Why would anyone use an LLM as calculator?

That just doesn't make sense.

It is like using a calculator as typewriter because it can spell 80085.

No it isn't. There is 100% propaganda and media targeting communities to spread it.

The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed to be toxic towards it. People who are influenced cannot see it, outsiders can though. It's like seeing right wingers talk about immigrants. They'll never be able to see how their news and media influence them. That is their truth and it's as true to them as hate towards AI is towards lemmings in places like c/technology

Look at the articles posted, the headlines, the appeals used, the comments. It has all the markers of an Astro turf campaign.

I mean... Yeah, but the same can be said for VB?

Any time, nutsack.

Microsoft might agree with this.

The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed

By who? Your conspiracy theory makes no sense. Why would anyone want to do that.

OK, I'm not really mad at this. I already used Copilot to design a table for me in Excel and it worked really well. It did everything for me, and I just had to copy-paste the formulas into their appropriate spots. If it's built-in, possibly will work better.

Not everybody needs to be an Excel expert, after all. Having that functionality might be actually beneficial.

How do you know those formulas are correct?

Money quote:

Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.

By verifying that they're correct...?

I think the concern is that you can come up with a number of formulas that will get correct answers for some combinations of values and not others.

If you do not understand the logic of the formula, and what each function does, how do you verify they are correct and will always give you the results you think they will? Double check every result in its entirety?

Is that creepy thing still alive?

It can't be ... but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow circa 2008 and running afoul of some dude there who was like the last living Access consultant on Earth. I've never encountered defensive rage like that before or since.

Fun Access fact, the Diebold-manufactured voting machines that featured prominently in the 2000 presidential election cycle used an Access database as their underlying data storage mechanism. Access DBs did incorporate an audit table - which was manually-editable.

Money quote:

Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.

Money quote:

Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.

"Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets."

Every year, Microsoft gives me more reasons to permanently leave their products.

Unfortunately, due to compatibility with financial and other Windows-only software I still need to run Windows, but I am down to two rigs and it might go down to one in the new year.

It can't be ... but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow circa 2008 and running afoul of some dude there who was like the last living Access consultant on Earth. I've never encountered defensive rage like that before or since.

Fun Access fact, the Diebold-manufactured voting machines that featured prominently in the 2000 presidential election cycle used an Access database as their underlying data storage mechanism. Access DBs did incorporate an audit table - which was manually-editable.

No, I'd definitely agree that AI sentiment overall is pretty negative. I am not such a hardliner, but they are definitely out there. I don't see it as astroturfing at all, to even suggest this is ironic because LLMs are the ultimate astroturfing tool. The institutions capable of astroturfing do support AI and are using it. What institution or organization are you accusing of anti-AI astroturfing, exactly? This question requires an answer for that claim to be taken seriously.

IMO the problem is not LLMs itself, which are very compelling and interesting for strictly language processing and enable software usecases that were almost impossible to implement programmatically before; the problem is how LLMs are being used incorrectly for usecases that they are not suited for, due to the massive investment and hype. "We spent all this money on this so now we have to use it for everything". It's wrong. LLMs are not knowledge stores, they are provably bad at summarization and as a search interface, and they should especially not be used for decision making in any context. And people are reacting to the way LLMs are being forced into all of these roles.

People also take strong issue with their perceived violation of intellectual property and training on copyrighted information, viewing AI generated arts as derivative and theft.

Plus, there are very negative consequences to generative AI that aren't yet fully addressed. Environmental impact. Deepfakes. They're a propaganda machine; they can be censored and reflect biases of the institutions that control them. Parasocial relationships, misguided self-validating "therapy". They degrade human creativity and become a crutch. Impacts on education and cheating. Replacement of jobs and easier exploitation of workers. Surveillance.

All of these things are valid and I hear them all from people around me, not just on the internet.

That explains why they didn't want anyone investigating the machines. Did proper authorities finally get access (no pun intended lol) to investigate? Or was that already known?

You're probably debating a tool.