This is exactly the kind of black and white reasoning that annoys me about online discourse. The camps of "neverslop" and "techbro shill" are extremely vocal, and squeeze out anyone in between with a nuanced opinion (like myself). And I know I'm not the only one because I get upvotes!

Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now? If anyone might be an authority on the ethical use of ai, it would be him.

"But Glitch, that's an appeal to authority fallacy!"

Okay, hypothetical strawman, you have a point.

Sure, there's people who exist who operate like how op describes. I'm not disputing that. But saying everyone who uses ai at all is braindead is both incorrect and insulting. I use ai for some shit, it's genuinely a somewhat useful tool and middling quality entertainment. But did ai write this comment? No, it did not, nor has ai told me what my opinions should be. So, proposal disproved by counterexample.

Someone is going to tell me I'm taking this too seriously, i can feel it.

Maybe it's not about whether they are or are not NPCs, but the time they spend being as one. I also think spending time scrolling, having all your content delivered to you via an algorithm, also is kind of like spending time being an NPC.

A question for them: Why live anymore?
Okay, a bit more friendly version: where did you gave up living your own life?

Citing “Another Brick In The Wall” is suspiciously generic and uncreative.

ever spoken to a person that heavily uses llms, thier response is to use CHATGPT every single time.

People who use the internet are actual NPCs. I'm the only main character here.

What about opensource self hosted AI?

There are still major ethical issues with how they get training data, but the problem with hijacking the economy and society seems resolved. I feel like I can more easily forgive the copyright theft for someone just fucking around in their homelab, replacing Google assistant.

Maybe I'm just bean-souping.

My favorite is calling them meat proxies.

need something?

For those who say "what about ethical uses of AI?" and "but what if it actually useful?":

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. Technology is legitimately useful.
2. Technology is so harmful it shouldn't exist.

We didn't "cancel" asbestos for an all-around better material. We got rid of it wherever we could due to the harms of it. AI is harming our society, since it attempts to replace human communication with technology.

I prefer "meat proxy".

People who use AI to outsource their creativity and ideas are NPCs. People who have ideas and use AI to bring those ideas into fruition are at least neutral.

I recently tried using AI as a test for therapy. Omg. It has no idea what it's talking about. It makes wild assumptions, defends the indefensible, and will always tell you it doesn't really know once you push back on it a little bit.

It's honestly useless for information. It's an auto-coder. That's all.

Unless you're saying that people using ai is causing you to isolate yourself and bottle up your own feelings that's not the correct song to use.

There are many, many effective ways to oppose AI. Dehumanizing everyone that uses it isn't one of them.

Dehumanization is a line I won't cross, maybe with the exception of Nazis. This is a little too casual.

Assisted AI is fine, but putting it in the drivers seat and abandoning critical thinking skills is pretty concerning, yet sadly not surprising with the masses

I see generative AI the same way I see anabolic steroids. If you're already versed enough in whatever field, it might not be that bad a thing, but you're 100% gonna deal with some consequences.

Take me for example, by the time I really got into generative AI in 2023-2024, I already worked IT for like 10-11 years, had several certs, and so I was able to get it to be mostly useful to me because I already knew my job well enough.

Others? I had some coworkers get straight up brainrotted and couldn't configure a damn Cisco Router without asking ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Deepseek or Gemini or whatever.

And shit, even for people who say, "WHY DON'T WE USE AI TO SOLVE CANCER!?" Like doctors who use AI to do that wind up becoming worse at spotting cancer on their own. Even me, guy with over a decade of IT experience? I felt myself becoming dumber when I use AI too much and have to take like tolerence breaks to go back to the old ways of scrolling old tech forums to find the answer.

shoutouts to simpleflips