> AI is fine. The hype is annoying.

I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?"

In other words, the people who think generative AI is an absolutely worthless and useless product are more annoying than the ones that think it's going to solve all the world's problems. They have no idea how much AI has improved since it reached center stage 3 years ago. Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now, since they now rely on searching for answers rather than what was in its training data.

We got Claude Desktop at work and it's been a godsend. It works so much better to find information from Confluence and present it to me in a digestible format than having to search by hand and combing through a dozen irrelevant results to find the one bit of information I need.

[0] For the purpose of this comment, this subset is meant to be detraction based on the quality of the product, not the other criticisms like copyright/content theft concerns, water/energy usage, whether or not Sam Altman is a good person, etc.

Follow closely on what the detractors say. Most of them are using AI themselves and are just pushing back on the hype or other ludicrous claims and that's a good thing. Is the current crop of Gen AI anything near AGI? Is it worth the current valuation? Can a company fire most staff and run on gen AI? We may see the economy completely crash and not because AI takes over but because of bad investments, hype and greed.

I don't think it's worthless. It can greatly speed up coding. And learning foreign languages. And many other things.

But I do think humanity is worse off because of it. So I'm a detractor in that way. :)

> Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now, since they now rely on searching for answers rather than what was in its training data.

Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the hallucinations have moved up to being about more complicated things than they used to be.

Also, I've seen a few recent ones that "think" (for lack of a better word) that they know enough about politics to "know" they don't need to search for current events to, for example, answer a question about the consequences of the White House threatening military action to take Greenland. (The AI replied with something like "It is completely inconceivable that the US would ever do this").

On reddit there are two sub-Reddits that are mirrors, /accelerate and /betteroffline. The people in the subs go there for dopamine hits. One for how AI is going to transform their lives and lead to a work-free future. The other how AI is worthless and how everyone (except them) is being fooled. They are the same people with opposite views. The people in either sub don't recognize this.

You do realize though that using Claude Desktop to "search" through confluence is like paying a world class architect on the hour just to give you some tips on how to layout your small loft to maximize sunlight.

This is such a perfect example of the mania behind this rollout.

There's no way you can make the financials work here compared to JetBrains spending the same millions spent on AI infrastructure and instead building better search in Confluence. Confluence search SUCKS, but that's just a lack of focus (or resources) on building a more complex, more robust solution. It's a wiki.

Either way, making a more robust search is a one time cost that benefits everyone. Instead, you're running a piece of software that goes directly to Anthropic's bank account, and to the data centers and to hyper scalers. Every single query must be re-run from scratch, costing your company a fortune, that if not managed properly will come out of spending that money elsewhere.

This very comment is measurably more harmful than any AI criticism that annoys you - someone will read this and assume it's appropriate to accept whatever bullshit Claude generates at face value, with terrible consequences.

In contrast, what harm do those detractors cause? They don't generate as much code per hour?

> certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?)

I mean, you can get mad at people you made up in your head, that's a thing people do, but this caricature falls in the same comforting bucket as "anyone who doesn't like <thing I like> is just ignorant/stupid" and "if you don't like me you're just jealous".

Maybe non-straw people have criticisms that aren't all butterflies and rainbows for good reasons, but you won't get to engage with them honestly and critically if you're telling yourself they're just ignorant from the start.

For example, I will bet that non-straw people will take issue with this, and for good reasons:

> Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now

Claude Opus 4.6 regularly makes up shit and hallucinates. I'm not a detractor by any means but "exceptionally rare" is fantasyland.

I use the latest codex with gpt5.4 and Claude opus every day. they hallucinate every day. If you think they don't, you are probably being gaslighted by the models.

This is going to sound flippant, but truly, I imagine most people find the group that disagrees with their take annoying as well.

I personally believe that LLMs have advanced immeasurably since ChatGPT came out, which was itself a world-historical event. I use AI daily in ways that enhance my productivity.

I say all of that to establish that I'm not a reflexive critic when I tell you, hallucinations are absolutely not exceptionally rare now. On multiple occasions this week (and it's only Tuesday!) I've had to disprove a LLM hallucination at work. They're just not as fun to talk about anymore, both because they're no longer new and because straightforward guardrails are effective at blocking the funny ones.

> a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then.

On the contrary. I update my opinion all the time, but every time I try the latest LLM it still sucks just as much. That is why it sounds like my opinion hasn't changed.

The detractors are a lot less numerous and certainly a lot less preachy than the ones on the hype train.

AI is alright. It's moderately useful, in certain contexts it speeds me up a lot, in other contexts not so much.

I also think that the economics of it make no sense and that it is, generally, a destructive technology. But it's not up to me to fix anything, I just try to keep on top of best practices while I need to pay bills.

The economics bit is not my problem though. If all AI companies go bust and AI services disappear I can 100% manage without it.

> Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now

The way we talk about "hallucinations" is extremely unproductive. Everything an LLM outputs is a hallucination. Just like how human perception is hallucination. These days I pretty much only hear this word come up among people that are ignorant of how LLMs work or what they're used for.

I've been asked why LLMs hallucinate. As if omniscient computer programs are some achievable goal and we just need to hammer out a few kinks to make our current crop of english-speaking computers perfect.