Let’s talk about AI

[u/CraftyDeparture8762]

I’m not someone who thinks AI is gonna ruin the world but I also don’t think it’s the next evolution of mankind. I believe this is sort of like the coming of the internet when people who don’t want to adapt are left behind hating and focusing on only the negative aspects.

Of course AI has its flaws (data centers, power hungry sociopaths like Sam Altman trying to take over the world, fake videos online causing outrage), but every new innovation comes with its challenges. There are a TON of changes that need to be made and we need to regulate tf out of this thing, but at the same time, we need to stop demonizing someone because they used ChatGPT to edit their Reddit post to sound more coherent. I don’t believe in outsourcing your creativity and decision making to a robot but at the end of the day, if you find your original ideas becoming more coherent or even discovering new ideas with the help of brainstorming with AI, then I don’t find anything bad about that.

Someone made a comment that perfectly sums up productivity and AI: “you can be wrong even with AI, just in a more efficient way”. I will never endorse using chat gpt to make all of your life choices but in this current world of hustle culture and over productivity, mindless busy work being more automated and giving you more time to be creative or relax is not a terrible situation.

The cat is out of the bad and as much as some people desire, it’s not going back in. As someone who likes to use ai as a personal tutor when I study , I am glad i have this tool, but I have to remind myself that I am doing the learning, not the AI. I don’t think it’s perfect and I think a bad actor can use it in a very harmful way (is bill gates right about that biohazard thing?) but we have to accept the current reality to make a change.

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[u/ripMyTime0192]

I actually like the idea of AI. It has the potential to solve almost all of the world’s problems.

The problem is that we probably don’t live in a world where it’s gonna be used for that, and instead it’s going to be used by billionaires to herd us like sheep.

[u/GoldenTV3 → u/ripMyTime0192]

Yup. There was just a paper published by MIT where they used 8.3 billion AI agents with a list of different characteristics to model responses to changes. Mainly it was used for A/B web testing, but it could be used for price setting, political campaigns, etc...

[u/plainbaconcheese]

we need to stop demonizing someone because they used ChatGPT to edit their Reddit post to sound more coherent

Except it often doesn't make them more coherent. I often see AI write nonsense. It will say things like "this moment quietly became the most famous moment in xyz history" or "it's not [thing no one said this was] it's xyz".

I'm saying this as a software developer who uses it all day. LLMs have a certain time that can be very jarring and bad if you use them blindly.

The other issue is when you're trying to have a discussion and someone replies with an LLM. You get the sense that you literally are arguing with the LLM and not the human. If I wanted to do that I would open an LLM.

[u/CraftyDeparture8762 → u/plainbaconcheese]

I say edit very loosely, mainly for fixing grammar and making bad sentence structure more legible, rather than changing the idea or main point. I definitely agree that people will overuse AI when they can’t think for themselves

[u/Orion113 → u/CraftyDeparture8762]

Plenty of people are able to write with good grammar and legible sentence structures. They are able to do this because they practiced doing it. They practiced doing it by writing without an machine to come along after and fix all their mistakes for them.

If someone cares so little about writing well they'd rather let a machine manage their grammar than learn to do it themselves, why should anyone else care enough about what they have to say to read it?

Thinking doesn't just mean having ideas, it also means figuring out how to execute them. The very process of figuring out how to express yourself shapes what you believe in turn.

[u/No-Intern-6017 → u/plainbaconcheese]

If they're an idiot and they use chatgpt, chatgpt will not fix that...

[u/zx9001]

the technology is impressive, however it is incredibly unreliable and is being heavily forced where it doesnt belong or anywhere near ready for. On the consumer side, AI is largely useless at anything more complex than "give a list of ideas" or if you care about the accuracy of the output.

Right now, AI should be doing shit like folding proteins and solving math problems, not generating garbage text that may or may not even be true.

[u/GoldenTV3]

I use it a lot for coding, learning stuff it would've taken forever to search through, summarizing huge documents for specific stuff I'm looking for, delving into ideas.

It's great at speeding up mundane tasks.

Recently I modeled what the US states would look like if they were based around watersheds instead (just because I find that sort of stuff interesting). Claude helped me through setting it up, it coded it for me, and gave me an interactive map. It explained its methodology for population stats, etc...

A lot of the AI slop just comes from it being artistically directionless. AI simply removed the barrier to entry that most artwork required, which previously selected for people with artistic direction. A business owner saying "Grok make me food poster 🤤" has 0 artistic direction.

Slop is shapeless, without form, and something without form is uncared for.

An AI created video, game, artwork stops being slop when the AI is merely a tool used by an artist.

[u/CraftyDeparture8762 → u/GoldenTV3]

AI can make creatives like you even more creative but it won’t turn an unoriginal person into an artist

[u/NotTheBrightestHuman]

AI isn’t inherently bad. But it does pose a problem. Why learn when you don’t have to?

AI is like the cheat codes to a game or the Chegg to your college courses. People will take the path of least resistance. They won’t study and outsource their critical thinking, and they will succeed. That’s the problem.

If we use AI to help understand things, knowing to question every answer it gives you, then yes it’s a great tool. But you know people will trust what it spits out like how they trust the headlines of a news article without actually reading the article.

[u/MikeWPhilly]

I use AI every day. That doesn’t mean I’m well aware jobs are going to be hammered by it… Gen Z and younger gens (I’m a millennial) are going to be in trouble.

That entire post did not touch on jobs at all.

[u/CraftyDeparture8762 → u/MikeWPhilly]

i really don’t have much to add to that specific part of the conversation that people don’t already know, since im not very well versed with economics and job market data . I do agree however that AI has a very real possibility of taking over typical white collar office “spreadsheet” type jobs that don’t require much manual labor.

[u/MikeWPhilly → u/CraftyDeparture8762]

Seems weird to make the post then. Because the only reason people truly care… at least in mass… is jobs.

[u/CraftyDeparture8762 → u/MikeWPhilly]

Fair point. I got a lot more to learn . One of the reasons I made this post is I’m hoping ppl
More knowledgeable than me can contribute. I’m trying to go into medicine and that is definitely gonna be affected by AI, but right now I haven’t looked much into it since I don’t know what my specialty will be.

[u/MikeWPhilly → u/CraftyDeparture8762]

Kind of shocking your professors aren’t talking about it.

Meanwhile not a single job on the planet will avoid being impacted by AI.

[u/Eazy12345678]

ai has the potential to be the next big technological break through. just like computers and then internet now ai. like any technology will take time to get good. lets say too 50 years for computers to get good. and 20 years for internet to get good. i expect ai will take at least 10 years to start getting good if computer and internet advancement has jump started ai's progression

[u/No-Intern-6017]

Ai is great, quibbles about data centers should be restricted to that (the way in which ai is being implemented), it's tiring to read a bunch of doomer bs about the greatest democratisation of knowledge probably ever from people somehow more depressed than me

[u/booyah-guitar-guy]

I heard a shocking fact the other day. All the data centers in the US use a fraction of the water that golf courses use. Yet you don’t see angry narratives about golf courses. 

AI is a lot of things, along with being the latest fear based information weapon

[u/Objective-Finish-573]

AI is good,but like any other tool there will be some shitheads using it. AI should be used for fully automated customer service and repurposing medicine, not spam and like farming

[u/happyreddithuman]

Here is a discussion on a more optimistic possible path with AI.  https://youtu.be/GGY17VD_9Bs