They also introduce much more uncertainty and remove your ability to judge the trustworthiness of the information you're receiving. That's not to mention the social and environmental costs.

I don’t consider myself a “proponent” of ai and I think it gives dependent and lazy people brain damage lol

But these people seem like complete contrarian Luddites who just want to insist it’s bad because they don’t like it and have seen too many negative memes about it

You are being lazy. If "I have to learn how to do this" is too high of a bar to clear for you then maybe you're just not supposed to do that thing. Setting up a self hosted environment is pointless if you don't know at the least the basics about how it works. It will break sooner or later and if you just typed whatever random characters your computer told you then you'll never be able to fix it. You won't even be able to describe to ChatGPT what the problem is.

AI is making learning harder, not easier. It's flooding the internet with bullshit and you're acting like that's a good thing. When you're learning something new you need to know that your teacher knows what they're doing. An AI summary might be pulled from a network engineers blog or it might be the sanitized ramblings of a schizophrenic pedophile who tries to host CSM on his smart toaster. As a beginner, you can't tell the difference, especially when an AI rewrites the crazy and presents it in an authoritative manner.

Yes, learning new things can be hard but the internet is already the shortcut. Quit trying to outsource even more of it.

So the fact you didn't pay kind of leads I to where I was going, that model isn't sustainable for AI, would you subscribe to get access to that information? How much would you pay? Because that is what those pushing AI want to happen, they want yo be the gatekeeper and you have to pay the toll to access information.

As for the usefulness of AI for technical questions. Well I'm the other side of the learning curve from you, I need detailed answers to complicated technical questions and AI fails to provide a correct answer 9 times out of 10 and worse is misleading in its answers with basic mistakes or out of date information which would trip up inexperienced users or lead them into bad practices.

It's only useful in giving me a direction to start, I still have to go to the likes of stack exchange and read and understand the primary sources it was trained on to get a useful answer and understanding. In general it saves me very little time and isn't that helpful.