Now a days people refer to AI instantly for an answer. Maybe it’s a problem they could have solved within 10min in their head or a question they could have done an internet search on and read a few forums to figure out. However, now people go straight to AI which is known to give many many wrong answers.
I know a couple people that fit this bill and now I almost completely disregard what they say. We’ll even be talking face to face and they’ll ask AI something from our conversation in real time.
I don’t know anyone like you describe (at least, not nearly this level of bad).
But I want to offer a more positive contra-example. Since AI has become ubiquitous, I have become a lot more forgiving of mediocrity in human made stuff, whether that’s a piece of art or other media, or simply someone trying to articulate themselves, but poorly. I’m way more likely to work harder to try to understand the point that someone is making, and to see the thing I’m engaging with as an earnest attempt to communicate with another person.
In a weird way, I think that AI has made me a better person because of this. It’s reminded me of what things truly have value
I like that. Thanks for sharing
Lowered expectations
I don’t think it’s a lowering of expectations — it feels like more of a qualitative difference. Like, the thing I’m looking for now is for someone to have given a fuck about what they’re trying to say. “Earnestness” is probably a good word for it.
Another factor in this is probably the fact that I was one of those kids who was at the top of my class for my entire school life, then went away to a prestigious university that just made me ramp up the pressure on myself even more. For a long while, I had built so much of my identity up around being smart, which led to me becoming overly preoccupied with ensuring I appeared smart too.
To give a concrete example, I’m a scientist who isn’t particularly well read, and for a long while, I held myself back from really engaging with the humanities, because I felt like I needed to stay in my lane and not make a fool of myself by having ill-informed or incorrect opinions on things like art or literature. I was too up in my head to be able to read a poem and actually have my own emotional response; internally, I’d be orienting myself around what seemed like the “correct” response. Ironically, being overly preoccupied with appearing smart led me to act quite dumb (though fortunately I met many delightful humanities nerds while I was at university, who were excited to both help me learn bits of the technical theory, whilst also being enthusiastic about my own crude, unrefined opinions).
So yeah, I used to be overly fixated on ideas of correctness and good execution in basically everything, and that made me hold back from engaging with my passion for the world, for fear of being wrong. I guess the point I’m making here is that my recalibration with respect to AI has also come alongside a personal arc in which I am learning to open up and let myself care about things without having to be good at them.
For instance, I am a deeply mediocre musician, but I have a lot of fun jamming with friends. I wouldn’t have been able to do this 10 years ago. So when I see someone being courageous enough to actually try to say or make something meaningful, I respect the guts of it, even if the execution is not great. A human can learn how to communicate better, but an LLM will never be able to actually give a fuck about what it says
You obviously put a lot of thought into this and I appreciate that. When I said lowered expectations I was more commenting on how AI is deskilling people. I don’t think this is a huge problem just yet, but I have a suspicion that it will be in the future.
Hence the lowered expectations. Not as a commentary on your own personal lense but more about AI impacts in general.
Of course this is exactly what was said about the new technology of photography. If you look at what people had to say about it you would be surprised how similar it is to modern day critiques of AI.
Yes. Husbands brother is in education, literal librarian/research background and has a chatgpt subscription and won’t stfu about it. Can’t stand it. Use your brain, fuck AI.
Sounds quite uneducated honestly.
That it has been labeled AI was one of the biggest tricks they ever could pull Off. People literally think there is intelligence.
People like to Take what the First google result jacked Out. With “AI” it got even worse. “Nobody” is questioning shit anymore.
Yes, I disregard idiots but that was true before AI too.
Boss brought in a guy from some neighboring company doing smart screens or something, hyped how innovative they were. So we did an informal chat over lunch where I got to explain our domain and approach. Asked him his thoughts and he said I should ask AI. Like why am I even talking to the guy.
Yes. It’s a clear sign that someone is… well, slow.
The thing is the people I thought about when writing this aren’t slow or dumb. However, for some reason they decided to jump on the bandwagon of new technology and let the convenience win
For a couple years, the ChatBOT reliance was isolated to people I didn’t trust for answers in the first place. But now I see it creeping into the circles I thought would never trust it. I just hope they’re vetting anything beyond trivial information (but I mean, why blindly trust trivial information from a chatbot in the first place? You wanted the correct answer, didn’t you?)
It’s not like trusting Wikipedia. It’s not like trusting an encyclopedia. It’s not like trusting a textbook. All of those take a plethora of sources to write their articles, cite their sources, then publish a single, public article that anyone can review. ChatBOTs take unspecified sources, summarizes them, and provides you a private response that undergoes no review. The only way to confirm accuracy is to already know the facts. If you did, you probably wouldn’t be asking.
On the other side of things, I need to evaluate an AI debugging tool and I feel like a tool any time I need to ask a colleague if what it just said makes any sense when I don’t know an area that well that they are better with. I don’t get how people can cite LLM output without being embarrassed about it, mortified even.
Seems like an evolution of people having opinions on stuff they hardly know anything about. Like headline reading or politics of a country they don’t reside in
I do the same. The worst perpetrators I personally know are the management in the company I work for. My boss knows nothing about the field he is managing and uses ChatGPT all the time. Before I knew this, I thought he was technically ignorant but a fairly intelligent person. Now I can see ChatGPT’s influence in every single email he sends out, and every half baked idea he has. He’s influenced at least 3 other people in management to do the same thing. It’s all so generic and infuriating when I have to interact with them through the written word.
Unfortunately I can’t totally ignore them, and I’ve had to shoot down more stupid ideas in the past year than any other time in my life…
I immediately ignore anything they have to say if they can’t do a lick of critical thinking of their own.
I have coworkers who use AI. Im in education. The kids fucking hate it. But then the little shits use it on their assignments.
As far as possible, yes.
I don’t disregard them, but I do think less of them.
Yes. I have a family member who has to ask Claude everything, and he gets back these self-affirming answers that further cement his already-held opinions.
Its existence depends on you liking it, and it is programmed to suck up to you
I’ve heard of the sycophatic behavior but never heard from someone specifically from an experience themselves. That’s crazy to hear
I have instructed mine to be dismissive, insulting, and question everything I say.
It works pretty well for getting answers.
I hate what AI is doing to society, the people who own it and are weaponizing it, but I think it’s silly to claim it is useless.
It’s great for getting quick answers that would take twenty minutes to google.
You just have to be not a fucking dumbass and not believe what it says outright and also know within which categories it can be trusted and which not.
It’s ok to be politically opposed to AI and also acknowledge its practical uses.
I’ve had some bad experiences using it for quick answers. I tried it to summarize studies for an open book exam, and it gave me some blatantly wrong answers, as well as some answers that would change based on how I posed the question. I’m not saying it’s entirely useless, but you have to check the source on everything it tells you, at which point you end up doing the reading yourself anyway.
That has been my experience too
Genuinely, what you get from AI is what you put in. If you’re a dumb asshole, you will get dumb asshole shit. If you’re not, it’s a serious boon.
Let’s separate the use of the tool from the people who deploy it.
AI is fucking evil, because of the implementation, not because of what it is.
This was always inevitable.
Capitalism is the monster.
Ok. Yeah me too.
I studied psychology and philosophy and I know perfectly well when I’m being bullshitted.
It’s havoc that ordinary people use AI as a surrogate for free thought, but stop saying it’s useless.
The issue is who controls the AI, and how much of the dwindling Earth resources we have left it consumes.
But AI in itself has plenty of great uses.
That’s all I have to say.
