Do You Disregard People IRL who You Know ask AI everything?

The most existentially terrifying thing about it is that it's not about education or overall intelligence, but personality. And even then, there's an emotional edge to it that may catch people in particularly vulnerable states.

Like a virus is a load of DNA being driven by a questionably alive entity, AI is a load of emotional signal being driven by a questionably conscience one (though I still argue not, I think the analogy stands). Education and intelligence can help ward it some, but people are complex and there's no telling what subsystems or random strings it manages to hook onto.

I have a background in CS and AI (from the early 00's, don't be too impressed) and have friends in linguistics. ML and more specifically LLMs have been on my radar for a long while and I am aware of their possible uses, but I'm tired of having to hedge every conversation around it. What we need to do is cultivate a strong social and cultural boundary for ourselves.

I heard someone say that the only thing AI should be used for is stuff people never should have been doing in the first place, things like catching spam/phishing out of your email. GenAI is just pure abomination.

Yes. A friend's brother developed the habit to look up stuff during conversation when something is unclear. He uses voice for that, so you see him whisper to his phone all the time when you or others are speaking. Weirded me out.

If I knew anyone IRL, damn straight I would.

I've stop reading one source of tech news and at least one fitness youtuber who uses AI. I can do no less for IRL interactions.

even worst when a tech guy, i know relies on it all the time.

I think those people are in need of a good hard rl slap across the face

But isn't that just a good search engine we should have separate to a LLM at that point? Semantic search doesn't need a full blown chat not in between.

my older brother relies on AI, hes in TECH too, well laid off years ago. but almost 100% and he does that to with AI. even a simple search on reddit will give you a proper answer.

Well, I would trust a 9th century BCE doctor from anywhere in the world to diagnose me for internal bleeding before I trust anything someone who relies on genAI says to me. Could literally be just their name and I would immediately presume it's fake and they asked genAI for a name.

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.

Seems reasonable

I might need to ask chatgpt to reply to this comment.

In fact if i ever see your username around i will put it into chatgpt and ask it to generate a reply for me, because i can’t think for myself.

Go for it, it might be kinda funny. A bit of irony in it too, as it would offloading the critical thinking required to engage with an argument you disagree with.

i don’t believe i’ve ever asked calculator to answer biology question for me.

Nor should you, you would be using the wrong tool for the job. I'd also not use a calculator to drive screws, that doesn't invalidate the point. Tools are useful when we use them the right ways. And ya, AI is a terrible tool to offload critical thinking onto. There are use cases where AI makes sense though. Things like image classification and fuzzy searches on large data sets are good use cases for various AI models. One of the problems with AI, at the moment, is that it has been sold as some sort of cure-all that will replace humans and critical thinking. And it's absolutely not that. It's in much the same place as cocaine in the first part of the 20th century. Hucksters are putting "AI" on the label and claiming it will solve everything. The reality is much more nuanced. It has it's uses but they are far more limited than the hucksters are claiming.

Large language models really can be useful for fuzzy searches in large data sets. To give an example from my own work, Copilot is really good at searching Microsoft documentation for me. Could I find the answers with a regular search? Probably, it would also take me longer. Instead, I send Copilot chasing after the answer to that question and go do something else while it finds the answer. They can also help in re-writing for different audiences. I write a lot of technical reports and those need to be summarized for managerial audiences. Yes, I _could_ do that manually, I've done it for years. I also hate doing it. Clippy is good enough at doing it that it can give me a first draft and I can finish it up in far less time and effort.

The biggest issue I have seen with LLMs is exactly what you point out, that people trust them too much and don't think critically about their answers. Again with my work, we use a product that uses an LLM to summarize cybersecurity issues and provides suggestions for response and investigation. It's a pretty well trained model and it's suggestions are pretty good most of the time. But, it falls down spectacularly bad from time to time and the analyst needs to be able to recognize that and respond to the alerts appropriately. Some analysts are better at this than others and this is now part of our training for new analysts. We teach them to use the LLM, but to also always think about the basics and question the LLM when it doesn't seem right.

Image classifiers are another area where I think AI has some good use cases. Consider the job of reviewing images and videos for sites like FaceBook, TikTok or YouTube. The folks who do this work are exposed to a lot of very violent and disturbing media. I used to work with a guy who did computer forensics in a law enforcement setting and he finally left that work because he could deal with having to review CSAM images any more. This seems like the perfect place to slot in an AI image classifier, to make a first pass at it. If it can correctly classify the vast majority of that sort of content, that greatly lessens the workload on the analysts who will need to deal with the borderline stuff and reports of false positives and negatives.

The new normal is people just follow what billionaire said, and you think it’s okay.

Not at all, but I also think the reactionary "fuck all AI" isn't okay either. It's a tool and it's going to change things. We need to navigate that with a clear head and careful consideration.

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.

The AI is a tool argument is getting tired. I haven’t seen it do anything useful at all that helps my day to day life.

I've also never had a use for a rib spreader. That doesn't mean it's not useful in the right setting. I talked through it in a different reply (feel free to use AI to find it), but LLMs and image classifiers do have use cases in particular settings. Just because some folks abuse them and use them for entirely the wrong use cases, doesn't mean they aren't useful in the right ones.

Yes, thank you for making my argument. The average person doesn’t have the right use case scenario in their day to day life.

The potential answer could be vs. the answer is.