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.

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[–] 69 points 4 months ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] 33 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 84 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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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  • [+] 39 points 4 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 31 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 22 points 4 months ago

    I know only one person who's completely fallen under the spell, but yes.

    Though to be fair, I already disregarded most of what he said since he's a reactionary conservative who spends his days pouring right-wing podcasts into his ears at 1.5x. But at least on topics other than politics, he used to be fairly knowledgeable and trustworthy.

    But since he's started telling me how impressed he is by how smart Claude is (since it tells him what he wants to hear), I've started disregarding everything he says, regardless of topic.

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago

    Yes. It's getting to be more of a problem where it's easier not to think. I don't see this trend ending well.

    I know whenever I'm at work and someone uses AI to try to answer a question where they are not qualified to validate an AI response, I don't trust anything that person says.

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    That's maybe a weird way to go about it, but I don't see an issue with fact-checking in real time. I'm aware many other people don't like it, but I don't give a shit. If it's wrong, it's wrong. However, the source musslt be trustworthy and ChatBOT is not.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago

    I've gotten my llm using friends to preface it with "the lying liar that lies says" which has in turn led to a sharp upturn in "but also the top link says" and generally helps keep me alert.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    Yes i do; My sister and her husband work in tech and they have become that kind of people that ask chat GTP for everything. I think what gets me the most is not that they ask AI but that they do so on the most obvious inconsequential things. I also hate when they use it as a research tool or to get a quick superficial answer. I often tell them I don't care what AI has to say.

    For some reason when people share AI music; it really grinds my gears. I am not a musician but a long time music fan and for some reason any type of AI generated music is an existential insult to me, aside from the fact that it all sucks.

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  • [+] 10 points 4 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago*

    Fucking this!

    I'm getting a CS degree now and even though the math still eludes me quite a bit, just understanding that LLMs are essentially a bunch of Linear Algebra and Matrix Multiplication calculations to weight a series of vector scored words to approximate desired output demystifies the whole thing and makes me very angry that this is what is being sold as the next big thing.

    It's not. It's an impressive milestone in Reinforcement Learning achieved in 2017. The use cases and prevalence of "AI" has less to do with it being an impressive piece of tech, and more a reflection of the failures of humans, specifically humans in the tech sector.

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  • [–] 33 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago

    I also disregard any screenshots of Google ai overview, it's been proven to be easily manipulated.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I don't think I know anyone who does that.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    i know, my older bro who is tech after the layoffs, uses AI for most things, and keep saying AI to look for answer, when asking him a simple question. he think its useful to help with "planning you career too"

    anything biological is often always wrongly interpreted in AI. i would say, why dont you use AI to write a resume, since you havnt been employed since the layoffs began(granted being in tech before layoffs he had significant savings to live off for years to come, and since most employers arnt looking for wfh for most people now. like he was tyring to identify certain pests that was attracted to dead animals that were invading the house.

    seen it being used as a comment to a certain question on reddit usually something on conditions that is common and that people had experience dealing, yea nobodies going take it seriously especially if it doesnt solve the current problem.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    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.

    https://medium.com/@elarson39/photography-was-historically-considered-arts-most-mortal-enemy-is-ai-69a2dc2f43ef

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago

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

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    yes.

    there's someone at work that doesn't read emails or reports, has AI generate the answers for them and just regurgitates the slop unfiltered.

    I interact with them until they start posting slop, then I just ignore that they posted it. when I say ignore, I literally pretend that it doesn't even exist.

    if they can pretend that slop has value, I can pretend that it doesn't exist.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago

    Just start asking your 5-year-old for counter arguments, as they are likely to be more valid.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    It bugs me, yes. The anthromorphic "ask AI" makes it even worse.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Yes. I know a few folk who've fallen way down the rabbit hole and believe anything the lying machines spit out. When they would get on their soapbox about LLMs or write very obviously ai-generated messages, I made it clear to them that I wanted to hear their thoughts or nothing at all.

    For the most part, I got the latter. My mom actually backed down a bit and uses chatgpt at least more judiciously now, especially after I showed her how it makes shit up about stuff within her knowledge base and explained how it was doing that for everything.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Just using slop generators at all makes you a moron in my books. Unfortunately I am something of a moron myself when I use free services in an anonymous browser tab to find out something not clear from documentation.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    Put simply, YES.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    Yes, I disregard idiots but that was true before AI too.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I disregard all of these people where I can. I can't disregard my CEO, and he does it more than anyone I have encountered.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    I generally take everything they say with a giant grain of salt, but that was somewhat true even before 2022. Most of the AI-reliant people I know were never that great at evaluating sources of information. It’s just that the problem is far more pronounced now.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    I almost kicked a D&D player for asking AI everything at my table. I begged him to ask me instead. He left shortly after for unrelated reasons.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    I immediately ignore anything they have to say if they can't do a lick of critical thinking of their own.

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  • [+] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    I definitely would, yes.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago
    [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    I have coworkers who use AI. Im in education. The kids fucking hate it. But then the little shits use it on their assignments.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago
    [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Most of the people I know who do that are people who I already don't respect. It really pisses me off when people who are smart and should know better do it.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    i'm just worried, thasall

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Depends what it's used for. Coworkers use it to generate memes a fair bit. I also use it as a starting point for looking stuff up occasionally, partly because so many fucking websites are AI generated now I may as well ask a more direct question to AI instead. Then once I have a more specific answer I can look that up somewhere more reliable.

    Recent example there being looking up things to grow in my allotment, give general goals and conditions and get a list of things. Then see what sounds interesting from that list and look that up on the RHS website.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    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...

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Personally, it's people who get answers from some so-called "book" or "university" or "expert" that grind my gears. Like think for yourself maybe?

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    As far as possible, yes.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    I don't disregard them, but I do think less of them.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I use it a bit, but generally only for checking my own work and helping me rewrite things so they're less harsh

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Its a tool, thats frequently wrong and I'm pretty much against it... but no, I don't disregard people who use it and I have used it plenty at work for menial tasks.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    That has been my experience too

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It depends what they ask.

    A lot of questions are fairly accurate to ask AI.

    Also, some people are smart enough to habe configured their pre-prompt to reduce common issues with AI platforms.

    There's a big difference between:

    "Hey whats the answer to (esoteric question)"

    Vs

    "Hey can you find me a paper on (well documented topic)" (and then opening the paper up and reading the actual source)

    Using it as a powerful fuzzy search tool with semantic intent is fine.

    Its the difference between asking a librarian how to cure cancer, vs asking the librarian to help you quickly find a book on cancer treatments.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I use AI a ton to find sources for information. Then check sources they used. Just made searching faster for me.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    I only ask it complex questions that I know need quite a bit of searching, and take the reply with a grain of salt. It usually gets me in the ballpark but it's not uncommon that I find an even better answer by myself.

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