25 Tech Experts Leak ‘Dirty Secrets’ About The AI Industry

Over the past few years, everyone’s been talking about artificial intelligence. Some hardcore fans are quite supportive of the AI-movement whereas, others are understandably worried about how ethically AI is used, what it’s doing to the environment, and how it could reshape the job market. So it’s a bit of a relief when someone actually pulls back the curtain. In one eye-opening Reddit thread, tech workers and AI-savvy internet users shared some of the behind-the-scenes realities of the AI industry. Revealing intimate knowledge on a subject that is quickly becoming the next big thing but that the average person almost never hears about but.

#1

Image source: GEEK-IP, John / Unsplash (not the actual photo) It's just reinterpreting what it finds on the Internet. GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) still applies.

#2

Image source: KelhGrim, DragonImages / Envato (not the actual photo) That most people don't understand what AI is, even "tech" people. AI is a very broad category. Everyone automatically assumes it is the mad-libs style LLM AI, however AI learning models have been around for a long time and do a variety of things. Things like your spam filter, predictive text, or your nav system's traffic avoidance, these are all variations of AI in the category of machine learning. These are tools which don't take jobs, they make our lives easier. Then there are AI machine learning models that DO take jobs, but actually do so much better than a person can do. Like ones that examine components for defects. They can identify things people may miss far quicker. This allows for better quality and safer products.

#3

If AI is a force multiplier, companies have two options: 1) reduce workforce to offset this performance gain and achieve the same amount as before with less people 2) keep the people you have and gain more market share by leveraging the labor you already have along with the force multiplier provided by AI. It's telling that pretty much every company is choosing option 1. If it was everything people claimed it was, they would all be piling in to option 2 and trying to win more of the market. Instead, it's convenient cover to reduce workforce while keeping a nice PR story. Image source: GrayestRock

#4

Image source: Weird_Ad6669, AnnaStills / Envato (not the actual photo) Most AI models are built on massive amounts of copyrighted data taken without permission or compensation. The entire industry is basically built on the largest scale of intellectual property theft in history.

#5

Image source: SciFi_MuffinMan, Celyn Kang / Unsplash (not the actual photo) Not a tech worker, I do know people at higher levels in this push: It’s all a gamble. The companies are using huge amounts of borrowed money to see if they can change what it is now into a gold mine that puts them in a position to capitalize on it for the next century or more. And if the bubble pops? They file for bankruptcy and the banks are too large to fail. Which means we the people get to pick up the tab.

#6

Image source: nerdykronk, Andrej Lišakov / Unsplash (not the actual photo) That most jobs are safe from it, but the corporate sector thinks they are saving money by reducing staff. People are still needed to make ‘AI’ work. It doesn’t just know what you want.

#7

We are rapidly reaching a point where AI is training on AI-generated content. Because the internet is getting flooded with AI text, the new models are learning from the 'mistakes' of the old ones. It’s a feedback loop that leads to 'model collapse,' where the AI eventually becomes a distorted, nonsensical version of itself because it hasn't seen fresh, human-created data in months. Image source: Ok-Bathroom273

#8

Image source: SnooPets1528, Getty Images / Unsplash (not the actual photo) It's causing very legitimate problems in the judicial profession. I work for courts and attorneys have attempted to use rulings that literally do not exist to help their argument. .

#9

Image source: RedditBugler, Rodrigo Rodrigues / Unsplash (not the actual photo) A ton of what is labeled as "AI" is just spreadsheets and algorithms that have existed for decades. Companies are calling anything done by a computer "AI" for marketing purposes.

#10

Image source: EventNo9425, Flipsnack / Unsplash (not the actual photo) One dirty secret is that a lot of “AI” isn’t nearly as autonomous or intelligent as people think. Many systems rely heavily on massive amounts of human labor behind the scenes: data labeling, moderation, cleanup, edge cases, and constant manual intervention. The public sees a polished model, but underneath there are thousands of low-paid workers correcting mistakes, filtering outputs, and patching failures in real time. Another uncomfortable truth is that most AI products aren’t optimized for truth or long-term benefit. They’re optimized for engagement, retention, and revenue. If a model keeps users hooked, it’s considered successful even if it subtly reinforces bad habits, misinformation, or dependency. AI isn’t “lying” to people, but the incentives shaping it are rarely aligned with human well-being. That gap is much bigger than most marketing admits.

#11

Image source: Celcius_87, Iyus sugiharto / Unsplash (not the actual photo) The RAM price hikes and raised prices on some products is just the beginning. You see, AI data centers consume TONS of power. The next crisis will be an energy shortage as we balance AI centers vs everyday life.

#12

Image source: Nizurai, Ilya Pavlov / Unsplash (not the actual photo) It’s really good at coding. There’s almost no going back to writing all the code by hand. But writing the code is usually the easiest part. The hardest part is to figure out how things should work. AI can assist with that part too but if you give AI an ambiguous problem and let it choose then AI will make some wild stuff. So it’s good as a tool but can hardly replace humans at this point.

#13

AI cant fully replace a software engineer… not even a junior @.@, in order for any company to have a shot at replacing devs they need a strong development process that is well documented / comprehensive which very very few companies have. Image source: Mem0

#14

The consequence of people not hiring juniors as much due to Ai being able to handle much of the grunt work that they would typically do will be absolutely devastating ten to fifteen years down the line. The old guard will retire and we'll suddenly have alot of senior devs with few people to manage. When it's their turn to leave... Well... Image source: TheCharalampos

#15

Image source: queen-adreena, Getty Images Google make around $250 billion per year from controlling nearly all of the online advertising market. Open AI need to recoup $1.5 trillion ($1,500 billion) just to break even on their hardware investment costs. Their current *revenue* is just $13 billion per year.

#16

Many companies feel the need to incorporate AI to “stay competitive” that have no idea what to do with it but that isn’t stopping them. Image source: ActionCalhoun

#17

Image source: Beginning-Law2392, Natalya / Envato (not the actual photo) The dirty secret is that these models are not optimized for truth; they are optimized for plausibility. They are designed to predict the next word that makes the user happy, not the word that is factually correct. It's kind of "Confidence Trap." If you ask for a specific statistic or source that doesn't exist, it will often invent a plausible-sounding citation just to be helpful. It has zero concept of "I don't know" unless explicitly forced to admit it. It's possible. Overcoming this 'people-pleasing' tendency requires explicit 'Uncertainty Prompting' to force the model to flag what it isn't sure about, rather than guessing." I show solutions to these kinds of problems and ways to deal with them in my publications.

#18

Image source: Telrom_1, Impactphotography / Envato (not the actual photo) It’s not actual AI. It still requires prompts. It doesn’t have true autonomy or self inspired standalone operations. It relies wholly on pre programming and external support. What we have is more akin to adaptive algorithms. Which is impressive but it’s not AI.

#19

Image source: onmy40, WBMUL / Envato (not the actual photo) If your job starts having you constantly logging random information and interactions about your duties you're probably training AI to do your job.

#20

Image source: summonsays, DC_Studio / Envato (not the actual photo) They keep saying general AI is around the corner. The current technology is fundamentally incapable of becoming a general AI. It's like saying any day now your toaster will become a TV.

#21

Image source: ToughAd5010, vukasinlj81 / Envato (not the actual photo) AI engineer here - the internet (web browsing) as a whole is going to fundamentally change into being AI-based - companies are moving away from being AI dependent . Yes everyone spent years saying AI is coming for everyone’s job and grandmother, but the pushback is real - as someone who works in AI (on education and cancer reseerch), the backlash i face is real.

#22

Most of what companies are pushing as AI - is NOT AI. It’s just automation. It’s just getting systems to talk to each other and kick off processes without human intervention. Agentic AI bots are in essence just connected to FAQ documents which look for key words, and then spit out the answers and create zendesk tickets (which are worked on by actual people) on the backend automatically. Then when it recognizes more help is needed beyond its prompts, it connects to REAL people to solve it. So yes, AI and automation are changing the workforce. But they aren’t doing near as much as what tech companies claim they are. Image source: JGonz1224

#23

Image source: Iamtress1, Yunus Tuğ / Unsplash (not the actual photo) CHANGE DEFAULT SEARCH PARAMETERS FOR MORE ACCURATE INFO (depending on the info you want.) You have to give AI search parameters if you want legit info, otherwise it tends to use Reddit, FB, Wikipedia, etc for a lot of the results. For example if you're researching mushrooms, you want to specify & say that you don't want any info from Reddit, FB, Wikipedia, etc., and you only want info from mycologists, fungal biologists, plant pathologists, experts in similar fields, PhDs, published research papers & books, and the like. You'll get entirely different answers when you specify different search parameters.

#24

For every over hyped startup promising an AI revolution, there are 1000 white collar people quietly using LLMs daily for basic tasks. Without much thought they won't need to hire a junior developer or expand their admin staff or backfill the guy that retired because they can do more and do it faster. The dirty secret is that entry level white collar jobs are vanishing. Which means universities are selling a ticket for a train that's being dismantled and the pipeline for filling future senior roles is empty. Image source: mechtonia

#25

Image source: BaltazarOdGilzvita, Brett Jordan / Unsplash (not the actual photo) Reddit partnered with Google last year. This part isn't that much of a secret, but what most people don't realize is that everything, and I mean absolutely everything, you post here is being used to train Google's AI model. Then, said model is being used to post back on reddit for many different purposes, through bot accounts. Then, it all gets fed back into AI, posted again, fed back and so on. So not only you're all here arguing with bots, but you're arguing with lobotomized braindead bots who are using your own regurgitated words back at you. It's kinda like playing tennis against a wall with a poorly-made drawing of you taped on it.