Yes to everything you said. It's basic FOMO, the same behavior with people who were selling bitcoins.

If it was good, we would use it. And any way, it's like learning how to use Google, it doesn't take weeks to understand how to write a basic sentence. It's a skill that you could acquire in 24 hours at most if you speak English.

The people who espouse such nonsense as "if you don't use AI you'll fall behind" believe that using AI will become an absolute necessity in the future, and that those who use AI now will have more expertise in using AI than those who don't, giving them better prospects. Those same people end up saying "you're just not prompting it right" when you point out flaws in the LLM's responses.

AI is the first major technology that I have have actively worked against.

I am a person who strongly believe that technology should make us better, and I can only see AI/LLMs making us weaker.

I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, "ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?"

When the AI bubble pops like the overstuffed bubble it is, and prices are going up, will you remember how to do your job without it?

Or, even simpler, what about if the AI service goes down, will you still be able to do your tasks?

For many, I suspect the answer is no.

From what I've experienced it's mostly managers saying this. They're afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.

I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”

If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.

My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:

Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.

They think there's some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason

im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn't perform equally because you choose not to, and you're fired.

So yeah... it's crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.

It's a desperate marketing strategy based on the classic "peer pressure" technique. "Everyone's doing it. You don't want to be the only one who isn't."

Try throwing AI at boring repetitive work.
I argued with an LLM for about 15 minutes and got a list of IPs and the name of the systems that used them. I could have done it manually in about an hour.

Also I'd argue that it's the opposite. It's for people that are experienced. If you can't check the output for correctness it's most likely wrong. I've never had the right answer the first time I asked.

They do it to protect their feelings. They’ve normalized the use of something most people hate, so they want everyone else to adopt it, too. That way, they won’t feel judged, when they 100% deserve to feel judged.

They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that "not using AI" would be like "not using electricity". There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered "behind" the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.

The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.

I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I'm just asking the "wrong" questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I'm also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright "minefield" around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we've lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for "more compute".

So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be "falling behind".

I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I'm staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It'll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.

(If it really does improve society, I'm sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)

AI: They probably can't define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.

I think when people talk about "falling behind" they're actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

They think AI is as life changing to our society as the internet is as steam engines were long ago. They're trying to promote its use because it doesn't have a good specific use for day to day. If anything AI has made the internet MUCH worse, there's so much AI Slop media on youtube and similar that I don't look at much new stuff anymore because of it.

FOMO, and the temptation of being able to get the speed of AI without the drawbacks of "vibe coding".

Reality is much more nuanced.

You can get a massive boost in your productivity if you use dependencies or just steal code, compared to writing everything from zero. I personally just reuse my own code snippets, and even started to put regularly reused code into their own libraries (next up is to make stuff for parsers).

I also seen cases, when "AI assisted" coding had the same amount of issues as fully vibe coded stuff, as the person really wanting to cram the chatbot into their workflow did that trusted Grok too much with understanding the documentations, so he just ended up trying to implement stuff based on Grok's summary, which was wrong at places.

If you ask: artists also sometimes fall for this trap, though much less often.

Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.

For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)

They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it's just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.

The difference being we don't actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it's like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.

Put simply, it's propaganda by the LLM salesman and liars like scam altman.

Avoid LLMs. Preserve your brain and skills. Don't become a slophead.

The only think you'll fall behind on is humanity's race to the bottom into total idiocracy.

I am reading this book https://thecon.ai/ that, among other things, explains the hype behind the set of tools we call AI. Check it, it might help you answering your question or at least having a different pov compared to the "if you don't use it you'll fall behind".

You'll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.

Fuck 'em.

Its people falling for propaganda.

The fact of the matter is, AI can be useful for minor coding help. The reality is its stealing advice from one or a few sources and spitting out an answer based on them, but it can be a quick delivery of advice.

The major problem is

1. AI (these LLMs) hallucinate ALL THE TIME. Relying on them to code for you is fucking moronic. Every coworker I've seen who does vibe coding is constantly getting dunked on, their pull requests are torn to pieces, and its baffling why they still get a paycheck.
2. AI can only, in the best circumstances, do exactly what you tell it to do. That is to say, you need to explicitly spell out what you want for it, including explicitly covering edge cases. If you don't, you end up with situations like Microsoft making Notepad code executable (which actually fucking happened.

Promotion of AI is total horseshit by the fascist tech broligarchs being done so they can replace the worker and, and I'm serious, achieve immortality by transferring their consciousness to machine. That isn't a fucking joke, that's an actual belief they hold. The AI and general tech CEOs are all in a massive death cult. This is real.

Remember NFTs? when people were buying pictures of cartoon monkeys and people were saying, if you don't buy it now you will be left behind

There is no there there. AI has yet to prove itself useful for more than support at the general public level. Right now AI's most compelling use for the public is as a mediocre assistant not good enough to be irreplaceable but not bad enough to fire. There are scientific applications where the technology is allowing researchers to do things that would have taken years in a few weeks, but general purpose use is still years away from being what people actually need or even want.

People who claim that if you don't use it you'll miss out are like beleaguered parents telling thier childless friends how great having kids is. It's the most basic human instinct, confirmation bias. I made this choice and therefor it must be the right choice so everyone else should make that choice too.

I kind of look at it from the point of view of people who are bad at their jobs.

They don't understand what looks good. They don't understand how long something should take. They don't understand how to do parts of their job without copying the work of others. Then, they get given a tool with the promise that the tool will do most of the hard work for them.

And unlike most computer stuff they can't understand, they can understand how to use AI. So if they can understand how to use AI, anyone can. And it isn't like most people are good at their jobs anyway.

If like you can't drive a car, that makes it harder to find a good paying job.