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.
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.
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…
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.
Yes, I disregard idiots but that was true before AI too.
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 have coworkers who use AI. Im in education. The kids fucking hate it. But then the little shits use it on their assignments.
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. It’s getting weird. Had a coworker ask me a question if something was possible. I said yes. He said: no, ai said it wasn’t. I didn’t understand why he asked me if he knew the answer already lol. They just accept ai as truth, can’t take those people seriously.
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At this point, why even ask people you pay anything?
He asked you for that exact reason… but then you gave him an answer he didn’t want. He may or may not have known what answer he wanted but as soon as you gave it he knew he wanted it to be something else. The quickest way to get a second opinion, was to ask the LLM.
If it had hallucinated the answer he wanted, he would have demanded going that route, because the AI said so, even if it was literally impossible.
And in his mind, this reinforced the AI as being correct, so he’s will be more likely to blindly accept it’s responses in the future.
Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug and AI is our supplier. It’ll be our downfall
It definitely colors my opinion knowing someone routinely uses GenAI and LLM’s, especially if it’s for little things like writing an email, because I write my own emails and a unique voice is important to me. I feel like writing something in my own voice is a way of showing respect for other people and their time.
Basically it makes me think a person is either lazy or ignorant.
Yeah, I agree.
I’m someone who, when overwhelmed by life (often), opening and reading emails is disproportionately difficult for me. The idea of spending the time and energy to read an email that someone couldn’t even be bothered to write is offensive to me
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.
I know a guy who does that. He used to be smart, but it feels like those antivax who refer to other people instead of using their brain. When he begins to talk about AI results, I zone out, and I’m starting to disregard everything he says, AI or not.
friend of me also: So i asked the ai and it said… yeah whatever dude i don’t care
even worst when a tech guy, i know relies on it all the time.
I separate those people.
If they said, "Chatgpt said… " And they are completely confident that it’s correct, I disregard them. This includes the AI cucks who send literal screenshots from AI as some sort of “proof”.
If they said, "The AI slop I got was… " Then they’re more likely to critically think about it. They know this is a third voice, rather than the definite answer.
I occasionally do the later, I always give a “take this with a pinch of salt” kinda thing because I know from personal experience LLMs love to spew out complete garbage.
I only ever use it for surface level yes/no type questions. The sort of thing that a 5 year old bothers their Dad about, inconsequential trivia.
This is what I think is fine.
Asking AI about the meaning of some TV show finale or if a movie is worth watching. Have it help you research travel ideas. Ask if it’s true pirates had wooden cocks. Dumb shit.
Where it’s really fucky is when people using it to do political arguments, have it find legal loopholes (haha fuck you CEO of Krafton), generate essays and creative work (oh fuck all those ai blogs and ai art)…
It’s lazy as hell and unfortunately, people are lazy and refuse to go beyond the immediate AI answer.
I think it’s really useful for getting my bearings when I’m not even sure where to begin on a question. Like if I have no idea what the right terminology is to find what I’m looking for, I can use an LLM to figure out what I should even be searching in the first place. After that I’m better equipped to start doing my own research.
We call it “Our drunk friend” since its always confident and nice but also spits out bullshit at random.
The potential answer could be vs. the answer is.
Seems reasonable
With search engines propping up AI answers and even newsrooms using AI, its the unfortunate norm now.
Im fine with them if they say claude made, or chatgpt made, not “I made”
I immediately ignore anything they have to say if they can’t do a lick of critical thinking of their own.
