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.
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
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.
I have coworkers who use AI. Im in education. The kids fucking hate it. But then the little shits use it on their assignments.
How many times until you disregard them?. Is it like if you see someone using it one time or is it after the tenth time? What’s the cutoff or frequency compared to a standard search? Is it if 50%+ of their searches are through AI or is it like 5%+?
If you actively use AI once I no longer respect your opinion.
deleted by creator
Seems a tad extreme. So like If a medical professional actively uses alpha fold to develop a treatment you no longer respect their opinion?
So are you paid by the comment or what?
Wait, they’re not paying you?
deleted by creator
That’s something I’m in the process of figuring out. My Spidey senses are on high alert for if what these people say sound like it could be from AI or their own brain functioning. It’s sad that I have to put effort into discerning a difference. Some of these people use AI more than the others. I know one really does seem to rely on Perplexity quite a bit
How do you feel like a Wikipedia level of usage? That is it pulls links to actual research and studies that are then verified? Of course not all research is created equally.
That goes into the topic if how credible any given study is and would need to be looked into first hand regardless of finding it on Wikipedia or through AI. Pretty much everything and everyone’s opinion has a bias, more so now a days with politics putting a spin into everything and LLMs are also created with biases. I don’t trust AI to give a credible answer, it consistently gives incorrect answers, I don’t have much reason to give people credibly if they constantly spout what an AI told them
You kinda totally avoided actually answering the question. Like you said a lot about aspects of the question without actually answering it.
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 was having an existential crisis about climate change, talking to a woman about it, and she used AI to summarize why I shouldn’t be so worried.
It, uh, didn’t help.
Those situations make me think, am I talking to you or someone else because I asked you for an opinion, not an AI…
I do because those people are fascists or catering to them. AI in its present form is unethical by its nature. Imprison the thieving billionaire surveillance cartel and more options open up.
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.
No, it’s the same as searching the web or your local library. Perfect information simply doesn’t exist at scale so one must know how to verify any source and use basic baysian thought.
It’s consistently wrong with basic searches for me in the Google AI overview, like who played a certain role in a show, or voiced a character. I don’t trust ai to be accurate even in the slightest.
Two completely different answers with back to back searches.
Just a quick example of how confidently incorrect it is. Fuck AI
As someone who did enough SEO work for a lifetime the pre-ai internet was likely even less reliable. People have rose tinted glasses on.
But we didn’t just blindly trust it. People trusting AI answers way too much.
Yes we did.
The article in your library/wikipedia/forum takes 10 contributors and publishes a single, public article for which all can see it. Chatbots take 10 contributions and summarizes them into a single, private article that undergoes no review whatsoever. If you don’t already know the answer, you have no inclination as to what’s true. It’s nowhere near the same.
Nope, statistically information was just unreliable. And before internet is even worse. Doomers just don’t want to believe we’re actually not regressing but I get it - the real answer is just too boring.
Depends on how you use it. I respect people who generally try to improve their knowledge before just talking shit. Most important think is to process and criticize the info you are searching and not spewing it out like a parrot.
I immediately ignore anything they have to say if they can’t do a lick of critical thinking of their own.
