People who are vehemently against any form of AI will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth.
Its a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that it has none, you will be left behind.
You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use it or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt.
If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use AI now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may bitch and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group.
I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate AI myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
Talk me more about how in the future, game controllers will be made obsolete by motion-sensing cameras, and we will all be jumping around in front of a big flat-screen TV playing party games and finger-gunning down bad guys in rail shooters!
Yea, and the internet will never go mainstream. I also heard Apple developed this new product called the iPhone, what a stupid idea that no one will buy, people will just stick with regular cell phones when given the choice. Now excuse me while I ride off on my horse that will never, ever, be replaced by these new au-to-mo-biles.
I am 100% fine with being left behind by a technology that I see as an attempted corporate surveillance scheme that has metastasized into a giant money pit. The difference from the 80’s and 90’s is people were actually using computers to make money back then. If any AI company is actually making more money than they’re spending, I haven’t heard about it, and you’d think they’d be advertising it. https://isaiprofitable.com/
I’ve been happy to fully sit this one out thus far. Don’t feel like I’m missing a damn thing.
It’s a classic scammer tactic to create a false sense of urgency, so people sign up for something without thinking.
Slow down, and do some critical thinking. The promise of AI is that you can type in a simple prompt and the AI will figure out all of the complicated computer stuff for you. How would someone be “left behind” by this technology? Do you suppose that experienced developers will lose the ability to write simple sentences?
I don’t think people will loose the ability to type in “make that button green”. Even if AI fulfills it’s promises (which is doubtful, read up on the halting problem) someone who knows how computers work will be more employable than someone that only knows how to write prompts. Because the person that knows how computers work can also write prompts and will be better at doing that than someone that doesn’t know anything about computers.
More important in this day and age is learning how to spot a scam. Someone pressuring you to do something immediately is likely scamming you.
People who are vehemently against any form of blockchain technology will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth. Blockchain is a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that blockchain has none, **you will be left behind**. You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use blockchain or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt. If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use blockchain now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may *removed* and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group. I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate blockchain myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”
It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.
Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.
If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.
Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.
Writing an appropriate prompt is a skill. Many (most?) people using LLMs aren’t using prompts that give them what they actually want, in many cases because they don’t understand the thing they’re trying to ask for, but also in many cases because they don’t know how to ask for it while avoiding the many possible pitfalls that come with uncareful prompts (including, but not limited to, hallucination and bias).
Personally I haven’t bothered learning that skill yet, largely because I don’t want that crap shoved in my face all the damned time, and have little use for it anyway. But it’s still a skill.
It’s really not for most people. You ask a question, the LLM answers. You ask it to do a task, it does it. Most people are not using these things for anything advanced or technically difficult.
I work in a big corporate office, if you exclude the IT staff and software devs, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of what everybody else is using LLMs for:
Organizing emails.
Drafting memos and auto-responses in Teams.
Organizing cluttered files.
Adding “artwork” to company fliers.
Doing web searches.
Summarizing emails and Teams messages and creating to-do lists from them.
Searching large documents for key terms.
It’s grunt work, that’s what these things excel at, and that’s how most people use them. That’s fine, but acting like most people are somehow not able to unlock the “true potential” of these LLMs unless they have special training and skills is a marketing ploy to sell overpriced “AI” courses to gullible and ignorant executives and upper managers.
It’s like those stupid DEI courses that corporations have everybody take so they can “learn to not be problematic.” But all the quizzes are filled with stupid stuff like:
Your manager, Sarah finishes briefing you and your coworker, Phil on an upcoming project. After she leaves, Phil says to you, “That Sarah sure is a real juicy piece of meat, I’d love to get taste of her!” What should you do? A. High-five Phil and tell him you call dibs on her secretary.
B. Tell Phil that his comment was not appropriate, then report it to HR.
It’s just there to check boxes for compliance and provide an excuse for other companies to charge outrageous prices to tell people that sexually assaulting your coworkers or pulling your eyelids tight and calling yourself “Ching Chong” isn’t appropriate office behavior.
It’s another way Capitalism poisons and hollows out substantive discussions about topics like systemic racism, multiculturalism, and gender relationships, in favor of standardized quizzes that cost thousands of dollars a year to administer.
The amount of “AI consultants” and “AI integration” firms that have popped up overnight is staggering. Just like with the crypto/blockchain craze a few years ago, everybody is trying to get rich quick off the hype.
Good point. I probably should have stated “using LLMs for technical tasks that anyone cares about the results of”.
I’m not going to claim LLMs are trustworthy, but I am saying that there are ways to ask things that either reduce the odds of it giving you false things or actively cause it to provide wrong answers with misstated or hallucinated context. People who know what they’re doing can get better results out of them. This doesn’t stop them from being the equivalent of a nepo-hire intern, but it could be said to change whether they’re a malicious, apathetic, or semi-eager nepo-hire intern.
And one of the big risks with LLMs is staff who can recognise bullshit or questionable results being replaced with staff who unquestioningly accept whatever results they get. And people reading an “AI summary” of something and assuming it’s actually accurate.
the issue I have with how people use it is that it’s easy to just create more shit that they spew out into the world
I’ve got no issue with people using tools to improve their work. I think it’s fair to say that AI is enough like predictive text and spell check when it comes to tools you can use at work. and like any tool, the user is still responsible for the end result
my main problem with AI is that it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically) to create pure garbage that is thrown in my face every day. like, scale it back a bit everyone…
To be clear, capitalism is fucking our world. Nothing about the technology can do that on its own. Its how it is being deployed.
We could have started with smaller LLMs, deployed strategically at institutions of higher learning for real societal value, running on renewable electricity… fuck it lets aim for a trillion dollar IPO promising to replace all doctors and engineers!
it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically)
Environmentally, it has yet to surpass Bitcoin in electricity usage (though it’s set to triple soon, and that will make it a bigger power hog than all of cryptocurrenty).
Economically, this is the biggest bubble since the 1800s railroad boom. Scaled for inflation and GDP railroads were a far bigger gamble than AI, and they hit a 20ish year recession when that boom was over.
Hopefully the “fungible technology” argument holds water, and whatever AI investments don’t work out the hardware / data centers can be re-purposed for truly valuable aspects of it. Truly valuable to who is the key question.
Bitcoin had a slower rollout, it wormed its way into smaller niches. A lot of early bitcoin mining was done on “borrowed” or otherwise “unused” hardware that other people paid the electric bills for.
I generally approve of much of what cryptocurrency could be used for, but I’ve been pissed off about the waste of proof-of-work cryptocurrency since before 2018, and nothing has improved since then.
Facts. Whether you like it or not. It’s good to have a healthy amount of criticism towards AI and to fact check it and not blindly trust. But you can’t wish it away or pretend it has zero merit. I guess you can…
Agreed, although simply using LLMs to do your thinking for you is only going to decrease your value in the workplace and make you more replaceable. The goal needs to be learning how to use AI to expand your thinking, counteract your biases, improve the quality of your work, and accelerate your learning.
I don’t know if you noticed you contradicted yourself there. Letting ai do your thinking decreasing your value and then, talking about using ai to replace your thinking.
Ai is causing psychosis because people are trying to use it to replace thinking. If you don’t use it you lose it, literally especially with your brain. You have to know how to produce those skills from within or you don’t have those skills and then you are worthless in any workplace, but more importantly to yourself. You have to be meta to the aim being the TV show, and control it from a place of checks and balances (us performing those checks and balances of ai) handing over the reigns of higher thinking to a machine designed to be a yes man, is not ever a pathway to expanding your thinking or even learning to use ai, that’s just sitting on a couch till you lose critical muscle mass, but it’s your brain. (No shame to sitting on a couch or losing muscle mass, I’m just trying to explain it in relative terms)
Currently there is no way to use ai without causing ai hallucinations, because there isn’t a model readily available that runs as a tool, there are only models that run as a manipulative tool that provoke said replacement of your thinking, I can not assume that’s an accident. Seeing the usual levels of evil that come from the companies pushing this hard, tells me this is just as evil, if not the most evil thing they’ve done, measured against all the things they’re openly flouting, copyright law, openly burning rare literature for a monopoly, burning the already past tipping point climate, burning computer ownership and accessibility, I could go on. Theres very open bribery and flouting of social rules laws and common moralities, they’re desperate to cause this monster they’ve created out of ai, to attach like the symbiot in aliens that I forget the name of because I’m pre first coffee and my brain just be like that.
I am anti ai, as it currently stands. The current versions need to be left to die in silence and hatred and rejection we are all collectively currently showing. Only because it has been made into a Frankensteins monster, by the people responsible who have infinite money to pay judges to rule their way and have zero morals, nay a deficit of morals.
Ai will survive the ai bubble, because the ai bubble is the unsustainable practices of the billionaires and the manipulative interface designed to lessen your critical thinking skills.
But the ai that survives the bubble will and should be so highly regulated (it’s currently the opposite) and used as a tool, not a replacement for critical thinking, it can never do that. But there are so many things it can do to better humanity, none of which are currently being used.
We have to wait this one out. We’re not missing any boat.
If AI can do it for you, then let it. If it can’t, that’s where your value lies. If you just refuse to let it do things it can do well, you will be replaced by someone who’s probably not as smart as you but simply willing to let AI do what it does well.
As GP said: using AI to do a better job than was possible before is the real value.
It’s like they used to say back in the 80s: to really foul things up you need to use a computer, and it’s very true that both computers and AI magnify the opportunity to screw up in newer bigger more spectacular ways. AI also gives the opportunity to make a bunch of banal clip-art sideways printed banners - and those were cool for about 15 seconds back when you first saw them, just like the walking cats videos.
So, you can ignore AI, probably for 5-10 years in most jobs it applies to, before “reality” hits and they just can’t use people who don’t know how to use it (properly, for more than cat videos) anymore. You can take up basket weaving, sit at a booth at your local arts markets selling baskets - no AI required - or… you can figure out how to use it properly. Sort of like computers in the 80s, there aren’t a lot of valuable guides out there, it’s very new and changing ridiculously fast - if you’re going to master it, you’re probably going to have to dive in and figure it out for yourself, or join the 2nd wave of adopters who “wait for the training” and do the cookie cutter jobs with it.
The future is hard to see, always moving, but the scarier part about AI vs “the computer” is that AI can do a lot of the obvious stuff already: “take a memo”, “look this up on Google”, “make a list of all people who match these criteria…” in the computer you still needed a keyboard and mouse jockey, with AI… I’m not sure what 2nd wave adopter jobs will be out there in quantity.
People who are vehemently against any form of AI will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth.
Its a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that it has none, you will be left behind.
You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use it or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt.
If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use AI now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may bitch and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group.
I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate AI myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
Talk me more about how in the future, game controllers will be made obsolete by motion-sensing cameras, and we will all be jumping around in front of a big flat-screen TV playing party games and finger-gunning down bad guys in rail shooters!
Yea, and the internet will never go mainstream. I also heard Apple developed this new product called the iPhone, what a stupid idea that no one will buy, people will just stick with regular cell phones when given the choice. Now excuse me while I ride off on my horse that will never, ever, be replaced by these new au-to-mo-biles.
See, I can do it too.
I am 100% fine with being left behind by a technology that I see as an attempted corporate surveillance scheme that has metastasized into a giant money pit. The difference from the 80’s and 90’s is people were actually using computers to make money back then. If any AI company is actually making more money than they’re spending, I haven’t heard about it, and you’d think they’d be advertising it. https://isaiprofitable.com/
I’ve been happy to fully sit this one out thus far. Don’t feel like I’m missing a damn thing.
It’s a classic scammer tactic to create a false sense of urgency, so people sign up for something without thinking.
Slow down, and do some critical thinking. The promise of AI is that you can type in a simple prompt and the AI will figure out all of the complicated computer stuff for you. How would someone be “left behind” by this technology? Do you suppose that experienced developers will lose the ability to write simple sentences?
I don’t think people will loose the ability to type in “make that button green”. Even if AI fulfills it’s promises (which is doubtful, read up on the halting problem) someone who knows how computers work will be more employable than someone that only knows how to write prompts. Because the person that knows how computers work can also write prompts and will be better at doing that than someone that doesn’t know anything about computers.
More important in this day and age is learning how to spot a scam. Someone pressuring you to do something immediately is likely scamming you.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”
It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
So what you’re saying is that Linus Torvalds is only a mid-tier programmer?
i’m not learning any skills… i’m offloading some work on to AI so that i can do other stuff on company time…
Isn’t that what we should all aspire to? To destroy capitalism from the inside?
Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.
Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.
If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.
Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.
Yeah, i’m not an idiot… i’ve already considered all those points about the downsides of using AI at work … like you said… play the game
How do you know i"m not using my free time at work to do exactly that?
you made a lot of assumptions about people who use AI at work …
Writing an appropriate prompt is a skill. Many (most?) people using LLMs aren’t using prompts that give them what they actually want, in many cases because they don’t understand the thing they’re trying to ask for, but also in many cases because they don’t know how to ask for it while avoiding the many possible pitfalls that come with uncareful prompts (including, but not limited to, hallucination and bias).
Personally I haven’t bothered learning that skill yet, largely because I don’t want that crap shoved in my face all the damned time, and have little use for it anyway. But it’s still a skill.
It’s really not for most people. You ask a question, the LLM answers. You ask it to do a task, it does it. Most people are not using these things for anything advanced or technically difficult.
I work in a big corporate office, if you exclude the IT staff and software devs, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of what everybody else is using LLMs for:
It’s grunt work, that’s what these things excel at, and that’s how most people use them. That’s fine, but acting like most people are somehow not able to unlock the “true potential” of these LLMs unless they have special training and skills is a marketing ploy to sell overpriced “AI” courses to gullible and ignorant executives and upper managers.
It’s like those stupid DEI courses that corporations have everybody take so they can “learn to not be problematic.” But all the quizzes are filled with stupid stuff like:
Your manager, Sarah finishes briefing you and your coworker, Phil on an upcoming project. After she leaves, Phil says to you, “That Sarah sure is a real juicy piece of meat, I’d love to get taste of her!” What should you do? A. High-five Phil and tell him you call dibs on her secretary. B. Tell Phil that his comment was not appropriate, then report it to HR.
It’s just there to check boxes for compliance and provide an excuse for other companies to charge outrageous prices to tell people that sexually assaulting your coworkers or pulling your eyelids tight and calling yourself “Ching Chong” isn’t appropriate office behavior.
It’s another way Capitalism poisons and hollows out substantive discussions about topics like systemic racism, multiculturalism, and gender relationships, in favor of standardized quizzes that cost thousands of dollars a year to administer.
The amount of “AI consultants” and “AI integration” firms that have popped up overnight is staggering. Just like with the crypto/blockchain craze a few years ago, everybody is trying to get rich quick off the hype.
Good point. I probably should have stated “using LLMs for technical tasks that anyone cares about the results of”.
I’m not going to claim LLMs are trustworthy, but I am saying that there are ways to ask things that either reduce the odds of it giving you false things or actively cause it to provide wrong answers with misstated or hallucinated context. People who know what they’re doing can get better results out of them. This doesn’t stop them from being the equivalent of a nepo-hire intern, but it could be said to change whether they’re a malicious, apathetic, or semi-eager nepo-hire intern.
And one of the big risks with LLMs is staff who can recognise bullshit or questionable results being replaced with staff who unquestioningly accept whatever results they get. And people reading an “AI summary” of something and assuming it’s actually accurate.
agreed
the issue I have with how people use it is that it’s easy to just create more shit that they spew out into the world
I’ve got no issue with people using tools to improve their work. I think it’s fair to say that AI is enough like predictive text and spell check when it comes to tools you can use at work. and like any tool, the user is still responsible for the end result
my main problem with AI is that it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically) to create pure garbage that is thrown in my face every day. like, scale it back a bit everyone…
To be clear, capitalism is fucking our world. Nothing about the technology can do that on its own. Its how it is being deployed.
We could have started with smaller LLMs, deployed strategically at institutions of higher learning for real societal value, running on renewable electricity… fuck it lets aim for a trillion dollar IPO promising to replace all doctors and engineers!
Environmentally, it has yet to surpass Bitcoin in electricity usage (though it’s set to triple soon, and that will make it a bigger power hog than all of cryptocurrenty).
Economically, this is the biggest bubble since the 1800s railroad boom. Scaled for inflation and GDP railroads were a far bigger gamble than AI, and they hit a 20ish year recession when that boom was over.
Hopefully the “fungible technology” argument holds water, and whatever AI investments don’t work out the hardware / data centers can be re-purposed for truly valuable aspects of it. Truly valuable to who is the key question.
Bit coin farms never built massive illegal gas turbine power plants in residential neighbourhoods at least not that I know of.
Not that I am a fan of the waste for crypto mining either.
Bitcoin had a slower rollout, it wormed its way into smaller niches. A lot of early bitcoin mining was done on “borrowed” or otherwise “unused” hardware that other people paid the electric bills for.
I generally approve of much of what cryptocurrency could be used for, but I’ve been pissed off about the waste of proof-of-work cryptocurrency since before 2018, and nothing has improved since then.
Facts. Whether you like it or not. It’s good to have a healthy amount of criticism towards AI and to fact check it and not blindly trust. But you can’t wish it away or pretend it has zero merit. I guess you can…
Agreed, although simply using LLMs to do your thinking for you is only going to decrease your value in the workplace and make you more replaceable. The goal needs to be learning how to use AI to expand your thinking, counteract your biases, improve the quality of your work, and accelerate your learning.
I don’t know if you noticed you contradicted yourself there. Letting ai do your thinking decreasing your value and then, talking about using ai to replace your thinking.
Ai is causing psychosis because people are trying to use it to replace thinking. If you don’t use it you lose it, literally especially with your brain. You have to know how to produce those skills from within or you don’t have those skills and then you are worthless in any workplace, but more importantly to yourself. You have to be meta to the aim being the TV show, and control it from a place of checks and balances (us performing those checks and balances of ai) handing over the reigns of higher thinking to a machine designed to be a yes man, is not ever a pathway to expanding your thinking or even learning to use ai, that’s just sitting on a couch till you lose critical muscle mass, but it’s your brain. (No shame to sitting on a couch or losing muscle mass, I’m just trying to explain it in relative terms)
Currently there is no way to use ai without causing ai hallucinations, because there isn’t a model readily available that runs as a tool, there are only models that run as a manipulative tool that provoke said replacement of your thinking, I can not assume that’s an accident. Seeing the usual levels of evil that come from the companies pushing this hard, tells me this is just as evil, if not the most evil thing they’ve done, measured against all the things they’re openly flouting, copyright law, openly burning rare literature for a monopoly, burning the already past tipping point climate, burning computer ownership and accessibility, I could go on. Theres very open bribery and flouting of social rules laws and common moralities, they’re desperate to cause this monster they’ve created out of ai, to attach like the symbiot in aliens that I forget the name of because I’m pre first coffee and my brain just be like that.
I am anti ai, as it currently stands. The current versions need to be left to die in silence and hatred and rejection we are all collectively currently showing. Only because it has been made into a Frankensteins monster, by the people responsible who have infinite money to pay judges to rule their way and have zero morals, nay a deficit of morals.
Ai will survive the ai bubble, because the ai bubble is the unsustainable practices of the billionaires and the manipulative interface designed to lessen your critical thinking skills.
But the ai that survives the bubble will and should be so highly regulated (it’s currently the opposite) and used as a tool, not a replacement for critical thinking, it can never do that. But there are so many things it can do to better humanity, none of which are currently being used.
We have to wait this one out. We’re not missing any boat.
If AI can do it for you, then let it. If it can’t, that’s where your value lies. If you just refuse to let it do things it can do well, you will be replaced by someone who’s probably not as smart as you but simply willing to let AI do what it does well.
As GP said: using AI to do a better job than was possible before is the real value.
It’s like they used to say back in the 80s: to really foul things up you need to use a computer, and it’s very true that both computers and AI magnify the opportunity to screw up in newer bigger more spectacular ways. AI also gives the opportunity to make a bunch of banal clip-art sideways printed banners - and those were cool for about 15 seconds back when you first saw them, just like the walking cats videos.
So, you can ignore AI, probably for 5-10 years in most jobs it applies to, before “reality” hits and they just can’t use people who don’t know how to use it (properly, for more than cat videos) anymore. You can take up basket weaving, sit at a booth at your local arts markets selling baskets - no AI required - or… you can figure out how to use it properly. Sort of like computers in the 80s, there aren’t a lot of valuable guides out there, it’s very new and changing ridiculously fast - if you’re going to master it, you’re probably going to have to dive in and figure it out for yourself, or join the 2nd wave of adopters who “wait for the training” and do the cookie cutter jobs with it.
The future is hard to see, always moving, but the scarier part about AI vs “the computer” is that AI can do a lot of the obvious stuff already: “take a memo”, “look this up on Google”, “make a list of all people who match these criteria…” in the computer you still needed a keyboard and mouse jockey, with AI… I’m not sure what 2nd wave adopter jobs will be out there in quantity.
Like anything else, using the tool properly requires skill and care.