this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Maybe not Chat GPT specifically, but you can hardly use the internet without some AI being pushed on you.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

There's a difference between passively using something and actively using something.

I use electricity every day, but I have no idea how it's generated. I (assume I) use RSA256, but if you ask me to explain block cypher encryption to you I'd just go "well you take a number and another number and....... hope they have sex to produce a bigger number?"

I use a lot of stuff without having to know how it works and having to choose to use it.

[–] [email protected] 113 points 5 days ago (15 children)

The amount of times I've seen a question answered by "I asked chatgpt and blah blah blah" and the answer being completely bullshit makes me wonder who thinks asking the bullshit machine™ questions with a concrete answer is a good idea

[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is your reminder that LLMs are associative models. They produce things that look like other things. If you ask a question, it will produce something that looks like the right answer. It might even BE the right answer, but LLMs care only about looks, not facts.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago (2 children)

A lot of people really hate uncertainty and just want an answer. They do not care much if the answer is right or not. Being certain is more important than being correct.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 77 points 5 days ago (7 children)

I feel like it's an unpopular take but people are like "I used chat gpt to write this email!" and I'm like you should be able to write email.

I think a lot of people are too excited to neglect core skills and let them atrophy. You should know how to communicate. It's a skill that needs practice.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

This is a reality as most people will abandon those skills, and many more will never learn them to begin with. I'm actually very worried about children who will grow up learning to communicate with AI and being dependent on it to effectively communicate with people and navigate the world, potentially needing AI as a communication assistant/translator.

AI is patient, always available, predicts desires and effectively assumes intent. If I type a sentence with spelling mistakes, chatgpt knows what I meant 99% of the time. This will mean children don't need to spell or structure sentences correctly to effectively communicate with AI, which means they don't need to think in a way other human being can understand, as long as an AI does. The more time kids spend with AI, the less developed their communication skills will be with people. GenZ and GenA already exhibit these issues without AI. Most people go experience this communicating across generations, as language and culture context changes. This will emphasize those differences to a problematic degree.

Kids will learn to communicate will people and with AI, but those two styles with be radically different. AI communication will be lazy, saying only enough for AI to understand. With communication history, which is inevitable tbh, and AI improving every day, it can develop a unique communication style for each child, what's amounts to a personal language only the child and AI can understand. AI may learn to understand a child better than their parents do and make the child dependent on AI to effectively communicate, creating a corporate filter of communication between human being. The implications of this kind of dependency are terrifying. Your own kid talks to you through an AI translator, their teachers, friends, all their relationships could be impacted.

I have absolutely zero beleif that the private interests of these technology owners will benefit anyone other than themselves and at the expense of human freedom.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I know someone who very likely had ChatGPT write an apology for them once. Blew my mind.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

You don’t think being able to communicate properly and control your language, even/especially for people you don’t like, is a skill you should probably have? It’s not that much more effort.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

I can and I do, but I don't think he's worth the effort specifically. Lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Why waste the brain power when the option exists not to?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Because brains literally need exercise, and conversations with other real humans are the best kind it can get, so you're literally speedrunning an increased potential of dementia and alzheimers with every fake email.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Not understanding how to use new technology, even flawed ones, isn't a flex

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

I understand LLMs well enough that I really don't want to use them because they are inherently incapable of judging the validity of information they are passing along.

Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's right. But they don't tell you when they're wrong, and to find out if they were wrong, you now have to do the research you were trying to avoid in the first place.

I tried programming with it once, because a friend insisted it was good. But it wasn't, and it was extremly confidend, while being exceptionally wrong.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Congrats, then don't use it to validate information.

LLMs are incredible text generators. But if you are going to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, then you are never going to find its potential.

Yes, there are tons of bogus AI implementations. But that doesn't say anything about the validity of the technology. Look at what VLC is doing with it for example.

It is pretty clear by those statements that you understand LLMs less than what you claim.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

But it wasn't, and it was extremly confidend, while being exceptionally wrong.

TIL I'm a LLM

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Yeah thats called ignorance and we shouldn't be celebrating it.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Wait, people actually try to use gpt for regular everyday shit?

I do lorebuilding shit (in which gpt's "hallucinations" are a feature not a bug), or I'll just ramble at it while drunk off my ass about whatever my autistic brain is hyperfixated on. I've given up on trying to do coding projects, because gpt is even worse at it than I am.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (3 children)

They absolutely do. Some people basically use it instead of Google or whatever. Shopping lists, vacation planning, gift lists, cooking recipes, just about everything.

It's great at it, because it'll bother trawling webpages for all that stuff that you can't be bothered to spend hours doing. The internet is really soo shitified that it's easier to use a computer to do this.

I hate that it is so. It's a complete waste of ressources, but I understand it.

It's a waste of your resources to close popups, set cookie preferences and read five full screens about grandma's farm before getting to the point: "Preheat the oven to 200°c and heat the pizza for 15 minutes.", when ChatGPT could've presented it right away without any ads.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Brought to you by chrome being the biggest browser and it willfully enshittifying adblockers, which incidentally made searching way more tedious and funneled people to LLMs.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

I have encountered some people who use it as a substitute for thinking. To the extent that it's rather unnerving.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It's so strange seeing people being proud that they can't keep up with the technologies.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Yeah, that's just judgemental and presumptive.

I have quite a lot of shit in my life, and I have actively decided to pay no attention to AI. Not because "I can't keep up with it" but because after some research into it I decided "it was bullshit and nonsense and not something I need to know about"

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I used to know a guy like that. He would say stuff like "I didn't even know how to use a computer mouse!" It definitely sounded like he was bragging. Such a weird thing to be proud of.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Spent this morning reading a thread where someone was following chatGPT instructions to install "Linux" and couldn't understand why it was failing.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago

I don’t know how to feel about this. I need to ask ChatGPT.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Oh hey it's me! I like using my brain, I like using my own words, I can't imagine wanting to outsource that stuff to a machine.

Meanwhile, I have a friend who's skeptical about the practical uses of LLMs, but who insists that they're "good for porn." I can't help but see modern AI as a massive waste of electricity and water, furthering the destruction of the climate with every use. I don't even like it being a default on search engines, so the idea of using it just to regularly masturbate feels ... extremely selfish. I can see trying it as a novelty, but for a regular occurence? It's an incredibly wasteful use of resources just so your dick can feel nice for a few minutes.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (35 children)

I don't get how so many people carry their computer illiteracy as a badge of honor.

Chatgpt is useful.

Is it as useful as Tech Evangelists praise it to be? No. Not yet - and perhaps never will be.

But I sure do love to let it write my mails to people who I don't care for, but who I don't want to anger by sending my default 3 word replies.

It's a tool to save time. Use it or pay with your time if you willfully ignore it.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (9 children)

Tech illiteracy. Strong words.

I'm a sysadmin at the IT faculty of a university. I have a front row seat to witness the pervasive mental decline that is the result of chatbots. I have remote access to all lab computers. I see students copy-paste the exercise questions into a chatbot and the output back. Some are unwilling to write a single line of code by themselves. One of the network/cybersecurity teachers is a friend, he's seen attendance drop to half when he revealed he'd block access to chatbots during exams. Even the dean, who was elected because of his progressive views on machine learning, laments new students' unwillingness to learn. It's actual tech illiteracy.

I've sworn off all things AI because I strongly believe that its current state is a detriment to society at large. 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 will learn every skill that I need, without depending on AI. If you think that makes me an old man yelling at clouds, I have no kind words in response.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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.

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