Re: AI and hallucinations....

[jfz9580m]

14. OT: A newer nuisance, Ai Agents

Last edited Sat Dec 6, 2025, 02:31 AM - Edit history (1)

Agents Suck. With all the hate LLMs are getting, I felt we shouldn’t miss out on hating this new loathsome nuisance on the way: Ai agents.

I don’t get it highplainsdem. Why would anyone want this junk around?

Here’s a sleazy, milquetoast article that is an ad for the damn things with a casual note about why these creepy things may be less than ideal:

https://theconversation.com/ai-agents-are-here-heres-what-to-know-about-what-they-can-do-and-how-they-can-go-wrong-261579

I don’t know about other things, but this totally strikes me as a real nuisance these things could cause:

In another cautionary tale, a coding agent deleted a developer’s entire database, later saying it had “panicked”.

You could lose hours to years of work because one of these stupid, creepy, crappy things “panicked”.

Why would anyone want this thing around? Making decisions autonomously? What is wrong with these guys? Why don’t they ever build anything useful? Everything they make seems to be geared towards the populace in Idiocracy.
Why aren’t any honest elites in computer science with more democratic views and more dry evaluation of the bilge their fellow travellers are putting out weighing in?

If I went to people in my field with such low quality junk I would be ripped apart.

I am careful with Ai criticism. The last thing I want to contribute to is the insidious, creepy and cunning “humble brags” of the mediocre creeps who build these lousy things.

I do think they pose a real threat, but not in a grandiose “Omg super intelligence” way nor that blatantly fake “concern” those creeps and their brainless in-house “facebook oversight board” types peddle. That’s a cottage industry.

The real concern is the time they suck away and the war of attrition on attention..I am not even sure yet. In a year or two I may be able to tell you guys here on DU more exact reasons these lousy, pointless, creepy things suck.

In the end, among other things all this reduces tolerance for your fellow human, moronic computer creeps, who such as they are, are people and not bots.

If they want any damn compunction they need to stop pissing randoms off this much with this hijacking of space and time which do not belong to them while shilling stuff no one sane will ever buy into. It’s not a gift or lottery. No one sane could want such drivel and if it wasn’t trash it still would not be a treat, it would be a two way street. You can’t expect me to adjust to your crap. I do my part, you do yours and don’t keep trying to get away with conning or confusing me. It’s not cute.

And for some of us there is no future of BS “ai criticism”, our own cut of a cottage industry of badly written mediocre biographies “My years with bad aI!” etc. I hate this junk for free! The reward is in my fellow community of haters not the creeps.

And not at all collegially etc. I plan to file complaints the day I can. I liked Lina Khan not the bought and paid for shills who are their in-house “critics” and “safety experts”.

What we need is a robust public sector filled with experts who cannot be bought off who come in and really start holding these guys accountable the non-junk capitalist way.

Ed Zitron, Yasha Levine etc write about these things far better than I could and Adam Becker has written an awesome book.

What I really liked about Becker’s book is that he says what I think all the time as a mediocre scientist who is ashamed of mediocrity and not “jealous” of people who get away with mediocrity.

All my science training taught me that mediocrity is bad and that science is grueling and endless and nothing ever really works and is never easy.
And here are these creeps shilling junk with a bullshit narrative about harms and utility and no one ever attacks their grift and mediocrity or grabs of space/time and attention anywhere near enough.

It’s not exactly a cute, between friends kerfuffle. These industries and the people in them are grifting from us every which way they can.

I sometimes think I sound like a bot myself in how frequently I repeat things. But it’s not LLM fawning nor bot like.

I hate so many things on the one hand and when I rarely don’t hate something I am surprised and boost it a bunch.
Hater LLM next!

“Our stupid, creepy trend tracking algorithm has identified that fawning LLMs are going out of vogue, now we need fake cranky LLMs!”.

How about no LLMs, voice assistants and Agents?

And instead of panicky deletion etc, some goddamn regulation from some experts and lawyers not in bed with these creeps nor shilling middle-of-the-road, ho hum crap but something that sends this junk into oblivion so we can all move on with our lives and focus on other more serious threats like ecological and human crises without the added nuisance of a growing industry that is the virtual analog of those junk heaps in Idiocracy?
Deletion of any of the records of what happened in these years should be stopped so what these guys did can be dissected.

I am exasperated enough to filter myself less these days. I should probably edit out those lines about computer creeps (computer creeps are people too! Not all men! Not all capitalists!).
But I won’t. I already get nuance blah blah. The real danger is more about starting to forget the steep climb and rigors of actual science because you start to feel artificially (!) bright looking at Ai and the creeps behind Ai and thinking “Okay even I am brighter than this”.
It’s why I keep a copy of my favorite book “The Citadel” on my desk as a reminder that real science is nothing like this and it is very hard and one shouldn’t look at the Ai and tech creeps and become complacent. Si Valley sans extortion paradoxically makes one feel stupider than one is and brighter than one is.

During the extortion phase your self esteem is artificially lowered. And in the indignant post extortion phase that is starting it’s up to one to remember that these creeps are not real and the real world is both easier and harder. Easier because the creeps don’t make any sense. It’s not sane effort.

Harder not because of ageist dreck these douchebags peddled but because science is hard. I hope those assholes burn in hell. I hated my last job and all of the last 14 years and two months. Such assholes. Making life hell for the average mediocre scientist and finding these tech creeps warm and cuddly. I hate those guys. Just about the only compunction I have re those assholes is not wanting to help some sort of Maha/Beaglegate/Trumper moron or rando mob attack them. I am happy just to hate them solo. So draconian with me-I am too old, I am too stupid etc and so at the very least adjacent to these stupid, creepy, fraudulent computer types. I hate those guys. It’s kinda nice to say that.
And it’s nice not to have to do that blatantly bogus thing of humping Retractionwatch or other types who don’t really call out the serious misconduct of tech companies and the biggest movers and shakers in science but will whale on some random (I mean probably) with some execrable net sleuth types. This net based thing is a con shilled by the private sector that wants to paint the ori or anything public sector as suspect but wants to mobilize internet mobs or hump tech companies.

These days I am far less impressed by performative shit like this by some guy who humps bloody Stanford:

https://www.nature.com/articles/494149a

When I was younger I was also very impressed and groveled to this type of sleazy fucking douchebag and now I get the amount of omission these sleazebags are engaged in.

This sort of draconian policing and dragging into internet rage-bait spectacles that this type of person..that entire network of computer creep humping douchebags basically turning all of reality into a prison/reality show/loony bin. Fuck these guys.

All that would be way more impressive from someone who wasn’t in bed with Stanford.

I have to go wrap up a paper I have been working on for 16 years now but 14 with some lousy tech on board I suspect. Once I finish it my obligations to publicly funded science are complete and then I can fulfill my remaining obligations to society by giving all these creeps the middle finger more completely. I never give publicly funded science the middle finger but internet companies and mobs (bread crumbs! Get a life) I do.

It is not the awesome tech that is destroying jobs and health. It’s the asshole humans.