Yeah sure. I mean, same reason why HN readers hate AI, right? It replaces their jobs.
(Obviously the difference is that the poor old claims adjusters didn't spend the last two decades "disrupting" every other industry and telling everyone else to "learn to code". Ha! If you hear a faint high noise, that's the sound of the rest of the world playing a violin, made of highly disruptive nanomaterials.)
As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsoft Teams doesn’t suck just like Sam Altman promised that AI is so powerful and so capable of exceeding the capabilities of humans that it’s dangerous.
Maybe at some point some of the B2B customers of AI products will be suing their vendors for the kind of grossly exaggerated marketing we are seeing right now. I think that SaaS companies would never get away with it.
I don’t know that the executives at my company suddenly lost their mind and decided that hundreds of dollars of AI spend per employee is suddenly justified even though approving a simple $##/month/employee SaaS tool was previously a rigorous slog. The only reason the executives at my company suddenly changed their mind on frugality is becausey they were sold a lie by a huge industry.
We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.
Nobody is forcing you to take poison, and saying "Well Microsoft promised me it isn't poison!!!" at this point, decades into it selling poison, doesn't make much sense.
Not saying they're not good for other things, but the "waste people's time and make them go away" use is just so perfect for the capabilities of even cheap models.
You see, I live with in a rural area and especially since LED light bulbs have become the thing, it's been clear that we are delivered far less than 120v service a lot of the time. We live about 200 yards from the transformer that we share with several other houses, too many I believe. About two years ago I set up Home Assistant and bought one of those power monitoring rigs that you put on each circuit in your breaker box, mostly I just wanted data about where my power bill money was going. I work in FinOps in case anyone was curious.
Anyhoo, couple years later I'm analyzing several months worth of power bills vs the circuit meter readings to quantify where I can make some upgrades and save some money. After a day or so of this I mention to Claude about the voltage issues and sure enough, it puts together a whole packet for me documenting brownouts down to 95v and routine brownouts below 110v. It helps me fill out the BPU complaint form.
2 days later I get a call from JCP&L (unfortunately to my wife's phone because it's her name as the primary on the account). I want a new, larger transformer for myself and my neighbors, so I need to call them back today.
They are using the cameras to catch fraud (where claimants try to lump previous damage with damage covered by the current claim.), etc.
altacc•1h ago