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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

These surveys don’t make sense. Ask the forward thinking companies and they’ll say the opposite. The flood of anti AI productivity articles almost feel like they’re meant to lull the population into not seeing what’s about to happen to employment.

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> Ask the forward thinking companies and they’ll say the opposite.

Which ones? OpenAI? Microsoft? Anthropic?

Eh, try using Microsoft Copilot in Word or PowerPoint. It is worthless. If your experience with AI was a Microsoft product, you would think it was a scam too.

Yeah Microsoft has consistently been bragging about how so much code is written by AI, yet their products are worse than ever. Seems to indicate “using AI” is not enough. You have to be smart about when and where.

It’s not just that though. You find when going through AI projects in an organization that many times the process is manual for a reason. This isn’t the first wave of “automation” that’s came through. Most things that can be fully automated already have been long ago and they manual parts get sold as we can make AI do it, until you see the specs and noodle around on the problem some then you realize it’s probably just going to remain manual as the amount of model training requires as much time and effort as just doing it by hand.

I have a dystopian future vision where humans are cheaper machines than robots, so we become the disposable task force for grunt work that robots aren’t cheap enough for. To some degree this is already happening.

It’s comical that Microsoft inserted Copilot buttons throughout all of their productivity suite, and none of them are able to do the bare minimum that you would hope for.

“Oh cool, copilot is in excel! I’m going to ask it a question about the data in the spreadsheet that it’s literally appearing beside natively in-app, or for help with a formula!”

“Wait what, it’s saying it can’t see anything or read from the currently displayed worksheet? Why is it inside the application then? Why would I want an outdated version of ChatGPT with no useful context or ability to read/do anything inside all my Office applications?”

Meta's AI can't search posts on Meta's properties (or at least couldn't a few months ago). I'm not really sure what it's point is unless it's meant as a kind of help desk for the site (which they already also have).

I was looking at Dell's website earlier trying to find out what hardware is inside a specific model (the list of hardware doesn't say, just a bunch of post numbers with cryptic descriptions), and there's a video at the bottom of the page on how to use their AI assistant. I didn't see any links to an assistant.

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