Dave Rahardja
This is a good thread. I’ve seen way too many otherwise level-headed and competent people slide into AI fascination, rationalization, normalization, evangelization, and eventually harmful self-delusion; and that shit is rapid and most definitely not something that a “normal” automation technology does. To claim at #ai is a “normal” technology is absurd. https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116220202738664759 https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116220202738664759 https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116220202738664759
Mar 13 at 9:21amWeb
Show threadsgt13724d ago

@drahardja

I get that you "hate" how AI can be abused & misused but I've found it very useful in answering open-ended fact-based questions that would take too long (if not impossible) to answer with a standard word-based Net search.

For example, I needed to make a pricing decision about a collectible folding knife originally made in 2014 & #ChatGBT gave me a specific inflation estimate of 35-40% based on CPI data that would have been very hard to find doing a typical word search.

So, #AI isn't all bad IMO. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Show threadDave Rahardja4d ago

@sgt1372 Sure. I posted before that AI is great for the beginning of a web search, because…well it’s trained on the contents of the web isn’t it? Plus Gemini can actually perform a Google search on your behalf.

Now I don’t trust its output, because how would I know if it’s right or wrong? But I use it to get a sense of what to search for in an actual search engine.

Although that use case can also be problematic, I’m not talking about that here. I’m talking about the apparent effect that continual use of genAI seems to have on otherwise reasonable people. We can’t deny that AI has changed some people’s thought processes, often for the worse, sometimes publicly. I think this is not the usual “early adopter syndrome” or one of those fanboi phenomena we’ve seen in the past; this seems to be much more fundamental to their psychology, and we need to acknowledge that it’s not an unlikely outcome of genAI usage.