this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
439 points (89.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

29837 readers
520 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there's a more appropriate one. AFAIK Aii@programming.dev is meant for news and articles only.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] neo2478@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I am still waiting for evidence of that. Tried it for a while for general questions and for coding and the results were at best meh, and most of all it was not faster than traditional search.

Even so, if it was really useful, it would still not be worth the fact that it is based on stolen data and the impact to the environment.

[–] Endmaker@ani.social 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

AI is a super broad field that encompasses so many tech. It is not limited to the whatever the tech CEOs are pushing.

In this comment section alone, we see a couple examples of AI used in practical ways.

On a more personal level, surely you'd have played video games before? If you had to face any monster / bot opponents / etc, those are all considered AI. Depending on the game, stages / maps / environments may be procedurally generated - using AI techniques!

There are many more examples - e.g. pathfinding in map apps, translation apps -, just that we are all so familiar with them that we stopped thinking of them as AI.

So there are plenty of evidence for AI's usefulness.

[–] neo2478@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

Fair enough. I was using the new colloquial definition of AI which actually mean LLMs specifically.

I thing the broader AI which includes ML and all your other examples are indeed very useful.

[–] AppleTea@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Langton's ant can procedurally generate things, if you set it up right. Would you call that AI?

As for enemies in gaming, it got called that because game makers wanted to give the appearance of intelligence in enemy encounters. Aspirationally cribbing a word from sci-fi. It could just as accurately have been called "puppet behavior"... more accurately, really.

The point is "AI" is not a useful word. A bunch of different disciplines across computing all use it to describe different things, each trying to cash in on the cultural associations of a term that comes from fiction.