Ask HN: I'm getting overwhelmed by AI. How to cope?

I can't keep up with the advancements in technology and it's taking my sanity away. I remember when GPT-3 was released in 2020 and it was all the news. I remember how "stupid" it was and how we mocked it, last year we got GPT-4 that blew everyone away and this year we are getting GPT-5. Technology is moving forward way too fast for my brain to keep up and all these LLMs are getting so good that almost nothing is worth doing anymore.

Learning takes time. Perfecting a skill takes time. I have to spend a year learning Unity game engine and another year to make a simple video game. Maybe I want to try selling it and make a living out of it. Why bother when AI can alredy give me code snippets and detailed instructions, in a year or two it will be able to produce a complete product. I can't compete with that, there are already tens of thousands video games for sale on Steam alone right now.

Maybe I want to learn digital painting and 3D modelling and animation to show it to others. Why spend years learning all that when text to 3D is already so good you can plug and play without very little work. Unity 6 is introducing an impressive text to 3D animation feature. That will make animators and modellers obsolete overnight.

Maybe I want to write a novel and have people read it, but why bother when Gemini can already do it better than I ever could. It's already producing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction in an automated fashion and it's getting harder and harder to know if it's written by a human or AI. You can't compete with all the spam on Amazon and even if you could, how could you ever prove to someone that you are the sole author and haven't used AI in your work?

Same goes for everything else that is not a strictly physical activity. There is already so much spam generated by people using AI products that I wonder how will anything have value in the future? I watched a Youtube short the other day and I had no idea the video was AI generated (it was a podcast) until I read it in the comments. I could spot these fakes in a split of a second just a year ago.

AI can do it fast, it can do it well and it can do it cheap. Everything I ever wanted to learn or do now seems like a waste of time. I am becoming apathic. I still have the same job I had when GPT-3 came out, still live in the same property and drive the same car. Seems like not much has changed in my personal life but the techno-world we are currently living through is changing so fast that I might not know how to navigate it in the very near future. So how do I cope with that? How do I adjust? What is my responsibility as a member of society in the context of intellectual participation if all the intellectual work is being outsourced to AI? Can I even be useful anymore? What is my role from now on? What do great minds of today think about that?

I think it's okay to do tasks that others (including AI) can do better and faster. For me personally, making art is as much of the process as the end product.

I like to draw digital art and paint and make digital music. I find the activities therapeutic and a fun way to pass the time. Can AI do better? Sure. Do I care? No. I make the art for myself and the people I share it with.

Another thing that helps is getting offline a bit. Seriously. ChatGPT can't go for a hike, bake a cake, make love, enjoy people laughing at your joke.

I'm in a data mining class and it feels a little dated because of LLMs (though we do discuss them), but I have found the class useful for understanding principles of data and knowledge even though we can basically plug it into a LLm and get an answer.

> I'm getting overwhelmed by AI. How to cope?

Ignore it.

The world may or may not be going to hell in a handbasket, but the being overwhelmed part is on you.

If it's really immediately interfering with your ability to support yourself, and I mean immediately: Have you been laid off? Is some other aspect preventing you from maing the money to pay your rent? if not, follow the "Ignore it" advice above.

If you really are looking for a long term strategy to prevent being economically sidelined, then consider beconming a plumber, or electrician. This answer is in your intro. Physical trades won't be replaced by software, and they are in demand. Conisder becoming a heat pump installer.

Or, maybe this is all a troll? Written by AI? Who knows, so why worry?

Yeah, pretty much the same experience here. Prose or poetry, AI-generated text is awful. AI-generated images also tend to look awful unless they're obsessively-directed and processed. AI-generated music is still so bad it's hilarious. Some AI can kinda code, but only if you limit it to the purview of boilerplate generation. A lot of common APIs and libraries simply don't exist, in ChatGPT's head.

I feel like as a programmer this just reaffirms to me why humans are still a valuable resource for problem-solving; text-generation doesn't put food on the table. Thinking is valuable, and while some people might not realize or care, trying to let ChatGPT manage a serious project is like delegating a task to an auditorium of monkeys on typewriters.

I will go so far as to contend that generative AI is a bigger nothingburger than enterprise blockchain.