> The Valley doesn’t understand how fed up normal people are with AI. This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially disliked, and the Valley is not equipped to detect that. It has no experience with being disliked by normal people.
Cannot state how off-putting this was as someone participating in this team activity. The talks I appreciated the most were the ones where people didn't have slides at all and talked off the cuff.
I think the early automobile had a huge share of haters as well?
Before, at a certain FANG you definitely know, you had management making presentations they very obviously had never seen before, made by people who weren't at product meetings and so were extremely shallow about any project and had basic facts wrong ... and of course management can't answer questions about the slides.
I 100% get the complaint. But what does it have to do with AI?
WILL change it? This guy is under a self-inflicted rock.
Yes. For many days after the DeepSeek R1/V3 release in Jan/Feb 2025.
https://blog.karliner.net/posts/chatgpt-and-the-velcro-test/
admittedly a bit old now, but...
In this team? Pre-AI, maybe 10% of the slides would be questionable. Post-AI? 90% of the slides were just "meh", broken animations (they never previewed it), and "uh, let me read that slide".
Oh, mercy. Do not read your slide deck to me. I can read it faster than you can read it out loud. While I'm doing that, say something that isn't on the slide.
But yeah sometimes when I just need to deliver some asset to a customer I use AI to create it and lightly edit it, the result is ok but it's not great.
I share the disdain for AI built presentations, especially Claude has a signature look that is so tiring. I remember this phase when Office 2016 (?) came out and featured this "smart" diagram editor that let you create these cringe arrows, flowcharts etc. with bullet points, some people really got hooked on that and used it everywhere, the result was as cringeworthy as the AI presentations are. Eventually people lost interest and things got back to normal. AI might be different though.
That said I also generate presentation decks for my products with Claude using an HTML based workflow with proper print CSS using Weasyprint, where I use my own corporate identity and design practices from the web, the result looks really professional and pleasing (to me), customers also like it a lot. It doesn't really look like AI either as it's just good HTML and CSS with a print stylesheet. So there are ways of using it to make things better, but it also brings out the lazy side of people that don't care so much.
Is seeing that much AI crap being thrown at their product lineup actually appealing to anyone?
Just one person’s experience, but it wasn’t a positive one.
KaiserPro•29m ago
One of the big issues with silicon valley (or how I see it) is the lack of ability to look out side and ask why something is the way it is, before trying to slap technology on it.
The smell of money which distorts people's reality to carry on doing something that looks and sounds like a disaster, is too strong.
FacZap•22m ago
idle_zealot•18m ago
We're talking about adults here, let's not infantilize and remove agency from them. It's not reasonable to treat as an accident the repeated disruption of regulated industries with the "old laws don't apply because I added computers" playbook. Bad behavior absolutely demands repentance and punishment. To say otherwise is a massive moral hazard that guarantees more harm, failing to counter the "smell of money" with reasonable caution.