Do you consider AI good enough to substitute human interaction?

This above all: no! Not remotely. Unless I am missing something, where is the humour, the anecdotes, the wordplay and self mockery? Where are the callbacks to shared experience? Those are the things that make human interaction worthwhile.

We have Copilot at work and I have experimented with a couple of others from time to time. They can be useful for a limited range of technical assistance. That it all.

I dont.

Do you consider AI good enough to substitute human interaction?

I don't think it's a matter of capability. Even as a neurodivergent introvert, I recognize in human connection one of the most fundamental aspects of our life on this earth. You may get answers that a person also would've given you, but think of all the people you won't get to know, groups you'll never be a part of.

it surprised me how complete and articulate answers are.

That's their greatest trap. They always need to sound confident to have the best chance of providing a good answer, so that when they don't know or you get an unlucky seed they just lie/pretend very convincingly. Never rely on LLM output as the sole source, even, especially, when it sounds plausible.

It is very important to remember that even if they "talk" like people, they are not people. Using them as a search engine on steroids is alright, but if you ever find yourself asking "what do you think about..." you're using them wrong. Never treat them as a friend, ask for advice, talk about your emotions, etc. This is easier said than done as a language-machine activates out brain in all kinds of funny ways; forgetting you're talking with an algorithm is very very easy.

Also, don't listen to people who say you'll be "left behind" if you don't jump on the train. That train is not headed to a nice place.

All that said, they are sometimes marginally useful. I would say that cloud AI usage is never ok and self-hosted models can be acceptable, depending on their usage. Look into Ollama and Unsloth. You don't need that much RAM/VRAM to get something workable, what are your hardware specs? I can suggest some models

Oh boy. Now this post? This is brave.

What AI chatbot do you use and why?

bold of you to assume we use AI chatbots.

AI is destroying society and the planet and needs to be stopped. The least we can do it not use it.

I selfhost my.chatbox (and agent) on my hardware at home.

Open models are surprisingly good and any thing you tell them stays on your premises, so no privacy risks.

You need some hardware and performance are not as chatgpt or Claude.

Yeah, it's good, but it's not a replacement for your own intelligence. Treat them as a free assistant which seems competent but probably says shit to please you....

Always double check and apply your own intelligence.

"I was always kind of an anti AI guy" sure

it surprised me how complete and articulate answers are.

Chatbots will be very articulate and convincing while feeding you utter crap. They are after all language models. So the "articulate" part is to be expected. I don't claim they always feed you crap, but when they do, chances are you can't tell the difference.

I occasionally use Mistral — I see it to be one to be slightly closer on balance of things. It can be useful, when the cost of risk is minimal, or you need to have somewhere to start from. It helps me a lot with me being neurodivergent, because sometimes starting something feels impossible. Additionally, I use local models whenever possible just because most of the tasks I offload to AI do not require that much of thinking -- they are merely mechanical executions of actions, or I am just using it as a rubber duck. And local models are quite good at it (mistral and gpt-oss models are good, though sometimes you might need to tweak context window and have at least 16GiB of unified/GPU RAM to run it).

Still, my experience shows that using those tools clouds your own mind a lot. More so than just searching internet ideas, because mere googling just made you to forget facts. This tool makes you forget to think for yourself. It makes an immence discipline of mind in order to fight that, especially with all the buzz around "being on top of things". I think the same as other people in the thread: the train everyone forces to feel FOMO about is actually heading into the wrong direction, and we need to understand that.