This entire argument is predicated on the assumption that it is a benefit to my life.
What if I believe that it’s not? That it is an active detriment? That I can live my life better without it?
And this is not contempt prior to investigation. I’ve tried it, and I honestly believe that I can do things better without it.
You know people who connect their fridge to the internet, and their front door locks to the internet, and their central heating system to the internet?
What benefit does that give me? All it does is allow – or potentially allow – someone to hack into my fridge, my central heating and my front door.
Why would I do that? I mean – that would be ridiculous. I have a front door lock that’s an actual lock because it is almost certainly going to be more secure.
I can write my answers, my emails, my letters better than AI can. I can write proposals at work better than AI can.
I can manage my life better than AI can because based on everything I have seen there is nothing it can do that is anywhere near as competent as I am.
A good horse rider was once better than an automobile for traveling on the dirt roads that existed. I have avoided just about every novel and ridiculously useless tech trend for 20 years, but I do not believe this is the same. This is a foundational change on par with the internet or the smart phone. If you can’t find a single use for AI in your life, then you will be left behind while others make significant improvements to theirs. More likely however, it we be unavoidable in the next decade as AI slowly becomes the user interface prefered by companies, which is already happening in customer service. Having used AI and LLM regularly for the last 3-4 months, there is no going back. You can choose to live in the past for as long as you able but your dependency on how you do things today will impede your ability to function in a future that makes those processes obsolete, especially as future generations grow up with AI from birth.
you’re not going to get anywhere with these people.
i’m fairly certain most people are much too threatened on a fundamental level by these technologies to be rational about it. we can sit here throwing data and studies at them if we want, showing they are objectively wrong but it won’t do anything effectual.
the way i see people like this discussing the technology reminds me a lot of schoolyard behavior. the feelings it inspires in them are too much to discretely express so we get obviously incorrect quips and jabs instead of thoughtful discussion, to the roar of the crowd
I hear ya, but I can’t stop. I believe this change is significant and I don’t want to see them blindsided by their inability to see it today. One day imt he not so distant future, they won’t be able to avoid it and better that they are armed with some information for the day they can no longer avoid it.
AI can be useful for certain things, I just think the majority of people are using it for shit that’s not actually making their life better. For example, students using it to write essays, summarize paragraphs for notes, etc. It makes their short-term work easier, but it doesn’t actually help them learn. Yeah, taking notes is annoying, but being able to read/hear something and then put it in your own words helps develop critical thinking and teaches you to synthesize information. I get companies having AI chatbots for answering simple questions that direct you to a real person if your question is too complicated or specific. But LLMs aren’t search engines and shit like a lot of people use them as
If a process that gets actionable results doesn’t require those skills, we will no longer develop them. As bad as it is for us, most of the reason we have education at all is because the business class needed educated workers. As soon as they don’t, support for education will collapse from the business side and with it, we all become American red states. If a student can get through their education, producing good enough answers with AI, why do they need to ever not use AI? If I can get an answer with a calculator I’ll always have access to, I simply exchange a mental math process with a calculator use process. If using AI is faster, with lower error rate, and can do more complex maths, we won’t need those mental math skills anymore. It would be a waste of time to learn them rather than learning AI related skills.
AI is going to upend things across society and we won’t be the ones deciding if it happens or what sacrifices were forced to make.
Critical thinking and communication are crucial life skills that people need to develop regardless of what job they do. Even if technology becomes so advanced that we have computer chips in our brains so that we can constantly search the web, we’ll still need critical thinking and communication skills. One major way we develop those skills is by going to school and doing things like math homework, taking notes, and putting the things we learned into coherent essays. We might learn more effective ways to learn these skills in the future, but that will still require the student to do the work themselves. Just bc they can pass their classes using AI, doesn’t mean they’re actually achieving the purpose of the class. Literally part of the reason why there are kids thinking that LLMs are search engines that will answer their questions with facts 100% of the time is bc those kids lack the critical thinking and reading comprehension skills to properly understand what LLMs are and what they should actually be used for. If we were to say, “actually it’s fine for kids to just use AI to spit out the right answers on their homework bc they’ll always have an AI on their phone in their pocket. Plus who needs critical thinking” then we’re leaving those kids vulnerable to manipulation by those who control what the AI’s say, just like how the lack of proper education already present in the USA leaves kids (who then grow into adults) vulnerable to propaganda
Inform disagree about the benefits of those skills, I just question whether we’ll still effectively produce adults who have them. People are lazy and they’ll take a good enough solution through AI than a better solution through their own effort, children are particularly prone to this. On the other side we have billion dollar companies that would love nothing more than a population completely dependent on their devices to survive, whose AI divisions are mostly unregulated and and whoa re currently collusion in a dictatorial overthrow of Americans democracy, so I don’t think they give a shit if our kid’s lives end up fucked up from a lack of critical thinking. They aren’t held accountable for anything their technologies do to us.
so, i don’t necessarily disagree that a lot of AI shit on the market rn is useless, trite bullshit but then again so was almost every tech product between 2000 and now. some people preferred to live their lives like they did before the digital revolution. you don’t really see people claiming the internet is useless anymore, tho, do you?
sure, you believe you can do things better without it. and that might be true. unfortunately, some others believe (correctly) that they can handle a larger cognitive workload using these tools, which is their purpose. regardless of your opinion on AI, anyone well educated enough in the actual industry knows that there is an additive, non-zero nootropic benefit that can be achieved. we would say the same thing about giving someone access to Google on a school test, of course they perform better! except with AI i think there is a lot of emotionally driven thinking causing people to not come to the obvious conclusions here. just because some people can figure out how to make use of these tools in a beneficial manner and you cannot doesn’t mean the tools themselves are bad.
the anti-AI horde always likes to harp about “b-b-b but my 6 fingers” and “it only can write in corpo-speak,” amongst other things. truthfully speaking, the sheer volume of work an AI is capable of doing vastly outweighs the fact that it makes mistakes in negligible proportions. i see these techs derided as “averaging-machines,” people with a straight face seriously saying this as if something that does average on virtually every cognitive task at all times isn’t already handily outcompeting its human counterparts. sitting here performatively acting does nothing to counter the fact that the most significant minds in this field of research can all at least agree that this won’t remain the status quo for long. these technologies are in a position to vastly outpace any human being’s individual economic output, like it or not.
you are in direct competition with these individuals and technology. i, honestly, hope you understand the “pro-AI” sentiment being directed at you is less a commentary on your choice surrounding the matter and more a warning that in the future you are going to be handily outcompeted by those who do choose to use these tools and exploit them to their full benefit. it’s easy to toss stones from the comfort of the present, but, when you’ve been jobless for 5 years because no one hires the “old” kind of worker maybe you will reconsider at least keeping up with the times. i don’t mean that as scorn, truthfully. it’s a fair warning.
I’m 100% with you on this. There isn’t a single thing that generative AI can do better than a traditional method or by myself.
AI code is pretty much useless, as you spend 2-4x the time debugging and fixing the code as you would have writing it from the ground up.
AI Search is useless because it regularly and predictably gives bad and/or incorrect results. A well built traditional search engine is so much better, but have disappeared with Microsoft and Google going all in on AI search.
AI art isn’t art, and I would never support anyone who uses it, let alone makes money from it. It fundamentally is missing three of the core pillars of art, which are creativity, uniqueness and the human experience.
AI chat bots are ruining human connection and consistently perform worse than human support reps.
This entire argument is predicated on the assumption that it is a benefit to my life.
What if I believe that it’s not? That it is an active detriment? That I can live my life better without it?
And this is not contempt prior to investigation. I’ve tried it, and I honestly believe that I can do things better without it.
You know people who connect their fridge to the internet, and their front door locks to the internet, and their central heating system to the internet?
What benefit does that give me? All it does is allow – or potentially allow – someone to hack into my fridge, my central heating and my front door.
Why would I do that? I mean – that would be ridiculous. I have a front door lock that’s an actual lock because it is almost certainly going to be more secure.
I can write my answers, my emails, my letters better than AI can. I can write proposals at work better than AI can.
I can manage my life better than AI can because based on everything I have seen there is nothing it can do that is anywhere near as competent as I am.
A good horse rider was once better than an automobile for traveling on the dirt roads that existed. I have avoided just about every novel and ridiculously useless tech trend for 20 years, but I do not believe this is the same. This is a foundational change on par with the internet or the smart phone. If you can’t find a single use for AI in your life, then you will be left behind while others make significant improvements to theirs. More likely however, it we be unavoidable in the next decade as AI slowly becomes the user interface prefered by companies, which is already happening in customer service. Having used AI and LLM regularly for the last 3-4 months, there is no going back. You can choose to live in the past for as long as you able but your dependency on how you do things today will impede your ability to function in a future that makes those processes obsolete, especially as future generations grow up with AI from birth.
you’re not going to get anywhere with these people.
i’m fairly certain most people are much too threatened on a fundamental level by these technologies to be rational about it. we can sit here throwing data and studies at them if we want, showing they are objectively wrong but it won’t do anything effectual.
the way i see people like this discussing the technology reminds me a lot of schoolyard behavior. the feelings it inspires in them are too much to discretely express so we get obviously incorrect quips and jabs instead of thoughtful discussion, to the roar of the crowd
I hear ya, but I can’t stop. I believe this change is significant and I don’t want to see them blindsided by their inability to see it today. One day imt he not so distant future, they won’t be able to avoid it and better that they are armed with some information for the day they can no longer avoid it.
AI can be useful for certain things, I just think the majority of people are using it for shit that’s not actually making their life better. For example, students using it to write essays, summarize paragraphs for notes, etc. It makes their short-term work easier, but it doesn’t actually help them learn. Yeah, taking notes is annoying, but being able to read/hear something and then put it in your own words helps develop critical thinking and teaches you to synthesize information. I get companies having AI chatbots for answering simple questions that direct you to a real person if your question is too complicated or specific. But LLMs aren’t search engines and shit like a lot of people use them as
If a process that gets actionable results doesn’t require those skills, we will no longer develop them. As bad as it is for us, most of the reason we have education at all is because the business class needed educated workers. As soon as they don’t, support for education will collapse from the business side and with it, we all become American red states. If a student can get through their education, producing good enough answers with AI, why do they need to ever not use AI? If I can get an answer with a calculator I’ll always have access to, I simply exchange a mental math process with a calculator use process. If using AI is faster, with lower error rate, and can do more complex maths, we won’t need those mental math skills anymore. It would be a waste of time to learn them rather than learning AI related skills.
AI is going to upend things across society and we won’t be the ones deciding if it happens or what sacrifices were forced to make.
Critical thinking and communication are crucial life skills that people need to develop regardless of what job they do. Even if technology becomes so advanced that we have computer chips in our brains so that we can constantly search the web, we’ll still need critical thinking and communication skills. One major way we develop those skills is by going to school and doing things like math homework, taking notes, and putting the things we learned into coherent essays. We might learn more effective ways to learn these skills in the future, but that will still require the student to do the work themselves. Just bc they can pass their classes using AI, doesn’t mean they’re actually achieving the purpose of the class. Literally part of the reason why there are kids thinking that LLMs are search engines that will answer their questions with facts 100% of the time is bc those kids lack the critical thinking and reading comprehension skills to properly understand what LLMs are and what they should actually be used for. If we were to say, “actually it’s fine for kids to just use AI to spit out the right answers on their homework bc they’ll always have an AI on their phone in their pocket. Plus who needs critical thinking” then we’re leaving those kids vulnerable to manipulation by those who control what the AI’s say, just like how the lack of proper education already present in the USA leaves kids (who then grow into adults) vulnerable to propaganda
Inform disagree about the benefits of those skills, I just question whether we’ll still effectively produce adults who have them. People are lazy and they’ll take a good enough solution through AI than a better solution through their own effort, children are particularly prone to this. On the other side we have billion dollar companies that would love nothing more than a population completely dependent on their devices to survive, whose AI divisions are mostly unregulated and and whoa re currently collusion in a dictatorial overthrow of Americans democracy, so I don’t think they give a shit if our kid’s lives end up fucked up from a lack of critical thinking. They aren’t held accountable for anything their technologies do to us.
so, i don’t necessarily disagree that a lot of AI shit on the market rn is useless, trite bullshit but then again so was almost every tech product between 2000 and now. some people preferred to live their lives like they did before the digital revolution. you don’t really see people claiming the internet is useless anymore, tho, do you?
sure, you believe you can do things better without it. and that might be true. unfortunately, some others believe (correctly) that they can handle a larger cognitive workload using these tools, which is their purpose. regardless of your opinion on AI, anyone well educated enough in the actual industry knows that there is an additive, non-zero nootropic benefit that can be achieved. we would say the same thing about giving someone access to Google on a school test, of course they perform better! except with AI i think there is a lot of emotionally driven thinking causing people to not come to the obvious conclusions here. just because some people can figure out how to make use of these tools in a beneficial manner and you cannot doesn’t mean the tools themselves are bad.
the anti-AI horde always likes to harp about “b-b-b but my 6 fingers” and “it only can write in corpo-speak,” amongst other things. truthfully speaking, the sheer volume of work an AI is capable of doing vastly outweighs the fact that it makes mistakes in negligible proportions. i see these techs derided as “averaging-machines,” people with a straight face seriously saying this as if something that does average on virtually every cognitive task at all times isn’t already handily outcompeting its human counterparts. sitting here performatively acting does nothing to counter the fact that the most significant minds in this field of research can all at least agree that this won’t remain the status quo for long. these technologies are in a position to vastly outpace any human being’s individual economic output, like it or not.
you are in direct competition with these individuals and technology. i, honestly, hope you understand the “pro-AI” sentiment being directed at you is less a commentary on your choice surrounding the matter and more a warning that in the future you are going to be handily outcompeted by those who do choose to use these tools and exploit them to their full benefit. it’s easy to toss stones from the comfort of the present, but, when you’ve been jobless for 5 years because no one hires the “old” kind of worker maybe you will reconsider at least keeping up with the times. i don’t mean that as scorn, truthfully. it’s a fair warning.
100% agree. I wish people weren’t so dismissive because I don’t want to see them hurt because of their failure to see the future in the present.
I’m 100% with you on this. There isn’t a single thing that generative AI can do better than a traditional method or by myself.
AI code is pretty much useless, as you spend 2-4x the time debugging and fixing the code as you would have writing it from the ground up.
AI Search is useless because it regularly and predictably gives bad and/or incorrect results. A well built traditional search engine is so much better, but have disappeared with Microsoft and Google going all in on AI search.
AI art isn’t art, and I would never support anyone who uses it, let alone makes money from it. It fundamentally is missing three of the core pillars of art, which are creativity, uniqueness and the human experience.
AI chat bots are ruining human connection and consistently perform worse than human support reps.