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Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

It didn't seem bad until the actual prompt "help my daughter write a letter...".

No. No one likes that.

There's this huge misunderstanding that I see a lot on these AI prompting ads that people will want to use AI to write things they care about... Perhaps a sort of "I care so much about this that I'd like it to be perfect" when I believe, for people, when we care about something we want to put effort into it. Even if the result is flawed, the effort is what matters.

If I'm an athlete and I receive a handwritten letter from a little girl, and i can see the struggle in a simple "I want to be like you" that is so much more valuable than a 10 paragraph ai assisted essay.

This is so obvious? Obviously google is surrounded by yes men.

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Exactly. AI is to remove the annoying, repetitive things you don't care about or like doing. This is the opposite of that.

Oh I don't know, writing papers is something I absolutely do not care about or like doing. I absolutely see the appeal. It's kind of like all of the math "tricks" that I learned after learning the actual methods on how to do the maths, but AI/GPTs is like just teaching the tricks without a proper understanding of how/why the tricks work.

The problem is that AI is a hammer so everything is a nail to them.

Yeah, writing a paper is a chore.

Writing a letter for your dying grandma is not really a chore. I think they are trying really hard to appeal to the common person but they misunderstand that all a common person doesn't really have a huge need of a lot of these things.

I mean, I use copilot and I like it. I even use image generation to get pictures to do collages with (before I would sometimes search for hours for the right image on magazine scans and so on).

But when I was leaving the place I lived for for years a few months ago, it didn't even cross my mind to use an LLM to write a letter for my friends. I would it, perhaps, to help me find specific words, synonyms, rhymes. That's something they're good at. But it's never a "just do this for me". Idk, I think they need to accept that this tech is just not the end-all-be-all of human writing.

Imo, an ad that simply shows someone asking the LLM for certain concepts, for word plays, for little things would play much better with the general population. I think Apple did some of that in their AI pitch.

>I think they need to accept that this tech is just not the end-all-be-all

Not really sure why you used any words after that as it is much more of an issue than just in writing. The cult vibes are off the charts

Generative AI is for removing the annoying, highly paid laborers creating code/text/images/video and replacing them with less well compensated laborers augmented by machine generated output cause it's much cheaper. It's a source of annoyance, but not for consumers.

Not just yes men, but an entire monoculture of people who don't see how exceptional and different they are from the vast majority of humanity. Unfortunately, their culture is being reinforced by fat, soulless advertising money and not any philosophical or moral superiority. With their collective finger on the AGI button, this may be our downfall.

Yeah, it's really baffling! The entire point of automation is to remove the boring jobs, not the emotionally fulfilling ones...

Now, if they showcased Gemini writing a good legal complaint to the Mayor detailing police about, that'll get them some black customers for sure.

Or they could show Gemini writing a reply to a HAO letter complaining about an untidy driveway, for that white suburbanite market.

It's interesting how from the very beginning of this AI hype cycle the focus has been on replacing human creativity.

One theory I heard from Robert Evans is that a lot of the tech bros (Altman, Musk, Andreeson, etc) have developed their vision of the future they're working towards from dystopian sci-fi. This is a hard sell because it's.. dystopian. So they feel the need to preclude any other possible vision of the future by drowning it out with machine-generated dreck.

I have another theory. My theory is this stuff doesn't really work for anything useful. Efforts to make AI drive cars or fold laundry have failed. But they have noticed that the randomness in the AI algorithms produces an effect that kinda feels like creativity so, you know, sell it to Hollywood.

I do think these tools are very good at providing good help for artists and creatives. I follow some really amazing creators on twitter that post works that are heavily gen-based.

But yes, they're being used as tools. They don't "replace" your creative output they augment it. It would be interesting if these companies actually collaborated with people that are doing cool things with these tools. But then again, they might think the AI is not placing an important enough role in the creation process. But, I mean, that's exactly what I think people would see as a plus.

For me, in this ad in particular, when it asked to come up with a training routine and such... that's good, that's helpful. Should have stayed with that.

>google is surrounded by yes men

Not Google alone, and it's a demonstration of those corporations and the way they act and behave being detached from the real world, probably a result of unrestrained growth. I would say it's a vain and effortless attempt to promote their subpar product, but after the Gemini image generation scandal (the most notable recent example) and how there wasn't anyone in charge that could stop it from going live, it's more about a clearly delusional group of people persevering in ruining their companies' image, after all as long as revenue and profit margins go up, they surely can't be doing wrong.

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