Just gonna say it, back in like 2019-2023, I was EXTREMELY pro AI. I messed around with OpenAI’s playground thing, messed around with that Dall-E Mini/craiyon thing, and was one of the first to hop on ChatGPT when it came out.
I had this really dumb opinion that it’s just fun stuff to mess around with! This isn’t gonna do any real harm! Thinking, stupidly, that most people wouldn’t use it to like replace writers or just do their work for them.
It was around 2024 I became a lot more skeptical of it. I kept seeing slop art in like local restaurants and even this one club I used to hit up that I absolutely don’t anymore. And the amount of time people say “I asked ChatGPT” drives me up the wall.
Like are you third partying your thinking!? And seeing it just dominate Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok also made me begin to lose it. It was literally the Dead Internet Theory becoming a fact. I felt like such an idiot for being pro-AI and thinking people would use it wisely.
That said, I’m not exactly anti-AI, to be fair. I have local LLM models on my computer running through LMStudio if I ever have want or need of these chatbots. It makes it way harder to use it and my poor gaming laptop screams for mercy every time I want to use Qwen, so I dunno.
I guess I’d say I’m AI-Skeptical and leaning more toward negative. But this isn’t about me, it’s about you. What do you feel about generative AI?
I think the technology is cool and holds a lot of promise in certain niches. I’ve been into it since 2019 and learned a lot just watching it evolve.
That said, I’m skeptical and I think some folks rely on it too much. I work with someone who just copy/pastes Claude on every response. You have to do your own thinking and you have to double check everything it outputs. It follows direction, but it doesn’t hesitate to make incorrect assumptions and inferences, and often the things you tell it isn’t what it does.
I saw an AI guy explaining some prompt technique where you tell the AI to ask questions until it is 95% certain what you want it to do, but it doesn’t have certainty and it can’t achieve 95% of something it doesn’t have, so it asks questions — sometimes pointless ones — until it has performed the ceremony of achieving 95% certainty. And I suppose maybe that that ceremony does help in some cases, but it’s not doing what you tell it to do.
AI has a lot to offer. Sometimes when I ask it to write code, it does so using libraries and annotations I wasn’t aware existed. I learn about things that way. It writes cleaner code faster than I do because it doesn’t hesitate and overthink. But everyone knows about the hallucination issues. And you have to make your instructions as narrowly scoped and unambiguous as possible — approaching the complexity of code.
I get frustrated because I am a believer in AI, but I’m surrounded by people who don’t seem to know how to use it appropriately and it’s frustrating. Skepticism and critical thinking is crucial to successful use of AI, otherwise you’re going to be caught with your pants down, having relied on it to do your thinking for you, and suddenly you realize you don’t understand the very thing you’ve supposedly done.