> worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
i think i want to expand on this even more. even people ive worked with for years that ive looked up to as brilliant people are starting to use it to conjure up organizational ideas and stuff. they're convinced, on the backs of their hard earned successes, that they're never going to be fallible to the pitfalls of... idk what to call it. AI sycophancy? idk. i guess to add to this, i'm just not sure AI should be referenced when it has anything to do with people. code? sure. people? idk. people are hard, all the internet and books claude or whatever ai is trained on simply doesnt encapsulate the many shades of gray that constitute a human and the absolute depth/breadth of any given human situation. there's just so many variables that aren't accounted for in current day ai stuff, it seems like such a dangerous tool to consult that is largely deleting important social fabrics and journeys people should be taking to learn how to navigate situations with others in personal lives and work lives.
what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back. even smart people that are using claude and proudly tout only using it at arms length and otherwise have really sound principled engineering qualities or management reportoire are not accepting disagreement with their ideas as easily anymore. they just go back to claude and come back again with another iteration of their thing where they ironed out kinks with claude, and its just such a foot-on-the-gas at all times thing now that the dynamics of human interaction are changing.
but to step back, that temptation you talk about... most people in the world aren't having these important discussions about AI. it's less of a temptation and more of a human need---the need to feel heard, validated and right about something.
my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities. because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI, it completely pushed us out of the equation because he clapped back with whatever chatgpt gave him when we were simply trying to get through to him. we got to see conversations he had with gpt that were followups to convos we had with him, ones where we went over and let him cry on our shoulders and we'd go home thinking we made some progress. only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him. it got progressively worse and we knew something was really off, we exhausted every avenue we could to try and get him in specialized care. he was in the reserves so we got in contact with his commander and he was marched out of his house to do a one night stay at a VA spot, but we were too late. he had snapped at that point, he chucked the meds from that one overnight stay away the moment he was released. and the bpd1 snap of epic proportions that followed came with him nuking every known relationship he had in his life and once he was finally involuntarily admitted by his family (WA state joel law) and came back down to reality from the lithium meds or whatever... he simply could not reconcile with the amount of bridges he had burned. It only took him days for him to take his own life after he got to go home.
im still not processing any of that well at all. i keep kicking the can down the road and every time i think about it i freeze and my heart sinks. this guy felt more heard by an ai and the ai gave him a safer place to talk than with us and i dont even know where to begin to describe how terrible that makes me feel as a failure to him as a friend.