AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/08/more_researchers_use_ai_few_confident/

by rntn • 10 months ago

80 34 10 months ago

theregister.com

taylodl• 10 months ago

Welcome to the trough of disillusionment!

ranger207• 10 months ago

The top of the S-curve

baobun2• 10 months ago

One anecdote. I was worried about a recent friend of mine (non-technical solo traveler) becoming besties with ChatGPT and overly trusting and depending on it for basically everything.

Last time we met they had cancelled their subscription and cut down on the daily chats because they started feeling drained by the constant calls for engagement and follow-up questions, together with "she lost EQ after an update".

jncfhnb• 10 months ago

Last time we met they had cancelled their subscription and cut down on the daily chats because they started feeling drained by the constant calls for engagement and follow-up questions, together with "she lost EQ after an update".

Can you explain what this means?

Your friend felt drained because chat gpt was asking for her engagement?

neom2• 10 months ago

Not OP, but:

4o, the model most non-tech people use (that I wish they would depreciate) is very...chatty, it will actively try to engage you, and give you "useful things" you think you need, and take you down huge long rabbit holes. On the second point, it used to be very "high EQ" to people (sycophantic). Once they rolled back the sycophancy thing, even a couple of my non-technical friends msg'd me asking what happened to ChatGPT. I know one person who we've currently lost to 4o, it's got them talked into a very strange place friends can't reason them out of, and one friend who has recently "come back from it" so to speak.

coldtea• 10 months ago

ChatGPT got on their nerves for nagging and baiting for more engagement.

baobun2• 10 months ago

Your friend felt drained because chat gpt was asking for her engagement?

Basically yeah (except the "she" in my comment is referring to ChatGPT).

andrewinardeer• 10 months ago

I'm fairly bored with AI now.

I genuinely wonder where the next innovative leap in AI will come from and what it will look like. Inference speed? Sharper reasoning?

mdhb• 10 months ago

I think there’s an extremely high likelihood that we just DON’T see huge advancements at least in terms of accuracy or capabilities which are probably the two major nuts to crack to bring it to a different level.

I’m open to the possibility of faster, cheaper and smaller (we saw an instance of that with deepseek) but think there’s a real chance we hit a wall elsewhere.

rhetocj232• 10 months ago

I find it funny we assume (arrogantly) that progress will just keep on coming.

Really? Im not convinced we have the right people in this day-and-age to bring about those leaps.

It might be that humanity goes another 50 years until someone comes around with a novel take.

BoredPositron3• 10 months ago

It's even worse for image/video generation. The models get better in fidelity (prompt adherence) but raw image quality stagnated for close to 1 1/2 years now.

lxgr3• 10 months ago

It’s the exact opposite for me. Image quality has been more than fine for me for a year or two, while prompt adherence has massively improved but still leaves much to be desired.

BoredPositron3• 10 months ago

Our applications might differ we do 16-20k production for various automotive clients. Hitting 100% geometric details is not possible with the newer models because of the fixed patch sizes in their RoPe implementations.

Gigachad2• 10 months ago

Is this just a cost issue? Like they could turn the resolution up but they can’t afford the resources

BoredPositron3• 10 months ago

It's an architectural issue.

dimmuborgir• 10 months ago

Nano Banana for me. After the initial wow phase it's meh now. Randomly refuses to adhere to the prompt. Randomly makes unexpected changes. Randomly triggers censorship filter. Randomly returns the image as is without making any changes.

DamnInteresting• 10 months ago

It's just like spending time with a human bullshitter. At first, their energy and confidence are fun! But the spell is broken after a handful of "confidently incorrect" moments, and the realization that they will never stop doing that. It's usually more work than it's worth to extract the kernels from the crap.

lxgr3• 10 months ago

Knowing whether (ostensible) solutions are easy or costly to verify is key to using LLMs efficiently.

mgh22• 10 months ago

It seems the whole world is under this spell of lies

sph• 10 months ago

It's just like spending time with a human bullshitter.

I am close to a very prolific human bullshitter. The hardest thing is that anyone unfamiliar with them will have bought hook, line and sinker into their latest story, and you have to work hard to explain how that's a complete fabrication, while getting attacked as a naysayer and a hater. It's exhausting, and often it's just easier to nod along.

The parallels with discussing the pros and cons of LLMs in this atmosphere of hype are undeniable.

ironSkillet2• 10 months ago

I don't know about other use cases, but AI is definitively a game changer for software development. You still need to know what you're doing and test/think critically about what it's giving you, but the body of software problems that you can conceptually treat as "boilerplate" becomes massively larger with the help of a good AI coding tool.

Gigachad2• 10 months ago

It’s like Stack Overflow but much faster and doesn’t insult you. Which is useful, but this is so much less than what the companies are claiming it is.

happymellon2• 10 months ago

I've just had to "fix" a bunch of shit that was thrown over the wall that "sort of did the job" that came from someone using AI.

It's a game changer for some people who only need it to mostly get things started and pretend they did their job, and a work generator for anyone who actually needs to get things working.

The code was shockingly bad, and had to be rewritten to be able to do step 2 of the task.

ironSkillet2• 10 months ago

In my mind that is a problem with your lazy developer colleague, not AI as a whole. You can't expect it to be right on the first try (just like human code), you have to iterate with it and have the experience to know when it's off track and you have to take over.

jcims• 10 months ago

Isn't this just the human condition at work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U

Fast forward a hundred years when we have a holodeck and sooner or later everyone will get bored with it.

m463• 10 months ago

I regularly use it with searches, and it really cuts through the nonsense.

Sort of like an information desk. The person there might not be a nobel laureate, but I don't know anything and they usually have enough knowledge to be immediately helpful.

Like "compare expedition max vs platinum"

(notice I didn't know max meant extra length, while platinum is a trim level)

geldedus• 10 months ago

For coding, AI works fantastically great. I'll take the "meh" AI anytime.

more_corn• 9 months ago

I’m past meh. I think it’s actively dangerous in precisely the areas where (and because) others think it is good.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better

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