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Please Use AI

shawnsmucker.substack.com

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Re: Please Use AI

#201

Post by ignu »

btilly wrote: post #85

I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 ) from a year ago. "The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped." AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy ch…

That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.

On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.

After a year I could no longer write for shit.

Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.

Now I don't even write near a computer.

Re: Please Use AI

#202

Post by jimbokun »

Brendinooo wrote: post #94
happytoexplain wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck? I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.

There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people. I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context. I thoug…

There are real benefits of AI.

There were many benefits of the original web as well. But it rapidly turned into social media and caused us more harm than good.

So many people are very skeptical and guarded about the promises of AI now.

Re: Please Use AI

#203

Post by giancarlostoro »

annnoo wrote: post #55

I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results. I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel emp…

I kind of have a process with Suno, where I have Claude or a different model generate lyrics for me, then I generate a song, and tweak the lyrics when they sound off, eventually I have a song that's more "me" than "Claude" with lyrics that make sense, but sometimes Claude has some petty sleek lyrics. I mostly do this for fun, but I enjoy doing it a lot.

On that same spirit, Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well. I always loved music, and used to make beats with FL Studio (which was shunned by people much like AI for ages) and even within the Suno community I see people shunning others if they have AI writing lyrics for them, its really weird to me. I do feel weird if I try to make Suno make songs I personally cannot 100% relate to, or experiences I've never been close to living through, like I love gangsta rap, I would never feel comfortable making and releasing gangsta rap since it doesn't define who I was.

Re: Please Use AI

#204

Post by yawniek »

cstever wrote: post #125
sushshshhs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one. Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue. AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like.…

> Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one. I think you may have misread the parent comment. And currently AI has no creativity nor does it enhance a human's creativity. It simply regurgitates and at best the human user can lie to themselves that they did it. Look at the "rins…

disagree. i designed a new shirt design for our small startup every year for the last 5 years. This year i was able to have significantly better designs (even two) in shorter times and much happier team mates. Still my creativity, still a good amount of work in Affinity Designer, but a significant quality and speed boost. its just a tool, but a good enough one in that muggles suddenly think they are 10x'ers because they produce more output which floods the system with "slop".

Re: Please Use AI

#205

Post by frankest »

causal wrote: post #35
frankest wrote: post #15

The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human. At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog. There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to…

> instead of a hand-crafted custom blog I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.

That’s the premise - the same tool can enable both slop and more humanity. The poem hopefully sticks emotionally onto humans who could be doing more of the latter and less of the former. It’s a choice. It’s an etiquette. It’s kind of a hygiene.

Re: Please Use AI

#206

Post by cortesoft »

ilikecakeandpie wrote: post #190
Gomotono wrote: post #164

For the sake of it: Just do everything manually. Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them. Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit. Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront. How about stop b…

You're being intentionally intellectually dishonest with your take here and this an absurd whataboutism. The author isn't telling people to stop using AI for work, coding tasks, etc he's saying to stop using it as a replacement for human interaction. Anecdotally, I've seen the effects that people delegating their executive functions to AI have had and the damage is quick and harrowing

If that is the argument, it makes even less sense. Who is using AI to replace human interaction?

People use AI to replace other computer solutions for things. This is arguing against a straw man.

Re: Please Use AI

#207

Post by SuperV1234 »

bko wrote: post #185

When your router is not working, please use AI. Don't call your friend who is "good with computers" have him drop everything he's doing and have him trouble shoot the problem for you over the phone. This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done…

And if my router wasn't working 5 years ago, I would have first used a search engine and tried to figure it out on my own.

Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.

Re: Please Use AI

#208

Post by cstever »

inanutshellus wrote: post #187
vitally3643 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something. No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find pu…

I interpreted GP's message as "We used to lean-on and learn-from our friends, families, and coworkers, and insodoing we ourselves improved in a symbiotic way". The "job" in the speech example would be "hey Joe, can I run this speech by you?" In that scenario, the friend would: * feel valued, * connect with you, * have something to do socially instead of "sooo uh whatcha been up to... uh... nice weather...", and * get…

Ok; That's good feedback. Job may not have been the right word. I admit I didn't pass my comment through an LLM, so thank you for helping me improve and push harder. ;)

Re: Please Use AI

#210

Post by revolvingthrow »

cstever wrote: post #98
btilly wrote: post #85

I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 ) from a year ago. "The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped." AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy ch…

>Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix. > So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself ha…

I’m not meeting with friends to work on our speeches, I’m meeting friends to do friends stuff. Go join toastmasters if you want to do work stuff as a fun pasttime.
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