r/comics • u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover • 1d ago

Tokenless [OC]

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2.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

76 comments sorted by

214

u/PharrowXL 1d ago

Learned something recently, that a major part of the demand (and waste) related to AI in the tech industry comes from corporate workplace policy to use as many AI tokens as possible to signal/prove productivity. Companies like Salesforce Meta & Amazon have been “Tokenmaxxing,” gamifying the needless usage of AI tokens for titles promotion and and raises and it’s been a massive contribution to all the issues with Nvidia and the resources taken away from normal people. Notably, tokenmaxxing also results in an inflated process that takes more time and energy to get done overall.

Obviously there are environmental issues, power issues that lead to demand of larger data centers, but most of all it’s literally for nothing. These people could’ve been doing normal work at a normal pace instead.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

100% We have KPI's for uptake of AI across departments in my company. Quite a bit of it appears to be "write an agent to search these folders, or summarise an email" .... I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

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u/PharrowXL 1d ago

I hate this so much.

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u/crankbot2000 1d ago

I'm getting AI regurgitation email and meeting summaries all day long. I don't read any of it.

I had a syadmin debug a problem using AI and he was copy/pasting AI answers into a chat with 30+ very senior people. It was all wrong, and one line of human reasoning shut him down. Made an absolute fool of himself in the process.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Inside I die a little each time I generate a summary/stakeholder presentation with AI...but, I also wonder. Did anyone ever read them when I took hours to write & create them??

Haha... soon (now) AI will simply be talking to AI.

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u/wolfgang784 1d ago

I've seen a lot of malicious compliance posts in recent months about people's bosses bein on em about how little they use AI in their work and how much better their results would be if they used it. So they just use up all the tokens on BS requests to burn through them, and then keep doing their work the same as they always have, and in a lot of the posts they claim sudden praise from management for using so many tokens and getting with the program and such while their output didn't actually change at all. I remember a few said they were touted as examples to follow for burning so many more tokens than anyone else on the team and for being trailblazers and such.

Dumb.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Yeh, that does not surprise me. Our team got top marks for "usage" of tokens...which i find very weird. Feels more like a CEO/CFO bullet point in a board presentation. Outside of software development, I have yet to see much in the way of genuine efficiency/productivity gains.

3

u/BossOfTheGame 23h ago

outside of software development... the fact that it's good at developing software is a really big deal. I don't think people should be forced to use it, but if you're not exploring what it can do for you right now because of social pressure, that feels very silly to me.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 22h ago

Oh I don't disagree, my current projects live and breathe on AI. The bigger questions are unknown though. What generates meaning, if you do not build and create with your own hands?

1

u/TheGazelle 16h ago

Ehhhh.... I wouldn't go so far as to say it's good at developing software.

It's pretty decent at writing code if given good prompts and carefully guided. But my experience so far is that outside of scenarios where you've got lots of fairly boilerplate or repetitive code to write (e.g. unit tests, initial project scaffolding, etc), the time you "save" on physically writing the code is more or less equal to the time you spend explaining business logic and reviewing what was generated.

Now, over time that will surely improve. If by some miracle you've already got excellent project documentation you can feed it, your jira tickets are always well and consistentlyformatted with exhaustive requirements detailing, and requirements never change mid-development, then you're probably saving loads of time already. But otherwise, for stuff that requires a fair bit of domain knowledge I still often find it's just as fast to just write it the old fashioned way, though I so still use the tools if only to practice effective prompting/planning and find gaps in the setup.

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u/TyloWebb 1d ago

This decade is so fucking stupid

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Forecast > it is going to get a lot worse

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u/Jaffacakelover 1d ago

"Amazon nixed an employee-created AI leaderboard called "KiroRank" after concerns it encouraged excessive AI spending." - Yahoo Finance :-)

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

We joked in my product team about creating a leaderboard for developers progress and completion on Jira tickets .... we were only half joking.

3

u/KazakiriKaoru 1d ago

It's all gonna crash sooner or later

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Yeh, more the collateral damage that bothers me.

4

u/ShinraHakke 1d ago

Mass hysteria in favour of AI is resulting in mass hysteria against it. Those of us who simply look at it as a tool to use sparingly and critically are unfortunately in the minority.

11

u/Setster007 1d ago

Tbh it does have some decent uses but the vast majority are either not good or not justifiable. But it definitely does have *some* value. Just not remotely close to the amount companies claim.

10

u/LastChance22 1d ago

Some of it comes from it being shoved into everything. People aren’t being given time to figure out for themselves whether it will add value to them or the ability to pick and choose when they use it. 

Missing that step and removing that choice inherently gets people’s back up and creates resentment.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Agreed! Personally I would like a setting in every app to "turn off AI"

3

u/ShinraHakke 1d ago

Agreed, I only use it for specific tasks, and even then, I'm auditing most of the outputs. It's become a buzzword like "the cloud" was once a buzzword. What we didn't notice was the slow dismantling of software freedom over the last 20 years.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

I get Microsoft Clip vibes from the insertion of "AI" into every nook and cranny,

1

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Indeed, a lot of it will simply go towards chasing attention on screens to sell more adverts.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

All depends if you can use the tool and have access to the tool.

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u/ShinraHakke 1d ago

True, the skyrocketing RAM prices and the price of UMA mini PCs ensure that LLM compute is out of reach for the average person unless they're willing to give up all their private data to Big Tech.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Yup, I am cognizant that I am priveleged > get to use Claude Code for my job. BUT, that is a very small percentage of people who are fortunate to upskill in realtime. Will be a lot of people left behind.

261

u/Zero_Burn 1d ago

"I gave up frontal cortex function to AI and can't come up with independent thought without a token, please help."

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

My internal thoughts are now written as prompts... I may have a problem.

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u/Zero_Burn 1d ago

They're written as prompts, but there's no reply, how do token for brain?

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

I have noticed a downward trending line in my ability to process simple tasks... notepad is hard!

3

u/Operation_Neither 1d ago

I guarantee that’s going to be a new popular self-help / motivation technique in the next years, if it isn’t already.

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u/Devil-Eater24 1d ago

"a" token? Okay, I give you "a token" to start thinking — <the>

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u/leg_hair_lover 1d ago

This reminds me that Sam Altman suggested that UBI might take the form of an allotment of tokens per month. What a joke.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Indeed, it is a joke...but no one is laughing. He describes a dystopian future of the degradation of humanity and meaning with an absence of decency or morality. A revolution is well overdue !

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u/King_of_Camp 23h ago

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 22h ago

I always think of Radiohead ... "When I am King you will be first against the wall"

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u/Tiny-Little-Sheep 1d ago

Gombuter....IDEA....Gombuter....DO...........wait!......"Masterpiece."...........Im a Geniuz...

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

2046.... I wonder if we still have pencils and paper

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u/Tiny-Little-Sheep 1d ago

I barely know how to use a pen and pencil NOW, i usually write on my phone, my notebook is purely for quick doodles and hasty ugly notes

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

I was the kid who was "great at drawing cartoons", now that I am old (48) ... i wonder if kids will still learn to draw/create cartoons... pretty tragic really... old man shakes fist at clouds

2

u/Tiny-Little-Sheep 1d ago

Pretty sure people will always enjoy drawing. It just comes in different forms. Ai won't change that since Ai is just commissioning a shitty artist essentially. It just doesn't hit the same

2

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Hope so! Very cool that my cartoon resonated today, keeps me motivated to create and share x

2

u/Tiny-Little-Sheep 1d ago

Its a very cool cartoon

2

u/MrLuthor 1d ago

Every day we are closer to idiocracy...

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

That movie was suprisingly accurate!

I imagine a future which is a mashup of Idocracy and the Matrix (with some Children of Men thrown in)

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u/BigBenIsTicking 1d ago

Brilliant

3

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Thank you !

10

u/superhamsniper 1d ago

Woah, how did you make this image when youre out of prompts? Did you steal someone elses ai art? Because you know stealing ai art is very unethical. I am DEFINETLY self aware.

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u/superhamsniper 1d ago

Anyways thats how i imagine an ai bro would respond to this image

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

haha... yes, quite often I find Claude starts telling me off for my behaviour, like a somewhat prissy, dissaproving Aunt, so happy AI is slowly retrograding our own autonomy of action and thought 😛

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u/CelticSith 1d ago

It’s 10 tokens for a BJ, 12 tokens for an HJ, 15 tokens for a ZJ...

15

u/elemepep-ton 1d ago

I am scared to ask what the Z stands for

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Yes, wondered what the "Z" was too...ha!

4

u/Toothless-In-Wapping 1d ago

There’s no way an HJ should be more than a BJ

5

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Agreed! an HJ is low effort, a BJ shows commitment!

5

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Reasonable!

13

u/PrepareToBeLetDown 1d ago

The new starving "artist"?

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

"Artists" were starving before & now software developers have joined the line... a brave, hungry future!!

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u/PrepareToBeLetDown 1d ago

I was referring to prompt "artists". 

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Ah yes... a friend once suggested I use AI to write a song... I am like, I spent 20 years learning to play guitar!!!

Learning a skill is good for the soul.

4

u/Tethilia 1d ago

How did you post this without tokens hmm? /s

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Mmm... the future to look forward to. One token per post.

5

u/Such_Introduction592 1d ago

Give him access to a library so he can start researching?

Or maybe a pencil so he can start drawing?

1

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

Actually, I would not expect us to have libraries or books in another 20 years.

I guess we are saving on paper, one win for the trees of the world.

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u/PensandSwords3 1d ago

Nah, we are still going to have them. To be honest, it’s exceedingly hard to digitize everything. Like, libraries digitizing their catalogues takes can take years and they still keep the physical copies on hand. Having a combination if print and digital copies is advisable anyway.

Because the library doesn’t depend on the wifi / application service to function. Thus, if Kindle or something goes down for you. The books don’t.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

I just love libraries, museums, and art galleries. Physical spaces of calm and reflection.

And paper is a gift!

The one upshot of AI, more people will appreciate craft, what is created and can be held in the hands.

5

u/Vonnegutsman 1d ago

Like if u cry every tim. Sad.ness.

3

u/King_of_Camp 23h ago

The politically correct term in “The Untokened”

1

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 23h ago

Haha! I like that 👌

2

u/symson Pillow Talk 1d ago

Funny and ironic at the same time.

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u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

thank you!

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u/Spungbarb 1d ago

100 tech debts and unmaintainable garbage per minute. But hey. Productivity goes up according to the management.

2

u/hopefullyshort Comic Crossover 1d ago

And no one understands the code, because they didn't write it. Circle of tech debt!