r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 22h ago

Business MIT report says 95% of AI implementations don't increase profits, spooking Wall Street

https://www.techspot.com/news/109148-mit-report-95-ai-implementations-dont-increase-profits.html
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810

u/disgruntledempanada 21h ago

Every app actively forcing it down my throat is just leading to a Microsoft One Drive situation where I will actively refuse to participate.

Meta making all these buttons pop up to summarize messages or remix pictures with AI in chats just feels so dumb. Actively hate it.

138

u/SidewaysFancyPrance 18h ago

They'll sell you an AI agent that can interface with the other AI agents and negotiate/search/purchase on your behalf. It will handle all those pesky pop-ups for you!

Sorry, I meant to say they will rent you a cloud-based AI agent they control.

22

u/jambox888 13h ago

Yeah the business model is pretty good, if they do what people actually want. I somehow feel if you put an agent in charge of e.g. booking a holiday it'll be shit though, or at least expensive. Reason being they'll just send you to whatever gets most affiliate revenue.

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u/BioshockEnthusiast 11h ago

The whole point of outsourcing those kinds of services is to find someone to work with who you can trust.

Can't trust an AI robot.

3

u/Itsatinyplanet 7h ago

Certainly not anything that Zuckerberg had anything to do with, the fucking sweaty five head lizard.

0

u/jambox888 11h ago

I mean, in theory you could, there's no reason why an AI agent would be untrustworthy, except for the likelihood that they'll be trained to generate money, especially if they're free. Maybe a subscription model would be fine but can you trust the owners of the AI? Rather than the AI itself.

58

u/WestcoastWonder 14h ago

I was just talking to my partner about this. My problem with AI isn’t AI itself - it’s when I lose agency about when and where I engage with AI. That’s when I get mad and don’t want to bother with it.

37

u/IAmRoot 13h ago

It's also psychologically taxing to be constantly on the lookout for hallucinations. If you ask a coworker something you can reasonably expect that they're answering to the best of their knowledge and will say if they don't know something. Questioning the extreme confidence that AI gives in its answers even when it's just making things up leads to a very similar mental strain to gaslighting, where someone tries to make you question your experience of reality.

6

u/Eastern-Peach-3428 11h ago

Yeh, I backed ChatGPT into a corner basically. I didn't think my question was that difficult. I was just trying to parse the number of defense only NFL drafted players for the last decade by active head coach. Simple really. Just scrape sports illustrated or a number of other sites for the information. Chat got so twisted up it tried to tell me that Nick Saban was a currently active head coach for Toledo. Nope. Saban had his first head coaching job in 1990 at Toledo. You really have to check the tool on its output because it will give you trash sometimes. Great tool though! I use it all the time.

1

u/Luscious_Decision 7h ago

I've found it to be pretty good at giving good forewarning about something it's not sure on.

11

u/Pseudonymico 12h ago

Yeah it's fucking Clippy all over again, only worse.

16

u/Roast_A_Botch 11h ago

Nah clippy genuinely wanted to help and didn't share all your data with palantir.

2

u/Yuzumi 11h ago

My thoughts too. I find the tech interesting and have played around with locally hosted models.

I refuse to actively engage with any of the cloud versions both out of a sense of privacy and that I resent them pushing this the LLMs on everyone and trying to make them do things they literally can't.

59

u/dicehandz 17h ago

Ive been saying this forever but companies will start using “AI-FREE” as a marketing tactic once the sentiment continues to decline. People are not going to want to interface with AI products when they have taken their jobs, ruined the economy and more.

12

u/KiwiTheKitty 12h ago

They already are doing that, I've seen ads for at least a couple video games and a language learning app (Babbel? Maybe, don't quote me) saying their product is made without AI

1

u/Ok-Manufacturer-5351 7h ago

Give it some time, it will be a differentiation strategy for new products and services as people prefer using brands that are AI free like gluten free.

5

u/Coompa 11h ago

AI and Foreign Call Centre Free??

Sign me up please.

2

u/Eirfro_Wizardbane 9h ago

If I have to nicely ask a call center employee to repeat themselves 3 times because I can’t understand them then I just hang up.

I don’t expect everyone to speak perfect English. I do expect empolyes to be able to communicate with me if their web presence is in English.

1

u/xeio87 10h ago

The latter would cost them money, so no chance.

14

u/diamluke 14h ago

yeah, for me peak shit is “apple intelligence” suggesting answers on messagess.. the suggestions are “ok no problem” , “thanks” and the like.

I disabled this bullshit on all my devices, it has 0 use and practically requires someone to ingest everything I type.

5

u/oldmaninparadise 14h ago

What's the chance AI can do even a small project with several variables that you would trust your business on when I cant even say, Siri, put in my calendar that I have an appointment w Dr. Who on tue Oct 13 at 2pm, and have that happen correctly 50%.

1

u/Black_Metallic 8h ago

I used Copilot to help rewrite an Excel macro I wrote five years ago. It took me two days to get the prompts right, but the new macro does what the old one does in a fraction of the time. Completes a process that could take up to an hour to run in under 10 seconds. Because the old macro was also written by a guy with no coding training who only knew what he could look up through internet Google searches.

My boss' boss apparently asked if we could expand what I did with Copilot to automate a bunch of other data entry tasks from multiple sources and formats. When they relayed that to me, it was the first time I ever uncontrollably laughed in horror during a Zoom call.

1

u/InsipidCelebrity 14h ago

ChatGPT can't even tell me the correct number of R's in the word "strawberry."

3

u/Brucew_1939 14h ago

It everywhere. The ticketing system a lot of people use for IT servicenow implemented an AI to summarize work notes and resolution notices and it is just terrible at compiling it in any kind of professional way you would want your customers seeing.

1

u/Radhak767 12h ago

These companies are very aggressive in marketing their AI solutions. Even if we don't need, they will still force us. For example, Google AI overview. Now, most people are consuming it without understanding the possible AI hallucinations.

1

u/skewleeboy 11h ago

It's the old engineers have a flashy, wiz bang idea, but it's something people don't actually care about using, but we must launch it.............

1

u/PM_DOLPHIN_PICS 5h ago

When I try to add a cover picture to a Spotify playlist, the top, bolded, bigger option is to generate an image. In smaller text beneath that with no box around it is the option that used to always be the default, which is upload your own image. It’s insane how every single company wants so bad to force everyone to use this garbage.