LauraWhat scares me the most about Chat GPT is not that people may not do any actual writing, but that they likely won’t do any reading.
Most content creation is already time-wasting, environmentally harmful, malicious junk — now we’ll have astronomical levels of junk production.
Mango BabyFrom Douglas Adams:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
I’m at 3, although I may be able to squeeze a career out of it if needed.
Patricklee@laescude then there’s his other bit of advice.
“Don’t panic”
“Don’t panic”
@patricklee This is the main one 🙂
Larvitz 
@laescude almost 40, can’t relate. I still very much enjoy new things and be fascinated by them.
Giselle@laescude That made me consider, again, what a strong reaction I have against this AI kerfuffle. I bet if I was in my 20s I'd be beyond excited by it. As it is, it just fills me with doom and gloom vibes. I hope most of the hype and wonder will blow over and that it turns out as a hurricane in a tea cup but I am actually worried that AI will rip away from us what we call reality and it'll be almost impossible to get it back. I hope I suffer from wildly exaggerated concerns.
@Giselle me too!
@laescude I think that content curation will become ever more important. When experts in their subject fields can tell us what is true and real, possibly via third party messengers who we are able to trust due to finding them reliable over time. The human component in passing on knowledge will IMHO have a more important and incisive role in the presence of AI. We will have to however get used to looking for sources and check that they're reliably quoted.
Justin Derrick@Giselle @laescude Once you use ChatGPT to try and talk about something you have deep experience in, you’ll see that it’s only really good at sounding confident about the BS it spews. The only threat from ChatGPT is that people take what it says seriously, because it’s mostly wrong about everything.
We already have that problem with a subset of the population on the political far right. They just may be fooled by different crap instead.
Johan Pelck Olsen@laescude checks out
Doreen32128 ready to rumble!
Ellcrys ☕@laescude I think that's basically true, but the age borders can vary, depending on the flexibility of your mind. I'm 52 (yikes), but can still be excited by new things.
But not all. I think it also depends on the topic... 🤷♂️
But not all. I think it also depends on the topic... 🤷♂️
Johannes Link
Michal MěchuraGood thing the whole computers-and-internet thing came along during my stage 2!
Jules she/her@laescude @pezmico the assumption that the conditions you grew up in are default is responsible for the "shifting baselines" effect in nature conservation too, every generation is trying to restore things to how it was in their childhood, assuming this is the natural state of things, not realising every generation's baseline is slightly impoverished compared to the last
Torlais Neoini
teledyn 𓂀I never did get step one. At a very young age I looked around and thought, "This is insane," and walked away. I'd had enough of suburbs, carparks, television, pop 'culture', fantasy magazines (they are ALL fantasy, cars, fashion, guitars, tits boobies and other birds), sugared sugar, and processed foods. Last TV show I remember was Happy Days. Having no idea what else might be possible, I went to the public library…
Needless to say, I didn't make many friends as a kid.
@teledyn @StevenFrench I bet it made you more interesting. It’s boring when all people know or want to talk about is pop culture.
Well… _I_ thought so, but…
I just thought I was mentally not quite right, failed socialization or something. Asking 'why' is juvenile, wondering what-if worse. That was until I was combing the downtown library and found this book by Richard Kostelanetz interviewing John Cage. I then read A Year From Monday, and Joyce, Fuller, McLuhan, Suzuki…
Needless to say, I later collaborated with Cage and discovered a whole other planet where my "mental illness" wasn't 😊
nionidh@laescude Im at 3 already but I'm only 22
Aeáro, a SeaWyrm 
@laescude
Uh oh, I have less than a week until the cutoff. I hope a lot of rad stuff gets invented before this weekend...
Uh oh, I have less than a week until the cutoff. I hope a lot of rad stuff gets invented before this weekend...
TwopawArthur Dent considered briefly, then profusely expunged, like overtannic Orange Pekoe:
"I am the last human being who will ever turn thirty-five, and I already thought the inventions of the younger folk and their novel derivations were rather goddamned unnatural in the first place."
"And I rather liked my big, red brick house without some idiot planner's need for superhighway-bypass running through. The planet wasn't much better, but was at least still mine in some small fashion."
@twopaw First time I read this, 35 seemed old 🙃 I’m now 38 and I love my red brick house 💚
Laura, if I may address you thus: I did not start writing science-fiction and modern fantasy until I was 35 years old, and then doubted considerably that I hadn't missed the bus, that even were I to begin, I had already failed in the timing.
It took no more than the loving friendship and simple, wise words of a nearly 90-year-old Skyrim Dragonborn Nan and gamer who always called me her Grand'cub, who fostered in us together both our friendship and trust in the mixed mediums of gaming and imagination, that friendship borne solely online over the past eight years but in human feeling and emotion of such breadth and richness of detail I could not imagine it with more tactile and cohesive solidity and wholeness, to convince me I hadn't failed, but that I had only begun; like Udo Kier's Yuri telling the Soviet Premier in Red Alert 2 that my creative and mighty shit had indeed only begun to meet intimately the blades of fandom's combat.
Not everyone will have a Grand'ma like Shirley Curry, the Dragonborn Nan, and perhaps fewer might thank her for the humanity she lent me when I doubted myself and my purpose a great deal more than I do now.
Like her, this rhook-cub puts his travelling boots on one foot at a time, and he remembers what his grandmother taught him whenever he questions himself or sets doubt far too close to his heart.
Faith Of The Heart, good chummer, Ad Astra. Be the lighthouse in the sea of stars, where kindness and humanity meets its berth, and is welcomed.
-2Paw.