Now a days people refer to AI instantly for an answer. Maybe it’s a problem they could have solved within 10min in their head or a question they could have done an internet search on and read a few forums to figure out. However, now people go straight to AI which is known to give many many wrong answers.
I know a couple people that fit this bill and now I almost completely disregard what they say. We’ll even be talking face to face and they’ll ask AI something from our conversation in real time.
Do you disregard people IRL who you know use a calculator for everything?
If that sounds like a ridiculous question, it’s because the use of that tool has become so ingrained in our society that we don’t question its use anymore. AI is a new tool and one which can offload a lot of mental work. Such tools have always been controversial. If Plato is to be believed (and that isn’t necessarily a given), Socrates complained that writing made men lazy and their minds weak, because they didn’t have to exercise their memories and were not taught things, just read facts.
AI is a tool, and it’s going to be worked into the fabric of our society, for good or ill. It’s also facing a lot of push-back, as have many tools, but that is unlikely to stop it. Will AI make us lazier? Absolutely. That’s kinda the point. If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father. So much of human invention is all about ways to not work as hard. Sometimes, this is because we need to improve how we do something, sometimes its because we’d rather be down at the pub sipping a brew while a machine does the hard stuff. Often, it’s both.
That said, there is likely to be a lot of pain in the short term as we adjust to the new reality. And it will likely cause another shift in how work happens. Businesses used to have hundreds of people doing nothing but tabulating accounts. Rooms would be full of people just doing math. Now, we have Excel and most of that tedious work is now done by one person at the click of a button. The main problem with the rollout of AI may be one of speed. The same speed which empowers Excel is making the disruption of AI happen at a much faster speed than many of our institutions may be equipped to handle. Or not, there’s been some reporting lately that the promises of AI have been severely over-hyped (shocker, AI companies over sold the capabilities of AI, whodathunkit?). We won’t really know until we’re well past the point of disruption.
So, does it annoy me that people use (and believe) AI to answer relatively simple questions? No not really. Sure, they could take the time to look it up with google, but that is slower and harder. Or they could look it up in a book, which is even slower and harder. Or they could just memorize it and avoid that new fangled writing thing, which is making kids lazy. But, that sort of thing is a dead end. Ai is here, it’s a tool people will use. We just need to find a way to educate people about its strengths and limitations. And that is a hard problem, but maybe AI will help us solve it.
A calculator gives consistently correct results.
Yes. If someone tries using their Ti-84 for relation advice, for example, I’d going to disregard all their opinions. It simply isn’t a tool for everything. It shouldn’t be used as if it were.
Yes, but that means they’re using the tool incorrect. I can attempt to jam a wrench on the end of a soldering iron and use it to make a circuit board, that doesn’t mean I’m using the tool wrong, and should be justifiably mocked for doing so.
LLMs have their place. The fact they are being wildly abused and misused does not diminish that.
I’ve never had a calculator lie to me. Or hallucinate a number. The AI is a tool argument is getting tired. I haven’t seen it do anything useful at all that helps my day to day life.
I’ve also never had a use for a rib spreader. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful in the right setting. I talked through it in a different reply (feel free to use AI to find it), but LLMs and image classifiers do have use cases in particular settings. Just because some folks abuse them and use them for entirely the wrong use cases, doesn’t mean they aren’t useful in the right ones.
Yes, thank you for making my argument. The average person doesn’t have the right use case scenario in their day to day life.
What a braindead take. The technology behind calculators is not built upon a foundation of the largest theft in history, nor does it continue to cause immense harm to people around the world. The same goes for the other human inventions you mentioned.
You’d understand that if you weren’t so desperate to let a random word generator do your thinking for you.
I might need to ask chatgpt to reply to this comment.
In fact if i ever see your username around i will put it into chatgpt and ask it to generate a reply for me, because i can’t think for myself.
Sarcasm aside, i don’t believe i’ve ever asked calculator to answer biology question for me. New normal or not, if the tool serve the purpose of a niche use and ease a particular pain point of a job/routine, then it’s a proper tool. If the tool meant to replace and impede logical and critical thinking, it’s a weapon against personal intellectual, and i’m genuinely worry about that. The lack of critical thinking and nuance in today society of instant gratification is already bad, in fact it’s so bad that the climate changed to what we experienced today, and many people still refused to just wake up a bit and think for themselves. The new normal is people just follow what billionaire said, and you think it’s okay.
Go for it, it might be kinda funny. A bit of irony in it too, as it would offloading the critical thinking required to engage with an argument you disagree with.
Nor should you, you would be using the wrong tool for the job. I’d also not use a calculator to drive screws, that doesn’t invalidate the point. Tools are useful when we use them the right ways. And ya, AI is a terrible tool to offload critical thinking onto. There are use cases where AI makes sense though. Things like image classification and fuzzy searches on large data sets are good use cases for various AI models. One of the problems with AI, at the moment, is that it has been sold as some sort of cure-all that will replace humans and critical thinking. And it’s absolutely not that. It’s in much the same place as cocaine in the first part of the 20th century. Hucksters are putting “AI” on the label and claiming it will solve everything. The reality is much more nuanced. It has it’s uses but they are far more limited than the hucksters are claiming.
Large language models really can be useful for fuzzy searches in large data sets. To give an example from my own work, Copilot is really good at searching Microsoft documentation for me. Could I find the answers with a regular search? Probably, it would also take me longer. Instead, I send Copilot chasing after the answer to that question and go do something else while it finds the answer. They can also help in re-writing for different audiences. I write a lot of technical reports and those need to be summarized for managerial audiences. Yes, I could do that manually, I’ve done it for years. I also hate doing it. Clippy is good enough at doing it that it can give me a first draft and I can finish it up in far less time and effort.
The biggest issue I have seen with LLMs is exactly what you point out, that people trust them too much and don’t think critically about their answers. Again with my work, we use a product that uses an LLM to summarize cybersecurity issues and provides suggestions for response and investigation. It’s a pretty well trained model and it’s suggestions are pretty good most of the time. But, it falls down spectacularly bad from time to time and the analyst needs to be able to recognize that and respond to the alerts appropriately. Some analysts are better at this than others and this is now part of our training for new analysts. We teach them to use the LLM, but to also always think about the basics and question the LLM when it doesn’t seem right.
Image classifiers are another area where I think AI has some good use cases. Consider the job of reviewing images and videos for sites like FaceBook, TikTok or YouTube. The folks who do this work are exposed to a lot of very violent and disturbing media. I used to work with a guy who did computer forensics in a law enforcement setting and he finally left that work because he could deal with having to review CSAM images any more. This seems like the perfect place to slot in an AI image classifier, to make a first pass at it. If it can correctly classify the vast majority of that sort of content, that greatly lessens the workload on the analysts who will need to deal with the borderline stuff and reports of false positives and negatives.
Not at all, but I also think the reactionary “fuck all AI” isn’t okay either. It’s a tool and it’s going to change things. We need to navigate that with a clear head and careful consideration.
I said that sarcastically, which i pointed out at the beginning of my 3rd paragraph, which you missed it. Funny isn’t it?
Missed my point, alongside the 4 paragraphs you churned out. I was trying to point out it’s a false equivalent because AI can be in and used for anything, calculator can’t. The point of this post is about people who use AI for everything, where they offload critical thinking and learning by simply using their brain, so i’m not sure why you trying to argue otherwise which, funny enough, you agreeing it’s bad.