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back to article Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Those using personal computers with built-in AI services are less productive than those using traditional PCs, according to a study conducted by Intel. The chipmaker, which is quite keen to see people buy the AI PCs sold by its hardware partners, came to this conclusion following a commissioned survey [PDF] of 6,000 people in …

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  1. Khaptain Silver badge

    In my opinion, many of those people don't actually understand what AI is and what it is actually useful for.. They have not yet understood that "intelligence" is not actually what is provided.

    Instead they have in front of them a very fast search engine that quickly collates, filters and sorts results that it has gleaned from the web and possibly one or two other resources... But, it cannot invent that which it does not know about, or make useful abstractions, nor can it provide answer to questions that are badly formulated.. And the big problem is with the data that it does have, if that data is skewed then you will never get anything but a skewed reply and the user does not know this

    One of my non-it collègues has managed to build a simple website using AI results, there is nothing fantastic here, but he is unable to understand why it is so difficult to make minor adjustments, he has no formal training or experience on how or which changes to the HTML, Javascript or CSS. So he spends hours trying to get the AI engine to change the code for him but because he does not understand the code behind the site and therefore does not know how to ask the engine how to make the suitable ajustements.

    He is using the a specialized tool for a job that he does not know how to perform. It's like giving a calligraphy brush to a four year old and expecting them to be able to write Japanese poetry.

    AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands, but almost useless when used by those with little or no knowledge. Some of them would simply be better of just using Google.

    46 4 Reply
    1. sabroni Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Meh

      re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

      For what? Lovely big post explaining why it's shit, let's have some examples of it being a "good tool".

      If I have to check what it's produced then it's not a "good tool", it's an "idiot assistant".

      30 2 Reply
      1. Khaptain Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

        "For what? Lovely big post explaining why it's shit, let's have some examples of it being a "good tool"."

        As an exemple I could cite the following .

        I asked it to produce code for a full screen Alarm Clock application, which allowed me to adjust the brightness by touching the lower/upper part of the screen, to automatically dim the brightness between 21:00 and 06:00 and to work in both Vertical and Horizontal modes, I use it as bed side clock on an old Android phone.

        I am a coder so I understand the code that it produced, all I had to do was modify the Font for the clock face and Bobs your Auntie. It took me around 15 minutes to have a working application. I certainly couldn't have coded that it 15 minutes, I don't write Android code for a living, it would have taken me longer than that just to look up example of working code, contraints by constraint ..

        It is a good example of where using AI to produce Boiler Plate code, which requires only minimal modification in order to produce a working application..

        Obviously this is not what you would want to do for critical applications but for the boring stuff it actually works quite well. But again, the tool has to be used by those that already know/have an excellent grasp of what they are doing.

        I am not an advocate for AI, for the majority it is an over-hyped fast search engine with some extra triage/filtering.

        15 4 Reply
        1. Ian Johnston Silver badge
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          Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

          Was the code it produced original or just a copy of something it had been fed?

          17 0 Reply
          1. Jedit Silver badge
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            Boffin

            "Was the code it produced original or just a copy"

            Look into your heart. You already know the answer.

            28 0 Reply
        2. Cardinal Fang
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          Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

          Strangely enough. I wrote a similar app. for our TV recently.

          That also took little time, I'm not claiming 15 minutes because I didn't care - but it was quick and only 66 lines of code. I got the font right in the process.

          1 0 Reply
      2. Tom66
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        Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

        Just the other day I use ChatGPT-4o to write a simple Python tool. The prompt was (roughly):

        > "Using Python write a tool that generates a Windows toast notification when a new serial port is connected to my system. The tool should run in the background and not require any user interaction once started."

        I have a lot of serial ports on my system and going into Device Manager was a chore to find which one I had just connected. (Lots of FTDI cables, for anyone familiar with embedded systems.)

        It created that tool in 30 seconds and it worked perfectly first time.

        Could I have written the tool myself - absolutely. And I expect such tools are available online - but IT policies would mean I would need to get approval to install anything. So this saved me time. Instead of spending 10 minutes writing it, looking up how to generate 'toasts' on Windows, how to use pyserial to find the newest serial ports connected, I used a tool which has that information in its training data set and can generate the answer in seconds.

        Would I use it for any serious production code? No. Would I use it for anything where I couldn't give the code a good look over and make sure it isn't doing anything bad? No. But it's absolutely brilliant for small, well-defined tasks.

        9 3 Reply
        1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
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          Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

          Wait. IT policy requires that you get things approved before installing, but you don't think that applies to AI generated code?

          24 1 Reply
          1. Tom66
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            Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

            No, because I have Python installed already and I can review the AI generated code to see if it's not a problem. 30 lines of code, not exactly a huge amount to look through.

            The issue comes about when getting permission to install an EXE, I can get it, but it takes time. So I have a lot of tools written in Python for little problems here and there.

            (Blame Cyber Essentials rules. Not my rules!)

            12 1 Reply
            1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
              Reply Icon
              Thumb Up

              Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

              Ahhhhh ok, That makes sense!

              Sorry, I was confused and stupid!

              2 1 Reply
              1. OldGeezer
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                FAIL

                Bypassing IT rules

                Ok, now multiply your 'bypass' by 10, 20, 100 employees - now bypassing IT Dept rules for critical departmental functions and you have a company wide maintenance and IP nightmare.

                With 45+ years development experience I go back to the days where "it takes too long for the programmers to write the application so I whipped it up in Excel". Then found rounding errors etc made the result wrong by a significant error of margin. Then found the person who 'whipped it up' had since resigned and the programmers were asked to modify it - answer was "NO, get whoever wrote it to modify it".

                Happened then and still happens today; the bane of IT management.

                14 1 Reply
          2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
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            Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

            It's called box ticking. Box exists for bought in code. Box does not exist for AI-generated code.

            15 0 Reply
        2. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

          You allowed an AI to create toast?

          We all know where that ends, though I do quite fancy a crumpet

          7 0 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

            Howdy Doodly Doo!

            5 0 Reply
          2. spireite Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

            On Star Trek, it would cause a glass of Champers to appear on your desk.

            0 0 Reply
            1. Roj Blake Silver badge
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              Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

              Champagne would be perfect for Kirk's latest piece of crumpet.

              0 0 Reply
              1. collinsl Silver badge
                Reply Icon

                Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

                Who's that then? What episode are you watching?

                0 0 Reply
      3. tatatata
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        Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

        There are two good examples for using AI that I can think of.

        Generating pictures to lighten-up your presentation. Not for content, just some illustrations.

        Generating elevator music. When you use real songs in shops or pubs, you need to pay quite a hefty fee to play music. When you use AI generated mind numbing background music, no licenses are required.

        5 1 Reply
        1. Ian Johnston Silver badge
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          Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

          Oh dear God. Death by PowerPoint has become even more excruciating.

          17 0 Reply
          1. Little Mouse
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            Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

            "two good examples"

            I suggest that their very existence in our "real" world is compelling evidence that we already live in a simulation...

            4 0 Reply
        2. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

          When you use AI generated mind numbing background music, no licenses are required.

          In the most advanced countries, the local equivalent of RIA requires that you pay a licence for playing ANY music to an audience outside the immediate family.

          Even when it is public domain music...

          3 0 Reply
        3. druck Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

          AI pictures are shit though, most of the time their overwhelm wrongness is so distracting whatever content they are meant to be accompanying goes unnoticed.

          1 0 Reply
      4. Groo The Wanderer
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        Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

        The fundamental problem is it takes real intelligence to understand plain, everyday user language. Current generation "AI" is just statistics gone overboard that has no actual intelligence.

        I've said it ever since I grasped what OpenAI started hyping: LLMs are interesting side bars, but they're a dead end for systems that can actually understand users, instead of requiring users to become "LLM chat speakers". Basically no different than expecting users to be good at programming.

        5 0 Reply
      5. _olli
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        Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

        Just the other day I was inspecting how to alleviate a performance issue in a custom software and tested using ChatGPT to help in the tesk. The prompt was (roughly):

        "Give c+++ code for mutex-free thread-safe multi-producer message queue for multithread communication".

        And voila, few seconds later ChatGPT gave C++ source code for a message queue. On the surface the solution looked somewhat decent, however, closer look showed that the code was not thread-safe, in other words it was useless for the purpose. Aside I set the AI and went browsing boost library modules.

        AI shows promise for doing simple stuff, which is good news for people working on simple stuff, however, it's currently questionable much it can boost productivity when working on hard stuff.

        2 0 Reply
        1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge
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          Re: ...however, closer look showed...

          AI is heavily promoted as a way to cut corners, but, as we know, the expression "cutting corners" should be treated as pejorative.

          3 0 Reply
      6. Sherrie Ludwig
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        Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

        it's not a "good tool", it's an "idiot assistant".

        Clippy? Is that you again?

        I have said this before: I don't want AI to write for me, I want a Roomba like thing that will clean my bathroom. Or, at least a Roomba that recognizes when the puppy made a mess: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/15/pooptastrophe-man-details-night-his-roomba-ran-over-dog-poop/88667704/

        1 0 Reply
      7. collinsl Silver badge
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        Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands

        it's an "idiot assistant".

        That should be "Assistant, Idiot", surely?

        1 0 Reply
    2. yoganmahew
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      "But, it cannot invent that which it does not know about"

      Oh but it can. and it's a significant issue. It gets worse the better the prompt you write about something the ChatAI doesn't know about.

      8 0 Reply
    3. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
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      "AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands"

      Which is probably less than 0.1% of the people actually using "AI" today. In truth, what passes for "AI" today is probably going to destroy the arts, literature, music and movie business as we know it, with terrible things generated almost on the fly as we watch them, while not actually "freeing up" anyone's time for doing actual work. So humanity loses its cultural heritage and works longer hours just so some Silicon Valley types can get rich. A lot like cryptocurrency, basically.

      5 0 Reply
    4. Snake Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      RE: don't understand what AI is

      Best line of the article:

      "Robert Hallock, Intel vice president and general manager of client AI and technical marketing, argues that the challenge for AI PC makers is reeducating knowledge workers, so AI tech is a help rather than a hindrance."

      So it's the HUMANS that are the problem, they aren't using the apparently superior powers of AI well enough!!

      My head has fallen off from the amount of shaking in disbelief.

      10 0 Reply
  2. lglethal Silver badge
    Stop

    AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

    Seriously, people would let AI write their emails for them? If the Email is so unimportant that you feel you can palm it off to AI, why are you bothering to send it in the first place? if it's a standard boilerplate response. "Thank you for your application, yadda, yadda, yadda". You can create a Template. Hell do it properly and you dont even need to have to modify it beyond adding the email address.

    Transcribing Meetings? Who on Earth does this? And if you actually had to do this, would you really trust the hallucinations of an AI to actually accurately reflect what was covered in the meeting?

    Managing files? If you are actually at the level of properly managing files (not just deleting the rubbish bin occasionally), then you would be far better off creating a script to do the managing for you. It's not going to suddenly go off and start "managing" other files that werent in the original remit, because the AI had a hallucination and decided that Root was a dirty word and therefore all files in Root had to be deleted...

    I've yet to hear of an ACTUAL daily usecase for AI for the normal consumer or even the normal worker. It's just another buzzword used to try and sell new PCs. It needs to go away... Fast....

    55 2 Reply
    1. Joe W Silver badge
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      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      And this happens:

      https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/21/new_york_times_lawyers_openai/

      "The bot ate my homework."

      12 0 Reply
    2. nematoad Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      I don't understand.

      Just because the PC has an AI label stuck on it does that mean that the PC is incapable of functioning as a standard non-AI machine? Or is it the case that managers have told their staff "We have given you this new AI PC and you must use it."? Without training.

      Or is it the case that the staff have been given this new toy and being curious have started playing around seeing what the new wonder weapon can do? Again without training.

      It seems to me that management have fallen for the promise of increased productivity but have forgotten that a new method of working does require a modicum of training before they reap any rewards.

      11 0 Reply
      1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

        Sure, you can ignore the AI parts, but it's still a part of the silicon die that could be better used for something else. And that's if you have an OS that lets you ignore it.

        I suspect that Windows will be full of unwanted AI "goodness" getting in the way.. Remember clippy?

        18 0 Reply
        1. Sherrie Ludwig
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          Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

          @Jamie Jones, yes, I do remember Clippy. And Siri, when I needed to get an Apple iPad Mini for a specific business use case. After less than a week, I throttled the bitch permanently, which made the i-thing more useful, and marginally more pleasant to use. As soon as the business use played well with other operating systems was happy to lose the i-thing.

          0 0 Reply
    3. Ian Johnston Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      Presumably the AI-written email will get an AI-written response, which gets a further AI-written response which gets ... ad infinitum.

      Writing emails takes me no time at all compared to deciding what to put in them.

      18 0 Reply
    4. abend0c4 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      Transcribing Meetings? Who on Earth does this?

      People who need a record of what was said and by whom for the avoidance of subsequent doubt or denial. Though in those cases you'd probably need each of the participants to review the transcript and accept its accuracy, so it's not clear AI would save much time in those circumstances.

      4 0 Reply
      1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
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        Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

        "Just press record"!

        13 0 Reply
    5. JT_3K
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      In terms of transcription, I'm unsure whether the Teams service is deemed """"AI"""" but having had to interact with other regions has been outstanding. I've been able to (with local HR) recruit IT positions in other countries where it's allowed the candidates in a stressful situation to not have to add the burden of a 2nd language. I've followed the technical and visual ques with HR providing a localised view on their "feel and fit". The candidates are going to be based in that region and speaking in that language anyway, just need some English to interact with the UK team when not under pressure.

      I'm not jumping on the "AI hype train" but the live transcription (if a little crappy at times) gets the job done really well.

      5 5 Reply
      1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

        How does it works when you have non native English speakers in the meeting, like for example:

        - French

        - Spanish

        - Peruvian

        - Londoner

        ?

        5 0 Reply
        1. JT_3K
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          Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

          Jokes aside, well. The Polish team I spent time with had a very regional dialect and I managed to follow throughout. I tried it with my Bulgarian team who both had a very different dialect and it had them too.

          0 0 Reply
    6. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      "Transcribing Meetings? Who on Earth does this?"

      Whoever it is they have an amazing amount of control. It's so important a job that, as Sir Humphrey would tell you, sometimes the minutes are written up before hand, just to ensure that they show the correct decisions being taken.

      Seriously: I'm on the committee of a charity. A few weeks ago the sec sent round minutes of the last meeting and I had to point out that there was an omission. I needed them to include a point which we had agreed but the minutes missed. It was one that enabled me to give the agreed reply to an enquiry via the web site. Hasty apology and circulation of the revised minutes. The written record matters.

      20 0 Reply
      1. lglethal Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Go

        Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

        Just to point out Taking Minutes is not Transcribing a Meeting.

        Taking Minutes is an essential part of any meeting, and absolutely not something you give to the person in the room likely to hallucinate or who has absolutely no idea about the topic being talked about. Or in other words the very definition of an AI. I doubt I'm the only person who has been in a meeting where the Boss has designated the brand new Work Student to take the minutes of the meeting, which then starts going into technical details, using a host of acronyms unknown to anyone not on the project. And when the minutes emerge at the end, they are absolutely useless, and no one knows what the hell the Minutes are trying to say, because the new Work Student didn't understand a word of what was going on. It is guaranteed to be the same outcome if you tried to use AI to generate the Minutes of a meeting,

        Transcribing a Meeting on the other hand means taking down word for word what was spoken in the meeting, and outside of a court stenographer, I've never heard of anyone doing that as part of their job.

        By all means, someone should keep the Minutes in any important meeting, and they should be gone over at the end of the meeting with everyone's signature on the bottom, if there's any hint of a suspicion that someone will try to weasel out of what they've said they will be doing. Getting an AI to transcribe what it thinks everyone said is simply going to lead to the old "I never said that. The AI must have imagined. What I actually said was..."

        9 1 Reply
        1. Tim99 Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Devil

          Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

          My late father was a senior local government officer. He maintained that the Secretary was the most powerful person at a meeting. I thought that its was the Chairman (This is a correct use - it just means the person who sits in the chair, and goes back to the days when a chair was expensive and reserved for important people, others sat on trestles or stools). My father explained that the secretary recorded the minutes, if it wasn't recorded it didn't happen; or the record could state something like "After extensive discussion it was agreed...". Similarly in a well ordered meeting if it isn't on the agenda, it doesn't get discussed - Who writes the agenda? It seems to be a skill, my father probably thought that Sir Humphry's skills were "adequate", "sound", but adequate.

          1 0 Reply
    7. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      Good luck automating bureaucracy.

      Getting things done is NOT equal to sending emails, managing files or taking meeting notes. But supposedly only a fraction of workers are capable of working on their own without supervision. So the capitalist "exploitation" is more of a "constant supervision for getting things done". The problem is that many managers are horrible procrastinators themselves. They are the bureaucrats adding useless reporting tasks to productive workers just to justify their own jobs.

      Reporting across company is mostly exchanging metadata and pointless blame-pushing. It is similar to managing dependencies in code. Complex workflows should be avoided as much as possible. Regular pruning is necessary. Simplification of laws and policies is critical.

      Blame pushing impacts politics too. While things are not done.

      Solution? - Pay managers less than actual workers. Only when managers decide what to do on the architectural level, should they be paid more.

      6 0 Reply
    8. phuzz Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      you would be far better off creating a script to do the managing for you. It's not going to suddenly go off and start "managing" other files that weren't in the original remit

      You haven't seen my scripting mate :(

      3 0 Reply
    9. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      If you have Teams, you don't need to transcribe anyway, you just tick the box in the call/meeting. No local compute required.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Mushroom

        Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

        No local computer required?

        Why is my processor overheating then?

        0 0 Reply
        1. Tim99 Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Trollface

          Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

          Excel, Word, Sharepoint, and Outlook/Exchange?

          0 0 Reply
    10. Jason Hindle Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      AI works pretty well with emails. Including the important ones.

      0 0 Reply
    11. O'Reg Inalsin
      Reply Icon

      Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

      There are plenty of AI apps out there already for transcription. Surely they vary in quality and features, and all make some mistakes - but that doesn't mean they are not practical in saving time.

      (Managing files sounds positively scary though.)

      There is a difference between letting a ChatBot writing an email/document for you and asking it to check for stupid mistakes.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: asking it to check for stupid mistakes.

        Yes, but I wouldn't even trust it with that task.

        1 0 Reply
  3. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    I'm not surprised...

    I seem to spend half my time on the work computer arguing with it and to be honest I'm getting a bit fed up of searching for how to turn things off. I'm pretty sure that I don't need my writing scanning for robot-perceived faults: to quote Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Iolanthe': "I can spell all the words that I use, and my grammar’s as good as my neighbours’."

    The robot complaining that the colour contrast of my email - y'know, standard black on white - might be a bit low for some readers is a final insult.

    [Unsurprisingly, searching directly for that quotation to confirm it didn't find a hit; mostly I got online grammar checkers, or (with quote marks) nothing at all. I had to search for a libretto for Iolanthe and then search that...]

    11 1 Reply
    1. AddieM
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      Re: I'm not surprised...

      Been a long while since search engines actually search for the words that you've typed in, in order - they've been awful for finding lyrics in songs for a long time. To an extent, finding synonyms and "natural searching" is useful, but it would be very handy to turn it off sometimes.

      "Text colour" is one of the things that LaTeX is quite concerned about, in the "traditional booksetting" kind of way. Rather than RGB colour, it means doing the hyphenation and layout in such a way that there's no big white gaps between words, or running gaps between words matching up over several lines, or squishing words to fit onto a line in such a way that there's a "dark line". That distracts the eye when scanning over the text, makes it difficult to read. Subtle if you don't know to look for it, but it's among the ways that a really good typesetter like LaTeX distinguishes itself from a really shit one, like eg. Word.

      Dunno why you'd get that complaint when writing an email, though - you write the words, computer does the formatting.

      11 0 Reply
      1. werdsmith Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        If you want a search engine to find matches for all your words in order then you are after an exact phrase. If you format your search terms correctly then your search will be extremely effective.

        If find they get song lyrics very easily.

        3 1 Reply
        1. Roland6 Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: I'm not surprised...

          Neil Barney’s is correct about the Iothanthe lyric/quote (try it, Google only found the quote when I prefixed the quote with Iolanthe.

          However, the lyric “ Steal a lot and they make you king” Google does correctly find without additional prompting.

          1 0 Reply
      2. Ian Johnston Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        Been a long while since search engines actually search for the words that you've typed in, in order

        Put them inside quote marks. Job done.

        7 0 Reply
        1. Roland6 Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: I'm not surprised...

          That works for the Iolanthe quote.

          0 0 Reply
      3. Bebu sa Ware
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        Text colour RGB.

        I remember reading, when still of an impressionable age, a page of text sporting "meaningfully" coloured words in Michael Palin's Bert Fegg's Nasty book for boys and girls☆ which, I think, featured the titular Dr Fegg and his axe but I vividly recall red as in <span style='text-color: red; font-weight: bold; font-family: spatter-pattern;'>blood</span> was greatly in evidence.*

        While not being at all squeamish in the matters of blood and gore, that experience induced a lifelong aversion to varicoloured text. Chromokeimenophobia?

        * along with the trite examples like <blue>sky</blue>, <yellow>sun</yellow>,...

        ☆ Methuen 1974.

        1 0 Reply
    2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: I'm not surprised...

      So.... when are you changing your name to 'Dave'? (2001 reference for those not old enough to have seen it in the cinema first time around)

      I have spent the last 50+ years working on computers and stuff, and I will refuse to speak to my frigging machine even though in a past life, I actually worked on some voice recognition software (oh the shame of it)

      The like of MS want to dictate how we should work so desperately that they make it harder and harder to block all their crap and turn it off. I had to spend a whole day last week doing just that for a friend who had a new laptop. No, I don't want to search the entire internet for everything I want to do. Dumbmotherfsckers.

      All that crap is just one of the many reasons why I dumped MS for personal use in 2009. My go to machine is currently an M1 MacBook Pro. I find MacOS far less intrusive that anything to come out of Redmond since Windows 7 (once you tamed it)

      8 1 Reply
      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Linux

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        Yeah, I too dumped Redmond about fifteen or twenty years ago - so long back that I don't recall, though some software I wrote about twenty years ago still follows me around and I have to field enquiries explaining that I don't do Windows any more.

        Sadly, work still feels the need for Windows.

        3 1 Reply
      2. Roland6 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        >” even though in a past life, I actually worked on some voice recognition software (oh the shame of it)”

        I was wondering whether part of the problem with AI is the same as the problem with the “open mic” of say anything continuous speech recognition applications.

        0 0 Reply
    3. Bebu sa Ware
      Reply Icon
      Headmaster

      Re: I'm not surprised...

      《Unsurprisingly, searching directly for that quotation to confirm it didn't find a hit; mostly I got online grammar checkers, or (with quote marks) nothing at all. I had to search for a libretto for Iolanthe and then search that...》

      DuckDuck quacked on

      Gilbert and Sullivan "I can spell all the words that I use, and my grammar's as good as my neighbours'."

      on the third entry after two adverts (grammar training, then the usual ebay bait [& switch] :)

      https://gsarchive.net/iolanthe/web_op/iol08.html

      I am surprised that Bing wasn't too shabby at this, particularly given it's a Microsoft creation.

      Looking at the libretto, some of the versification sails pretty close to doggerel. Tabors/Neighbours, Hearty/Party - end rhymes to die for, or do I mean lethal? If I were Gilbert I mightn't set my hopes on Poet Laureate (actually he wouldn't have been the worst.)

      2 0 Reply
      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        I use DDG. My first attempt just had the quote, no quotes. That used to be a good way to get a lyric if you'd forgotten a word or two... nada.

        Adding quotes provided 'no results match...'

        Removing the quotes and adding Gilbert and Sullivan _now_ drops me straight into the GSarchive page you got - but the first time, just repeated the grammar checker adverts.

        Wasn't it nice when search engines were deterministic?

        1 0 Reply
        1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Coat

          Re: I'm not surprised...

          To quote an expert in search engines, you are using the wrong quotes, and doubling down on the quotes may not give you the quotation you are after...

          0 0 Reply
    4. Irongut Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: I'm not surprised...

      > "I can spell all the words that I use, and my grammar’s as good as my neighbours’."

      Provided your neighbour is also incaable of correctly using an apostrophe.

      What exactly belongs to your grammar in that sentence?

      0 7 Reply
      1. DailyLlama
        Reply Icon

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        Nothing. The apostrophe in "grammar's" is used for the contraction of "grammar is".

        7 0 Reply
        1. Neil Barnes Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: I'm not surprised...

          Thank you!

          1 0 Reply
      2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: incaable

        Someone here is taking the "p".

        The revolutionary thing that people will shortly be discovering with the advent of AI is that any piece of text with a typo or grammar error in it will undoubtedly have been written by a humann.

        1 0 Reply
      3. Zoopy
        Reply Icon

        Re: I'm not surprised...

        Sir or madame, I regretfully refer you to "Muphry's Law".

        2 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Studying staff time waste? Have a look at Microsoft products..

    I'd love to see a study that has a look there, and it's not just bad UI design.

    There's also the confusing mess of OneDrive vs SharePoint, the active encouraging of shadow IT (certainly with how they currently are flogging Copilot) which means that people with no actual competence can now take their mischief beyond Excel and make decision tools that run on near impossible to audit models, I can go on. And yes, that's before mentioning the ever present waste of time by eternal patching. You know that a version of Windows is approaching something of stability (no, I said approaching) when Microsoft starts preparing a new version.

    If MS were as competent at writing code as they were at lobbying, marketing and manipulation their products could actually be useful, but code dev stops at 'nearly good enough'after which it is rammed down the throat of its victims users who no longer have any choice but to be beta testers and thus be on the receiving end of a style of quality control that even 90's era Lada would have been ashamed of.

    And yes, I didn't have my coffee yet. How did you know?

    18 1 Reply
    1. DJO Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Studying staff time waste? Have a look at Microsoft products..

      UI design is certainly the issue with copilot. In Visual Studio there are continual pop-ups and overlays with "helpful" suggestions and they are always exactly positioned to be as annoyingly obtrusive as possible so I have to press Escape to dismiss them which wastes a lot more time than the occasional bit of useful help saves.

      Also with the "AI" checking everything as you type, the IDE is about responsive as a 1990's VS on a 386.

      3 0 Reply
      1. Groo The Wanderer
        Reply Icon

        Re: Studying staff time waste? Have a look at Microsoft products..

        I have that same issue with every IDE. I only want even simple autocomplete to fire when I explicitly trigger it. Even Netbeans is guilty as sin in that regard.

        DON'T INTERRUPT THE FLOW OF MY TOUCH TYPING!

        2 0 Reply
  5. khjohansen

    Is this about *who* got their AI PCs yet?

    Y'know, who would be the types that got max-spec brand-new PCs already?

    5 0 Reply
  6. sebacoustic
    Facepalm

    At Last!

    We now have a worthy successor to "Powerpoint makes people stupid"

    14 0 Reply
    1. Bebu sa Ware
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      Re: At Last!

      "Powerpoint makes* people stupid"

      Any tool that discourages critical thinking (or any thinking) will nourish the seed of implicit stupidity native in the human condition, allowing it to blossom into a mind boggling bloom of explicit stupidity.

      AI/LLM appears to supply the ultimate nutrient for an unprecedented efflorescence of human stupidity.

      * "No," as the daemon Crowley, I think put it, "they do it to themselves."

      7 0 Reply
  7. FirstTangoInParis Bronze badge

    Talking to computers

    Talking to some bank / isp / mobile company chat bot: “I want to talk to a human. Don’t tell me I can find answers on your web site because I can’t so I’m talking to you instead”.

    Talking to a misbehaving computer: “Right, you asked for it. I’m going to give you a damn good thrashing.” *fetches very big stick*

    8 0 Reply
    1. BenDwire Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Talking to computers

      If only John Cleese was still doing his management traininng videos ... I would have loved to see him beating a computer with a tree branch

      2 0 Reply
  8. Big_Boomer

    Bubble? BUBBLE!!!

    Yet another load of hype for something most of us have little use for, yet they invested billions in it and need to recoup their costs, so we get even more hype, and the bubble grows and grows until POP! I see uses for LLMs in image analysis and data mining but whatever they do needs to be checked by other means because they are untrustworthy, and yes, so are humans. I REALLY wish that the marketing idiots would stop using the term AI because it isn't and never has been Intelligent. Perhaps it actually means Artificially Incompetent? I am currently in the market to replace my home/gaming PC and I actively avoid any that even mention AI because they have obviously bought into the hype and I will be paying over the odds for something I don't want. I already waste far too much time CORRECTING my PCs when they do something for me that I DO NOT WANT them to do, just because some muppet decided it would be a good idea that everyone on the world is forced to work exactly like they do. The LAST thing I want is some overblown Clippy trying to "assist" me.

    12 1 Reply
  9. The Central Scrutinizer

    "Our role as technology leaders is to support this transition to AI-assisted living.... "

    I'm not old enough that I need assisted living thank you very much.

    Now kindly fuck off.

    16 0 Reply
    1. Bebu sa Ware
      Reply Icon
      Windows

      Never old enough...

      I'm not old enough that I need assisted living thank you very much.

      I don't think I will ever permit myself to be sufficiently decrepit to require AI to assist my continued existence.

      Now kindly fuck off.

      From a certain age that was an implied closure to any verbal exchange of mine. Rather less polite than Vetinari's "Don't let me detain you" although lacking that autocrat's veiled but nonetheless credible threat.

      4 0 Reply
  10. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Mushroom

    "Organizations [..] must [educate] in order to truly showcase the potential of 'everyday AI' "

    Aka : please help us sell this new generation of bullshit.

    5 0 Reply
  11. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

    "44 percent of respondents believe AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic""

    Really,,? I thought it'd have been far higher.

    5 0 Reply
    1. BenDwire Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Maybe 56% of the respondents came from the Sales & Marketing departments ... ?

      1 0 Reply
    2. Wang Cores
      Reply Icon

      Keep in mind people will nod and compliment the material when asked about the emperor's new clothes, so to get nearly 50% means people feel some significant level of frustration, safety, or impunity in telling the bosses: "no this sucks actually."

      0 0 Reply
    3. desht
      Reply Icon

      The article doesn't state what percentage of respondents either don't know or don't give a fuck about AI either way.

      0 0 Reply
  12. Mike 137 Silver badge

    Not really news

    " "Many AI users spend a long time identifying how best to communicate with AI tools to get the desired answers or response"

    This has for ages been the bane of those trying to get meaningful results from search engines. The evidence is out there -- just nobody in the technocracy (or more realistically, the tech plutocracy) has bothered to look.

    2 0 Reply
    1. Ian Johnston Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Not really news

      And now Google gives that AI generated summary at the top of the results, which is usually complete rubbish. Why on earth do they think that giving wrong results is a good idea?

      2 0 Reply
      1. Mike 137 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Not really news

        "Why on earth do they think that giving wrong results is a good idea?"

        Two possible reasons I can think of:

        [1] they can't be arsed to prevent it happening

        [2] wrong results crafted as click bait[1] make them as much money as right results

        These possibilities are not mutially exclusive.

        [1] e.g. search for 'Pythagoras' theorem' yielding links to sales sites announcing "big discounts on Pythagoras' theorem"

        .

        3 0 Reply
      2. teebie
        Reply Icon

        Re: Not really news

        I recently had a case where the AI summary gave (what turned out to be) the right answer when there was a typo in my query, which it corrected to the wrong answer when I fixed the typo.

        Unfortunately, we're no closer to rightly apprehending Babbage's confusion of ideas, because the AI is a black box.

        0 0 Reply
        1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Coat

          Re: Not really news

          I am pretty sure that AI comes in a beige box

          1 0 Reply
      3. Groo The Wanderer
        Reply Icon

        Re: Not really news

        Google couldn't even tell me how to check voicemail with my new phone from Virgin Mobile in the summary. Instead of telling me to call my own number, it told me Virgin's 800 support number.

        0 0 Reply
  13. Fonant

    Generative AI produces Bullshit

    Generative AI produces bullshit: plausible-looking output that may or may not bear any resemblance to reality.

    Luckily people are quickly realising this, and the bubble hopefully won't inflate too far before it bursts.

    AI, as a tool for spotting patterns contained in mass datasets, _does_ have powerful uses.

    The "I" in AI cannot stand for "Intelligence" as intelligence isn't involved anywhere. It should be called "AL" - Artificial Learning. Or "APM" - Artificial Pattern Matching.

    4 0 Reply
    1. teebie
      Reply Icon

      Re: Generative AI produces Bullshit

      Surely generative AI is spotting patterns contained in mass datasets, and that's where the bullshit comes from.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Groo The Wanderer
        Reply Icon

        Re: Generative AI produces Bullshit

        It also comes from being nothing more than a statistically probable sequence of words with absolutely no understanding of the question or what the words in the response actually mean. LLMs can never be useful to me because of that glaring gap.

        0 0 Reply
  14. Kane
    Terminator

    ...transition to AI-assisted living...

    Yeah, I've seen that film.

    2 0 Reply
  15. Jonjonz

    The whole purpose of these built in AI processors it to reduce the friction on their surveillance of you. The AI chip can analyze and summarize large quantities of subservience data on you and then phone home that summary, rather than the time consuming and more costly, sending the whole of the data and using up bandwidth.

    The are struggling to show any concrete benefit to the customer, as that is not the goal of the chips.

    3 2 Reply
  16. Bebu sa Ware
    Windows

    AI PCs

    When all the tulips have withered and their bulbs have rotted in the ground AI augmented PCs might be repurposed for better optical character recognition systems (and handwriting recognition.)

    Many decades ago I imagined systems that could be presented with a manuscript of technical writing which included equations, figures and text which the system could classify each textual component to produce an electronic version where the natural language text is represented as such, similarly equations, and figures as (vector?) graphics.

    Basically the logical content, which could be processed to produce any number of presentation formats as well as being searchable or amenable to semantic processing.

    (The semantic web was once(?) a thing but I have no idea what it was (or is?) as at the time I was too busying bofh~ing - every open window an unmissable opportunity. ;)

    Not much of this has come to pass. I can scan a printed page from a journal but any software purporting to usefully process it is pretty piss poor at best.

    Handwriting recognition isn't too bad when entering plain English text but try and enter anything technical like (∀x)... no dice. You are stuck with typewriter conventions like (x) or (Ax) and [x] or (Ex) which you might postprocess later or using Latex or eqn forms.

    David Gries text The Science of Programming (1981) used (A x: ...) and (E x: ...) which definitely lacked a certain aesthetic elegance.

    Not really the good old days but just that much has not improved, much has gone backwards and more has gone, as Cory Doctorow's coinage would have, to shit. So little time, so much sky to shout at (2π sr actually.:)

    1 0 Reply
  17. Detective Emil
    Thumb Down

    Report indeed makes a strong case for user education

    Lack of familiarity with AI PCs leads to what the study describes as "misconceptions," […] 17 percent believe AI PCs are not secure or regulated.

    Yup, they definitely need to work on making that number go up.

    1 0 Reply
  18. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    For a great many applications it would be more productive to use a dumb terminal and server-based applications than to use the PC. I don't suppose Intel will do any studies on that topic.

    2 0 Reply
  19. Wang Cores

    Anybody not in the politburo of PHBs could have told you that.

    To oversimplify: the assignment is to carve ice sculptures with fine detail but INSIST on a military flamethrower (AI gen spaghetti) for the job.

    The morale knock-on effects of:

    A) giving the conscientious, invested ones fits when it doesn't do the job

    B) insisting to all who will listen that the skilled flamethrower operator will replace the sculptors who spent a lot of time and money learning how to carve ice.

    I suppose are to weed out any potential competent leadership candidates and preserve that illusion most middle management "adds value?"

    0 0 Reply
  20. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Many AI users spend a long time identifying how best to communicate with AI tools

    I would suggest this to be the time required to source a sledge hammer from their favourite retailer.

    1 0 Reply
  21. breakfast

    "No, it's the kids who are wrong..."

    AI PCs are amazing! The only problem is all these users who insist on thinking they're "not very good" and "actually worse than not having AI in the PC" which just goes to show that the users are faulty and need replacing! How do you know if there's something wrong with a user? If they say their AI PC is bad, they are the problem. Get rid of them and employ someone who appreciates the benefits of an AI PC. It will do wonders for our... ahem... your productivity, just wait and see!

    1 0 Reply
    1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Devil

      Re: "No, it's the kids who are wrong..."

      Hark... is that the sight of an open window with the sound of a woodchipper running below?

      3 0 Reply
      1. Groo The Wanderer
        Reply Icon

        Re: "No, it's the kids who are wrong..."

        No, that's the boss' BMW idling under the window. The AI PC is going to have a "percussive maintenance event" with said Beamer, closely followed by the boss, the CEO, the board, and anyone else trying to make the staff waste their time on this schite...

        1 0 Reply
  22. teebie

    "misconceptions," [...] AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic [...] concerned about the privacy and security of their data when using an AI PC [...] AI PCs are not secure or regulated.

    Should these be called 'conceptions' or is that not a strong enough word?

    0 0 Reply
  23. PhilipN Silver badge

    So it has started

    Pardon my cynicism but (Ok that was false humility) we may anticipate that selective recycling of datasets built from trillions of moronic posts by billions of goggle-eyed FB etc. users will inevitably lead to the dumbing down of the whole planet.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Groo The Wanderer
      Reply Icon

      Re: So it has started

      Once they started scraping Twitler's site, it became an artificial ignorance system...

      2 0 Reply
  24. Derezed
    Meh

    We must be holding the AI wrong.

    1 0 Reply
  25. ocelot

    I met Copilot code once, somebody who subscribed personally to gain access thought it would provide them with a solution to a problem.

    It did.

    It spewed back a slightly modified part of a somewhat outdated version of part of the Boost library.

    But the person concerned did not understand the theory behind the algorithm, and why the code it produced was in fact redundant in the particular use case.

    Now if I can just get an AI to summarise all the AI generated messages and then auto-reply to them. Simples, and my time will be 100% saved, as I wont even have to read them.

    0 0 Reply

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