@brib the rapid onset of helplessness I see around me is troubling
This goes for so much tech. Once people get used to some little convenience they seem to forget how they used to just get along fine
@brib yeah definitely accessibility (speaking broadly and inclusively) is a great reason for tech convenience in this context. But if everyone starts using the tech then the people who actually need it are kinda right back where they started, relatively.
I'm thinking mostly of accessibility to work or like be "productive"
@hwll Plus (and this is what gets to me personally) they complain about how hard it is to do things without AI while destroying the resources that help you figure it out without AI.
It angers me just how many search engine results are pure slop now
@brib ugh yeah I'll be searching for something pretty mainstream that I *know* is indexed but just isn't coming up past all the similar hits for SEO garbage. And then the pages I do click are keyword baiting slop that are 10 slightly different 1000 word articles slopped up around the same tiny kernel of actually real information.
Then I think... I know of an LLM trained on the same corpus that is suited to exactly this kind of keyword similarity searching over a large area, and it's currently *free*.
So I get it. But as we know it's a bad trade in the long term.
@brib I had a recent silly example of looking for an AR app where you could "drop a pin" on a map and then have that position show up using the phone camera as a viewfinder, with things like bearing, distance, etc.
Can I do that with a map & compass? Sure. But, that doesn't mean it's not handy to have the convenience.
That is a world of difference from losing the ability to navigate, especially with a tool that may just point to a completely different and made up location, render the place name in garbled text, and where you still have to "check the outputs" using the manual methods (that you have now forgotten) to ensure you're not looking at a completely random and fabricated spot.
Aw come on, he’s a tech pundit. The list things he can’t do…
He has to maintain that willful ignorance so the tech bros will talk to him.
I think originally I wrote this in response to a slop version of the werehouse meme. One commenter remarked how it was great AI exists because nobody would have made this kind of picture before, but the meme was actually a plagiarised version of a photochopped meme that has been around for several years.
It's also a common refrain around a lot of AI booster circles. "Without AI, who would be making apps?". "Without AI, how can you make music!". "AI is democratising art because it was so hard before!". Etcetcetc
Yes, but once those people learned that skill, they weren't "ordinary people" any more; they had skill!
"Gotcha There!!!"
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