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Please Use AI

shawnsmucker.substack.com

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Re: Please Use AI

#321

Post by _DeadFred_ »

ryukoposting wrote: post #215
sushshshhs wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated? I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it. I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file ha…

If a photo has strong composition and symbolism, does it matter if the photographer took the photo as opposed to prompting it into existence?

The entire purpose of a photo is to capture a moment. What 'moment' is AI capturing? Do the books in the background represent the 'moment'? The adverts? The furniture? The clothing? The hairstyle? These are all 'parts of the moment'. When we look at old pictures, these details are the parts people LOVE going over. None of that is there in AI, and in 20 years, no one will care go look it over, because it's meaningless, unintentional slop. Not a haircut someone picked out. Funny hiphugger/mom waist/tight/loose/bellbottoms. Not currated books in the background that represent thought of the time in which the picture was taken.

There is nothing in the AI photo worth re-looking at later, because there is nothing there. There is nothing to take from any of the 'details' in the image.

Re: Please Use AI

#322

Post by Brendinooo »

moron4hire wrote: post #276
Brendinooo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that nobody else is as smart as them >it's their job to tell them how wrong they are lol. To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so. If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: pe…

The problem is that your core premise is flawed. Nobody who has access to an LLM today has lacked for access to knowledge in 15 years. The LLM providers even tell us themselves that they provide worse access to knowledge because they train on what is available on the public internet up to a certain cutoff date.

The point isn't necessarily access (though I'm not willing to concede that), the point is ease of access.

In another comment[0], I gave a personal example. In a sense you are correct, because I could have taken a year or two to go to the library and find books on reading Cyrillic and speaking Serbian, or maybe found something Duolingo-like (I have to hedge here because neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone offer Serbian, which perhaps challenges your point), or even hired a private tutor.

All of these options sit on some kind of spectrum of ease and cost. If you have enough money, you can get the best help in the least amount of time. If you don't, you have to maximize the time you can put in instead, and both will be constrained by your intellectual capabilities.

One of the primary purposes of technology is to unbundle what consumers actually want from the craft that was previously necessary to deliver it, and in so doing allows us to do more, experience more, be more. That doesn't mean that there are no possible drawbacks, but let's not lose the forest for the trees.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323929

Re: Please Use AI

#323

Post by cindyllm »

godshatter wrote: post #65
hootz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!

I just use it as a "mentor". A captive demon that has to answer my questions, no matter how trivial. Writing the code is the fun part for me, searching for answers to questions can be fun but I'd rather just ask the AI. I even ask them to give me longer answers so I have more context, even with languages I've worked with for decades.

[dead]

Re: Please Use AI

#324

Post by arjie »

The whole AI/anti-AI schtick doesn't have a sense of sanctimony to it that I think would be considered gauche in real life. That makes me wonder. I'm here on this site a lot but my life seems very different from most commenters. So I'm starting to believe that the difference clusters a little. For instance, I frequently see the "we never talk to our neighbours anymore" idea expressed, but in real life I live in a high-rise in San Francisco where the neighbours will help people wash laundry, or borrow yogurt or sugar, or help with a broken knob[0].

Then there's this business about "AI removing connections to people". My wife's an artist (and now a Creative Director in a corp) and she used an early image model years ago to iterate on the design that we then had embroidered onto my sherwani[1] in India through a close friend's connection and I made a suno.ai tune to walk out for my wedding to. My wife and I use this new tech to model things and print it out on our 3D printer[2] so we can reuse my daughter's infant-stage play pen as gates now that she's older. My wife once tried to make us persimmon bread from a recipe that 3.5 gave us. We have a claw-like bot that is hooked up to our calendar, contacts, history, planes, airbnbs, hotels and so on and helps us with stuff.

By any measure, we are pretty social people and we are quite happy. And the thing to note is that, as far as I can see, we are not particularly remarkable. This seems to be the standard way most people I know use LLMs: to do things that they wouldn't cross the effort/reward threshold otherwise. And there's no grand disaster happening.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community

1: https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665?s=20

2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...

Re: Please Use AI

#325

Post by krackers »

MostlyStable wrote: post #228
doug_durham wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to spend the evening coming up with funny things to say with your friends, then you shouldn't use AI. If your goal is to finish the t-shirts so that you can move on to the next topic in organizing a very complex event like a marathon, then perhaps you should use tools. Using AI tools isn't a problem. It's lack of care and thoughtlessness. That is the problem. That's alw…

I think this is part of the issue. Most activities can be divided into two categories (obviously this is only one of many different ways to categorize): 1. Things which are done primarily to accomplish a specific goal 2. Things which are done primarily for the joy of doing them. Many tasks have aspects of both of these things. Automation, in all it's forms, is a way of maximizing the first, often at the expense of th…

>but the two can co-exist.

Experience with modern society has shown that "third places" and human interactions get mowed over when you let algorithmic engagement take over. As I understood GP's point, the whole point of the "words on a shirt" was to get together as a group and attempt to form bonds, and by handing the task over to chatGPT they failed to do that.

Technically you can imagine a future where people use chatGPT "in moderation", but in practice they'll use it for everything and spontaneous/creative "hanging out" will suffer as a result.

Re: Please Use AI

#326

Post by happytoexplain »

dissahc wrote: post #304
llm_nerd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection. So every time I'm thinking about what to make with…

It's an incredibly smug poem that has the vibe of someone fantasizing about winning an argument against someone who doesn't even exist. The narratives about people not calling their friends for advice, but instead using AI... these are basically unfalsifiable. How could he possibly know that this is a thing that commonly occurs? That's right, he doesn't. >Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal pl…

You're reacting to a very level, honest examination of what we lose with AI by insulting and berating and inventing other scenarios. You're exemplifying both the thing you are accusing the author of, and also the thing that the author is lamenting.

Re: Please Use AI

#327

Post by Brendinooo »

graemep wrote: post #93
Brendinooo wrote: post #29

This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into…

> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Not everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or ne…

Yup, this meshes very well with the point I was trying to make.

Re: Please Use AI

#328

Post by 1shooner »

jimbokun wrote: post #211
1shooner wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about But this is the thing. Many people don't, or have some other real or imagined barrier preventing them from it. Many people are really extraordinarily isolated. While I relate to the heart of the poem, there is an aspect of it that's essentially criticizing people for their suffering. There's a "just stop drinking" vibe.

You're right. It's much better to forever wallow in your loneliness and lack of friends, instead of working on how to develop better friendships and relationships.

I just don't think moralistic condescending poetry really helps any of that.

Re: Please Use AI

#329

Post by btilly »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #165
jimbokun wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can’t they continue to do so? Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them. > After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was. There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.

> instead of Citation needed. People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.

Not everyone did. But many now talk less. Why?

AI psychosis is real.

People who talk to LLMs too much, get used to them sucking up. Real humans feel jarring after that. (Just like people who get used to being in echo chambers, stop wanting to interact outside of those echo chambers.)

After someone has an answer from an LLM, often that replaces reasons we would have talked to others. (See the OP for examples.)

Re: Please Use AI

#330

Post by pmxi »

The first part, describes a decision to ask AI over calling a good friend and domain expert. Typically the domain expert is not an option. (looking at my last 10 Claude chats, I knew a domain expert for one of them).

The second part assumes AI writing can substitute mastery of writing, and simultaneously, not be good enough.

We have, for a several thousand years, continued to develop labor and cost saving technology. We have been OK thus far.

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