Ask Lemmy

yes i ignore their input

It bugs me, yes. The anthromorphic "ask AI" makes it even worse.

Just using slop generators at all makes you a moron in my books. Unfortunately I am something of a moron myself when I use free services in an anonymous browser tab to find out something not clear from documentation.

Just start asking your 5-year-old for counter arguments, as they are likely to be more valid.

Personally, it's people who get answers from some so-called "book" or "university" or "expert" that grind my gears. Like think for yourself maybe?

If I knew anyone IRL, damn straight I would.

I've stop reading one source of tech news and at least one fitness youtuber who uses AI. I can do no less for IRL interactions.

Yes. I know a few folk who've fallen way down the rabbit hole and believe anything the lying machines spit out. When they would get on their soapbox about LLMs or write very obviously ai-generated messages, I made it clear to them that I wanted to hear their thoughts or nothing at all.

For the most part, I got the latter. My mom actually backed down a bit and uses chatgpt at least more judiciously now, especially after I showed her how it makes shit up about stuff within her knowledge base and explained how it was doing that for everything.

I generally take everything they say with a giant grain of salt, but that was somewhat true even before 2022. Most of the AI-reliant people I know were never that great at evaluating sources of information. It’s just that the problem is far more pronounced now.

That's not my criteria.

I also don't disregard people who spurt out everything they hear on TicTok either, though that's arguably worse.

At least AI ingested it somewhere and isn't directly fabricating a problem so it can sell me a product to fix it. It's still reasonably likely to be either wrong or at least somewhat misleading.

I give the annoying AI "researchers" at least some small amount of credit for trying to look stuff up.

And it's kind of fun to inform them they were misinformed. Extra credit points if you ask an AI right after they ask theirs with qualifiers like cite your source for this answer and don't include any quotes that didn't come from subject matter experts.

Put simply, YES.

I almost kicked a D&D player for asking AI everything at my table. I begged him to ask me instead. He left shortly after for unrelated reasons.

I definitely would, yes.

Depends what it's used for. Coworkers use it to generate memes a fair bit. I also use it as a starting point for looking stuff up occasionally, partly because so many fucking websites are AI generated now I may as well ask a more direct question to AI instead. Then once I have a more specific answer I can look that up somewhere more reliable.

Recent example there being looking up things to grow in my allotment, give general goals and conditions and get a list of things. Then see what sounds interesting from that list and look that up on the RHS website.

I use it a bit, but generally only for checking my own work and helping me rewrite things so they're less harsh

Tbh I kiiind of do that with everyone. Well, not quite, I take what they say with a big grain of salt and just continue the conversation. A couple exceptions: they are experts in what they're talking about. Or, its some personal experience

It depends what they ask.

A lot of questions are fairly accurate to ask AI.

Also, some people are smart enough to habe configured their pre-prompt to reduce common issues with AI platforms.

There's a big difference between:

"Hey whats the answer to (esoteric question)"

Vs

"Hey can you find me a paper on (well documented topic)" (and then opening the paper up and reading the actual source)

Using it as a powerful fuzzy search tool with semantic intent is fine.

Its the difference between asking a librarian how to cure cancer, vs asking the librarian to help you quickly find a book on cancer treatments.

I use AI a ton to find sources for information. Then check sources they used. Just made searching faster for me.

I don't know if anyone I know does this. Im sure most or all use it somewhat but also still use standard searching.

Not totally, but if they ask for an answer or ask AI to do something for them so they dont have to think im suspect.

I think AI can be useful, I use it to help me edit and proof my writing, but I specifically wont let it rewrite my words. I will let it make suggestions for clarity and grammar but thats the limit.

I will use AI to generate a meme level image, but im not going to use it for a presentation or as part of something that would have been a paid element.

I have played with using it to help me prototype some software, but I still read all the code, and I still take the time to understand what its writing.

AI replacing your own thoughts is bad, AI helping you refine and extend your thoughts is mostly ok.