I use it to communicate with my landlord sometimes. I can tell ChatGPT all the explicit shit exactly as I mean it and it’ll shower it and comb it all nice and pretty for me. It’s not an apology, but I guess my point is that some people deserve it.

Is something that is so often wrong a good learning tool when there are online resources?

We used to have web forums for that, and they worked pretty okay without the costs of LLMs

This is a little off topic but we really should, as a species, invest more heavily in public education. People should know how to read and follow instructions, like the docs that come with Google sheets.

Why not just read the first part of a wikipedia article if they want that though? It’s not the end all source but it’d better than asking the machine known to make things up the same question.

Hey, I may be stupid and lazy, but at least I don’t, uh, what were we talking about?

Developer here

Had to spend 3 weeks fixing a tiny app that a vibe coder built with AI. It required rewriting significant portions of the app from the ground up because AI code is nearly unusable at scale. Debugging is 10x harder, code is undocumented and there is no institutional knowledge of how an internal system works.

AI code can maybe be ok for a bootstrap single programmer project, but is pretty much useless for real enterprise level development

He says he uses it to do sexual roleplay chats, treats it kinda like a make-your-own-adventure porn story. I don’t know if he’s used it for images.

Wdym “using your own words is less effective than having AI speak for you”? Learning how to express yourself and communicate with others is a crucial life skill, and if a kid struggles with that then they should receive the properly education and support to learn, not given an AI and told to just use that instead

Good for you buddy.

Edit: sorry that was harsh. I’m just dealing with “every comment is a contrarian comment” day.

Sure, GPT is good at basic search functionality for obvious things, but why choose that when there are infinitely better and more reliable sources of information?

There’s a false sense of security couple to a notion of “asking” an entity.

Why not engage in a community that can support answers? I’ve found the Linux community (in general) to be really supportive and asking questions is one way of becoming part of that community.

The forums of the older internet were great at this… Creating community out of commonality. Plus, they were largely self correcting I’m a way in which LLMs are not.

So not only are folk being fed gibberish, it is robbing them of the potential to connect with similar humans.

And sure, it works for some cases, but they seem to be suboptimal, infrequent or very basic.

x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA’d at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.

But we shouldn’t just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads “As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models,” or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.

Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?

ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.

If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly.

I grew up, mostly, in the time of digital search, but far enough back that they still resembled the old card-catalog system. Looking for information was a process that you had to follow, and the mere act of doing that process was educational and helped order your thoughts and memory. When it’s physically impossible to look for two keywords at the same time, you need to use your brain or you won’t get an answer.

And while it’s absolutely amazing that I can now just type in a random question and get an answer, or at least a link to some place that might have the answer, this is a real problem in how people learn to mentally process information.

A true expert can explain things in simple terms, not because they learned them in simple terms or think about them in simple terms, but because they have to ability to rephrase and reorder information on the fly to fit into a simplified model of the complex system they have in their mind. That’s an extremely important skill, and it’s getting more and more rare.

If you want to test this, ask people for an analogy. If you can’t make an analogy, you don’t truly understand the subject (or the subject involves subatomic particles, relativity or topology and using words to talk about it is already basically an analogy)

Speaking of being old, just like there are noticeable differences between people growing up before or after ready internet access. I think there will be a similar divide between people who did their learning before or after llms.

Even if you don’t use them directly, there’s so much more useless slop than there used to be online. I’ll make it five minutes into a how-to article before realizing it doesn’t actually make any sense when you look at the whole thing, let alone have anything interesting or useful to say.

Saying you heard of it but don’t even try it and then brag on social media about it is different than trying it and then deciding it’s not worth it/more trouble than it’s worth.

Do I see it as detrimental to education? Definitely, especially since teachers are not prepared for it.

The thing is, some “tech” is just fucking dumb, and should have never been done. Here are just a few small examples:

“Get connected to the city gas factory, you can have gaslamps indoors and never have to bother with oil again!”
“Lets bulldoze those houses to let people drive through the middle of our city”
“In the future we’ll all have vacuum tubes in our homes to send and deliver mail”
“Airships are the future of transatlantic travel”
“Blockchain will revolutionize everything!”
“People can use our rockets to travel across the ocean”
“Roads are a great place to put solar panels” “LLMs are a great way of making things”

Not all tools are worthy of the way they are being used. Would you use a hammer that had a 15% chance of smashing you in the face when you swung it at a nail? That’s the problem a lot of us see with LLMs.

It takes a lot of skill and knowledge to recognise a wrong answer that is phrased like a correct answer. Humans are absolutely terrible at this skill, it’s why con artists are so succesful.

And that skill and knowledge is not formed by using LLMs

But you have the tech literacy to know that. Most non-tech people that use it do not, and just blindly trust it, because the world is not used to the concept that the computer is deceiving them.

I used the image generation of a jail broken model locally to drum up an AI mock-up of work I then paid a professional to do

This was 10000x smoother than the last time I tried this, where I irritated the artist with how much they failed to understand what I meant. The AI didn’t care, I was able to get something decently close to what I had in my head, and a professional took that and made something great with it

Is that a better example?

Fuck that, anything “AI” worth anything is just algorithms we already had that were rebranded to take advantage of stupid people.

While what you describe does happen (and are the worst of the worst examples of shitty unnecessary bullshit) LLMs are not algorithms we already had.

Things like ChatGPT/Copilot are novel tech. You might not like them, and they can hallucinate answers, but it is new.

My life is going just fine without its nonsense, thanks.

The theory is that you will be left behind, not that your life is missing anything.

Picture the native Americans before colonialism. Their lives were going just fine, but then a money addicted hyper “efficient” type of culture appeared and they weren’t able to raise armies and build weapons at the rate necessary to keep their way of life.

If you + LLM can do your job more efficiently than you alone then by supply/demand your value as an employee is going down by refusing to adapt, and your salary will reflect your comparatively lower output than your peers.

No, it very much isn’t. AI is a mass data analysis tool with vastly greater capabilities than any human counterpart.

so, i don’t necessarily disagree that a lot of AI shit on the market rn is useless, trite bullshit but then again so was almost every tech product between 2000 and now. some people preferred to live their lives like they did before the digital revolution. you don’t really see people claiming the internet is useless anymore, tho, do you?

sure, you believe you can do things better without it. and that might be true. unfortunately, some others believe (correctly) that they can handle a larger cognitive workload using these tools, which is their purpose. regardless of your opinion on AI, anyone well educated enough in the actual industry knows that there is an additive, non-zero nootropic benefit that can be achieved. we would say the same thing about giving someone access to Google on a school test, of course they perform better! except with AI i think there is a lot of emotionally driven thinking causing people to not come to the obvious conclusions here. just because some people can figure out how to make use of these tools in a beneficial manner and you cannot doesn’t mean the tools themselves are bad.

the anti-AI horde always likes to harp about “b-b-b but my 6 fingers” and “it only can write in corpo-speak,” amongst other things. truthfully speaking, the sheer volume of work an AI is capable of doing vastly outweighs the fact that it makes mistakes in negligible proportions. i see these techs derided as “averaging-machines,” people with a straight face seriously saying this as if something that does average on virtually every cognitive task at all times isn’t already handily outcompeting its human counterparts. sitting here performatively acting does nothing to counter the fact that the most significant minds in this field of research can all at least agree that this won’t remain the status quo for long. these technologies are in a position to vastly outpace any human being’s individual economic output, like it or not.

you are in direct competition with these individuals and technology. i, honestly, hope you understand the “pro-AI” sentiment being directed at you is less a commentary on your choice surrounding the matter and more a warning that in the future you are going to be handily outcompeted by those who do choose to use these tools and exploit them to their full benefit. it’s easy to toss stones from the comfort of the present, but, when you’ve been jobless for 5 years because no one hires the “old” kind of worker maybe you will reconsider at least keeping up with the times. i don’t mean that as scorn, truthfully. it’s a fair warning.

A good horse rider was once better than an automobile for traveling on the dirt roads that existed. I have avoided just about every novel and ridiculously useless tech trend for 20 years, but I do not believe this is the same. This is a foundational change on par with the internet or the smart phone. If you can’t find a single use for AI in your life, then you will be left behind while others make significant improvements to theirs. More likely however, it we be unavoidable in the next decade as AI slowly becomes the user interface prefered by companies, which is already happening in customer service. Having used AI and LLM regularly for the last 3-4 months, there is no going back. You can choose to live in the past for as long as you able but your dependency on how you do things today will impede your ability to function in a future that makes those processes obsolete, especially as future generations grow up with AI from birth.

I’m 100% with you on this. There isn’t a single thing that generative AI can do better than a traditional method or by myself.

AI code is pretty much useless, as you spend 2-4x the time debugging and fixing the code as you would have writing it from the ground up.

AI Search is useless because it regularly and predictably gives bad and/or incorrect results. A well built traditional search engine is so much better, but have disappeared with Microsoft and Google going all in on AI search.

AI art isn’t art, and I would never support anyone who uses it, let alone makes money from it. It fundamentally is missing three of the core pillars of art, which are creativity, uniqueness and the human experience.

AI chat bots are ruining human connection and consistently perform worse than human support reps.

why do i have a feeling if i asked you to tell me what hallucinations are in a technical sense i would get a regurgitated answer from google?

being blind to the obvious doesn’t help anyone, man. anyone who has genuinely worked on or even just with these tools knows that they are capable of producing quality outputs. sometimes they mess up, sure, but it also can work 1000000x faster than you can. the energy problem in turn is a valid discussion but this is just being oblivious to the obvious.

why do you guys all mistake the climate of early tech adoption as an indicator of the technology itself being bad? were you not alive for the rise of the internet or something? i think you guys all just hate corporatism, not AI, but for some reason can’t take the logical step to that conclusion.

That’s entirely on you for using it for what its bad at and then claiming its bad at everything. I use it an LLM literally every day for work and it’s a time saver. I had to learn what its good for and what it’s not though. I also use the better available versions, not the publically available ones. Asking it questions about vague and subjective things isn’t where its best. Asking it to make an excel formula that does a thing without needing to even know a function exists to do that? Priceless.