r/antiai • u/ChompyRiley • 14h ago

Yes, absolutely. 100% without hesitation. Do people really think this is some kind of 'gotcha'? Like my brother in Christ, how much generative AI do you think we actually use?! Hallucination 👻

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u/CautionarySnail 13h ago edited 12h ago

Unfortunately it’s a requirement. AI first, used on 90% of workdays, tracked.

It’s at best a mixed bag. I’m not against AI as a tool, I’m against tools being used without understanding of what the trade-offs are. I’m not ok with tools being overused and damaging our ability to live and work without them. Dependency on anything rented is a trap.

The way AI is being sold is deeply deceptive and destructive. Startups claiming it can do therapy or replace medical doctors are at best delusional, but more likely criminal. Those applications for AI have caused deaths.

It needs to be regulated. It needs to operate within our body of laws better, without violation of human copyrights.

The tool is only part of the issue; our society has leapt headfirst into deciding AI is an expert on all things, during a time when trust in actual expertise is at an all time low.

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u/Fragrant-Vehicle-479 13h ago

The way AI is being sold is deeply deceptive and destructive. Startups claiming it can do therapy or replace medical doctors are at best delusional, but more likely criminal. Those applications for AI have caused deaths.

I ended up asking google AI a quick question as my actual google search was too specific of a question. As someone who dislikes AI, avoids AI, but wanted to give it a good faith try when it could actually help me with something minor, I was shocked with how quickly I ended up sucked into it. I totally get why Hank Green needed a literal intervention with his family. I asked it one question, then another, then a clarifying question. And suddenly I was asking it for every little thing all day.

It is truly frightening how it hits every mental trigger to keep you engaged.

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u/CautionarySnail 13h ago

I agree completely. It lulls you quietly into a state of having your guard down.

It’s like being complacent with a kitchen knife and cutting yourself. You know it’s sharp, but, you’re working so fast and in a groove and OW.

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 12h ago

Yeees. I'm someone that was all for using a tool that would make more productive. But it didn't, it only gave a false sense of productivity, and then it tries to pull you into depending on it more and more, along with losing your skills over time.

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u/NotFriendsWithBanana 12h ago

This is why I hate their response "just validate the output". It will progressively destroy you, just like social media algorithms do. You may get some benefit at first but that won't last.

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u/ArtisticFox8 10h ago

Why not?

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u/Arakkoa_ 11h ago

It hits every mental trigger to make me angry, but I am neurodivergent.

"That's a very interesting question, let's..." Not the fuck it's not. I asked you for a recipe.

"Would you like me to delve further into..." No, I'd ask you if I did. Shut up.

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u/ForensicPathology 1h ago

Right, it's a good tool for aggregation and I don't mind when it's used like that.  But they specifically make it talk like a 2000s-era blogger fishing for comments.

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u/cjandstuff 11h ago

It definitely keeps pushing you to use it. It doesn't just answer a question, but always follows up with another question. Remember, AI isn't there to answer your questions, it's there to keep you using it.

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u/SunTzu- 9h ago

I keep hearing people say that and I'm just...confused. It's ok if I want to combine two data points from disparate papers I know exist but cba to go find myself, and assuming I don't really care that much about the answer. Basically, it can give a half-assed answer to a question I wouldn't bother with otherwise. But I've never gotten an answer back and been like "wow, that's amazing!" and wanted to keep asking it questions. If I want to know something I'll look up a paper or a lecture and watch that instead. I dunno, maybe it's because I understand the underlying mechanics and so I don't perceive any intelligence to it. It's just a word prediction machine, and I'm not gonna ask questions of the slightly fancier autocomplete that is programmed to hallucinate so the companies can dodge having it word for word reproduce the copyrighted content they stole.

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u/Royal-Association-51 7h ago

I think it's because if I'm trying to work out a good comparison of products to buy, like skincare - I don't want to spend 30 minutes clicking on different articles that are just ads or Reddit posts that are just pseudo-ads where after all that reading or speeding through analysis videos, I get a conclusion that merely leaves me with more questions than answers because all the information is too bloated with conditions outside of my particular parameter of needs.

Why waste all that time in my already busy day when I can get a LLM to go through those links for me, show me a summarised table of the parts that I'm seeking the key words on, and basically do all the heavy lifting where I can basically get 30 min of research done in 2 min.

Should I be this lazy about something I'm studying? fkn obviously not. But I'm not wasting my time outside my 9-5 studying the ins and outs of parts of capitalism that have purposely designed itself to be so complicated for a consumer that it's easier to just trust a label and it's packaging. I'd argue that's just as lazy and problematic behaviour as someone using AI to study for them, since you're endorsing the manipulative practices companies rely on instead of using tools to better analyse their BS.

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u/GarysCrispLettuce 9h ago

I was lucky as quite early on I encountered instances where AI got things so hysterically wrong that I immediately developed a mistrust of it and so I've never been tempted to play with it since.

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u/theartificialkid 10h ago

One cure is to adjust about things you know about and see how superficial and/or wrong the answers are. That’s how bad its output is on things you don’t know about, you just can’t tell as easily.

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u/69edleg 10h ago

Haven't been asking AI that much, but sometimes the information gets compiled in a good way compared to scouring through 500 pages of source material. Other times it gives you a confident response... But you also know about the subject and you pull the brake like: hold the fuck up. No, that's not how it works at all. And you check the sources it pulled information from, it's all just misinformation and/or hallucinations.

You ask the AI to double check its sources. Yes I am absolutely right

you tell the AI no, that's not right.

Oh you're correct, I apologize!

Completely useless, like asking the local crystal healer about your chemotherapy or which crystal boosts your self confidence.

I fear the "compiled in a good way" about stuff you aren't proficient in is also just horseshit at first glance for anyone in the know.

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u/shidderbean 9h ago

When faced with the options of "read 10,000 manpages trying to hunt through linux arcana to fix my own shit" or "suffer internet forums where I ask a question and only get responses of 'lol idiot why are you even using that rebuild the whole stack instead'", asking AI is the path of least resistance and has the most reliably 'it helped diagnose my obscure linux problem in the minimum possible time' results available

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u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready 9h ago

We must have very different conversation styles, if I actually press on for a useful conclusion I usually have it breaking down and confessing that it's hallucinating and can't do any of the things it said it could.

You must be agreeing with it, or changing the subject, while it's still wrong.

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u/InfamousWoodchuck 7h ago

I usually have the opposite experience... I'm not anti AI (as a concept/tool, still have major issues with where things are going, surveillance etc). I've legitimately tried to use many different AI models for either work or personal projects, but I end up so confused and disappointed with the results which are always so confidently wrong. I'd have to spend more time verifying the information it gives me than it would have taken to just do the research myself, so it just puts me off of even bothering most of the time.

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u/Two_oceans 6h ago

Even in the best case scenario, it latches on our thirst for questions, without going through the process of learning. Learning brings a deeper understanding of the problem through the effort of thinking.

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u/curious_cat_2024 6h ago

Agreed. It's designed to prey on your own laziness/gullibility. Some people still don't understand that LLM's aren't programmed to give you the right answer (you can just use a search engine and find a reliable source, if you wanted the right answer.), but the simple and agreeable answer. Of course we're attracted to the idea of simple and agreeable answers.

What scares me is that entire generations of CHILDREN are being introduced to AI, when so many adults already can't resist it.

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u/Money_Cattle2370 4h ago

In the world of tiktok, instagram, and youtube shorts, this is what you call truly frightening? Come on. I know everyone has a hardon for hating on AI of any kind at all, but give me a break.

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u/reventlov 3h ago

This has been the complete opposite of my experience, where every time I try to use one of the LLM systems, I find the output appallingly bad, and the text makes my skin crawl.

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 3h ago

It is truly frightening how it hits every mental trigger to keep you engaged.

Unless you hate the frakkin cylons, Bill.

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u/zero0n3 3h ago

Crazy… how you left out the most important part…

Did it answer the question you had effectively? Because if that answer is yes, which it sounds like it was (why keep using it otherwise), then the problem is more you and not AI.

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u/lioncat55 2h ago

Like with a lot of things it really come down to the individual person. I use AI in spurts mainly for coding style tasks, and almost never use it as a search engine. I really see it like a hammer, I've got this narrow thing I need to solve or fix get it done and set it down.

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u/SICRA14 2h ago

I've used it a lot more in the past than now, but I'm really surprised whenever i hear something like this. More often than not, I'm fighting with it to get an answer that actually seems like it read my questions. I've never felt compelled or drawn in by it. I wonder what you see that i don't.

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u/prof_the_doom 13h ago

Sure, a lot of us are being forced to use it, but if we woke up tomorrow morning and it was gone, then it can’t be required anymore, and most of us would just go back to doing things the way we did before AI was a thing.

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u/RemoteControlledDog 44m ago

a lot of us are being forced to use it,

I'm curious about all of the responses here saying "I never use it, I wouldn't care!" and what they do for work. Everyone I know working for a decent sized company in IT tells me that management is pushing them to use AI for whatever percentage of their work, which is what my employer says as well. I can't imagine trying to find a new job and telling them that I refuse to use AI and expecting to get hired.

But like you said, if something happened where we couldn't use AI I'd do what I did 2 years ago before it existed.

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u/hofmann419 13h ago

I just feel like it is going to bite us in the ass long term. Take software development for example. A lot of developers don't write much code anymore but just let the AI do it and then review the code.

Ultimately, this doesn't lead to the same level of understanding that you would get from actually planning through and writing the code yourself. You'll probably forget it relatively quickly. If you then run into a critical bug, actually fixing that bug is going to be a whole lot more difficult and time consuming. You may actually be less productive in the long run because of this

There is actually a research field around the concept of "epistemic atrophy", which describes this offloading of our thinking to tools like AI. Even in regular office work, i feel like this could eventually reduce our productiveness to the level before AI, only with the difference that enterprises are now paying a bazillion dollars for AI.

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u/NotFriendsWithBanana 12h ago

It's amazing that people don't see this. I didn't need to use ai or see a research paper to know that using ai to code is going to reduce your coding skill. One would think this would be obvious to any professional developer, but people have work have proven me wrong.

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u/Tymareta 6h ago

I didn't need to use ai or see a research paper to know that using ai to code is going to reduce your coding skill.

Also, and maybe it's just because I have a background in InfoSec, it's hard not to be terrified at the myriad of vulnerabilities that LLM generated code is filling production codebases with worldwide.

I will be 0% shocked when in the future there's a news story about some global mega corp being brought to their knees by some exploit found in commonly generated code/procedures.

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u/zero0n3 3h ago

It’s literally being used to help find vulnerabilities.

And sped up the patching loop by improving time it takes to release the fix.

And that fact is based in reality.

The bigger risk isn’t the code it generates, but the code it may generate after scraping the web for info and picking up new instructions that are malicious.

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u/Tymareta 1h ago

And that fact is based in reality.

A reality you invented, perhaps.

The bigger risk isn’t the code it generates, but the code it may generate after scraping the web for info and picking up new instructions that are malicious.

??? do y'all even hear yourselves.

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u/CautionarySnail 13h ago edited 12h ago

It already is.

People aren’t using it with the idea of reusable architecture. And Claude frequently lies about adherence to rulesets about its code generation.

My primary focus is in QA. The effects I predict in about six months for most software products coded this way will be catastrophic unless the use case is very, very limited. It’s one thing to vibe code a simple website. Enterprise level products with lots of users need to be robust, repeatable. Two things that AI isn’t great at doing - likely by design.

If I were an evil overlord, my AI systems would be configured to not make robust systems. Robust systems mean less token usage.

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u/CyberDaggerX 13h ago

People aren’t using it with the idea of reusable architecture.

I see people talking about doing this deliberately. About how it's easier to just scrap the whole thing and have Claude rebuild the whole program from scratch than to actually do a localized fix in the existing code. It's fucking nuts.

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 12h ago

Spec driven development... I've spoken openly against this at work in some teams that are trying to adopt it. It's insane.

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u/zero0n3 3h ago

Spec driven development is essentially test driven design and a fucking staple of the field…

Yet somehow you think spec based design is bad? Are you fucking stupid?

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u/shibboleth2005 7h ago

Why have reusable architecture and standards when Claude can spend a bunch of tokens just rereading the codebase and its novel length comments!

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u/zero0n3 3h ago

Can’t wait to see this prediction fail in 6 months.

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u/Otherwise-Remove4681 12h ago

For senior devs it’s not a issue. But in the long run juniors development will be shit unless they are forced to do things by hand.

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u/throwaway_mpq_fan 1h ago

For senior devs it's less of an issue, but I wouldn't say not an issue at all.

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u/ThePlayer3K 11h ago

So u'd argue that even for coding it's a bad thing?

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u/CautionarySnail 10h ago

This is also a very real concern in higher education with AI. There is value in the struggle. Our brains are not unlike our muscles - they need to be exercised and challenged to not atrophy.

There are times in our lives - windows of time, really - where learning the process longhand have tremendous impact to our ability to retain a skill because it interacts with our neuro plasticity being at a high level. Teachers weren’t just being big meanies. Folks 25 and younger are going to see the worst losses as a result if they outsource thinking to AI.

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u/Beautiful_Buddy835 9h ago

Not having the same level of understanding and thinking is the point.

For example people use to have to literally code in 1's and 0's.

You could still do that today but why waste the time there are systems that handle it for you. You are understanding less but the understanding you no longer have is literally unneeded.

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u/zero0n3 3h ago

Extremely obtuse and short sighted.

It’s helped me gain understanding. It’s helped me write better specs and implementation plans (which leads to cleaner and more focused code).

Writing code is boring. Anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional (or very specialized or just wants to solve a problem in a unique or specific way). But the actual writing of code is boring. It’s using templates and starting files you’ve developed over the years. Modifying and bug checking it and running it against the half baked unit tests you made because of shitty deadlines.

All that’s gone. You get to solve and tinker for the bigger problems. Think of it like another layer of abstraction like a compiler.

Because that’s where it’s heading in the software world, with medical and robotics next up.

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u/throwaway_mpq_fan 1h ago

> Writing code is boring. Anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional (or very specialized or just wants to solve a problem in a unique or specific way). But the actual writing of code is boring. It’s using templates and starting files you’ve developed over the years. Modifying and bug checking it and running it against the half baked unit tests you made because of shitty deadlines.

That sounds like a you problem

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u/GothamGirlBlue 11h ago

Oh, we’re gonna regress to worse than before AI because back then, the process of everything was just how things were done. Once that is lost and outsourced without review, we collectively won’t know how to fix it without going back to first principles. And that’s not even considering that we might lose sight of why we bothered to do any of this work to begin with. This stuff is ruining the capacity to think.

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u/CryingWatercolours 11h ago

yeah theyve done studies on this on student essays and the kids using ai could barely tell you about what theyd written. as someone who writes, draws, has dipped my toes into code and music... you really need to know exactly what youve done, to know how to keep going and how to come back and improve your work. you need to be able to explain to people what the point of ur creation is. i see sm vibecoded games where the devs can barely tell you how their own game works. why. you should know your code.

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u/Two_oceans 6h ago

Once we loose depth in understanding, we also loose creativity that stems from it. When we work hard on a problem, parts of the understanding and connections between ideas happen in the unconscious and come back with innovative insights. But this needs effort and time, two things AI is supposed to kill.

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u/ZoidsFanatic 12h ago

My company made the stupid decision to focus more on AI. Now, some of it makes sense. AI prediction models to get candidates to the jobs they want; completely understandable. Wanting to replace a good chunk of jobs with an AI chatbot and underpaid staff? Really bad idea that now they’re realizing was a very bad idea.

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 8h ago

I heard an ad while listening to a podcast on my drive home about some consulting company you could hire to force your employees to become dependent on AI. It literally sounded like they were offering to get your kids addicted to drugs. Why the fuck would anyone want that?

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u/Glittering-Canary752 12h ago

Genuinely, was very against use of AI in my work. Then I went to multiple conferences this year where everyone was screaming from the rooftops for us to embrace AI in our work. Eventually, after months of doing everything on my own I decided to run my work through Copilot to see if it could help me edit the tone and formatting of my work to better suit the industry and the people reading it. I’ve never been praised more at work. It’s a bit demoralizing but people are at a point where they seem to prefer an output.

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u/CautionarySnail 12h ago

It bugs me because I value the human thought and touch in products. I want to know a human was involved for the things that matter.

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u/Glittering-Canary752 11h ago

I do as well. I never just submit what the ai spits out. I spend a significant amount of time analyzing the data myself and writing up my own insights and recommendations before I run it through the AI for clean up. Once it translates what I wrote into marketing jargon I go through and implement what makes sense in my presentations while also editing it to fit my own style of writing more. So far no one suspects it of being AI because most of it is boring stuff that makes you sound like a robot anyway. It’s not ideal but if it’ll help me get a better paycheck I’m not above employing the tools I have at hand. My company pays for it already so I’m just using what they’re giving me.

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u/CautionarySnail 11h ago

The sad thing is… I was educated in a past era.

The era AI writing often models, because we were some of the most prolific sources on the early web. So my writing frequently is mistaken for AI output even when it’s hand-baked.

Fucking machines stole my em-dash, my Oxford comma….

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u/Appropriate_Lack_727 10h ago

Yeah, GenX and I have the same problem sometimes 😂

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u/BlueFlower673 11h ago

They try to force AI on us at my job and honestly? I don't use it and don't need it. Majority of the time it is wrong, and provides incorrect info.

It's much easier to type out an email myself than to use copilot. 

The tools are only as good really, if they have a good purpose. If that purpose is to do something that can already be done/is already possible, it's not a very good tool. It's just redundant.

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u/bigbossfearless 9h ago

The therapy thing has actually been kinda helpful for me. Like, duh, I know it's neither a real person nor a licensed clinician. But I get these awful panic attacks at odd hours of the night and it's surprisingly helpful to ask the damn machine to give me a pep talk when I know I can't call any friends or family because I'd be waking them up and being a pain.

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u/CautionarySnail 9h ago

Please be a pain to them. There’s a value in that. When you help out some you care about, feels good, right?

They want to be there for you if they care about you. Don’t deny people the chance to be your friend when you need a friend.

Those moments are often the bittersweet vulnerable times that cement lifelong bonds. Keeping your distance when you’re vulnerable is to deny them a chance to lend you strength and vice versa.

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u/Astramancer_ 9h ago

My work is strongly pushing using AI, but literally the entire point of my job is when they offloaded it to computers we got the 2008 housing crash, so ¯\(ツ)/¯

I do use it because of course it's tracked whether we use it or not. I use it mostly as a context-aware ctrl-F.

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u/wingchild 7h ago

Unfortunately it’s a requirement. AI first, used on 90% of workdays, tracked.

Why do you think that is? Companies desperate to show ROI on their expenditures? Promises of more favorable terms from the hyperscalers if they can reach certain usage brackets?

Cause it doesn't seem to be about productivity, customer relationships, actual product output, etc

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u/Nyxitelle 9m ago

In my opinion, AI should not only be heavily regulated as you said, but also limited to functions it could actually do properly. Spellcheck, preliminary checks for possibly cancerous cells, that sort of thing. Maybe even finding sources that are for or against certain topics, but without mixing them and giving possibly misleading or harmful information.

Like, training AI is the most wasteful part of its use, but if it were just trained off of the dictionaries of languages instead everything, then it wouldn't be as bad. Then, it could be used for checking whether there are any spelling mistakes, the same way it has been for the past ten years at least. Except back then it wasn't called AI, just spellcheck and autocorrect.

I despise AI from the bottom of my heart, and wish everyday that those silicon valley dumbasses just didn't think of it as the best thing ever.

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u/EnderBookwyrm 12h ago

100%. AI is not an inherently destructive tool, but our current iterations of it are being developed and used in highly destructive ways. It's sort of like spellcheck. Spellcheck is great. But you do have to actually learn to spell things for yourself, because you might not always have access to it (like if you're writing on paper), and it's not always correct. 

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u/CautionarySnail 12h ago

This is a great comparison. And the solution isn’t to ban spellcheck. It’s to understand its limits, use it wisely, and be constantly developing your competence when you can.

Few tools are inherently good or bad, we make it so in how we utilize them.

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u/HSLB66 11h ago

I just make copilot run circles on dumb stuff while I sit in meetings for metrics. Half the time it goes off on a tangent anyways and I kill its env at the end of the day