that is "AI." When I talk to them about the larger political economy of corporate algorithm use, they see it as "efficient" or "convenient" or "making life easier." And now our Dean of Academic Affairs started using ChatGPT to determine which courses we should offer in our departments, overriding curricula that were created by experts in their fields who studied both local needs and actual curricula at other universities. The degree to which this is being embraced is deeply disturbing.

[@AngelxSwift]

Holy shit. I can’t even form a more coherent response to ChatGPT being used to determine courses available than “holy shit”

[@transsexual_computer_faery]

oh no.. no no. no no no no no no no no no

[@sethbritton6970]

​@@AngelxSwiftWhen ChatGPT first came into the public eye, I heard about the company behind it gearing up to spin it off into a custom built legal licensed lawyer. I asked ChatGPT about how it felt about that development. In short? It too was shocked (or 'shocked' if you prefer) and kept insisting that it was super not meant to be used for that. It was so insistent about that that it requested the article I had found about this development, and was less than thrilled when I provided it. I thought it rather telling.

[@transsexual_computer_faery]

i mean yes , it is efficient and convenient and it does make life easier. but that should not override "common sense". work smart, not hard.... and also, work fair....

[@Sasu123456789x1]

Holy hell :(

[@techcoghead]

"A.I." as an umbrella term is becoming so dangerous. The range of "A.I." systems is so broad and nebulous that we lose sight of the specific flaws and specific dangers of these systems. "A.I." discourse and regulation can't proceed if the public is duped into seeing these systems all as broadly intelligent creations. If the public cannot truly picture what these different systems are, we cannot comprehend their potential harms.

[@karnak333]

Shareholder economy is so shortsighted, and priorities short term gains for long term losses. You can see it in the rush. Who cares about misinformation, job loss, loss of quality service; all so they can sell more products and make a bigger quarterly

[@EmeralBookwise]

That's because investors don't make their money off of long-term stability. It's not about how profitable a business is, it's about how quickly that business is growing. The moment that growth starts to stagnate, the investors just pull all their money and move onto the next business.

[@lydia1634]

It's also a bubble. Our economy right now is built on hype.

[@tallonhunter3663]

Air canada does. Had to follow thru with the support bots claims.

[@intersexcryptid]

"Excessive efficiency" is a very good way to put it. That's exactly what it is.

[@BulbasaurRepresent]

I saw one funny (well, sad) conversation between two "AI Bros" where one person generated a piece of "art" and was questioning if they could call it their art, to which someone responded "of course. It only exists because of you - you are the reason this art exists." And just... wow. That's a take. As someone whose passions are both programming AND creative writing, the potential for AI to replace jobs concerns me greatly. At the same time, I am absolutely fascinated by the technology and admittedly do think it's really cool and mind-blowing when I see it respond to my ~3000 word prompt just like that. One of my mates was working on a machine learning AI to detect suicidal intent in text messages, and I think that's incredible. But at the same time, a lot of what it IS being used for feels extremely dystopian, and it is being used by people who have no understanding of its limits and weaknesses. I am extremely anxious about the future.

[@CouncilofGeeks]

That's literally saying "I commissioned this piece of art, therefore I made this art." These people are infuriating. And like, honestly in a vacuum the tech is cool. But our current system can't be trusted with it.

[@witherschat]

AI would be amazing in a post-scarcity world. It's crazy how low our society has fallen that "we will be able to automate jobs" is scary and not good news.

[@marocat4749]

@@CouncilofGeeks Also no, the laws just didnt caught up, but it doesnt protect you from being sued.

[@kellswitch]

It's depressing how so much of the potential technology that I grew up reading and looking forward to in science fiction is now a dystopian horror show due to greed.

[@neoqwerty]

Honestly I'd like to know what sci-fi you read that WASN'T ringing the warning bells about how corporations were going to consume us, because my first exposure to sci-fi was Robocop and the rampant, gross consumerism and treating Murphy like a machine even after it's obvious there's still a human in there got lodged in my brain since I was 12 and the knife only twisted more and more as the years go on. It'd be nice to look at retro sci-fi stuff without the obvious cautionary tales that haunted my forrays into sci-fi.

[@cronchyskull]

Was at a comic creator's conference a week or so ago, in a room full of other artists, and this one person was like "but it will speed up the process of making art!" It had all the energy of walking into a northern working men's club in the 80s and saying: "I for one think it's GREAT that Thatcher is closing all the mines!" 🙃

[@heatherrockwell9012]

The degree to which AI is inevitably being used for profit makes me sad because of how cool the technology is in a vacuum.

[@CouncilofGeeks]

That's my basic rebuttal to all the "think of the good it could do" defense. Even if they're right, it's not being used for any of that. It's being funded by money to generate money.

[@heatherrockwell9012]

@@CouncilofGeeks I think it’s a fair defense if you’re using it for things unrelated to profit (which I do, for instance); it just can’t justify expansion of the technology or its continued adoption until such time as it’s sufficiently regulated (or people stop having profit motives, but that’s even less likely).

[@Elwaves2925]

@@CouncilofGeeks It's a very fair defense because it is being used for good, along with non-bad uses. You simply didn't research it enough. For one, it's being used to help disabled people overcome their disabilites. A company not too far from me is using it to track tiny facial movements so that seriously disabled people can have their emotions and feelings translated to a screen. Also, saying it's "funded by money to generate money" applies equally to KZbin and Patreon, yet you're quite happy to benefit from both of them.

[@Dave102693]

@@Elwaves2925 Sounds like a bunch of words just to justify to exploration under "ai is helpful though"

[@neoqwerty]

@@Elwaves2925 I'd be EXTREMELY cautious of that "track tiny facial movements" thing; it sounds to me like a redux of the pseudoscience of facilitated communication. How are the facial movements linked to feelings and emotions? Who's confirming that the AI is correct? Is it humans? Are the humans accurate? If it's AI confirming itself, how is it weighting it? Who gave it the values to weight with? (Always remember that there's a human in the chain, creating the reward system the AI relies on.) McGill University, "Who Is Doing the Pointing When Communication Is Facilitated?": "At the core of facilitated communication-a technique that claims to allow people with disabilities to communicate eloquently by providing a facilitator to hold their hand, arm, and/or shoulder-lies a significant question, one to which scientists have an answer but which believers in the technique routinely dodge: who is doing the pointing? "Facilitated communication targets “disabled communication partners”. They may have cerebral palsy or a head injury; they may have Down syndrome or some other intellectual disability; or they may be at the severe end of the autism spectrum. For one reason or another, they are often unable to speak, write or type unassisted. A facilitator comes along and holds the communication partner’s limb to get them to type on a keyboard or to point at a letter board. Through this facilitation, individuals who had been thought of as unable to communicate or even as intellectually disabled are revealed, very quickly after the start of FC, to have rich inner lives. To people who believe in the miracle of FC, the facilitation demonstrates that what was first thought of as a mental disability is in fact purely a motor problem. It’s the equivalent of using a cane to compensate for a wobbly ankle. People whose communication has seemingly been facilitated in this way have gone on to write poetry books, deliver TEDx talks, and even write a short documentary film. "If this all sounds too good to be true, then we have to ask ourselves a very important question: how would we test for this? What kind of test could we devise that would assure us that the person doing the typing is indeed the partner with the disability and not the facilitator? "The answer to the question is to separate the facilitator from the communication partner. Imagine asking the facilitator to leave the room, showing an object to their partner then hiding it, and bringing the facilitator back in the room. Can the two of them type out the name of the object? The answer is no. Several trials were conducted in this way (also by using pairs of headphones that played back different words to the facilitator), and these studies revealed that it was the facilitator who was doing the pointing. Systematic reviews of the evidence up until 2018 have summarized the state of our scientific knowledge: there is no evidence that FC is a valid form of communication for people with severe communication disabilities. "It first bears mentioning that putting words into the mouth of an individual with a severe communication impairment is, at the very least, highly problematic and has been called “an abuse of human rights” by some. If we value the self-expression of these individuals, we cannot endorse trickery." My concerns is that "facillitators" are just pushing the blame onto a neural network next, and we're just watching the neural network hallucinate those emotions and feelings, putting words in the mouths of people who aren't even _able_ to say that's wrong.

[@amethystimagination3332]

The AI stuff has felt like snake oil to me since the very beginning mostly because of the people pushing it, tech bros. I don’t understand how people aren’t noticing how shady it all is when everyone was able to notice it right away in previous MLMs for cis straight men like NFTs, crypto, metaverse etc.

[@Dave102693]

Exactly!

[@MickBordet]

I would recommend reading "Weapons Of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil, who covers these topics exactly, but not just by big business - it is affecting ALL aspects of life, including schools, the justice system and everywhere else. It's not JUST AI, and it's not even necessarily about greed, but there is a lot of bad stuff happening because of badly written or implemented algorithms of many different types!

[@oculttheexegaming2509]

I saw her in The Social Dilemma.

[@humanthetooth]

i love that book, its great on audio. i remember listening to it staring out the bus window.. horrified. good times.

[@josefwissarionowitschstali1225]

ONE MORE REASON TO NEVER EVER GIVE IT ACCESS TO NUKES......

[@EphemeralTao]

"Democratization of Art" is not only disingenuous nonsense, it's patently absurd. Art is about the most "democratic" human activity there is. Any child capable of holding a brush, pencil, or crayon can make art. Making art, _being creative in some way_ , is something nearly every human being on the earth is capable of (barring severe disability). Creative expression is one of the qualities that make us truly human, and is possessed by all humans; unless it is beaten out of us (literally or figuratively) by the society and culture we live in. When Web3-bros talk about "democratization of art" what they are really saying is that they want the status, admiration, and most importantly *money* that goes along with being an artist; without having to do any of the actual work to learn and develop artistic skills. And as we've seen throughout the crypto-bro world, they're perfectly happy to scam or steal from others to get it.

[@Rik77]

That culture of "we don't need experts, they block everyone from doing X if they want to" is such a destructive and reductive culture. The expedition that anything can be done for no effort is so awful and wrong.

[@lumplumplet]

Its so funny theyre clamoring about the democratization of art when just three years ago they were holding on to NFTs because there was supposedly no way to share it

[@InsomniacMoonbat]

Your story about the books shelves you reminded me of my first job. It was a factory where we got clothes from the countries they were made and had to control if they were okay to sell, or make them presentable (ironing, hang them up, ect) We were paid piece by piece, so time was crucial. I was there for 1 year and in that year there was a significant drop of income for all employees and we noticed that some jobs really didn't pay that well. So what happened was: They took 1 dress shirt and let a supervisor do some rounds to get used to the procedure of taking measures and then stopped the time for them doing it once. So that was the price for measuring those shirts. Of course that didn't include that you had to go somewhere to get a carton full of shirts, carry that back to your work station, open it and also after the work was done, put them back, so they all fit in again and close the carton and carry them to the other side. And when we talked to our bosses about it, they only told us to work faster to earn the same money we did half a year ago... Had my first burnout in that job and quit. For some time I thought that because of my numerous psychological problems and my neurodiversity, that work environments are always hostile for me. I slowly realize, that it's hostile for everybody and people like me are just the canary birds in the mine. We drop first, but eventually this stuff will grind everybody to dust. And with AI, this process is only going to speed up until everything derails. Also dynamic pricing made some headlines (at least in Germany) when it was found out, that depending on the device you used to look for flights, the prices were very different. It was cheaper to book the same flight from a desktop computer than a mobile phone. And just a few weeks ago I laughed about a guy saying, that Mc Donalds would have different prices at the drive through, depening which car (more or less expensive) pulls up. Now this is something I could actually see in the future if this trend continues... As you pointed out, there need to be railguards and laws for these things. But I'm afraid until our politicians get into action, there will be even more we have to worry about then...

[@krose6451]

Your Barnes and Nobles stories reminded me of a store manager my stepfather knew. He got in trouble from corporate for supposedly drastically underutilizing his space. He figured out they had forgotten to account for aisles. These are the people in charge of the big corporations (and hold too many government positions) and its depressing.

[@SuperSmashDolls]

Now I'm wondering if someone has tried deliberately filling their stores with inaccessible shelves right next to one another just to prove a point to the managers.

[@Nightman221k]

I’m so exhausted by this shit. This dystopian nightmare makes it hard to even eat and work these days.

[@Sasu123456789x1]

Yeah I know right 😢

[@josefwissarionowitschstali1225]

Don't worry. We have at least 20 years left before global civilization enters a new phase of its development...

[@josefwissarionowitschstali1225]

The future is uncertain and shrouded in dark. It was almost ALMOST like that. So calm down, live healthy and PREP!

[@modmaker7617]

AI should be used as one of many tools in the toolbox, not a replacement for work.

[@iheartsarcasticnerds]

agreed

[@TheRonnieaj]

⁠​⁠@Mantastic-ho3vmWhy nope?/gen I’m an attorney and use legal specific AI. There are things it can do that synopsize work it would cost my client thousands of dollars for me or my paralegal to do. That frees us to work on other clients, on things that I would never leave to AI. It allows us to read through a summary of large amounts of documents, then pinpoint specific locations we need to read in more detail. As an author in my spare time, I am VERY concerned about its “creative” use, but saying there’s no use for it seems as short-sighted as the ways it’s being used now.

[@Random_Handle_]

​@@TheRonnieaj- Given how often ai makes mistakes, I loathe the idea that the attorney I'm hiring isn't using their own eyes and brain to assess my case.

[@TheRonnieaj]

@@Random_Handle_ Then you have no idea how AI is used in a legal context. The attorneys using ChatGPT for cases are inane and should properly be sanctioned. That’s not remotely what I’m talking about.

[@Silver77cyn]

The problem is that Ai is not going to be used as a tool, but as a replacement.

[@maxxjapan619]

I used to have a lot of fun with AI image generators creating meetings of characters who can't actually meet (Crayon Shin-chan winning the Super Bowl, Goku and Superman teaming up to fight Darkseid, Twice joining Starfleet, Spider-Man swinging through Tokyo). I had a ton of fun, and the images were often quite good... but then I learned about the ethics (or lack thereof) in these generators and I think I'm done with them. If there were a way they could be used ethically, I'd love to go back to them. Till then, I'm happy to find a new toy.

[@marocat4749]

Its fine, thats how its suppoed to be a toy and to play off ideas is what it should be used for, not cutting the creatives and people out.

[@johnhmaloney]

Having had some addiction issues in my life, I'm starting to realize that capitalism bears quite a resemblance to addiction. All that matters is feeding it ... getting the next fix and the next fix and the next fix. You can never satiate it and if the addiction is strong enough, you'll do some horrible things to get that next fix.

[@intersexcryptid]

That is an EXCELLENT point.

[@Sasu123456789x1]

Now this is a great point

[@juls_krsslr7908]

You are absolutely right! I used to work for a company that was pushing AI as the "next big thing," and I was very uncomfortable with the narrative they were promoting. I don't understand marketing jargon very well, but something just felt off. "Efficiency" was a word that appeared frequently, and, sure, I understand the dictionary definition, but what _exactly_ did my company have in mind when they were promising other companies that AI would make them more "efficient"? When the ultimate goal is making money, "efficiency" seems like "making more money for less expense." So, laying off "unnecessary" workers? Determining the highest price consumers will pay? Since we were pitching this to hospitals, what does "efficient" medical care mean? Were we suggesting that AI could determine the minimum amount of staff needed? The maximum number of patients that could be seen in a day? The prices of procedures? Whether procedures were even necessary? It all sounded very bad and potentially dangerous. We need to reorient our thinking to put human beings at the center of our society. AI needs to work for the benefit of human beings, not the other way around. People are not machines and having a machine-like society should not be anything we aspire to - or, rather, we should be trying to eliminate the dehumanization that already exists in our society. We are living in one of the lowest points in human history, and failing to recognize it because we have our priorities backwards.

[@Brunoxsa]

Thank you for the video, Vera! In the creative fields, what really pisses me off about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) creating art is the exploitation and cheapness! Corporations want to eliminate the necessity of paying people for their work. And right now (and for now), the only thing stopping them of doing so is the fact of A.I.-generated works not being copyrightable. It is almost funny how libertarians (especially the ones in favor of crypto currencies and A.I.) do like to advocate for capitalism free from government intervention and anti-exploitation regulations while arguing that would solve any poverty and social inequality problems naturally. Their argument is literally: "Did you see all these problems caused by capitalism? Let's use even more capitalism in order to solve them!". That is pure bullsh*t!

[@Dave102693]

Thank you!

[@thesquire9966]

"We're not charging you more during busy hours, we're charging you less during quiet hours." I fail to see the difference between those two statements.

[@Tustin2121]

Yes, exactly this. I’ve been calling this shit out and it bugs me that people think it’s somehow different. Like, no, they raise the prices and then give you a “discount” back to the previous pricing during “off times”. There’s no difference!

[@SarahJo]

Maybe we should all start just effing with the AI and every time we see a company trying to use this, go to the app or whatever, put stuff in our cart until we see the price and leave. See how long it takes for the price to just drop and drop until the corporation loses so much money on each sale

[@EmeralBookwise]

The way Wendy's is backtracking is how they should have made the announcement in the first place. Someone in their PR department screwed up big time, that or an executive got ahead of themselves and started running their mouth without consulting the PR department. Either way, however, the reality of such systems is that even if it started out as means of lowering off peek pricing to lure in more customers, eventually they would just start raising the base price, which would result in the same kind of surge gouging. I hate it so much. AI could legitimately be used to make the world a better place for everyone, but once upon a time automation was supposed to do the same. We were all sold on the promise that by letting machines do the work for us we could all live easier lives, but the corporations only saw it as a way to employ fewer people to do more work. Automation worked out great for the people at the top, and even the middle class, but for the working class it meant less jobs to go around, and with the direction corporations are taking AI it's likely going to be the same thing all over again, only this time even the "skilled" labor of the middle class will be on the chopping block.

[@patricklynch9574]

The ceo and management jobs are perfect for ai.

[@Loxalair]

At my job, our hours are tied to "efficiency", which means how many sales we make. So if the deli department has a bad week, the next week they get less hours for the employees. But efficiency is barebones, because the store gets perks for being as close to 100% efficiency as possible, or even under efficiency, making more sales with fewer employees. Of course, this means that cashiers, who don't make sales because all they have is chocolate bars and gum, gets gutted, even though they're the most necessary employees in the store. So the manager decided that when cash was busy (it's often busy), they'll call from other departments, which means those departments get their work interrupted, which means that they make less sales, and get less hours, and get less employees who can't be spared to go to cash but get called anyways. (The manager does not go on cash himself.) And this is all done by people. The manager decided that, and implemented it, and efficiency is calculated by someone with a spreadsheet. I am very grateful that I'm almost done my degree, because if they decide to put machine learning onto this, it will be so much worse

[@liquidhistory]

A part of this for me is I'm so burnt out and sick of this consumer landscape that I am no longer interested in almost anything. Movies? Video games? Books? Nothing is exciting and, even if it is, the quality has dropped so much in my 30something years of living that I'm always disappointed and left feeling bad. And most of the time the artist/writer/musician isn't even being paid hardly at all. I feel bad for the overworked people actually making the things. I feel bad for the retail staff selling the things. And I don't think this is just depression (been dealing with that long enough I can tell when it shifts) I just feel ill participating in consumerism even at my most frugal. If they're not stealing my money they're stealing my time or my brain space like my hard drive is full or something. And AI is making it even worse as you've eloquently laid out. It's giving cover to bad actors ("I didn't steal that stuff! The AI made it!") and it's just so insidious watch. People in power are leaning on this to make these hyper-efficient decisions and you know what? It might actually work short term, but the crash is going to be nasty and so many people are going to be hurt and struggling in the meantime. EDIT: Now that I think about it, 08 was the test run. They realized they could run things on a skeleton crew and it never bounced back. Now these algorithms and AI bullshit is being used to push it even further. "It's not my idea as CEO, the AI says it's possible and better and you don't want to be an unemployed luddite do you?" Well, they finally squeezed all the blood they could out of the stone and they just keep going. That's a fourth quarter problem, as the 90s show Dinosaurs put it all the way back in like 1994 or something like that.

[@KaleShadowWalker]

I'm fighting AI when it comes to job seeking. Places keep using AI to comb through resumes for the ones that fit a certain criteria and make a certain "score" base on keywords and it's next to impossible to write a resume to pass all these AI checks. I feel like I have to use an AI chatbot to help write my resume in order for it to pass AI so a real person will see it.

[@carultch]

The irony is that all this is doing, is creating more spam, which doesn't help anyone. The only people who benefit, are the AI companies, who are creating this infinite loop of bots talking to bots. Hiring managers despise this as well, as it means more applicants who all look the same, and whose documentation is not a reliable source of information since it's all AI generated anyway.

[@Tera_B_Twilight]

We are rapidly heading towards a post-labor economy and WE ARE NOT PREPARED. We'd best sort out how to support humanity without making it transactional or we will see even more widespread homelessness and hunger on a scale we've never seen.

[@alfje5492]

Biggest trouble is that the people in charge, have never been in work and have never had to worry about paying bills (money just comes from immense wealth or high-paying positions in corporations, gotten through the old-boys-network or just nepotism). These people are already eradicating the working class just to earn a bit more dividend and will gladly do the same with the middle class.

[@TheDopekitty]

Loblaws in Canada tried to get rid of their 50%off stickers on stuff that needs to be sold asap and were going to go with 30% instead, but the pushback from the public caused them to backpedal. Not sure when they'll try it again, but I hope it's been a while

[@maougha]

Did it? I saw in the news about the 50% off going away, but then heard nothing about it after. I still saw the sticker though, and assumed it was maybe a province by province thing. Also here they call them Dominion so also thought that had something to do with it.

[@931i]

Can confirm thats what happened at our local loblaws (toronto on)

[@cmmosher8035]

I found this weird because my local YIG only ever used the 30% stickers.

[@931i]

That sucks!!! I wonder if that location is franchise? (based on the"independent" in the name) If they are, they might have more leeway in how they do the pricing. I have also heard that price sensitivity is supposed by vary by province. (as rule of thumb: further east == more and heavier discounts) idk if that is still relevant tho.... may be outdated knowledge @@cmmosher8035

[@petrus4]

In terms of the AI art argument, as someone who has used Stable Diffusion, and has also genuinely experienced hours of frustration in the process of doing so. If you want to tell me that it isn't art in the sense that I haven't taken the time to learn to draw or paint, fine; I accept that. But that doesn't mean that (for me at least, I can't speak for everyone) there is no effort involved. The analogy I would use is photography. I am not creating everything from scratch, no. But I still am having to assemble both the program and the various forms of filters that I use. I view each image that is generated, as the equivalent of one snapshot. Some of those (most of them, in the case of Stable Diffusion) will be thumb shots, bloopers, stuff that gets deleted afterwards. I'm looking for that one shot, out of dozens, maybe even hundreds, and I'm making small refinements every few shots in order to try and get closer to the one I want. Is that art? I don't know; you figure it out, if you care. But I know I am incorporating elements which other people have produced in order to make it myself, which is also why I don't believe in making money from it, either. As someone who has been a software pirate since the Commodore 64, that was one of the first rules I learned. "If there is no money in, then there is no money out."

[@Syurtpiutha]

The Luddites weren't against technology in and of itself. They were about the costs TO the labor force that these machines would be implemented for: Replacing workers and leaving them with nothing. And history is proving their concerns right over and over again. But the image of someone smashing a machine (a person smashing private property) being equated to an irrational vandal is a powerful propaganda tool. It looks so violent, man with hammer going at a 'harmless' passive device. Ignoring the fact that said device is being used to drive multiple people into poverty. That bit is harder to convey in a single image which is convenient.

[@dragon1130]

I only just learned about this from you. when I heard the words "Dynamic pricing"... my eye started to involuntary twitch, and I could feel my blood boiling. I think that should be enough to show how much I hate that idea.

[@elisabethmontegna5412]

This sounds like what insurance companies have been doing since the beginning (especially HMOs) using healthcare data and actuaries. It’s just that data collection, computational power, and machine learning have caught up enough for other industries to be able to afford to do it as well. So, basically we’re looking at nearly every every large company in every industry providing the same type and level care and service as the average HMO. God that’s depressing.

[@antney7745]

This reminds me of a scene from a film called "Death Becomes Her", where Madeline is buying the immortality potion and asks how much it is. Lisle: "The sordid topic of coin. The price, it's different for everyone." Madeline: "Well, for me how much?"

[@sojabursche]

They’re doing that at my work too. Half my colleagues are in or pre burn out. At least we have workers rights here so they can’t fire us after working us into the ground. So if we recover from burn out we can go back to the job if we want to. And we also have sick pay.

[@fourcatsandagarden]

and I promise you, when they start firing people over these new programs, they won't be firing the CEOs, even though the CEO position is the most easily automated part of an entire business.

[@Sasu123456789x1]

So true

[@marocat4749]

yes replace cceos and middle manager first

[@HBHaga]

Sadly, we've been data points since differential calculus was applied to economics in the 1800's. "A.I." algorithms are just making that faster and more complex, with the suits becoming more and more dependent on them. We have to push back against these things more and more because the only thing that's going to stop all of this is for corporations to become miraculously less greedy.

[@ReturnToSenderz]

Wendy’s doesn’t even need to use surge pricing to screw people over. All they need to do is raise their base prices and spin the “discounted” prices during slow times as a magnanimous sacrifice they’re making for the customer.

[@Manemaze]

I work at a small university in Mexico City and we have a new boss who told us to do all our marketing and social media content with "AI". To no one's surprise the students hate it. Specially because some of our courses include digital design, language translation and stuff like that

[@QuiteBearish]

Good video, with some great points being made. The bit you touch on at the end is important, I think. I agree that theres certainly potential for these technologies to be used in great ways that will benefit humanity, but at the end of the day that just wont happen so long the primary purpose is to produce a profit. So long as we exist under a capitalist system, tools like this will only ever be used to exploit us.

[@HonoredMule]

I'm _disappointed_ at the Wendy's pricing pushback. When they announced that, it didn't even occur to me to complain. Don't get me wrong, I don't like it. In fact, I dislike it enough that just knowing that pricing uncertainty exists is reason enough I was just no longer going to consider eating at Wendy's in the future. But the way companies can just announce stuff and measure the tantrum customers throw is just way too convenient _for the corporations._ A tantrum says that customers hate something, but also that they desire the product enough that just happily dropping it isn't an easy choice for them. Sure Wendy's backed down, but all _we_ did was help them modulate the _rate_ at which they make everything shittier. And now the whole industry knows where to aim; they can make the next calibrated move more quietly. Even if called out, Wendy's in particular can just deflect to the worse thing they didn't do while turning out their pockets in a gesture of performative poverty. This is not the relationship companies should have with their customers. They should be terrified that if they make a wrong move, their business will just silently dry up overnight. Every profit-maximizing step they take should be slow, timid, and still a failure because their also-fearful peers won't jump in to normalize it but instead jump to eat their lunch. We should not be announcing what we will not accept, but simply dropping businesses like flaming turd bags at the tiniest slight.

[@HonoredMule]

For what it's worth, I _do_ believe Wendy's would have actually lowered prices below baseline during low traffic. Lots of fast food locations across all the franchises operate at a substantial loss outside their peak periods. If Wendy's were to pull a significant traffic increase from other chains by aggressively cutting margin when they'd otherwise be paying rent, utilities, and wages just to sit idle, it's a win-win. It might have actually been helpful to the most frugal people. I'm against it because I'm risk-averse and don't want to put conscious effort into guarding against price gouging. It's bad for society overall because it's an inattention tax and liable to disproportionately price gouge the poor. And just imagine all the bait-and-switch from people drawn to low-traffic pricing only to arrive at a place that's no longer low traffic. You can turn around and leave, but your time and travel expenses are already wasted. Discriminatory pricing has always been a thing. And it has always been kind of disgusting. This is next level _even if the price only went down._

[@arwenspicer]

I am reminded of a quote from economist Anwar Shaikh (apologies if my wording is inexact): "Capitalism is at war with anything that costs it money." That means it's at war with stable burger prices, with shelving six shelves an hour, with restrictions on data mining, restrictions on AI; it's at war with you and me, whenever we act as anything other than capital generators or cost savers. This will go on with every technology, every policy until we change our economic system. For starters, we need cease measuring a "strong economy" solely by GDP growth; in fact, we need to stop using as a measure GDP at all.

[@itzhexen0]

Strangely worded. But interesting.

[@karnak333]

AI ain't artificial nor is it intelligence, it's a misnomer. It has a collection of data and regurgitates by using probability based on its text inputs.

[@otakubullfrog1665]

Dynamic pricing in food service is nothing new (think bars having happy hours to convince people to go out on weeknights or restaurants that mainly do a dinner business offering lunch specials), but it usually doesn't come across as creepy or predatory when it follows an advertised and predictable schedule and you know that whoever is sitting next to you at the counter is paying the same price as you. This was just an experiment by Wendy's to see if Uber had trained people to just accept totally arbitrary pricing they at time of purchase and the answer just seems to be not yet for hamburgers specifically. I don't really trust my fellow consumers not to fall into the Uber trap of using some new hamburger app that works this way and does offer better deals initially by running at a loss for awhile.

[@annieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee]

Surge pricing theoretically makes sense for uber as there are a finite number of drivers and they can't be everywhere, so they sell their time and labour to the highest bidder (if the money actually went to the drivers-hence theoretically) but for food it makes no sense, yes people may have to wait slightly longer for their food but the food is not going to run out, its not like there's a decision that had to be made over who gets the burgers unless they're terrible at keeping stocked up, also people need ubers at specific times, most people can wait for a burger, I just don't get how that works

[@Madeleinewith3Es]

It's maddening it's even gotten into fandom spaces, and there have been outcries and condemnation of anyone using AI to "finish" abandoned fics or write their own, and I absolutely think anyone using character bots they train to sound like their "blorbos" or for fic ideas are lazy and uncreative. You're not writers, and that neural net isn't a character, just something you trained to sound like you wanted it to.

[@kastle3066]

This hit soooooooooo close to home when you spoke about retail.

[@Stephen_The_Waxing_Lyricist]

9:50 I bought an electronic metronome (device for counting time when playing music, pinging each beat) from Amazon. In the "people who bought this also bought" section, the suggested item was... Lube. Yup, someone bought a metronome as well as lubrication to help with sex. When i saw it, i burst out laughing! Since then, i have tried to work out why. Two scenarios (other than coincidence) sprang to mind. The first is that someone might want help with going at an adagio pace, and doesn't want to set their partner on fire. The second is, well, this metronome is an awkward shape... 😂

[@ftumschk]

_"Yup, someone bought a metronome as well as lubrication to help with sex"_ ... Looks like someone was taking the Rhythm Method far too literally.

[@cristinafigueroatejera8649]

😂😂me sacaste una carcajada

[@britzkrieg2]

​@@ftumschk👏👏👏

[@carultch]

@@ftumschk That was a good one!

[@mintx1720]

The problem is the human brain is hard-wired to seek community, with humans you might think otherwise, but you know for a fact an AI does not have your best interest at heart. How many of you can live with these premises: "All humans are evil", "Nobody cares about me" etc. AI kinda fulfills both roles on this spectrum, if you have say an open source llm on your hands, you know for a fact it will never betray you, it is more loyal than your puppy dog, let alone another human on the internet. But you also know for a fact that cooperate AI will do everything in its power to make you miserable.

[@annaglover2470]

I agree with you about the tech; AI could have so much positive impact on society. It's the corporations and the billionaires, the oligarchs, and the plutocrats who want to rule like their predecessors did during the First Gilded Age that are ruining things...again. It's why we can't have nice things, always.

[@Elwaves2925]

It is being used for good but unfortunately it's only the negative side of things that makes the news and gets the clicks. For one, it's being used to help disabled people overcome their disabilites. A company not too far from me is using it to track tiny facial movements so that seriously disabled people can have their emotions and feelings translated to a screen. As always, the money people want to ruin it all and take it for themselves, while others use it as a crutch or a shortcut to a solution. The same arguments made in the video can be levelled at the internet and computers in general, yet here we all are using that tech. AI tech is not the problem and never will be, it's the people that abuse it that are.

[@Dave102693]

@@Elwaves2925 because the negative aspects are what the capitalist class are only interested in.

[@Elwaves2925]

@@Dave102693 Yes but the world is made up of far more than the capitalist class.

[@marocat4749]

yeah it should compliment, not replace creatives and people. And people and what they bring is undervalued, because literally people are not mashines

[@gRinchY-op5vr]

I now want a Gothic Burger restaurant called 'Wednesdays'

[@nazokashii]

Thank you so much for talking about this

[@Shinigami88X1]

It's going be a point where is going to lead to something dangerous

[@Namari12]

Airlines have been doing this for years and years. Hotels, too. It's just a further and further extension of the same concept

[@TheDopekitty]

I noticed what you mean about Amazon recommendations

[@TheRonnieaj]

I was nodding along so hard at that point. Especially for bigger ticket items. Buy a printer? Ooh, here’s 7 more printers. Why…why would you think I’m looking at new printers immediately after buying a printer? Now, pens and notebooks? They might get me there 😂

[@MaximumMadnessStixon]

When I first started hearing about A.I. (the umbrella term) a year or so back, my mind immediately went to places like the medical and industrial fields. Places where it could help revolutionize the way we treat sick people or improve production lines and make them safer. But of course, even though there are a _few_ places using it that way... that's not where it went for the majority of people. For the majority, it's just being used to steal artwork and take away creative jobs, make creepy fake porn of people who don't consent (which can cause lifelong psychological harm), and make big businesses lots of money at the expense of everyone else. It's sad how in fiction, we speculated that AI would turn on us and instantly destroy us physically... when in reality, AI is doing something arguably far more insidious... destroying us psychologically and financially long-term.

[@stoferb876]

When I heard of the major improvements in "AI" about a year ago my immediate thought was that this was going to make internet scamming explode in scope even more than it already had by that point.

[@MorbidGod391]

6:58 so I have no idea what your going to say next BUT they also didn’t rule out raising the over all price and then lowering it “back to normal” but yeah currently cheaper prices during these times… I honestly WONT be going to Wendy’s anymore. I like to know what the cost will be before I go somewhere and now I have no idea knowing what the prices will be when I get there.

[@lingo3125]

It's just lean management (as it was used in manufacturing plants since the 1980s or so) applied to the services industry, with the help of technology. It just forgets that workers of a sector are the customers of another, so...if you reduce the number of workers or their wages, it can lead to less consumption in the economy. Except maybe when people can get loans (but then it's a debt spiral)

[@lilpetz500]

This is why I'm just done (along with just financially struggling anyway despite working to burnout). I'm checking out of the consumerism thing as much as I can. If I don't need it, I don't buy it, clothing, almost all food (I buy from only brands that at least indicate a little fairtrade production standards, if not as high standards and local as my budget allows), entertainment. When I give in to wanting something because I'm a young person who just wants to enjoy life, I look as much as I can in secondhand platforms, if it isn't there, I don't get to have it. And yeah, this life is miserable, it really sucks, especially when so many around me get to ignore the problem, and even pressure me to make this choice as invisible and convenient to them as possible. But it's literally the only way I can stop feeling guilty for being forced to fund all the greed and exploitation, and see a glimmer of hope that things get better.

[@lydiaelsewhere1504]

That sigh at the end... i sighed in the exact same way at the same time. Kind of uncanny.

[@vrpansy]

your b&n bigwig guy is living in what i call "numbers world". our upper management does that too (as all of them do). they say we can get all of our trucks done with the amount of work hours they give us and we sure can't

[@CharlieBrown-tr4zn]

hold on, what you're describing is way worse than the nickel and diming us atms part. we just had a pandemic that brought our systems to the brink of collapse worldwide because everything is just-in-time, efficient at the cost of every other metric. the lesson to take away was to build more resilient systems with more contingencies and so forth but if the logic you mentioned is instead applied we would get systems that are more energy hungry, more brittle and practically designed to fail way faster because of way less disruptive events.

[@intergalactic92]

In fairness to Uber there can be some variation in transport costs depending on the times of journeys. Flights often do this. As do normal Taxis where I live. Trains give the option of buying cheap "off-peak tickets" which can only be used at "off-peak times" (and you can get in serious trouble if you're caught trying to use one during "rush hour." It’s something we have all collectively accepted, doesn’t feel right though, does it.

[@rowanc88]

Was this filmed before the news regarding Doctor Who's promotional department?

[@CouncilofGeeks]

Yes.

[@gamer3ed484]

Dang. I looked it up and it’s just depressing to read. I’m recalling from memory since I’m too lazy to pull a direct quote, but the statement from the marketing head even said something about how generative AI saves time and resources when it comes to creating assets for use in promotion. Just sad stuff all around.

[@danderson601]

My factory has been pushing workers to the limit seeing how many machines one person can run... I just been red pilled

[@MareaRayneOleander]

The only way that i can see "dynamic pricing" working in ANY kind of practical capacity would be charging people based on percentage of income. Like a house should cost 20% of your yearly income, and it's solely based on that percentage point. A system like that would have to be HIGHLY regulated by the government.

[@gazsmith7105]

Not sure if you've heard the BBC's Doctor who is going to use AI to help with Promotion

[@CouncilofGeeks]

Depressingly, yes. It was just after shot this.

[@hyenaedits3460]

I can't work in warehouses anymore after my previous job. The AI determined I should be picking 100 items an hour. In ideal conditions, that would be easy. But the people in charge of putting items away would just leave the boxes of product in piles at the end of the aisle instead of putting them in their designated spot on the shelf. So everybody and their massive, heavy carts would crowd the end of the aisle. And while the AI that assigned items to pickers would usually have them go in a uniform zig zag pattern, some people tried to take shortcuts or otherwise interrupt the flow of traffic. Sometimes it was over 100 degrees and I had to stop and sit down or I'd pass out. I developed plantar fasciitis because of how quickly I had to walk and how the heavy cart affected how I walked. The managers hated the situation too, but they had no control over it. AI is ruining jobs.

[@SuperSmashDolls]

7:47 Ok, I'll bite. The reason why Wendy's might be considering using dynamic pricing to lower prices is that they've already done all the price gouging they think they can get away with and it's starting to eat into their demand. We've had years of "inflation" driven by, among other things, large businesses realizing that the economy will just let them keep increasing pricing, because they bought or killed all their competition. Problem is, while the upstream megasuppliers for food are all monopolized, the restaurants aren't. So they're in a bind. Having a Wendy's that costs more than a sit-down place isn't going to fly, but they can't just go back to the old pricing because then they're just handing their margins away to whoever they buy their burgers from. So instead they're hoping to try and square the circle by charging "as much as they can" (which is what dynamic pricing really is). I don't think it'll work, IMO.

[@e.a.spikol6229]

A fellow bookseller! I did 2004-2014 at B&N and yeah, when the brought in SPH, it seriously ruined zen shelving shifts.

[@jonhart2822]

It makes sense for you to drop the price *but* have a problem when they do the reverse. I'm not being critical but you have fallen into one of their traps cos it's the same policy slightly reworded.

[@pipedrmmr]

I LOVE A.I. !!!!

[@CouncilofGeeks]

Wow, what a thoughtful and well worded rebuttal. I shall now reassess my position on the basis of this deep analysis.

[@kingpinogaming3366]

12:37 i quit a grocery job over this exact kind of thing

[@LovelyRuthie]

Thank you for framing this argument with nuance. A.I. has the capacity to eradicate capitalism, but it is being used to ratchet up capitalism to the point where the majority will end up living with little to no choices or freedoms. The problem is not A.I. - it's the way it is being developed & used.

[@RebeccaRuhlman]

Banks and mortgage brokers are also working on “AI” based algorithms for loans and mortgage rates. This will codify the worst of redlining and kill private home ownership.

[@KidarWolf]

Do you want to get into the real 1984 dystopia of this? In the UK, the government has proprosed using AI to monitor, without a warrant, the bank accounts of anyone in receipt of benefits for "fradulent activites". Given how the government's current party line is to treat all benefits claimants as scroungers and grifters, and to be very vocal in encouraging that mentality among the population, it doesn't seem so far fetched, especially in the light of the Postmaster Scandal, that what government will expand this to do, is to monitor a person's every purchase, and, should they find that a benefits recipient spends money on something some bureaucraft arbitrarily decides is frivolous, to freeze their benefits. And no one will find out about the AI having been altered to do such until people have died because they no longer have access to housing, food, heating due to having their benefits removed. There is a real and present threat of an AI-caused genocide against the disabled, and that should terrify everyone.

[@mk-aka-morgan8386]

Watching this while drawing 🤝 Thanks for helping educate us 🤝

[@zigzagperson]

This is the next step of a capitalistic society, and it sucks. Making capitalism more efficient was not on anyone's "when i grow up" Now here is where we should actually state "please think of the children" Side note- your little boogers are so cute 😍

[@RebekahSolWest]

I agree, but unfortunately, I don’t think the government is going to enact much regulation beyond some minimal level.

[@Algorithmicgeneratedwordsalad]

The way that the internet already suggests things to me it doesn't feel like it's curated it feels like it's cultivated not I'm teaching it it's trying to teach me

[@josefwissarionowitschstali1225]

"You cannot stop it. It's evolution!" some peasant woman in THE CREATOR

[@annageorge8406]

At my job I have a luch break after 8 hours legally, I supposedly get breaks, but the only breaks I get are bathroom

[@lousielouise8716]

Price discrimination is perfectly legal- student discounts and senior discounts are both forms of price discrimination. We could legislate that companies must offer the lowest price when asked- and legally enshrine “price matching”, which some companies do already. The line between price gouging and price discrimination is blurry.

[@TaylorTheOtter]

I wanna share a good and useful way I use AI. I have an eating disorder that makes it very difficult for me to cook anything for myself because by the time I'm done, I'm nauseous to the point of almost vomiting. It's triggered by textures, tastes and smells but the triggers shift constantly. So lately I've been using Gemini (Google's chatGPT like thingy) to write recipes that avoid the triggers at that moment. It generates a recipe and if I see anything that makes my stomach churn, I just ask it to either think of a substitute that doesn't evoke that reaction or I ask it to make a new recipe keeping the elements that I did find acceptable. It's honestly great. Now I get that that sounds like AI apologetics but I don't mean it that way. If it could help me this way, maybe there's other people who find new and interesting ways to have AI help them with their disabilities. AI is here whether we want it or not so we might as well try to use it to actually improve people's lives. Of course we should still try to limit corporate misuse of AI (I know, understatement of the century) where we can but that's easier said than done.

[@youtubelisk]

The world was run by computational decisions way before consumer generation. The generation of text by an ai is not unlike that of a brain. The brain isn't magical the same way we discovered that the heart isn't, it's an organ with a function. Does interfacing with ai make you an artist? Did photoshop make you an artist?Did using a camera make you an artist? It's turtles all the way down. If you are concerned about something you don't understand, maybe that's the problem. Seek out the opposition even if it feels wrong.

[@jdeljones]

I'll withhold judgment for now. Movie theaters have had matinee prices forever. I use Uber when going to big events and when the game or concert is over and it's price surging, I'll usually go to a bar nearby and connect with friends until that's over. It's usually some of the best memories I have from those nights is the wind down. I can see this having an opposite effect where Wendy's thinks they're going to have peak prices during the lunch of dinner rush but instead they'll get hammered late at night when people think they'll be off-peak. Capitalism has lead them to this ordeal. But if customers get frustrated with weird algorithms and decide to go grab dinner elsewhere...that's also capitalism.

[@jimanyon8143]

Similar to how everybody is an Journalist and it needed social Media to make the general public to understand that, everybody already is an Artist and im puzzled why people needed AI to find that out. It just gets on my nerf when people blame AI for the failings of Capitalismn. Yes, AI needes regulation, like everything else.

[@darthbee18]

The reason corporations bring back dynamic pricing (because remember, dynamic pricing is not new - that's what haggling/bargaining is!), is not for us, the consumers, to be able to gain better deals (and save money), but for them to nickel and dime us to the last cent 💀 I said this and I'll say this again - I am not worried about the "AI" per se, I am more worried by *people* who use it (and by extension, the way people receive things resulting from an AI). And with the way the current development of AI is going, there's definitely lots to be concerned about (especially considering how all their decisions on it will be money-driven, humanity be damned) 🤦🏽💀🔥

[@reeee-turn]

First few seconds made me wish for AI bleed-out acceleration. Good job.

[@superslammer]

I just want AI to help me with coding projects and for it to be used for research. :) I do like AI.... for what I use it for. A tool for my personal use.

[@Val-wj3vy]

JFC, this reminds me of a TTRPG scenario by a Science Podcast where the corporate overlords of Mars decide to let an AI takeover for maximum efficiency a few years ago.

[@miaththered]

Yeah, pretty much.

[@lydia1634]

There was a book published in 2019 called "On the Clock" that is specifically about the impact of AI on workplaces, how "efficient staffing" forces low income workers to work without bathroom breaks at insane levels of productivity because a computer model said it was possible. This has been a problem for a long time, humans expected to work like robots. It used to be managed by humans with stopwatch. Now they replaced themselves with AI, and plan on doing it to the rest of us.

[@ansambel3170]

The tech is too important, and has too much potential to ban. Efficiency is way to important to simply not take it. If 1 person can do a job of 5 ppl, thanks to AI, then we should figure out how to benefit from the savings, instead of fear it. And sure a lot of jobs will vanish, but you're not living to work, lol. And things like price gauging, well, we need to just ban it, along with stuff that is clearly anti-customer. I'm not sure if thats possbile in US, but in EU, we're slowly getting there, Apple just got slapped with 2B$ fine, for trying to act the way it does in the US.

[@Dave102693]

I've been following ai "artists" accounts for months now, and while some of them aren't pissing me off and making me feel sick, alot of them are. Then, the commenters of these channels are even worse.

[@cristinafigueroatejera8649]

La mayoría de mi familia y amigos son fanáticos de las AI, y yo, como artista, trato de explicarles de vez en cuando como en realidad son muy perjudiciales para nosotros como consumidores y para... Mi .. para el futuro que ellos mismos desean que tenga como creadora, pero están convencidos de que es solo un avance tecnológico y que soy yo quien tiene que ponerse las pilas y aprender a utilizarla para mí beneficio... Por eso agradezco cuando creadores en los que confío publiquen su opinión y conocimiento al respecto, me recuerdan que en realidad no estoy loca, que toda la publicidad que se le está dando a las AI, está dirigida a personas que se ven "beneficiadas " por las AI, y nos hacen ver a nosotros como bebés llorones, o nos comparan con los trabajadores que perdieron trabajo en la revolución industrial... Por lo menos esos son los argumentos que más escucho cuando intento debatir el tema con amigos y familiares. Gracias por exponer tu opinión, me encantaría saber más en un futuro video. Es gracioso pensar que el debate se escucha como, máquinas contra humanos, cuando son humanos quienes están usando esas máquinas para perjudicar a otros humanos...

[@meganvincent5381]

We've seen this with the video game industry, price gouging is gonna be back whether its KFC or McDonalds

[@misterlau5246]

It's a tool that can be used in a variety of ways. You can use it to consider the extra human time needed to accomplish the task in question If you use it correctly, you can use it to optimize a lot. But humans are lazy. But I'm adhd so I'm not like that

[@MidnightChimey]

AI in itself is not the evil, ultimately it's just a tool, but it is potentially a very powerful tool that can do a lot of harm (and arguably is already doing) and what we do with it is a reflection on us

[@eyezerocool]

You know this wouldn’t be as much of a hard sale if instead of just trying to get the ai to take as much money as it could they keg it up sale you. I mean actually upscale to. Not just give something a pink coat of paint and the slap $50 on the price

[@larissabrglum3856]

Much like GMOs, I don't think AI is an intrinsically terrible technology. The real problem, as usual, is capitalism

[@emris2697]

With all the AI technology being developed put together, there is a plausible future where the AI in your phone determines you’re in a bad mood, sends that info to nearby restaurants who will then up the prices cause they know you’re more likely to come order food to feel better.