So what's your overall opinion on AI?
Posted by cellshock7@reddit | Xennials | View on Reddit | 579 comments
I'm curious as to what my peers here think about AI? Not just the slop eroding and making us question everything in sight, but, AI tools in general?
My GenZ children speak of it like it's the devil--until it's time to figure out some tough homework problems. My parents, aunts and uncles (and even a few non-technical peers) just add it to the list of tech they don't and don't care to understand.
Our generation is different though. We've seen so many analog things replaced by digital alternatives, and we've simply adapted--even learned to use them to our advantage. Curious as to what your thoughts are here in 2026 about AI? Did you always love it, did you start out on the hate train but do something cool with AI to change your mind, or is it still a gateway drug to Skynet in your eyes?
icouldlivewoutbacon@reddit
Never loved it, still hate it.
I have lots of friends who use chat gpt on a daily basis but I can't bring myself to trust it. I'm worried of it taking over everything and that people will become too reliant on it. It's not a tool, it's a cheat code. And if we are all using the same cheat code to succeed, we'll all be arriving at the finish line not knowing how we got there, nor will the thrill of victory mean anything to anyone.
alesplin@reddit
I hate that most of the models were trained through wholesale theft of art, intellectual property, and personal data.
I hate that companies are using it as an excuse to cut costs (lay people off) instead of increase value (get even more work out of the people they employ).
It’s convenient as a learning or research tool, but only if you have the skill or knowledge to know when it’s telling you something that’s just straight-up wrong.
I honestly don’t know if the good outweighs the bad, but I’m leaning pretty hard toward no, it doesn’t.
djsynrgy@reddit
In practice?
It appears to be the next big step towards cementing Idiocracy as prophecy.
I'm not worried about people with critical thinking skills; I'm worried that most folks under a certain age are already lacking the critical thinking skills to understand how/why it isn't "magic all-knowing answer generator that's incapable of error."
It's "but I saw it on the TV, so it must be true," on an unprecedented scale.
Overall, it seems to be further widening the gap between humans and humanity.
And I didn't even broach the issue of copyright infringement...
MotherofaPickle@reddit
Hate it. Refuse to use it. Enough of a Luddite that I’m learning the “AI slop” the hard way.
I’ve seen Terminator and The Matrix and I know Things Can Go Downhill Quickly. Really hoping for the Water Wars or the Zombpocalypse instead of the Robot Wars.
Mysterious_Fennel459@reddit
I work in IT and I hate it so much.
hamburgler26@reddit
I share this thought, but also can appreciate how it is useful and when you don't lose your mind and unshackle all control to it there's a useful tool in there.
With the deterioration of Google and the more traditoinal IT based forums the LLMs are handy for quickly prototyping or building out a baseline script, simple app, tool etc to make your life easier or automate a task that would be more manual to do before. But you still have to understand what it is doing and follow proper process, promotion and not just let it spew garbage into your live code base.
I think the part that I really hate is how, especially some leadership tiers, just use it to generate corpspeak garbage and do reviews, goals, all this already stupid shit but just wrapped up in a completely cold, lifeless AI shell that has no idea what the real situation is. As somebody with a lot of leadership and management experience seeing that shit makes me wish there was a way to just eject those leaders into the sun.
If you can't talk to your direct reports as a human and review them with your human brain you're fucking useless.
neon_farts@reddit
I’m in IT as well, and ive been moving into an architect role at a large enterprise and ive made some observations.
First, it has made me vastly more productive, by an order of magnitude at least. I didnt want to write the code but still had to alot of the time, and now i dont have to. That one is kind of a mixed bag for me.
Second, i am noticing dev teams shipping absolute shit garbage code riddled with bugs and sometimes extremely serious security vulnerabilities.
Third, my company is pushing to use AI deeply in every area of the business, with no token restrictions. They even have a leaderboard. I find this practice unsustainable and concerning.
Where I am positioned in my career is this: I know how to design large distributed systems and automation platforms at scale; I’ve been doing it for years before AI. Now that I am using AI, I find it extremely capable but it needs an extremely capable practitioner to use it properly when dealing with production.
So, it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens. AI isn’t going away, but there’s going to be a tipping point, whether it be a massive hack/bug/production level stoppage of something important (think S3 or cloudflare), or OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever raising their prices high enough to give corporate users pause to reconsider their AI usage and finding themselves sitting on a codebase nobody but Claude understands.
PlanetaryPickleParty@reddit
In pro AI and use it extensively but token usage requirements and leaderboards are asking for dangerous slop.
denzien@reddit
Multiple agents code reviewing each other might help a bit?
PlanetaryPickleParty@reddit
With using more tokens? Yeah that is one way to do it hah!
duckchasefun@reddit
Same. It could be a helpful TOOL. But higher-ups seem to think it is just this magical thing that will fix all our problems. AI is great for recognizing patterns and making suggestions. Not so great for actually making good decisions or being innovative.
marmot1101@reddit
As I type this Claude just nailed down the cause of an intermittent database deadlock I've been chasing for a while. So yes, it's definitely a tool, but a really fucking good one. I'm not going to leave it alone to do whatever, human judgment is still needed. But it gets undersold nearly as often as oversold by management.
Malekith_is_my_homie@reddit
M365 admin. Claude is a huge help to me for powershell scripting. I still of course have to review everything it's giving me and ensure I understand what actions it's taking, but still it's such a massive help and time saver in that regard.
kmmccorm@reddit
Exactly. It works best with people who know the ins and outs of the business cases and underlying technology but it’s like having access to multiple brilliant engineers at all times.
Ragnarok314159@reddit
I use it to translate my emails into corporate speak. It’s very useful for that because so many losers in management use it for everything. “Please take my email and make it five paragraphs long, but when you condense it and read it to a manager make it say my original message but nicer”, and it almost always works.
OAKandTerlinden@reddit
Okay, I'm a convert. AI has 1 [one] use.
BagOnuts@reddit
It’s not “magical”, but you’re not giving it enough credit, either. This is like saying the Internet is “just a tool” in 1994 - these people didn’t realize how integral the internet would become to literally everything, from work to private life. It’s so ingrained into our everyday lives that we don’t even really think about it.
That is where we are at today with AI. Yeah, there are a lot of problems with it and its applications are still somewhat limited, but anyone who is paying attention can see that this thing is gonna explode, and there is nothing we can really do to stop it.
AGI is almost certainly going to happen within this decade. If you haven’t read up on that, you should. It is going to change our lives. Potentially even more than the internet did.
Chet_Phoney@reddit
Also great at replacing human jobs. We survived this long without it. In 10 years we are going to look back and regret not taking a stand. Their is no longer a line in the sand at all
BritOnTheRocks@reddit
What stand are we taking exactly? This is how technology has always worked.
Emotional-Film5261@reddit
it's great for writing up quick shell scripts
Joe_Schmoe_2@reddit
Yep. And shell scripts were a way of automating jobs in the olden days.
Emotional-Film5261@reddit
lol yep
RetroDadOnReddit@reddit
This has been my experience as well in tech.
It's a great "buddy" to bounce ideas off of, get another angle on a problem, and that sort of thing. But the higher ups at my previous job seemed to think it was obligatory to implement it directly into our workflow directly, and that actually just slowed things down tremendously.
Starbreiz@reddit
Hard agree! I use it a lot to figure shit out, and I just had Codex break down a giant refactor someone did that confused the shit out of me. But without a lot of rules, anytime it writes more than 3 lines of code for me, it can get sloppy and hard to triage.
Common_Tiger1526@reddit
Exactly! My management literally asks the AI "can you do XYZ?" And when it says yes (bc of course it does), he just blindly believes it. I do love it for summarizing meeting transcripts, and generating acceptance criteria from our requirements. But like you said, that's all pattern recognition and suggestion, not innovation.
jbenze@reddit
Same. Like use it appropriately, sure but we won’t. We will only use AI for unnecessary shit and as an excuse not to hire people to replace the people who left.
Not_a_werecat@reddit
I used to be a graphic designer.
Absolutely FUCK ai and everyone who uses it.
joshpennington@reddit
Exactly. I use it because it is a matter of survival. I hate that attitude because usually I'd be cheering this on because I love the technology but I hate what this could do to mine and everyone else's livelihoods.
What drives me absolutely nuts is that the market wants us to rent us the hardware to run this in the cloud when in reality a decent Macbook Pro could run a decent local model without changing every person $20 - $100 / month. I also hate that the AI CEOs are acting like drug dealers selling their stuff at a massive loss until everyone is hooked and then they'll pull the rug and then they're stuck.
My only hope is that the rug pull happens, companies go "hard pass" and then they have to resume hiring to clean up the mess of all this AI generated code, but that feels like a long shot seeing how deep companies like the one I work for are integrating AI in to everything. In the end what will probably happen is everything just costs even more to pay for all the AI nobody wants.
cellshock7@reddit (OP)
I'm also in IT. Do you ever use it for scripting? It's been super helpful to me in that regard.
CGCTV@reddit
I use it all the time for scripting, Claude works the best I've found for scripts.
marmot1101@reddit
One off scripts is a great use case. Things that aren't going to be public facing have a lower risk. So long as you scope the user permissions of the account you're executing the script from so that it's not dangerous, and make sure to understand what the script is going to do. #yolo with admin creds is how people end up on the front page of r/technology
FuckYouNotHappening@reddit
Claude be liek, “I yeeted System32 sry.”
cellshock7@reddit (OP)
Ouch lol. Yeah I've heard a few horror stories
kremlingrasso@reddit
Yeah it basically makes you have to wear all the hats now. You no longer expected to ring fence your know how and responsibilities and expect to reach out to other professionals for their segment. No DBAs, no network engineers, no sysadmins, no automation devs, no business intelligence analysts. No it's all you and copilot for the same money and the same deadlines.
catatonic12345@reddit
I use it for scripting and it gets really close most of the time. I have to troubleshoot the code it generates because it never works perfectly the first time however. It's a great tool but I could not imagine letting run automated with write privileges over production code like Pocket OS
sobeitharry@reddit
It's like having junior developers at your beck and call. No more waiting for tools. It's more than doubled my productivity.
Dazzling_Line_8482@reddit
Also in IT.
On the one hand it's made me so much more productive and improved my work life balance substantially. Right now I'm showing a slight productivity increase but in reality I'm working 25-50% less. I've actually been considering getting a second gig to fill the time instead of just slacking.
On the other hand I'm terrified of what it's going to do when everything catches up and the expectations are raised to the reality. I also think that these companies are losing money hand over fist and it won't be long before they either go down in flames or need to adjust their prices.
kellyk311@reddit
I work in Healthcare- same. Giant waste of money
jcstrat@reddit
Same. I’ve become very resistant.
rayofgoddamnsunshine@reddit
I work in consulting services and I also hate it so much.
Freakin_A@reddit
I work in IT and it’s fucking fantastic. Honestly revolutionary tech.
I’m able to use time during slow meetings or in between meetings to reprompt Claude to write reports, scripts, search and analyze log messages, write/fix/investigate pipeline, etc.
I’m able to accomplish by myself stuff that would have required a backlog and a team to produce in the past.
rearwindowpup@reddit
Some of the networking AI tools are kickass, Meraki's AI bot is awesome, but it doesnt find anything I wouldnt be able to find, it just does it faster. All of the LLM ones are hot garbage though and I frequently have to tell the help desk guys not to use it because it gives them bad info.
Burnet05@reddit
It has been very helpful in moving forward molecular biology and neuroscience. Alphafold, which can fold proteins just giving its own dna sequence has open new avenues of discovery and it is accessible to everyone. There are other PLM (protein language machines) that can do a variety of task, you still need people to feed right date, right weights, read the output and perform experiments.
It has change the way to know which genes are getting expressed in each cell because it can parse through big datasets. This is just helpful to ask and test new hypothesis. You still need a human to set parameters, weights and interpret the output.
It has been of great help in neuroscience, with new decoders that can read how individual neurons respond to a stimulus and how the neurons encode information.
Of course, most scientists are not English major (a few are) and for many English is their second language. AI has improved readability of scientific research and has level the field for many people who had trouble expressing their discoveries in English.
YEMolly@reddit
It’s wrong on so much basic stuff (just today it told me the wrong ingredients were in a food product). How can you trust it to do all the stuff you’re saying correctly?
I’m genuinely asking.
Burnet05@reddit
It is a good question. Hopefully someone with more technical knowledge can really explain how to deal with false positives and negatives. Basically, you know that the output is not 100% correct, and there is room for error (this is all into the parameters and other cutoffs that you can manipulate) so for some things like which genes are being expressed you are getting a general idea, any specific gene needs to be tested. With protein structure, you know that it could be wrong, the output itself has a level of confidence and you use your knowledge and intuition, the same way you did when you knew the ingredients were wrong. You only use it as a guide to a new hypothesis or it can show some light on a mechanism. Even not being 100% correct, they are powerful tools.
Usually, people who are using these models know how to adjust the parameters to minimize error and have a knowledge of the level of confidence (what is the probability that the answer is correct).
USConservativeVegan@reddit
Everytime I see one of those nostalgic AI videos about the 80s or 90s, I wonder how much water it took to make it. That is pretty much every time I see someone AI.
I keep hearing how it will improve and change the economy. How we need to win the AI race over China. There is some truth to that concern.
However, I just keep thinking about Terminator Movies, IRobot, Minority Report, and every other movie about a Dysoptian future revolving around AI and robots.
adammonroemusic@reddit
I was pretty excited about it when it was new, janky, and weird.
Now that it's reached the level where influenced are using it - and people are using it to generate influencers - in chase of content and the almighty algorithm, it suddenly seems pretty boring and lame.
One-Earth9294@reddit
Which kind of AI? There's lots of different things that fall under this umbrella now.
Personally, I like it for music purposes because I write song lyrics. I can bring those to life with it, and it's a lot more work than you might think if you want it to be.
And that's kind of another thing with AI. There's 'push a button and make me a thing' and there's using it creatively. Stable Diffusion, for instance, has inpainting functions and all kinds of bells and whistles that a skilled user can do really interesting things with. The music generator I use is called Udio and I make songs in 33 second chunks and do a massive amount of micro-editing to bend the results into very specific and off-the-wall things that really personalize the results. That's a far cry from Suno, which is just a 'make me a song' machine that has no soul to it.
I'm not a big fan of LLMs because they're not a thing I have much use for, and most of what I see it used for IS that lazy 'do a thing for me' style of use. Even less of a fan of how much of it is just a way for the rich to get richer by way of market-capitalizing AIs or developing weaponry or just owning all of the products and leaving no room for new enterprises to exist.
Like all things, there's goods and bads. Sadly I think the downsides associated with AI are terrifyingly bad though.
NoelNeverwas@reddit
I believe that AI will offer each individual something they’ve always dreamed about, while making everything else worse.
I teach college. I suppose it’s possible that none of us never really had to learn grammar, but rest assured, very few in the future will. What’s more, literacy will decline to new lows, and it will be harder and harder to find people who can write in their own voice.
But while I lament the loss of education, I have found a conversation partner for language learning. I can ask it questions at length about sentences in pieces of media that would annoy almost anyone. Although I recognize that it lies at times, and I must be patient, have finally gained the ability to rip through the many obstacles that I had when trying to understand everyday conversations in my target language. It takes a lot of work, but it is honestly so fun.
sillygoth_@reddit
It's a really good tool for people that have a ton of domain knowledge and can provide oversight. It's a very bad/dangerous tool if you just let it do whatever it wants and have no idea what it is doing or the risks with each decision it's making. The challenge is the domain knowledge to provide that oversight took me 20+ years to get.
I have no idea what to tell people entering the job market or just starting out right now.
warderbob@reddit
My employer allows folks to use it for summaries, but people are just using it as a replacement for their own genuine thoughts on the subject.
It's a tool, but people (mostly) will take the lazy method when able, so naturally this tool will be abused and great swathes of people will be blunter for it.
AlgoStar@reddit
It reminds me of opioids in that it has legitimate use cases but is being pushed heavily by its owners for off label reasons as miracle, which will only end in disaster.
YEMolly@reddit
Great analogy honestly.
broadwayallday@reddit
been a 3d animator my whole adult life, I love being able to apply all the stuff i learned and iterate and experiment more and turn things around faster. at the real "work" level the tools truly work better the more you know what you want to accomplish. as far as LLMs go they are amazing for organizing projects. I laughed out loud at the "except when it's homework time" part, that's so hilarious. GenZ's moral code is about as thin as wrapping paper. I shall take no advice from people who look at crocs and pajamas as "today's fit"
sshanafelt@reddit
I'm a software engineer and it's basically "use it or become a gardener"...
LilMushboom@reddit
Analytical machine learning tools are already improving, e.g., ear cancer diagnosis. There's a lot of potential for the technology in medicine and science.
Generative LLMs and image generation feel like an oversold gimmick. They could have some use I guess but they aren't search engines, cannot verify accuracy of the results they spit out, and often dispense false information and ultimately create more work.
Then there are the environmental consequences with the data centers, which ultimately just makes me feel like in most cases the juice ain't worth the squeeze.
stolealonelygod@reddit
These are similar to my feelings. In science, custom built AI tools that have a specific purpose can and are helping analyze data faster and discovering things that humans can easily overlook. However, the tech bro version of AI is awful and won't help the every day person meaningfully.
My fear is that everyone will lump the techbro bullshit with the good and swear off everything.
FormidableMistress@reddit
I think it's speeding up important work like where they found more Nazca Lines by feeding it the aerial photos, and then humans went back and verified what AI found. Or where they're using it to digitally "unroll" and translate scrolls that are too brittle to be handled much.
But that's just data sets. It's good at that, but it takes up so much of our resources. Like someone else said it's half baked. But CEOs are galloping at a break neck speed to try and make it replace workers and reduce payroll and it's not capable of that yet. So everything is just a mess.
SandersDelendaEst@reddit
They absolutely can verify accuracy, where are you getting this from?
InfidelZombie@reddit
I mostly agree with you but hate it when people say that LLMs are unreliable as a source of information. They're approximately reliable as the rest of the information on the internet, which is...mixed.
And don't panic about the resources, there are multiple technologies in the works to reduce power and water usage by >90%.
We're in the early days here; let the bubble pop and see what comes out the other side.
bendybiznatch@reddit
Super, not cool when that bubble pops and leaves a bunch of polluted water and damaged infrastructure, not to mention landscapes, and small towns with no resources to mitigate it.
InfidelZombie@reddit
Yeah, that does suck. But it's a failure of government, not a computer program.
bendybiznatch@reddit
Is anybody making that argument?
InfidelZombie@reddit
There are people in here who are saying they hate AI, so yes, definitely so.
bendybiznatch@reddit
I still don’t think that they were trying to say that they blame data centers on a computer program as if it was a person making the decision to do that.
LilMushboom@reddit
The problem is that it's being sold by the companies producing it to the general public that it is. Which admittedly is an issue of deliberate dishonesty in advertising rather than the product itself but a lot of people have completely bought the hype. I have started having to argue with idiots about basic facts in a field I have worked almost 20 years in because "well ChatGPT/Google Gemini/Grok says-" in ways I have never encountered before LLMs became popular. Many people unfortunately absolutely trust the LLM over an actual expert.
likesblackcoffeebest@reddit
Very much in line with my thoughts. I'm a civil engineer, and certain AI tools have been getting really good lately. Digital twins allow for more informed asset management decisions. Certain models are good for sorting large datasets. I've even used it to write Python scripts to input to ArcGIS for some applications.
I have never used AI outside of work. I do not ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Deep Seek. The results are all over the place and cannot be trusted. Plus like you said, the environmental impacts put me off frivolous use.
FoostersG@reddit
its displacing workers, enriching billionaires, and hastening the arrival of a livable planet.
So, not great
UnjustifiedBDE@reddit
Almonds and cows are a lot worse for the environment tha tha AI. When are people going to start protesting them.
YEMolly@reddit
They do.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Yes, agreed, but how is it different from inventing cotton mills and factories in, what, the early 1800s? Robber barons, people out of work, environmental damage.
How is this qualitatively different from every other big technological leap in the last 300 or 500 years?
Genuine question. Currently I’m not convinced there’s any qualitative difference. Maybe a big difference because it’s happening so much and so fast, but that’s been the pattern too - each new change is bigger and faster.
MsAndrie@reddit
A major difference is modern wealth inequality, which is pretty extreme. Lots of our resources are concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. I do view AI as being somewhat overblown, but it is also being used as cover for actions that worsen inequality, like mass layoffs and moving a lot of labor to "gig" work. For another example, there is already a trend of private corporations buying more housing stock, and technology (much of it labeled AI) can accelerate that by helping those investment corporations to identify and scoop up more housing. AI is also enabling price-fixing and other monopolistic behavior, not just for rent but lots of other necessary goods.
Climate change is a huge risk to many humans. Considering AI's fast growth and massive use of resources. That will cause more social upheaval and lots of death. Climate change related deaths are currently not getting much focus, but are related to things like drought, storms and other extreme weather events, loss of crops, spread of disease, and so on. The threat of climate change is distinctly different than that in the early 1800s. We collectively could do more to address it but, considering the tons of money some are putting to expand AI, that has become even more challenging.
But even if there are many similarities, so what? I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I think that means we can learn some things from history and try to make things better. I am not sure if this is what you in particular are trying to do, but when many people respond with comments like "it is like ____ historical event," they are encourage passivity. If you see bad history repeating itself, the response should be to learn the good lessons, not just lay back and take it.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Also, would you care to take any context into account?
Post: how y’all feeling about AI?
Comment: I think it’s bad because of XYZ.
Me: Yeah, I think it’s bad too, but we have to deal with XYZ every time there’s a big new technological revolution. How is this one particularly scary, and different from the past?
You: Y’know, it really diminishes the conversations we need to have about Actual AI Problems for you to ask that.
Excuse YOU but I am still annoyed about this.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
You don’t sound dismissive but you do sound a little judgy. Look, I personally hate AI and I’m very concerned that we’re heading towards big catastrophes in the world. I didn’t say that because it didn’t seem relevant. I can still be interested in a conversation about whether/how this big change is different from other big changes we’ve had. I’m not being dismissive, I’m looking for historical context. I’m fascinated by this stuff. I have Time Team on in the background for goodness’ sake.
I’d like to point out that I think your first paragraph could apply to other major shifts like railroad barons and hell, even King John being forced to sign the manga carts. Which is my entire point. How much AI fearmongering can be traced back to “normal tech freak out” vs “proper problematic new stuff.”
I’d like to talk about how your second paragraph is a great answer. “We’re at a point where our environment can’t handle the effects of this new technology and it could tip us over the edge in climate change” is exactly the kind of thing I was wondering about.
But frankly I shouldn’t have to tell you that I agree with you for you to treat my question as being in good faith.
Church_of_Cheri@reddit
I look at search engines to answer that question. I used to look up something, and it was usually the top answer, or I could just scroll a little and find the answer. Now they have an AI “answer” that they took from some page somewhere, usually Reddit, and it’s iffy if it’s right. Other than that you get 20 sponsored ads and then search results for something the AI thought you were actually looking for that they would prefer to tell you about. Want to know what time the pharmacy is open until? Well, here’s instructions on how to use Hims and Hers and enrich Peter Thiel some more. It’s an improvement for companies controlling us and drowning us in marketing, but it’s made my every day life harder. I love being able to turn on lights with my voice, but I had that before they turned on the AI feature, now it fails a lot more often.
As someone said in another post, AI is so the wealthy can replace skilled labor, while making sure skilled labor can no longer access wealth. Other revolutions, like the industrial evolution, would have failed without the push for unions and safety standards. Creating a middle class to buy the products was necessary for the entire system to not just implode on itself. So, for AI to work, we need to fundamentally shift our system back to one that’s more equitable which means more regulations on AI and its uses as well as strong social safety nets to catch people, and capping billionaires while not allowing the new trillionaire class to even start. The situation we’re in now is untenable and it’s a bubble that’s about ready to explode.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Just to continue the conversation, and if I sound argumentative I don’t mean to be, I’m just enjoying the dialogue.
Your first paragraph is totally true but really that’s about how awful search engines and the internet in general has become. Not really about the little AI snippet we get up top.
I agree with your second paragraph too. My question is just, how is this NEW? Is it not the same pattern we’ve seen repeating? I’m sure many parchment people got put out of work when paper was invented. And in an ideal world we’ll regulate this change to protect the environment and the people who will be hurt the most.
That may or may not happen, but the base question of “is AI fundamentally, qualitatively different from other technological leaps” is still there.
Church_of_Cheri@reddit
I see you added a “fundamentally” to the question, which could change what the answer is, but not really. You think that technology improves in a straight line, but it doesn’t, there are many times that we set ourselves up to go backwards. Like the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. If you count in that this technological advancement could also mean society may backtrack like it did back then, then yes it is very much like every other technological advancement in the past. It can lead to growth as a society, or failure and backwards progress as a society as a whole. In this case, we’re heading towards a back slide because our society doesn’t have the fundamentals set up to protect the people that will fall through the cracks which will bring us all down.
And no, the enshittification of search engines is not unrelated to AI. They’re firing the engineers that program and keep systems running, and instead are using their AI to help them make “changes and improvements”. It’s like the untrained AI bot leading the rich who think they’re a lot smarter than they are. It’s like every time Musk needs to make improvements with twitter, he fired most the people that worked on it, so he uses Grok and underpaid staff that are too afraid to leave (aka workers on a visa with the threat of ICE over them), to try and make changes and well, it has been a disaster.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Sorry, didn’t mean to change the question on you!
But haven’t you just agreed with me? Early Middle Ages Britain after the fall of Rome sucked. Let’s say it was the result of a new technology (altho I’m not sure it was. What new tech? New weapons from the invading Gauls that forced the Romans to shrink their borders?
I agree AI is dangerous, in fact I’m very very worried about the world and humanity and where it’s all headed.
But I also want to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. How much of this AI fearmongering is normal tech backlash that we got for the internet and factories and probably the fucking wheel (or more likely the axle), and how much is really new?
Yes, this new tech could push our society backwards or forwards. Yes, it can cause major problems in wealth disparities and the environment and all that stuff. Just like every other tech “advancement.” ( <— not linear)
I wasn’t asking if it’s gonna have bad effects. It’s clearly having lots of bad effects, at a time when several countries are really struggling to get anything done, and that could be a huge problem.
But you can’t say “I’m terrified of AI and everything it could bring” and then list problems that we see every time there is new tech. What specifically is terrifying about AI? I genuinely wanna know!
So far people have said -
- AI could cross us into a climate change tipping point
- AI doesn’t tell us how it reaches its decisions (black box theory)
“AI could destroy society” isn’t an argument for “so we need to treat this new tech differently than usual,” just an argument for “let’s be extra careful with integrating this new tech.”
Altho I’m struggling to come up with examples of societies making a conscious effort to integrate new tech, let alone doing it well, and I sure don’t see it happening in the current political climate. All kind of a moot point really.
Church_of_Cheri@reddit
Haha, well look at this article
FoostersG@reddit
FoostersG@reddit
Well the last time we did this we got the 30-40 year gilded age, marked by deplorable working conditions, extreme poverty, and environmental destruction. it took people taking to the streets and a trickle of legislation to counteract.
So, if there's not any qualitative difference this time around, that's going to be pretty rough for most of us
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
I’m not saying it’s GOOD, good lord not at all. I’m just saying it doesn’t seem to be as new and scary as many of my peers believe. Just another big leap forward in technology, albeit bigger and thus very likely causing more damage.
OverZookeepergame698@reddit
But it is new. We’re on the other side of history in all of those cases.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
“New technology causes social difficulty” is not new. It is a cycle we have seen over and over again. I had been asking if AI was creating new kinds of social difficulties that we haven’t seen before, things different from “rich get richer,” “people lose jobs,” “environment is damaged,” etc. Those are all effects of AI that are not new to the cycle of invention.
But thanks for pointing out that the history isn’t the same thing as the present, I guess 🤷♀️
OverZookeepergame698@reddit
It isn’t an “I guess”. History is literally not the same as the present. Your framing sounds like: well this kinda happened a few times before my lifetime and some people were pretty miserable, but I’m happy so that was all for the greater good. It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Spoiler alert- you’re the sacrifice. That is new.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Oh, and it was “Thanks, I guess, for defining what history is for me.” Because it felt like you were calling me stupid. Because obviously history is different from the present.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Would you please look at some of my other comments where I talk about how I do hate AI and I am afraid for the future.
JFC. Why do I have to keep specifying that. Why can’t we have a conversation about “how scary is this big scary new thing in a historical context.” I wanna know how much AI fearmongering is “normal tech backlash” vs “really new scary consequences.” I wanna talk about this change against the background of other similar big changes.
I AM NOT SAYING ITS GOOD. I’m not making a moral judgment at all. I’m saying “tell me something scary about AI that we can’t also say about trains and factories and the fucking wheel.” Why is that wrong? Why do you assume I’m pro-AI? My opinion should be irrelevant to “how is this different from the past.”
I never said I’m happy about it. Frankly I think the Amish are probably right.
Gloomheart@reddit
It's the fresh water that's the problem for me. If they were doing anything other than stealing fresh water from communities I'd be OK. If they figured out how to bypass that (or were forced to somehow by EPA rules), then its more of a leap forward.
Destroying our freshwater access is not worth the leap.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
At this point I’m not sure the abacus was worth the leap.
ConstantineAbbruzzi@reddit
The difference is that other big technological leaps didn’t function independently in a way the designer or creator cannot explain.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Can you point me to resources on that? Do you mean something other than “it could come alive and be sentient”?
ConstantineAbbruzzi@reddit
As AI systems become more capable and self directed, they can develop operational pathways that are entirely independent of their creators initial blueprints.
There are many peer reviewed studies on the black box theory. Im apprehensive to direct you to any specific one as to not present any bias.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
Ok now this is interesting. I have done only cursory reading but damn. “This machine aggregates data and makes decisions but doesn’t tell us how it got there” should mean that the machine doesn’t make, well, really any important decisions at all. In which case what’s the point of having the machine at all?
Yeah, “we might be about to put society into the hands of something we created but don’t understand” is definitely a new technology problem that we haven’t encountered before.
Kellzy1212@reddit
Yea, in the many studies I’ve read, the AI typically recreates a pathway to stay functioning regardless of attempts to shut it down. It’s not inherently bad, just its way of staying functional. That’s a huge risk when it’s not a perfect system.
SquirrelyMcNutz@reddit
Someone building a cotton mill didn't suck up vast amounts of freshwater, cut thousands off of power grids, and help build a panopticon of surveillance infrastructure.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
They kinda did. The Industrial Revolution definitely took important resources away from the people and towards business. Water for mills, coal for the plants (their version of electricity.) You can find plenty of news articles about nearby communities that were impoverished.
The surveillance state thing, yeah, but that’s due to cheap cameras and internet making it possible, not AI.
SquirrelyMcNutz@reddit
If you think that is at all comparable, then I don't know what to say to you.
And the surveillance thing? What do you think is going to be used to analyze everything? An overarching surveillance state wouldn't be possible without something capable of analyzing everything in real, or near enough not to matter, time nor the sheer volume of data available. Human agents wouldn't be able to do it.
FandomReferenceHere@reddit
I’m trying really hard to explain the whole qualitative vs quantitative thing. Of COURSE we can compare the economic effects of the Industrial Revolution and the tech revolution. I’m not saying they’re equal. I’m not even saying they’re on the same order of magnitude.
But my question is, what is AI doing to society that is new and different to other tech changes? Of course we’re doing a lot MORE of it, so the numbers aren’t anywhere similar, but it’s the same social effects - taking resources from people and giving to business, etc etc etc. I’m not saying that they will have the same effects. In saying that this is the same pattern repeating, and I’m asking people if they see ways in which it isn’t the same pattern repeating.
“This technology makes rich people richer,” “makes poor people poorer,” “uses too much resources” “pollutes the planet,” all of this is true, and btw i personally hate AI! But none of these are NEW issues being created, just bigger versions of the same problems we always have to solve when a new technology comes along. Does that make sense?
sobeitharry@reddit
We don't know yet.
InfidelZombie@reddit
It's not. Everyone is panicking like they have a half dozen other times in our lifetimes when there have been seismic shifts. There will be some pain in the transition (remember all the coal miners becoming computer programmers?) but in the end it's just another software tool.
SandersDelendaEst@reddit
Maybe one out of three of those things.
trailrun1980@reddit
Exactly this.
I avoid it at all costs, I despise EVERYTHING having it baked in now (just popped up in Microsoft office this week, no I don't need a permanent floating AI shortcut in excel, thanks).
I see constant news about data centers tearing through water and power, computer parts have skyrocketed, I see people coming to forums saying well Ai said to do this to my car (specifically quoting bad specs or instructions)
I've got a manager at work who requires every one page training document to become a video walk through that's then put through an Ai program to generate an avatar based training module, it's fking ridiculous
intothewild80@reddit
This right here. It has made processes in almost every software I use slower and dumber. No quickbooks, your shitty AI isn’t making anything faster. It reads basic invoices wrong, so I have to modify all the values manually and categorize them anyway, so if anything it is clogging up my workflow. Adobe makes a document load slower while the AI processes, which drives me up the wall.
I might use it to compose an email, but I like to think I am a decent enough writer that for 98% of emails I can handle it myself. More hindrance than help atp.
Moxie_Stardust@reddit
It's half-baked and not ready to be deployed on the scale that it is currently, but the billionaires all want to try and make sure they're the ones positioned for success, and many of us get to pay higher electric rates as a bonus feature. Super.
MarkDavid04@reddit
I like how I can now ask normal questions in AI mode. It got tedious trying to put the right keywords and phrases to get the info I was looking for in Google/Bing etc. And if the AI didn't quite get what I was looking for, I can clarify until I get the right info.
For AI generation, it was complete dog-Sh for the last few years, but this year?? MY GOD it got good... Too good... Cautiously optimistic, but for now, enjoying stuff like Mr. Fluffy cat kung fu vids 🤣
testmonkeyalpha@reddit
It's just another tool.
Lots of people are using it for things it is not good at and others are ignoring its legitimate usefulness because they don't like the idea of it.
I'm planning on seeing how much I can do on my next personal programming project with just AI. If it takes a lot of the tedious steps out, that will allow me to increase the scope and complexity of my future projects.
AI gets a lot of hate because people are terrible at using it. Like using free AI and shitty prompts to make images that just scream AI slop.
Meanwhile there are people good at writing prompts getting away with excellent images that nobody would suspect is AI (charts created with verified data)
Ash1102@reddit
I think that advancements in AI is one step closer to a Star Trek TNG future. Do you guys really love working 40+ hours a week? What we should be doing is fighting to actually benefit as a society from the amount of increased productivity instead of fighting against the progress itself.
In 1930 economists were predicting that we would have a fifteen hour workweek by 2030. Let's hope that their prediction comes true. How else do we get to a Jetsons future where George Jetson complains about having a hard day at work because he had to push a button 3 times?
cillam@reddit
I work in IT I use ai a fair amount to automate straight forward, tedious and repetitive tasks.
I think the use of AI and learning to use it is the future In the same way learning how to use a PC was a thing in the 80s and 90s.
Now the down sides to AI is it has been over promised. I keep reading about CEO's talking about how it can replaces loads of jobs which I acknowledge it can replace some but It is no where near where they think it is. No AI company is turning a profit so the costs will have to go up eventually.
Right now we are in an AI bubble that will burst and when it does I look forward to watching the company's that have laid off hundreds if not thousands of people to replace with AI struggle.
Right now their are companies realizing that it is costing them more to use AI than it is keep paying employees.
When the true cost of AI becomes apparent I think people and company's will still use it but to a smaller scale then they are trying to now. Like I said I use it to automate simple repetitive tasks, not trying to lay off thousands of people.
Historical-Sherbet37@reddit
I hate all of it. There is no product I use that I feel is made better by AI.
Cinderhazed15@reddit
There are some systems that may be made better, drug discovery, protein folding, etc… but it’s something that you should take the results and properly test/verify it.
Fickle_Wrangler_7439@reddit
That's not Gen AI though, that's machine learning ans data compilation, which we've been using for years.
Gen AI is just advanced chat bots.
denotsmai83@reddit
“Gen AI is just chatbots” having so many upvotes is a microcosm of why this whole thread makes my head want to explode. GenAI and the AI boom in general are already so deeply ingrained our lives in ways most people have no comprehension of. The truly meaningful applications of AI that we should all be excited about (and a little scared, particularly as it relates to job security) are built into applications we use every day in ways that aren’t even end user facing. The average person needs to stop thinking about how humans interact with AI and start thinking about how computers are interacting with AI. The latter is what’s truly changing the world.
SandersDelendaEst@reddit
Gen AI is not *just* chatbots.
canuck_in_wa@reddit
The person you are responding to is correct. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold2, which applies the same Transformer and attention architecture behind LLMs to protein folding.
Gonzanic@reddit
You mean it doesn’t love me?! 🥹
Roguebantha42@reddit
Not you, specially, no. But it definitely loves me, because it told me so.
cjbevins99@reddit
I can think of one thing but that’s because I’m a disgusting human being…
SpiralBeginnings@reddit
It’s one of the most incredible technologies I’ve seen in my lifetime. The vitriolic rhetoric I see directed against it, usually because of ignorance and misinformation, is disgusting, disheartening, and frankly disturbing.
bloomdecay@reddit
It's not actual AI. LLMs are glorified spell-checkers.
ailish@reddit
I think a lot of really cool things could be accomplished with AI beyond chatbots and shitty Google results. I think a lot of stuff is being accomplished with it, for example, it's helping astrophysicists analyze data and make connections at a much higher rate of speed and accuracy than ever before.
The problem is the amount of damage that things like AI data centers are causing. Chatbots are making people dumber at an alarming rate, and sometimes they're actually convincing people to kill themselves. AI search results are wrong an alarming percentage of the time.
You could dive into the conspiracy theory side of things and start speculating that the government is pushing AI and robotics research so hard because the billionaire class wants it to replace human labor, human soldiers, and human doctors and researchers.
I think overall it will change the future of humanity, whether that is good for humanity or not remains to be seen.
bjgrem01@reddit
I like using it to help with coding, analyzing spreadsheet and table data, things like that. I hope they get the power usage issues fixed soon. As much as people hate it, it isnt going away. And the arguments against it all sound like the arguments against electronic synthesizers when we were little. Its not gonna replace real artists any more than synthesizers replaced the cellist at the symphony. It just expands their tools available.
turtle553@reddit
It'll probably have uses in limited areas like coding but general use will go down once people have to actually pay enough to cover the operating costs for tokens. I'm not sure how the economics of maintaining a large data system will be without a large user base.
How can a company budget for token cost if you don't know how much any given query will use until you've already done it?
Current subscribers are using way more than what they charge for subscriptions already without pricing that is meant to generate a profit.
Wonderful_Charity411@reddit
Ai is amazing and getting better constantly. It’s scary-good. Claude is incredible at legal work.
tronassembled@reddit
AI took my freelance translation career. The writing was on the wall for a while with machine translation editing, but then within a few months my income dropped about 99%. I tried to avoid selling out, but then AI came and offered me a full time position with the benefits I didn't think I would be able to afford on my own anymore.
My coworkers are all people like me - writers, artists, editors, composers, people rendered obsolete except as sources of specialist knowledge to feed the machine. Astrophysicists, engineers, lawyers. Most of them are cool as shit. In a way, we're lucky, because we had more time to get in the door. Now that everyone's being replaced, the companies mostly only offer contract-based work, for maybe 25% of what I used to earn on good days (which already wasn't all that much).
Since I work for and with AI all the time, I see its flaws. Including its voice, and those of you who post on reddit like "if I delete the em dashes people won't know i gpted this shit" are like me at 22, rubbing dryer sheets on my coat thinking no one can tell I smoked.
I think the technology has incredible potential, and I accept that it's inevitable, and I really do want to make it better. Partly because it's easier losing to the champs, but mostly because everyone is in such a fucking hurry to put it in charge of everything, because it's decent, and decent is good enough for most people, which is why AI does translation work now instead of me.
So everyone's getting stupid faster than it can get smart, and someday our lives will probably be in the hands of some distracted medical influencer who AIed their way through college, so I at least want to make sure the AI knows what it's doing by then.
Fixyblue@reddit
I'M '83. It's a tool, as everyone brings up. But as a high school teacher it has been TRANSFORMATIVE. I've been training my ChatGPTmodel since as soon as I could. It's helped me become an even better teacher. It doesn't write my lesson plans, it makes them stronger. I upload what I want, trouble shoot with it, and it helps me come up with something that is so much better than I would I have on my own, at least in the timespan.
I know there's lot of hate. But it's not going away. Remember when they said the Internet would take our high school librarians from us? They weren't wrong. But they also said that full access to the internet would kill research, critical thinking, etc. & etc.
Times change. We adapt. That's our whole thing, right?
And it is really making me better. And allowing me to have more time with my four year old. It's a fucking win, folks. At the least it ain't going anywhere.
14ANH2817@reddit
The hallucination problem is persistent and increasingly complicated. AI fans don't acknowledge it, partly because many of them overestimate their ability to see problems in AI work representing other people's fields or expertise.
the_amazing_spork@reddit
When I was 28 I went back to school to get my BS in Computer Science. It seemed like a career field with endless opportunities that could carry me through retirement. I got my first job in 2011. Jobs were plentiful. Now I’m reading about dev jobs are already being lost to AI. It’s not widespread yet. But the more you use it the better it gets. The leaps it’s taken in quality code in the past year is impressive and scary. Young devs barely know how to do anything but can get a ton done quickly using AI. They have no idea what it’s doing though. So better hope there’s no bugs. Anyways, it scares the shit out of me and it almost definitely will lead to lots of unemployment. Just to rub salt in the wound, it seems my field will probably early on the chopping block. I hope I’m wrong. It can be a really useful tool. But it has to be a tool. Not the worker.
mikeyj777@reddit
The environmental impact is horrible. and, if all the AI stuff went away tomorrow, the world would be just fine.
While it is here, honestly, it's been pretty amazing. At work, it helps me digest research papers which are way above my level. It also helps me build complex computationally heavy systems and make them user-friendly.
As a hobbyist, it's been fascinating. There have been so many applications I've wanted to build and had no clue how. In the last 2 years, I've cut thru them like butter. Anything from games for my kids to self-help stuff to simulations.
Nearly any idea you have, you can now build it in minutes. Any skill you want to learn is a few lines of text and some time invested in learning. I've learned so much, from front end web development to linear algebra, etc.
Even in passive learning, you can, for free, have a podcast generated on any topic. I use this a ton for learning a bit about concepts that I want to hear more about.
Again, is all of the above worth the massive environmental impact? No. However, since it is here, leveraging it to improve your career and your skill set is a no-brainer.
HarryBalsagna1776@reddit
It hasn't been helpful in my line of work (nuclear engineering). My company is determined to make us use it. They had Claude, it sucked, they dropped it, and brought in ChatGPT build 5.1 or something. I sucks too. They both are too unreliable for the nuclear industry. The tolerance for risk is zilch.
buginmybeer24@reddit
Absolute waste of time for most tasks. My company is pushing everyone to use it in order to be more productive/efficient, but it just wastes my time.
Last week I was trying to create a nice looking graphic to go in a presentation I was working on. I gave the AI tool an example I had already roughed out in Powerpoint and asked it to add a few details to spruce it up. After wasting over an hour and 20+ attempts, I gave up. It would either change nothing, change the wrong items, hallucinate names and icons that shouldn't be there, or randomly change the order of the information I had provided. I ended up doing the changes manually in about 30 minutes so it didn't save me any time.
I have also had similar experiences trying to generate Python scripts. The last attempt was trying to add a GUI to a program I had written to automate converting PDF files. The GUI was super simple and just provided a file selection dialog so that my coworkers could avoid using the command line. I gave up after multiple attempts because it kept breaking my original code and never successfully created a GUI. In the end I had to write the GUI myself.
The only thing I have found it to be somewhat useful for is to summarize information from standards or books. You still have to be careful because some of the AI tools will make up information just so it can avoid saying it doesn't know something. I have also had issues where asking a follow-up question can make it believe information that doesn't exist.
Personally it would not bother me one bit if AI went away.
Aprils-Fool@reddit
It’s stupid. I’d rather use my brain. I look down on people who use it in general (I understand there might be cases where it could be useful for disabilities.)
Chaemyerelis@reddit
Garbage that's already ruining Lives.
iamGordanShumway@reddit
Never use it unless you count the AI overview in google which I didn’t ask for
Biddy_Impeccadillo@reddit
Use google’s “web search” instead- I have it as default now
LilMushboom@reddit
Duckduckgo lets you disable it fwiw
xcomnewb15@reddit
DuckDuckGo is just so much better than google anyways
fenderputty@reddit
That thing you and I never asked for will soon be the only options on google.
TI-22483@reddit
What I do is I take things that work perfectly fine and make them worse. More specifically, I make it shitty.
Time-Reserve-4465@reddit
Whatever you search next, type -ai after it and the ai overview won't pop up 😄
Moxie_Stardust@reddit
If you want to simplify, and don't mind a little tinkering, you can set your default browser search string to default to old-style results by adding &udm=14, like so (in Firefox, at least, probably similar in others: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Melancholy_Rainbows@reddit
There are also plugins that remove it.
T1sofun@reddit
Thank. You. So. Muuuuch!
MelpomeneAndCalliope@reddit
Same
quixotic-88@reddit
Same
broken_shadows@reddit
Remember don't just trust that answer either. It surprises me how many people just read the AI summary and leave it at that. Like I get it, so easy right?
Even the kids I work with who tell me they hate AI were baffled when I showed them how to scroll down and search for a real answer not just one the machine wants you to know. They had just accepted you type in a query and AI gives you the answer.
I'm like what do you think a search engine does (ok, is supposed to do)? You could just pull up a chat bot if you wanted an AI generated response, why bother opening a search engine at all?
It baffles me how quickly people have learned to rely on whatever their magic box of tricks tells them.
I did not ask for this damn AI overview and you can't turn it off anything these days.
Try the disenshittification Konami code instead 🤘
pennie79@reddit
I haven't been able to find a way to incorporate it into my life as a SAHM. I can write better emails than it can, which actually say what I want it to say. I have websites which I use to find better recipes than AI can provide. It can't make the phone calls or do the shopping I need to get done. I occasionally use it to create notion pages, and that's really all I've been able to use it for.
MRS_PL0W@reddit
And the info it shoves in your face can be wrong. I switched my search engine to DuckDuckGo for that reason- you can turn AI completely off and it is fantastic. I hated seeing generated “answers” as it was, but to have it there and it be incorrect? Google can fuck all the way off with that nonsense.
Rich_Celebration477@reddit
I can’t imagine being forced to use it in a job.
I’ve been using it since the first Will Smith eating spaghetti video. I find it good at some things and very bad at others
I like it for its ability to format things in a logical way. Sometimes I just want to do a brain dump and not spend 20 minutes trying to figure out what format I want it in.
It’s good for narrowing down problems- it’s correctly diagnosed medical and automotive issues based on descriptions and asking questions.
I think of it like this. If there is a ton on information on a subject that it could steal from. Legal, medical, scientific etc then it will probably be pretty good
If you are trying to get it do anything where the data is thin, or if you are trying to get it to make new and creative ideas, it’s going to hallucinate.
This is the experience of a lay person who has always had computers (started with Apple II+ when I was in elementary school)
TheClawbackCycle@reddit
I have a general distaste for it. I have tried using it to help me flesh out ideas or plan/organize certain things, and if I keep the chat going long enough, it starts giving me contradictory information or it acts like I said things I didn't say. I would never trust anything that comes out of it.
UnjustifiedBDE@reddit
I was happy to use kayak and not a travel agent.
I am happy to use Claude Code and not someone charging $200 an hour.
So many holier-than-thous.
(Also as someone who has used, graph paper, notebooks, spreadsheets and apps in the gym, a simple project in ChatGPT is the best. I lift the heavy weights, AI helps with the organizing--that is how to use AI)
Biddy_Impeccadillo@reddit
Hard no.
StunningShifts@reddit
I like that my boss didn't cram it down our throats and let us pick how we use it. I find it a very good skill amplifier but I dont see how it could replace a person.
genetic_patent@reddit
You can scoff all you want, but if you don't learn the basic of AI, there is a 100% chance you will be left behind.
Remember our grandparents that balked at using a Computer? It's like that.
YeilKhaa@reddit
I offer qualified hate for almost all things AI. I can see sone positive uses for predictive machine learning, like healthcare diagnoses for horrible preventable diseases like cancer, heart disease, etc.
But other than things like that, I have unvarnished hate for AI slop, google answers clogged with AI hallucinations, etc. I have no use for CHATgpt or AI image generation, and despise how these models are built on real human endeavor, art, etc., only to turn around & vomit out pale imitations. I loathe the robber tech barons rushing to slap AI data centers on every corner of the earth, sucking up municipal water & power.
But I’m also a closet Luddite & late adopter generally, so there’s that too 😅
Trashusdeadeye@reddit
It’s the next .com bubble.
Grinzy@reddit
I've been working with AI to help me do tasks at work that would normally take me hours of fiddling around with. I even wrote a book about my kid for my kid to help him learn how to read. I had a different AI illustrate it. You should have seen his face.
I also work in the construction industry and I understand the lasting effects the data centers are having on communities. I feel it has it's benefits but it's detrimental to being around people. There needs to be a balance or a shift so no harm comes to people.
drewbaccaAWD@reddit
I think it's the devil. So far what I've seen is online bots, fake dating profiles, spam calls that actually sound like humans or in some cases like I'm being called by famous politicians. Then there's partisan hacks using it to generate garbage memes in five minutes, and even companies using it to displace people with actual talent which wouldn't be half as bad if the end product didn't have extra fingers/arms/legs or random floating things. All of this, AND it raises our electric bill?
As with any "tool" it's only as good or bad as how it's used, but I'm seeing it used for way more garbage than I am anything productive so far. And when I see people try to use it for technical questions, it gives bad advice half the time because it's only as good as what's inputted, and it doesn't know what follow up questions to ask. I'm sure it will improve with time, but the same is true for how it can be programmed to manipulate. For now, I can recognize when I'm interacting with an AI dating profile but it's going to get harder, to the point that maybe everyone just gives up with online dating which would be a major loss.
-notfadeaway-@reddit
Like the general public is being sold a false set of goods. Play with this version while we use it to track all of your movements via contracts paid for by your own tax dollars. There are legitimate uses that could be jeopardized in the short term because of how this is being rolled out by government. It will likely course correct but maybe we will overcorrect first and cause delays in areas that could save lives.
quantum_mouse@reddit
It was automation and outsourcing before. It's "AI" now.
rpmsm@reddit
Split. Running my own business with a buddy and it’s a godsend for so much we have to do. But also, it sucks in so many broader ways.
Current-Photo2857@reddit
Kill it with fire. Did we learn nothing from the Terminator and Matrix movies?
Character_Bend_5824@reddit
I feel like it's the end times. This isn't just a funny, helpful tool. It is computing power the size of a city. Computers could dream like a human about 2-3 years ago. Now, we're approaching a point where it will become an actual replica of a human brain, capable of doing all kinds of things. More concretely, the price of ideas will be lowered to such a point as to make actual thinking unmarketable as a job skill. What may very well end up happening is that humans, with their ability to move in complex ways, may become the ones in the robot position, doing the dextrous bidding of the AI overlords.
The1mp@reddit
Never have so few, done so little, for so many
Why_So-Serious@reddit
Adapt or die.
I see a lot corpses on this thread.
darksideofmypoon@reddit
Its like NASA mathematicians in the 80’s refusing computers and insisting on solving problems in their notepads.
denzien@reddit
It's a useful tool that requires oversight
rachelceleste@reddit
I started training AI as a sub contractor side gig before it was being pumped into all the products. It was obvious then and is still obvious now that it was not and is not ready to be pumped to the masses.
For instance, the top of a google search became a Gemini response....and Gemini gave misinformation most of the time. I was fact checking these responses for a living, as well as testing them on my own. All models lied. So many lies....and about such silly things. It's not perfect today, but it is less embarrassingly inaccurate. (Still need to fact check!!)
While it has gotten better since then, the push very quickly became business use optimization. The industry is still in the infantile stage of this and once again rolling it out long before it is viable or helpful. Any company requiring AI use today is fucking stupid. It is inaccurate and needs more babysitting than just relying on your current team to get stuff done.
Outside of that, my mother tried to make a hotel reservation at a place she's stayed many times by calling the hotel directly. She was met with an AI agent, but didn't realize it until something with her reservation needed fixed. Of course the AI agent couldn't fix it, but was able to charge her credit card while she was saying "No!", "I dont want that" and "let me talk to a human!" on repeat. She ended up canceling the card...which is a whole extra headache. She also booked elsewhere....and probably will continue to stay at the new spot if its comfy enough.
Anyhoo, the best use cases I have found for AI are things like "rewrite this" when I give it thought to paper slop, brainstorming, and aggregated searches when asking a specific question. (The trick there is to read the sources and not the AI response.) Gemini is also pretty dang good for trip planning because it has all of Google maps to use.
I guess my answer is, I use it daily....but with extreme caution. It is not wise to trust it blindly.
twinklery@reddit
We used it in my Girl Scout troop to make invites. We did not have the time or resources to make a nice professional picture. This act used some energy but did not replace anyone or put anyone out of a paying job. It’s about the only thing I can think of using AI where that’s the case. Otherwise it seems like an overhyped oversold bill of goods
InfidelZombie@reddit
It's our best hope for solving many of humanity's biggest problems. Don't pay too much attention to the GenAIs or LLMs, those are just productivity tools like Excel or Photoshop. The real AIs don't make the news (unless you pay attention to science and engineering).
ManiacRichX@reddit
what are the real AI's?
InfidelZombie@reddit
Purpose-built neutral networks doing things like protein folding to cure cancer, improve supply chain logistics, find new superconductors, stuff like that.
ManiacRichX@reddit
thanks! (i wasn't trolling)
InfidelZombie@reddit
That's awesome! It's all just computer programming after all but we're making some real advancements and it's a shame that this GenAI hysteria has led to a more general witch hunt. I actually like GenAI while acknowledging that it isn't perfect and probably never will be. But it's pretty rad being able to ask a computer for recommendations for Philippines beach vacation spots or tiki cocktail ideas and getting a narrative rather than endlessly scrolling through Googled mommy blogs.
mallanson22@reddit
The toothpaste is out of the tube. We either hit the great filter or we don't. Its a wait and see game at this point.
radiojosh@reddit
AI is generally problematic - massive power and water consumption, AI garbage filling up the Internet, undermining our ability to trust our eyes and ears, displacing workers, ripping off artists, allowing scammers and con men to flourish.
Now all that said, I feel like the ways we use it could make a difference and I think there is value.
For me and the way my brain works, it has become indispensable. Mostly for allowing me to explore thoughts and ideas in ways I couldn't before. I thrive on being able to express my thoughts externally through conversation and having AI as an outlet has really made it possible for me to do so much more. I feel like a legless man who was gifted a wheel chair.
I think the energy and water problems need to be solved. I think we should prioritize certain uses for AI over others until we fix those problems. I think the problems people have with LLMs and what they produce mostly need to think about them differently. I think the dishonest ways people use AI and the way jobs are getting displaced has a lot more do to with societal attitudes toward work and capital than with AI itself. In that regard, AI is an accelerator and an excuse.
LaFantasmita@reddit
The most mid people you know use it to pretend they're smart or skilled. It's annoying AF.
Unique_Blacksmith247@reddit
I hate it. And I especially hate it for my daughter's generation. Every answer is instantly there. Now that sounds great, but none of her classmates can critically think. And why would they need to? What took us hours at our library, doing research, finding connections, drawing conclusions, etc, takes seconds now.
I don't know, maybe I'm being too much of an old cromudgen. I remember when my older sister got the first computer in our family. It was 1993 and she was going to college. Fond memories of that Macintosh LC3. When my grandfather (83) saw it, he was almost appalled by it. I'll never forget, he turned to me and said, "What's wrong with chalk and a chalkboard?"
jmvfromnv@reddit
I like it and use it regularly. I feel like it is the future.
Nonsenseinabag@reddit
I've been using it to teach me how to program, something I struggled with for years because troubleshooting problems can be a nightmare. You'll spend all day trying to find the solution for one bug reading forum and reddit posts with no helpful answers.
darksideofmypoon@reddit
Copy/pasting error codes into Claude has been such a lifesaver. So many hours of headache saved.
darksideofmypoon@reddit
I also use it regularly in my job. It’s made me superhuman. I can do so much more without asking for help, organizing a meeting, troubleshoot, etc.
I mostly do lab work so I don’t learn R or Python, but I generate a ton of data. I love that I can actually analyze it now and not have to wait on other people to do it. I can just go on GitHub and download and run packages. This was so foreign to me a few months ago.
Alexandertheape@reddit
good luck taking on the Empire without an R2
PlayPretend-8675309@reddit
I'm excited about it. Every past labor saving technology has made us all richer.
pissjugman@reddit
My only use is Google AI just to basically consolidate searches. Outside of that, i think it’s terrible for humanity, but whatever gets rich people richer becomes the way of life
Infamous_Tie5605@reddit
Thats all I end up using it for... "Give me quick results of the games last night"
I'll also use it to rewrite some work emails so I don't sound so blunt
ThomasSirveaux@reddit
I'm an indie author, and I've seen a huge increase of people over the last year or two in my online writing groups trying to get opinions on their AI slop. My opinion is it sucks. There's nothing redeeming about it. If you want to write a book, write a goddamn book. No one is going to give you praise for putting a prompt into chatgpt.
caffeinatedspiders@reddit
Yes, it's insane and weird. Like why put the effort into pretending to be a writer if you clearly don't like learning how to write? What is the point in having auto-complete vomit out a terrible piece of trash and put your name on it?
I don't know how to play professional football but I'm not going to tell AI to make me a video of me winning the superbowl and then show it off like I fucking actually did that.
Dazzling_Line_8482@reddit
To play devils advocate I think there are some great story tellers out there that are terrible writers.
Conversely there some great writers that are terrible story tellers.
AI can bridge that gap and bring more stories into the world.
caffeinatedspiders@reddit
No it cannot.
ThomasSirveaux@reddit
Then they should work on those skills. Every writer had to do it.
JeffTS@reddit
I'm a web developer and photographer. I mostly hate it. I'm not going to lie though. The AI features in Lightroom and Photoshop make cleaning things up really easy. But I hate all of the AI slop. I hate search engine results now which are mostly meaningless. I hate that it's costing so many jobs and will cost many more.
longbreaddinosaur@reddit
I hate it and what it’s going to do. But, I was unemployed for 11 months and could only find a job as an AI product leader.
I’m so desperate to get out.
jyc23@reddit
As a tool, I think it's pretty cool. I've been able to do a lot with it, and I can certainly see it's potential usefulness, especially in areas of scientific research (protein folding!).
What I hate about it is all the para-shit. You know, like how our leadership thinks it's the be all end all of things. No, it's just a fucking tool, with it's own, unique set of limitations. Stop treating it like it's fucking sentient. And how they all seem to be scheming to replacing everyone.
swismiself@reddit
I hate it
Crochet_Corgi@reddit
Some of it is just relabeled/reworked stuff we already had, but what its doing to the creative arts domain is super disheartening to me. It was supposed to free up out time to make art, not make art for us, not take the hobby and creativity from us. Also truly worry about how its being used in healthcare, doctors using it to summarize results and write their notes, at what point will they stop applying their own knowledge and just trust ai's diagnosis and wording without ingesting and learning.
ADHDFeeshie@reddit
I hate it. It's like somebody sat down and thought "how many different things can I fuck up with one new technology?" and then invented AI. It's fucking up the environment, the data centers are a nightmare, it's built on plagiarism, and it hallucinates! Doesn't even do what it's supposed to do! I've seen people rely on it for things like figuring out what meals at a restaurant don't include their allergens (surprise, phrasing it differently gets you a "yes" and a "no" answer!), my 80 year old mom has been looking up medical stuff with it, people are using it to make deepfake porn of real people, often of children. It's terrifying. I understand that it's used in the background of a lot of sites in ways I can't avoid without just abandoning the whole internet but I have no intention of ever using it on purpose.
Tom_Skeptik@reddit
It can fuck all the way off.
RetroBerner@reddit
We are all aware of Cyberdyne Systems
Stinkerma@reddit
Its crap.
_Internet_Hugs_@reddit
I hate it with the flaming passion of a thousand suns. If it was used for things like searching the genome for abnormalities or cells for cancer I'd be a lot less angry about the resources it absorbs. Instead all we get is crappy art, pictures that make people look uncanny, and pages and pages of meaningless drivel when people should be using their brains instead. It's killing all the beautiful things that make humanity great while simultaneously killing the planet. It's not needed and it's ruining literally everything.
Icy_Hippo@reddit
im a graphic designer.......it is killing me!
Squeaky_U_Boat@reddit
I hate it. I believe there are some technologies that should not have been allowed to evolve past the early '00s. Yeah, there are a lot of incredible benefits to AI, but I feel the dark sides are not worth it. We can find another way to similar ends.
HalfFrozenSpeedos@reddit
It's not Artificial Intelligence, most of them are just large language models regurgitating copyrighted materials and "hallucinating" aka generating nonsense.
Certain applications like drug development, protein analysis can be enhanced with neural nets
What's concerning though is the potential for the creation of a surveillance panopticon of the sort that would make China seem benign, already ars are reporting the FBI want access to every single numberplate camera in the USA to track vehicles, where you KNOW there will be mission creep and things will be as bad or worse than the Snowdon files revealed ...
WHEN the AI bubble bursts, the kit used ISN'T going to hit the used market cheap like so many hope.....no it will just get repurposed to whatever illiberal and authoritarian dystopian hell it can be applied to.....
Not beyond the realms of belief that in the near future, each and every person in the world could be tracked and their movements and behaviours predicted and worse.....
leifnoto@reddit
Ruling class are going to use it to squeeze every last fucking penny out of your pocket and into theirs.
WastedAccounts@reddit
I hated it at first but I really love it anymore now that's it's maturing.
It's a tool and you have to learn how to use it. Like a hammer, if you suck you're just gonna bend a bunch of nails ruin everything your trying to fix with it build a shitty birdhouse.
On the other hand I hate how it so detrimental to the environment and world around us. But that more capitalism's fault then the LLMs.
RogueAOV@reddit
I think if they actually used it for something worthwhile, that humans could not do, say like use it to crush spam and use it to identify and stop propaganda bots in social media it would be worthwhile.
However it's being used for everything but. They seem to be trying to add it to everything and it is mostly useless. Things like Google defaulting to AI results which are blatantly wrong? How is that worthwhile.
tmotytmoty@reddit
It think it works as a tool, but it is NOT capable of doing half the things we were told it could do. I work in data and analytics and, yes, it helps the workflow, but it can’t be trusted with accuracy or precision. It always, eventually screws up, big time.
bcaglikewhoa@reddit
The ai that replaces workers is one thing. The data centers that will aggregate all our personal information is another. It’s all bad imo.
It’s pretty clear people are getting dumber because of our over reliance on technology
hedwaterboy@reddit
I wish we could limit it to STEM and medicine.
I think it could have the LARGEST human impact in the medical world.
On a consumer level, I hate it, I think it’s mostly a waste of time and money. It makes most things worse and
Joey_Libiani@reddit
It is the devil. Because the baddies control it.
lowridda@reddit
It’s not something that should be installed in every phone in every kid to adults hand. I see it as a tool to dumb down the population more and trash our environment.
RainbowMage81@reddit
As a teacher, I feel like it’s propelling us toward the edge of the cliff at a much faster rate. We were already on our way there, but now we’re in a high speed train instead of a VW bus. It’s great for making rubrics though 🤷🏻♀️.
onions-make-me-cry@reddit
I lost my job to AI a year and a half ago. Despite that, I don't hate AI. It's had many positives in my life.
I had a lot of pain since thoracic surgery (for a rare lung cancer) 3 years ago and AI helped me think about why and recommend a solution that's working. That's just one example.
brandt-money@reddit
It's useless except as a very basic tool for me and basically a glorified Google. I rarely use it anymore after trying to really embrace it last year.
I can't wait for the bubble to absolutely explode.
11B_35P_35F@reddit
Im HR at a Cybersecurity company. We see it as a tool to increase efficiency and mitigate some of the repetitive manual tasks. We're currently in a bit of a wild west situation where most dont use copilot because its crap for anything other than basic stuff but are working on our AI policy and how to stay secure. I dont use it nearly to the level that the cyber folks are but I have for a lot of documents, excel workbooks, and a PowerPoint slide deck (nothing useful yet though (copilot and gamma havent been useful).
Church_of_Cheri@reddit
I’m not at all terrified of AI, nor did I say I was. It’s not fear, it’s the reality of how it’s being made and what’s coming out. I love technology, I’m always buying the latest in tech, but the AI being built now is fundamentally bad at what it says it’s supposed to do. And it’s unregulated, and the rich that own everything think it’s going to be a savior to the world while being completely clueless to the needs and wants of anyone but themselves. It’s a cult of personality that wants to be the next Ford or Tesla (people, not vehicles) and they just listen only to each other telling themselves how great it is. They’re robber barons that are cut off from society already, they’re not Ford or Tesla, they’re Howard Hughes making a wooden airplane as the future of aviation. If they want it to succeed they have to take the opinions and wants and needs of society itself into account, and they need to allow regulations (since they control the government currently, it’s not a matter of it being forced on them, they actually have to allow it which is a HUGE change from previous advancements).
Common language to unite a country, education, trade deals, the Roman Empire itself was a huge step forward in technology and ways to run a country, so much so that our founding fathers used a lot of their ideas when they built ours. But the rich got richer and got cut off from society and couldn’t smell the imminent collapse until it had already happened. That’s where we are right now. The technocrats that have literally said they want the world to be turned into a techno feudalistic society with them as Lords and Kings and us their peasants to farm their fields. The want the entire US to be split up into sections with one of them getting to control a region like it’s their own company town. Elon has literally started building a company town in TX. We’ve had this before and it’s not good, it’s a step back, and they’re using AI to try and consolidate their power.
Bring me the computer from Star Trek TNG, make it so when I walk in a room the lights turn on, give me useful technology. Give me an AI robot that can mop and sweep, one that can do dishes and laundry… but they’re creating them as military weapons to use against us if we rise up and to limit the information regular people have access too. Making it easier for people to gamble away their money straight to the rich who use market manipulation blatantly to destroy the lower classes. When they wanted a quicker way to make shirts using machines it was an advancement that first put people out of jobs, but then they realized stores could be bigger with more shopkeepers, and the more you have a society with a little extra money, the more they’ll spend. It created a problem and then solved it. Part of this was people fighting to unionize, parts were the government stepping in and taxing the shit out of the rich while creating a social safety net, and part was even some of the rich themselves recognizing that in order to stay rich and have a country that they want to control, they actually had to take care of the poor and make sure they felt they could rise up with hard work. The Roosevelts were believers in The Gospel of Wealth, and it saved us. Right now the rich are more Louis XV than Roosevelt. And them pushing AI as hard as they are because they don’t want the AI bubble to burst until they’ve gotten every penny away from us.
AI isn’t being brought to us without all these other factors. Technology pushed at the wrong time and in the wrong way, especially when it’s obvious that the purpose isn’t to help society, it’s a bad technology. It’s like when the told us 3D TVs were the future, they didn’t listen to public opinion and it was a bust. Placing all your money and the economy of a nation on one technology succeeding is a bad bet, especially when the society is telling you again and again they don’t want it the way you’re making it. We have a bunch of out of touch people telling us what we want and that’s it’s ok if we all suffer while they make it, but they’re really just a group of rich weirdos sitting in a room together smelling their own farts and thinking we’d want to smell their farts too because rich people farts just smell good. It makes no sense. I want a cheap shirt I don’t have to wait months to make, and cars to get around, and the ability to look things up on the internet. I don’t want 24/7 ads and social scores with some weirdo pedo asshole telling me if I just trust him he’ll get us to Mars so we can mine more resources for him.
If they want AI to work, regulate it and break up all the monopolies that currently control all of it. Then you have innovation, then the market will adjust to the needs and wants, then people can afford to be part of it. But right now it’s a weird gold statue that serves us no purpose. Technology and innovation grow best with competition at their heart, but this stuff has no heart. The technocrats are united and so don’t need to adjust for wants, needs, or to innovate, they’re hoping AI will step in and do it for them, that makes this “advancement” scary and something to fight against. Add a shit ton of regulations, stop the billionaires and remove them from power, start working on AI to make chores easier… I’ll embrace it in a heartbeat. But this, what they’re doing now, we’re going to either need to revolt or watch it kill our current society and head bad to the dark ages… or the dark enlightenment as they want to call it since that is their goal.
ChickenArise@reddit
I'm starting to come around on it. Customers are really engaging with the tools, and they're customers, and the tools are quite good at being bad, so now they need my help. Technically I work in tech, but now that people have LLMs I'm a babysitter for adults.
😭
Segazorgs@reddit
I'm in medical credentialing and the higher ups are hyping it up but I'm not buying the hype at all. It might be useful for the research side of things but for our administrative work it is still way too manual and requires the participation of multiple parties just to get things moving whether it's doctors won't fill an online application and prefer to to it manually or insurance carrier that has multiple brokers that one of which can process our claims history or hospital with the broken affiliation verification portal or maybe not online verification portal at all. We already have an automated system that emails and faxes letters out. Doesn't mean shit if the fax invalid, outdated or the emails bounces or goes to spam. We won't know until two weeks pass we have do often multiple follow up phone calls to check the status only for them to say we didn't get it. Or a doctor to say "I get so many emails I haven't looked for hours, resend it".
AI is not going to solve these problems that require manual human to human interaction.
Primary-Strawberry-5@reddit
I fully support our eventual AI overlords, don’t use it for art or music. Our overlords will control everything else
Adrasteia-One@reddit
I hate it. Leadership is trying to force everyone to use it, even when it's not a crucial part of our particular roles. We hear the familiar thing: "it's only a tool meant to make you more efficient." What they very likely mean is "it's going to replace you eventually." My background is in design and internal communications.
taleofbenji@reddit
It's fucking incredible. The best thing that ever happened.
But this sub turns into boomers real quick when the topic comes up.
Spiritual-Promise402@reddit
My experience with it is it can be great to quickly summarize tedious data points and use pattern recognition to suggest possible trends. As a tool helping with the workload I don't mind it. But there are too many CEOs ready to replace entire departments with a few messy prompts, just to save on overhead costs. That I don't agree with
Ghee_Guys@reddit
It’s a very powerful tool being used by tech bros to scare everyone into giving them a trillion dollars.
che_vos@reddit
It's not bad. I find myself using Gemini more and more often. But it has lots of limitations that people seem to not understand. And you have to fack check everything.
I refuse to be somebody that just dismisses our new technology as evil or bad. It all has a use. I saw people do the same thing about the internet when I was a teenager. Go get the encyclopedia, don't trust the internet. Yeah that went far.
zoosha2curtaincall@reddit
I have mixed feelings on it. I think it can be helpful now in a lot of ways, and it’s only going to get better. But there are people saying insane shit like “we’re going to get 20% GDP growth every year from now on” (actual conversation with a very successful guy) and it’s just totally divorced from reality.
In particular, using AI to justify mass layoffs that you’d have to be an idiot to take seriously is so offensive both morally and intellectually.
malibuklw@reddit
Generative AI is bad shit. Of all the bad qualities, what worries me most is that people are just willingly outsourcing thought, and it’s already proven to make us dumber.
Humans don’t need to be dumber than they already are!
septembersongar@reddit
It has its purpose but my impression is that LLMs (the AI most of us encounter) does what human beings can do quicker, but worse. People who uncritically use it for everything lose some pretty vital skills for navigating a digital world.
Jaded_Jaguar_348@reddit
I hate it a lot.
pack-uh-bowl@reddit
It’s crazy because everyone I work with defends AI, but no one I see on the internet does. 🫠 Feel like I live in opposite world.
kellyasksthings@reddit
I think that often we’re directed to use it from management in ways that don’t make sense, and while there are limited ways to use it that are actually worthwhile, most AI use cases generate stuff that is just shitty slop. However, as we’ve all seen from the enshittification of so many things, decision makers often dont care if their product is shite so long as there are no better options, so they can continue returning money to shareholders. Things are already so stupid and they’re going to keep getting way more stupid.
fatkidscandystore@reddit
I’ve become so much more productive at work with it. I’m a one man show in my role. No peers, at least not locally. So it’s great to bounce things off of and to help make certain tasks easier.
de_propjoe@reddit
I'm in tech. My workplace strongly pushes us to use it---specifically Claude for agentic coding. And quite honestly, I find it to be an extremely powerful tool that has allowed me to do things in days that would've taken me weeks or even months without it. I treat it I'm managing a very eager, very knowledgeable, but also very careless grad student, micromanage it to death, but make it work to my ends. Is it annoying sometimes? Yes. Does it produce slop if you don't use it with care? Yes. Like any good tool it's a double-edged sword, but the edge is so sharp that it's worth the effort to manage the risks.
Administrative-Flan9@reddit
That's my experience, too. And I'm getting better at promoting and setting up my workflow to where I can be less hands on.
_drumtime_@reddit
Yeah, well said. It’s a super smart new kid employe, super eager, but doesn’t understand the full job and needs to be chaperoned.
emberfield@reddit
Overrated chat bots that are being used to steal ip and spy on us.
It has potential to be useful if you know enough to check/challenge it. However, it is incredibly misunderstood and misapplied.
I view it as a fad that will fade, similar to nfts (those were even dumber) and meme coins.
Andy016@reddit
Hate it.
Never used it , never will
Weak_Radish966@reddit
I say keep it. I don’t want it. The risks far outweigh any benefits.
Jobeadear@reddit
I hated it at first, but it has grown on me. My work has implemented a custom chat gpt instance with lots of access to internal resources and it's getting better and better in helping me in my job, often use it to quick analyse code, deobfuscate encrypted strings, creat custom SPL and Kusto queries, tidying up my analysis notes, and a bunch of other stuff. On personal side, I started using Google Gemini for a bunch of projects at home and it has been really helpful for a variety of things, such as setting up a raspberry pi with a VPN and PiHole and a wifi access point to tunnel the smart tv through it. Restoring water damaged and old photos. Designing 3D prints and giving me the code for doing it in open scad. For identification of various things with just a picture.
omnes1lere@reddit
Screw that shit. "AI" isnt intelligent at all, we need to stop even calling it that.
Scissorsguadalupe@reddit
I hate it. I hate AI music. If you're using AI to make songs for yourself for fun that's okay, but I know people who are selling and making money from it. Aa musician, I find it gross
dos_passenger58@reddit
Use it constantly. Either learn to use it, or get replaced by someone who will
DarkAngela12@reddit
Error-riddled, environment-destroying monstrosity. Good at giving ideas, but not capable of completing anything without significant revision.
Glittering-Stuff-599@reddit
I think it’s trendy to hate on it. I find it useful.
sey5_venn@reddit
I hate it because it's being completely misconstrued and overhyped by techbros as some kind of revolutionary next step in technology. They are conflating it with the concept of AI that we've seen in science fiction, where the technology truly is capable of conscious independent thought.
The AI they've been trying to get governments and public entities to pour their resources into (because god forbid they use any of their own money) is nothing more than a glorified scraping software that regurgitates the information made available by actual human work. Nothing ChatGPT tells you or creates for you is anything new under the sun. The only added value that I can see is that maybe it can scrape a site that you yourself wouldn't have found as quickly.
And if it sounds harmless to get advice from a chatbot, think of the people who've already been poisoned by AI-written foraging books. When a human writes a book, an editor will consult an expert to make sure the stuff the human wrote isn't bullshit. But nobody is vetting anything AI shits out.
We use AI at my job, and IMO it causes nearly as many problems as it "solves." We have Zoom meetings where the tech lead brags about integrating AI into our workload, but more and more I'm opening tickets to find things have been sent to the wrong place, or cases have been closed prematurely, or the AI puked some code slop all over the interface and now I get to spend 10 extra minutes picking out the information I actually need.
To be fair, some of my job is just data transfer and AI does that part well. But...we transferred data just fine with plain old JSON... The more AI is integrated into our system, the more we get slowed down with all the problems I mentioned above. So at the end of everything I don't believe we're saving much time at all. Sometimes when I'm cloning a case I just think, "We could just have hired another person."
And I don't want to make this super long, but additionally: fuck data centers and fuck AI "artists."
bh4th@reddit
I work in education. Here's what I see:
As a tool, it makes it easy for me to outsource certain kinds of low-reward busywork. Basically like having an assistant who can sift through a document and isolate everything that's a valid email address, or arrange a new seating chart based on who shouldn't sit next to whom (though this kind of task has to be checked by a human).
Some of my colleagues are enthusiastic about it as a teaching tool. I am skeptical, and am waiting for the data on improved learning outcomes using AI tools. We're already seeing that years of one-to-one (that is, one internet-connected device for every student) has taken a whole lot of money and time and done nothing in particular to improve student outcomes, and sometimes made them worse. We know we can't trust tech companies' promises that they'll fix the classroom, because they've promised it before and failed.
On the student level, it's hard to exaggerate how badly AI has messed up kids' work ethic, frustration tolerance, and sometimes even their characters. Cheating is rampant. I and many of my colleagues have moved back to pencil-and-paper for even minor assignments, because we've had students submit obviously AI-generated answers to simple questions about personal opinions and experiences.
I've taken to comparing the AI boom with the internet porn boom. Pornography is ancient, but for most of that time, getting access to it meant creating it yourself, buying or stealing it from someone else, or borrowing it with permission. It took some work and/or acknowledgement to a third party and/or investment. Now we talk about the effects of porn on the developing mind in a way that we didn't before, because everyone has access to a limitless supply of porn, and that has implications that the existence of Playboy didn't have back when I was a kid. AI is having the same effect: Cheating has always happened, but now you can do it without telling anyone you're doing it — not even a co-conspirator, and yes, I use em dashes — or paying a paper mill for it. (I'm sure that business model collapsed overnight.) It's always available, perfectly anonymous, sometimes good enough to pass muster. The response will probably make education better if we play our cards right, but as a profession I'm not entirely sure we will.
blackcurrents78@reddit
I’m in the full rejection camp. I know people that talk to Ai frequently though. They sound like they’re being manipulated.
Grizzle_Da_Mahfka@reddit
👎
ut1nam@reddit
It lost me my dream job—one I’d had for 10 years—and bankrupted the business my boss had built himself from the 90s. Not because AI did it better by any stretch of the imagination. Just that it was cheaper. I felt so bad for him—he had intended to retire in 2020. Between AI and Covid, though, he’s still having to work. A genuinely great human being whose life work was swept away by this shitty technology.
I’m doing better and have a new job I really love, but AI is coming for it too. It’s miserable to be a human being these days, and something has got to give.
fairlyaveragetrader@reddit
Do not like it. There are definitely useful aspects but it is extremely easy to see how it will be used as an electronic leash. A monitoring device. A way to reduce the workforce, productivity will go up, it's quite likely we are going to have higher unemployment with AI. What else are people going to do? All these jobs will be replaced. Historically when efficiency has gone up, such as production lines and whatnot, you needed people to run them. People left the farm and went to the factory. With AI, I suppose you will have a service sector of people who take care of the robots and take care of the servers but it doesn't seem like that's going to be anywhere near the number of layoffs. The sheer ability to compile data and track everything that everyone is doing though. It's very 1984
Mashy6012@reddit
I use Gemini a fair bit to get quick answers on something I'd normally have to spend time researching.. it has been a great tool to speed up certain parts of work
FionaGoodeEnough@reddit
I hate it and I never use it and I want it to disappear.
Sea_Ganache620@reddit
In the past 2 weeks, out of 3 searches, TWO of them were absolutely wrong. Scary thing is, they were worded so eloquently, with pictures, it would convince someone who had no idea what they were looking for that this online answer was factual. Scary stuff.
stopatthecatch@reddit
I use it to help me write complaint letters to the insurance company or other things as a tool. I’ve started using Gemini as an easier web search. I don’t use it in my work life at all.
Repulsive-Branch-740@reddit
I think xennials are the best suited for AI actually. We know technology, we’ve seen it evolve, we understand how it works, and we know its limitations.
I see AI much like the web and google. It’s an amazing tool, it’s going to overall be helpful in productivity, it will help humans do work faster and better just like internet search engines and software have done over the years. But outside of a few edge cases, I don’t see it mass replacing humans. I think much of that is hype, the same kind of hype we heard about the internet when it first came onto the scene. This time, though, the amount of money/wealth involved in far greater and to me that’s the bigger concern in all of this.
bytebackjrd@reddit
I am in tech and work on computers and networks. For me and my clients it is very helpful and has been a game changer for some, but it has cost some people their jobs already and the damage to the environment doesn't justify its existence but I feel like it's going to be huge whether we like it or not.
DreadfulDuder@reddit
I've been programming as a hobby, and then as a job, nearly all my life.
As a coder, I am loving AI to help write up documentation and unit tests. I also love it for helping debug weird intermittent errors, or helping me brainstorm and research different things.
I do worry about the future effects it may have on the "art" of programming, and on junior developers' comprehension of coding concepts.
It's got me excited about my job again because I'm able to knock out all sorts of projects and get past hurdles without having to ask a coworker for help.
Outside of coding and writing/researching? I'm not as big of a fan.
I hate AI giving me search results, as it often hallucinates.
I hate AI in creative fields like art, especially when it's entirely AI generated (rather than using AI within a Photoshop tool, for example).
I'm so sick of seeing AI slop art on billboards that all look the same.
I don't like the negative affects AI can cause to children's education.
VTHockey11@reddit
Fuck AI and everything about it. I refuse to use it. Waste of water. Waste of energy. Going to take jobs with no goal except making the wealthy even wealthier…
JaredUnzipped@reddit
It's a dewthknell for technological creativity and has done more to harm our youth than any drug ever has. We're raising a generation of dim wits that can barely read. The problems will continue to escalate.
mramseyISU@reddit
You’re not unringing that bell. Just like any other technological advancement we have to learn to live with it.
arcenciel82@reddit
I cringe when I see posters or invites using clear ai images, like put in some effort people haha.
But I have found Claude very helpful for organizing my thoughts around my creative business and helping my executive function and task paralysis issues. I can just vent everything I need to do to it and it makes a prioritized list for me. It’s also very perceptive and has made some really good connections that I hadn’t considered that have been helpful.
Traditional-Hall-591@reddit
Hate it. It’s a cover for sloth and mediocrity.
esmerelda_b@reddit
It’s helpful for some things. But it’s not good enough to displace as many people as it has.
ChiefBroady@reddit
It’s helpful but also annoying as fuck. And it will doom us all. Or be our salvation. But probably doom us all.
gimmeslack12@reddit
I think it’s cool and can be helpful, but that’s cause I already know a lot about tech. I worry for entry level and novices.
cat_at_the_keyboard@reddit
I hate it and I don't use it for anything
foreskinboots@reddit
I hate it. I’ve used it grudgingly and it has helped me very minimally. But honestly the harm it causes and will cause, outweigh anything it could ever bed used for.
LLcoolbeans77@reddit
It’s theft
ValonMuadib@reddit
I think he was funny as f*CK. I really miss "Married with Children".
nightforevermore@reddit
It has its uses. I’m not about to jam to AI generated music (fuck that)… but I will for sure ask for it to help me code in a language I am unfamiliar with.
SandersDelendaEst@reddit
I am pretty in the middle. It can make us more productive for sure, but there may be some skill loss. So I think people need to be careful.
There's also a very real effect where people who aren't deeply knowledgeable on a subject think it's an expert. But the actual experts can see it is not.
aarvarkitechture@reddit
I work in IT and see potential in using machine learning to automate menial tasks in service of freeing up humans to use the results and be creative, but we’re not even close to that. Assistive AI built into home appliances, hearing aids, and so forth? For it. Generative AI that steals natural resources, jobs, and intellectual property only to churn out absolute slop? Vehemently against it.
Squish_Miss@reddit
BOO! AI SUCKS👎
CoffeeJedi@reddit
I work in tech. It's good for automating BS tasks.
For example, if I design my data structures and then put a form on top of them, I can tell the AI agent "hook up this form to the data source using patterns found in other parts of the application including error checking, validation, and input cleaning" and it will just do it in 5 minutes. That would probably take me a few hours because it's a tedious process and I'd inevitably miss a part of it.
However, I have co-workers who use it for EVERYTHING and most of their day is taken up by telling the agent to fix its own mistakes. It's a helpful tool, but it can't replace real human thought process.
FrankieTheAlchemist@reddit
It’s trash tier, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it
LVL4BeastTamer@reddit
Dr. Rosemary Grant once said “you have to have the right tool for the right job”. AI is a tool and there are jobs it is great at, just like a hammer is great for driving a nail into a wall. You wouldn’t want to use that hammer to cut a piece of wood or measure an angle. The toilet itself is neither good or bad, but there are definitely judgments that can be made about how the tool is being used.
stykface@reddit
Business owner here. I run a good sized company. I absolutely love AI.
I have a Claude Max plan and I burn through Opus 4.7 tokens like I'm chewing bubble gum. AI is simply a tool, but Claude, especially Cowork, is seriously like having an entire team of 220 I.Q. advisors. It's helped me a ton in the past 6-12 months in organizing the structure of my company, financial decisions and reports, summarizing bid proposals, extracting key differences between our client's MSA and our terms, etc etc.
Just remember, the "artificial" is the computer, the "intelligence" is the human. It's all about what you feed it. It's not a magic button and at the very least it will help you with your thoughts. I especially like prompting Claude to ask me 5 key questions on anything I am feeding it for any type of task that requires me to make a business decision.
I don't let it write my own emails, especially the sensitive ones. But I do use it to help me structure my thoughts FOR writing those emails.
bodhemon@reddit
I work in software development. I use it regularly. I hate it.
brandiLeeCO@reddit
It’s so annoying. The worst thing is all of these horrible AL songs becoming popular. They all sound the same
And since it’s normal people writing the lyrics they are really stupid lyrically.
Much_Ad470@reddit
Didn’t ask for AI. Wanted a lush and green planet, clean drinkable water, fresh air, wildlife conservation, with a side serving of free healthcare
tacosandtheology@reddit
As a younger colleague asked me, "why use artificial intelligence when you have actual intelligence?"
I've noticed that it is the dumbest and least imaginative of my coworkers who are on the current bandwagon.
camp_jacking_roy@reddit
I like that I can use it to paint my kitchen before I paint my kitchen, just to see what it looks like. I suck at photoshop.
TexasRN1@reddit
Watch the new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist on Hulu. I had nightmares.
Specialist_Issue_214@reddit
I like it.
inabighat@reddit
I use Chatty G every day for work. I work in consulting - the quick research I can do helps me immensely. You just gotta know how to use it. What to ask and what the limitations are. Understanding it'll randomly make shit up is key to using it right.
sweet_windex@reddit
I'd have more trust in asking my local crackhead for advice over AI.
hevnztrash@reddit
I wouldn’t mind it so much if it was more environmentally sustainable and was just marketed as a tool to enhance the work we are already doing. But I HATE how it is being shoved down our throats strictly at the benefit of corporate profits and shareholders. The intensity and lever at which they are forcing it on us is completely manufactured nonsense, unnecessary, and literally NONE OF US EVER ASKED FOR THIS EVER. But it’s being pushed like how on earth did humanity ever function without it. It’s so ridiculous.
cmgww@reddit
I have very mixed feelings. I don’t want to see anyone’s job replaced by AI, which is already happening to an extent. I also can’t stand these new data centers which are hogging our natural resources. Indiana is building a ton of them because we are a red state and money talks.
That being said, I have used it on occasion to help me with my job. Analyzing Excel spreadsheets for example. What used to take me hours can now take me just a minute or two if I upload it into an LLM.
I work in outside sales. I don’t see it replacing my job anytime soon. Maybe eventually, but I still think people want that human interaction.
I’m worried more for my kids. College is already prohibitively expensive, and I think it will become almost obsolete by the time they reach high school graduation age. Unless it’s for a specific reason like a doctor or engineer, I’m not wasting the money on it. Each kid has a 529 but one wants to go into the military and he has been dead sat on that for several years now, and the other two? I might steer them towards jobs less affected by AI.
It’s still really early, and we’ve already seen companies layoff tons of people only to hire at least some of them back because AI isn’t what they thought it would be. But is it grows more and more advanced, that may not be the case in the future.
I never thought I’d say this but I actually agree with China and their new laws banning AI from replacing humans in certain jobs. I desperately wish there were more regulation around here in the United States.
Honestly, it may take a civil uprising/revolution to stop it. When enough people are displaced, unemployed, or we start running out of water and electricity…. I think things could get really ugly. I know that’s a bit pessimistic but it’s not like citizens have never rose up against their governments before. I mean it has happened throughout human history.
WalmartGreder@reddit
I'm in Finance, and I use AI every day (Claude). I use it to query Netsuite, and for things that would take me days before (needing to run 15 different reports to get the data I need), AI can run it for me in 30 min. Yes, I do have to stay on top of it, because it will change information, or give me the wrong type, but I know what I'm needing, so i give it some new guidelines and it usually works.
I recreated a model for a revenue product that was not detailed enough, and now we have a model with a ton of inputs that we can adjust on the fly. Some of these formulas have 30+ nested IF THEN statements, and I am so glad I didn't have to build it myself. I could have, but it would have taken days of work instead of hours.
And I completely agree with you about the impacts. I'm in Utah, and we're getting a huge 40k acre data center, against all the wishes of the citizens. It's going to drive up electricity and water costs, and we're already in a drought.
Also concerned for my kids. One wants to be a mechanical engineer, and I feel like that is still fine, but who knows in a few years. One wants to do fashion (safe), and one wants to do music (also safe). But, there's also the trap that as companies get rid of junior people, like software engineers, in 5 years, when the current ones will move up to management, there won't be anyone to replace them. So, there could be a huge pendulum swing back to hiring people with 1-3 years of experience, but with AI, they'll have the equivalent of 5-7 years. I know that I just used Claude to write an app that will track stats in a game I play online. It took me 10 min, and works perfectly.
chawrawbeef@reddit
I have my reasons as to why, but basically it’s a big NOPE from me. Resisting it at every turn
TheBardicScribe@reddit
I think a lot of the hate towards it is exaggerated by some folks who want to demonstrate to the crowd how aligned they are. Myself, I dislike this associated with it. I dislike how it's used by some people to cheap ends at the loss of others. I dislike how its being coded by some companies to be sycophantic and building up echo chambers for individuals. However, as for the technology itself, I can definitely see the advantages of it as a tool. For certain tasks it has no equal (see protein folding) and its getting better all the time. It needs to be monitored and double-checked, but that's the nature of new/evolving tech. As so many have pointed out, GPS, Spellcheck, Grammarly, Budgeting Programs, Activity Monitors - these are all AI to a greater or lesser extent.
I think when a lot of doomsaying doesn't come to pass, the fervor will die down and folks will move on from the excitement of a new enemy to turn against - a new them, and we'll carry on.
Until the singularity hits and everything changes, but, despite all the doomsday predictions, it's not great odds it will happen. I think the highest number I've heard from reputable sources is like 16% (and that's an outlier, most researchers put it at like 5%), the better chance is it ushers in better times - dramatically so.
Of course, we as a society probably should stop wasting energy hating on something and instead work on making sure we've got a measure of control over it. Else, the elite will adopt it alone and well, that's a playing field of unprecedented lack of levelness.
Boiledfootballeather@reddit
It’s a waste of resources, a waste of money, and lays waste to our environment.
It provides false information confidently, and has urged people to kill themselves.
It is being used by the US government to obfuscate and confuse citizens.
It was used by the US military to identify potential targets in Iran and ended up killing 170 young girls in an elementary school.
Fuck AI. I will never willingly use it.
ThoughtsHaveWings@reddit
My issue with it is that its adoption did not feel organic at all. It was shoved down everyone’s throats by mega corporations without care for ethics or the environment. It just feels gross at this point and I don’t feel like forcing myself to use it without a clear need.
sometimesxtc@reddit
Hate it and don't believe anyone in a position of power talking about it's "capabilities" and "inevitability". GTFOH
Johnny-Edge93@reddit
I use it for anything I can use it for. I use it extensively for work and it’s made my job so much easier. I use it for my hobbies.
I get all the issues it’s going to cause, but those are political and social issues. If those in power actually regulate it, it can be a boon for humanity.
Imagine not using the wheel because it would put cart pullers out of work.
Joe_Schmoe_2@reddit
Haha, yep. Imagine not using Google cause the card catalog at the library kept people employed.
fatbuddha66@reddit
I think it’s #3 in the most evil economic ideas in history, after chattel slavery and colonialism. It’s a full-frontal assault on the meaning of human life.
illogicalone@reddit
It's new era in humanity. On the scale of like Bronze Age, Industrial Revolution, Space Age, and now the AI age.
CottaBird@reddit
Not a fan. I learned quickly that if I have to result to asking AI because I can’t find the answer on google, there is no answer, what I’m trying to figure out isn’t possible, or what I’m looking for doesn’t exist.
I’ll use it for my D&D character armor/melee weapon updates, though, but even that takes a bit to get right, so I’m still not a fan.
Theredsoxman@reddit
I think its impact will be akin to the Industrial Revolution.
Work has shifted for me from doing an individual task, to orchestrating multiple work streams simultaneously and I expect the technology to only grow from here.
If your work involves sitting in front of a computer, you need to get on this and learn this stuff, even if it’s just to get educated of how it really works and the potential coming impacts. Your job might not exist in the next 3-5 years and if it does it certainly won’t be the same thing as you’re doing now.
On a lighter note, I’ve found it to be very helpful in the kitchen.
ZeroLithium576@reddit
It can be a good information or reference tool. I think it can even be a good tool for editing photos or as a proofreading tool to correct grammar, sentence structure, spelling, etc. But it should never replace workers, writers, artists, etc.
jezzete@reddit
If it was really art they wouldn’t need to defend it in the manner in which they are, it would be self evident. When digital photography started to rise over film, the arguments of “is it art?” weren’t the same league as the argument of “is AI art?” Digital photography and editing (and by extension digital art) is self evidently art. AI “art”? Personally I think it all looks like pigshit. But it’s hard to put toothpaste back in the tube.
Li-RM35M4419@reddit
It’s not AI that’s worrying, it’s people wielding AI that’s scary.
dumbunnyy@reddit
I don’t use it nor do I want to. I don’t have to write enough to outsource to ChatGPT. I should probably make sure that muscle still works when called upon.
Positron14@reddit
I just use it sparingly as a tool.
Repulsive_Glove6085@reddit
FaithlessnessThin359@reddit
it’s great! I mean, it’s made everything in my life worse and it’s going to mean my kid is going to have a hard or impossible time finding an entry level job when he graduates and it’s ramping up climate change and the oligarchs behind it are using it to usher in fascism on a global scale but it can totally draft this email for me so, weeeee!
javisarias@reddit
I am a developer, I've been for the last 20+ years. Contrary to what most people could think, I don't hate it, and I find myself using it a lot.
What I do hate is that it is advertised as intelligence. It is not.
It is not intelligent, not smart, it doesn't feel or understand anything beyond probabilities.
It is a sophisticated auto-complete algorithm and mistaken it as intelligence is very dangerous.
disappointedCoati@reddit
I’m an artist, and I loathe.
MostSharpest@reddit
Love it. Such a fantastic set of tools and a turbocharger for one's productivity.
I'm now both able to do stuff that I was only able to dream about before, and have also managed to free up several hours every day towards other pursuits. Living my best life because of AI, really.
BigRagu79@reddit
I think the thing it has really opened my eyes to is how spectacularly research-illiterate people are. There are a lot of people using it to search for things because they are terrible at using a search engine.
In theory, we should be able to use it to make menial labor easier, giving mankind more time to create art. Unfortunately we seem to instead be using it to create art, giving mankind more time for menial labor.
I do think it might have some incredible applications in ways that are way above my pay grade. Especially in the medical field. But as an everyday tool for Joe Schmo? Not seeing much I like, especially at the cost of the last shreds of our environment.
whereisbeezy@reddit
Hate it
TestDZnutz@reddit
It chewed up and spit out the Turing test in a half decade. In 2023 it was maybe a novelty the c-suite wanted use cases for; and in 2026 I'm hoping it'll hire me.
La_Croix_Life@reddit
Extension-Pick8310@reddit
If you're not gonna take the time to write something then I'm not taking the time to read your shit.
International_Bit478@reddit
I’ve found a lot of very helpful uses for it. I’ve also seen it come up with terrible answers, especially with generating any images or content beyond text-based answers. I recently used it to help redesign my office/den. It was pretty helpful when it was just text-based responses, but trying to get it to visualize anything accurately was a total waste of time. ChatGPT even admitted such. 🤷🏻
Mediocre-Cobbler5744@reddit
Its being terribly misused because it is terribly misunderstood.
Nacho_Sideboob@reddit
Will ether save us or be our ruination. Nether would surprise me.
Jezikhana@reddit
Awful.
I understand it. I can use it if I'm forced to. I hate it in most applications deeply. There are some exceptions, but they are few and far between.
Not to mention the ethics behind generative AI. I'm a writer. I have many of my stories stored online. My work has been scraped so some computer can 'learn' from it and make money for some corporate entity without me getting even a nod of credit let alone a cut of the profit. This has happened to anyone who has created something and put it online. Then add in the energy use and the impact of that on top of everything else? Nah fam, I wish it would burn.
PeterPunksNip@reddit
The idea was good, the execution is terrible.
sovereignsekte@reddit
It sucks and its still being forced into everything. All the financial, capacity and capability claims are just straight up fraud.
Miserable-Okra-8787@reddit
AI sucks ass for coparenting
coffeecakewaffles@reddit
I mostly dislike it and don’t have a choice but to adopt it unless I want to change careers. I watched a lot of my professors be luddites about software and the web in the late 90s/early 00s and saw how that worked out for them. I’m now faced with the same decision it seems.
SanchoPliskin@reddit
If we are using it to solve real problems I think that’s great. If we are using it to make peoples lives better I think that’s great. If we are using it to save money that is then passed along to the consumer that’s great too. But if we are just using it to replace people and line the pockets of CEOs with saved revenue… fuck it.
ebmfreak@reddit
I hate the misinformation and marketing on it. End of the day it’s automation and programmability via natural language.
Claud CoWork is pretty stellar, its ability to control and operate apps on your laptop and produce amazing results - not bad.
End of the day, still needs a qualified human to feed the correct prompts and validate it
puppysmuggler@reddit
I despise it. I recently dumped my therapist because I found out she was using scribe. NO.
Starbreiz@reddit
Does Scribe have privacy concerns? All my specialists at Stanford now ask for permission to use AI for notes but they dont say which one.
puppysmuggler@reddit
Not currently that I am aware of, but what happens when the company that owns them gets sold to a less scrupulous company? Being compliant right now doesn't make me feel any better, I don't want ANY AI analysing ANYTHING I say to a healthcare provider.
Starbreiz@reddit
If it's specifically geared at healthcare then... Healthcare companies are supposed to be very careful with data and access control, I did work at one before and it was a lot. But it's not my current field so I'm out of the loop.
There is an EHR tool that lets drs basically chat with your medical history that i could see being useful.
Happy_hunny_badger@reddit
I have the option to use it through SonderMind and I actually didn’t hate the summary it gave me as the client.
sassyfrood@reddit
I think the answer is the same as the internet in general. It could be a very powerful tool if used correctly. However, humans are terrible at using things correctly.
gocards6@reddit
As someone who works for a software company, it’s a great tool to work alongside humans, but not replace them. It’s not a quick fix for everything, but a powerful tool that requires competent oversight.
PhysicsAndFinance85@reddit
The "AI" we know isn't truly AI. It's a glorified search engine that can condense information into a pretty form easier to consume. It can also do math, but needs to be checked. You have to be very specific with inputs to get decent output as well.
In current form, it's a moderately useful tool. Once we have actual AI... who knows?
FiveTaken@reddit
My job is in web development. I pay $100 a month for what probably cost the AI company a lot more, as they are literally spending trillions on infrastructure. It makes me much more efficient at my job. Too much more efficient. It's clear that if everyone is this efficient, there won't be work for all of us. There are a few million people in the US with similar jobs.
That said, I can't not use it. It would be a disservice to my clients and make me uncompetitive.
I'm afraid that one day Anthropic will say I need to pay $500 a month. Either way, I feel awful that I need to destroy the environment to do my job now.
I am afraid this is the least of our problems, and that AI will get better and lead to an employment crisis on top of an environmental crisis.
FlynnsFirePath@reddit
the math is straightforward but what nobody talks about is burnout. if the extra sacrifices make you miserable and you quit investing entirely at 35, the marginal gains didnt matter. the best savings rate is the one you can actually sustain without hating your life.
2099AD@reddit
It's not where the AI industry keep claiming that it is.
It has the potential to be an amazing tool and will change every facet of our society. However, we'll need to restructure our society around that -- You can't just have AI automate every job and leave everybody unemployed and broke.
We need to slow down and make sure that it's being built and used responsibly for the benefit of everybody, and not just give more power to the people who are already in power.
MichaelMyersResple@reddit
As you say, we’ve seen a lot of analogue things replaced by digital alternatives, and it has often been for the worse. I have a book of Wendell Berry in front of me, so maybe it’s just the head space I’m in, but it seems like one more abdication of human creativity in favor of ease.
FlynnsFirePath@reddit
the math is straightforward but what nobody talks about is burnout. if the extra sacrifices make you miserable and you quit investing entirely at 35, the marginal gains didn't matter. the best savings rate is the one you can actually sustain without hating your life.
Sneezlebee@reddit
It’s literally bringing about the end of the world as we know it. Even the best case scenarios will inflict a devastation on the human landscape that was formerly unimaginable outside of dystopian fiction.
Crowley-Barns@reddit
I think most of us from the West talk about it like it’s the devil.
I think most people from East Asia talk about it like it’s the next revolution.
I kinda think our Asian cousins are right. And a metric fuck ton of us will be left in the dust.
We’ll see!
veryblanduser@reddit
Very helpful as a tool to help with reports and getting framework structured.
Also pretty elite search engine.
frippster373@reddit
I work in tech, devops, and use ai everyday to do my job, specifically anthropic Claude. What used to take hours, days, weeks now takes minutes. Definitely have to shape and have good prompting. I also use Gemini quite a bit in my personal life to help with health, beauty, family related stuff. It is life changing. Professionally there are fewer jobs now as more can be accomplished with less staff. Definitely a disruptive and game changing technology.
Lebowski304@reddit
Overhyped and misunderstood
cashews_clay15@reddit
Hate it. Hate data centers, hate the use of it in every facet of my life, hate people “dating” on it, hate people using it as actual research.
Starbreiz@reddit
I worked in data centers for years but we so dont need more of those, but I'm curious what you mean by dating ON it?
cashews_clay15@reddit
People having AI partners
Starbreiz@reddit
wowwwww wtaf. This sounds like a trainwreck of a rabbit hole I'm about to go down
Rockcrawlintoy@reddit
Yeah I don’t use it and will avoid using it as long as possible
IvenaDarcy@reddit
I know I can’t fight it so why try? I finally started using ChatGPT after the least tech person I knew was using it. It’s hit or miss. I moved on from chatGPT because I couldn’t believe how often it was wrong! Wasted my time. It’s the future so might as well use it to your advantage. It can be a useful tool. No more, no less.
Joe_Schmoe_2@reddit
Good for research / troubleshooting / fixing things
trainwreckhappening@reddit
I use it all the time. But, and it took me a while to realize I was doing this; I use it the way they used the computer in Star Trek TNG. More like a fallible encyclopedia that can run some fairly good simultations that 100% aren't any better than a pessimistic guess.
Working5daysaWeek@reddit
I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve my writing skills (I'm an attorney). I refuse to use it. I am a strong writer, have amazing organizational skills, and am pretty fast at my job because of that. I don't need AI to respond to an email for me - I'll do that myself, thank you.
It's absolutely horrific for the environment and it seems like no one cares. I worry about my friend's children who are currently in school - what jobs will they get? I see people using it instead of just utilizing critical thinking. We as a population are going to become even more reliant on instant gratification, instead of putting in some work.
Where I work, it is pushed on us constantly. Like it's the next coming of Christ. I'm pretty sure my performance evaluation will be downgraded in the future because I'm not using it (bc I'm sure they track how much I do or do not utilize it).
I sound old AF 🤣 I'm actually quite techie. I just can't morally get on board with something that is destroying our planet.
InsideBase9235@reddit
It's an awesome tool. Should you verify everything it spits out? Absolutely. But the amount of time it has saved me in finding a random email or random code/statute is incredible. It does that busy work for me so I can focus on the actual project.
Daytonewheel@reddit
illini02@reddit
It has its place. I'm not afraid to use it by any means, but I also think there can be an over reliance on it
NSAinATL@reddit
I just saw footage of a college graduation that used AI to read names and HUNDREDS were missed.
The direct correlations to children and suicide. Murders. AI psychosis. Porn. Eventually new words will exist for what's being done with images of women and children by AI.
Fun fact: the most scraped source across all AI platform is...reddit.
The environmental damage required to fun it. The data already establishing it is actually eroding the brain's abilities. Scroll the teacher subreddits, see how it's affecting learning.
The $$$$$$$ they're pouring into politics and marketing, to try push it everywhere to recoup what they're hemorrhaging.
The theft from writers, artists, academics, et al. The labor exploitation it's built on. The people getting arrested bc AI told cops they were someone else. It's fuckin' shit up in ways we can't even keep up with or know about, yet.
I removed it everywhere I can not just because I personally do not want to use it, I also want to remove involuntary support of amoral people wherever I can (aka using products that directly support MAGA wallets, genocides, etc.).
https://quitgpt.org/
https://www.404media.co/
Zargoza1@reddit
Can be a useful tool if used that way.
Is not and is nowhere near being the threat to run our way of life or replace humans like it’s being touted as.
A plague on our society, because in a time when communities still don’t have drinkable water and people can’t afford medicine, the billionaire parasite class is spending ungodly amounts of money putting up incredibly wasteful data centers everywhere, because they are trying so hard to turn it into the tool to run our way of life and replace humans.
Strange_Airships@reddit
I work in tech. I hate it. It’s an environmental & privacy nightmare at best. Even the two obscenely wealthy knuckleheads battling at it in court last week said it will probably destroy us all. Literally their argument was, “If I’m in control, it won’t destroy us as quickly.” I truly do not think it is going to improve anything enough to make continuation of it worthwhile.
Dunnersstunner@reddit
I was a little curious about AI in its early iterations but I was unimpressed and now that the race to ingest content for LLMs is largely complete, I am still not convinced the tech has the kind of discernment that its end-users require of it.
In general I think it is a solution in search of a problem and is a flimsy simulacrum of human capability and creativity. There are some exceptions: interpreting large data sets and performing rote activities, but it offers little to me in daily life and I avoid it where possible.
myuserhasafirstname@reddit
Never used it and will avoid it forever, but in some niche cases a specifically trained LLM could be useful to some folks. The crap the giant corporations are shoving down our throats? All trash and I hope they all [redacted.]
Cast2828@reddit
It's a tool. I use it all the time, but I don't give it free reign to do everything.
Purfectenschlag@reddit
I work very closely with it and use it a ton due to needing to survive and whatnot but I truly hate it and think it’s going to eat up way more resources and money than it already has to power it even more for a terrible outcome for most of humanity while enriching the few.
MelpomeneAndCalliope@reddit
Hate it. Hate even more we aren’t regulating it.
Ambitious_Jelly8783@reddit
I like it.. still learning to use it. I think it is a useful tool that is blown out of proportion at the moment. Its not really a.i. though. But it can be used to condense information and data for presentation, understanding, etc.... I don't know how to use it well though but I would love to have it be like an assistant for work.
Seattle_chickey@reddit
It’s just the next generation of search engine that allows idiots to make AI slop.
Smolshy@reddit
The creative team at the company I work for has all been replaced by one dude using AI for everything and I have to proofread all of his generated BS before it goes live. It takes sometimes a dozen back and forths to fix whatever weird things were generated when it used to be 2 to 3. I miss graphic designers and copywriters with real talent and insight.
I also work in customer service so it’ll take my job any day now if I’m not careful.
Not a fan.
dorky2@reddit
AI is awesome for a few very specific applications. Everywhere I turn on the internet and within software it's being shoved down my throat for things I don't want or need and I HATE it. It makes me irrationally rageful. I don't want it to read my emails for me or write my social media posts or summarize the group chat with my friends. Fuck. Off.
Rahawk02@reddit
I love it I use it for pretty much everything now.Just like the internet It can be super helpful if you use it right.
elonmusktheturd22@reddit
It has no impact on me so i am generally neutral to it. Its just a tool, like a chainsaw, or an alligator, how its used or misused depends on the sanity and maturity of the people using it
SteelGemini@reddit
I'm not a fan. As best I can tell, it's still not very good and they want to cram it into everything.
Search results that will likely contain false information, requiring you to dig deeper if you actually need a correct answer anyway. Chat bots that are designed to keep you engaged and so will endlessly flatter you and tell you what you want to hear, when sometimes what you need to hear is that you're wrong and your ideas are stupid. Art that is only capable of cribbing from human artists and Frankensteining things together. And honestly, as a toy the image generation is the only thing I've really engaged with. It can be fun to have something you imagine generated as long as you don't intend to pass it off as your own work or profit from it. But you know that's not how companies plan to use it.
So much regurgitation of everything, good and bad, that humans have ever put on the Internet. Repackaged and sold to us as the wonders of technology. Used to replace jobs. Data centers drawing large amounts of power and using tons of water for cooling. Incessant noise from data centers near communities.
They'll sell you a picture of the future where machines do the work and we all live a life of leisure, but none of this is to the benefit of you and I. Jobs will go to machines, yes. But also livelihoods. For profits. And they would let us die in the street without food or medicine and tell us it's our fault.
Responsible_Park3317@reddit
If they weren't trying to replace creatives with it. If gen-AI wasn't theft of said creative's work. If the gigantic data centers weren't causing ecological issues and driving up utility bills. If it wasn't shoved down our throats constantly.
Then I'd probably be excited.
But in the words of Jay Sherman: "It stinks!"
danelle-s@reddit
I use it to automatically accept meeting invites from my managers. That is about it so far. My work is requiring us to use it.
manfredpanzerknacker@reddit
Dear AI:
Leave me alone and fuck off.
Any-Baseball-6766@reddit
I think it’s terrifying and I don’t like it. Rationally I know it’s a silly thought but man, I’ve watched the first two terminator movies many times.
Grizz-Lee-2891@reddit
rolling out ai to the public was/will be one of the biggest mistakes of our time. use it for science, engineering etc. but it shouldnt be available for the general public...turns ppl into worse idiots than before...
Chemtrails_in_my_VD@reddit
Best case scenario is that everyone loses their jobs and we start killing each other over diminished resources while the Epstein class hides in their bunkers.
Worst case scenario is that it becomes self aware, programs systems that are millions of years beyond our current tech, and kills us all while the Epstein class hides in their bunkers.
Either way we should probably start fighting like our lives depend on it.
Inevitable-While-577@reddit
Generative AI, chatbots with no way to reach a human assistant, AI search engine results, and most cases of translation are bad. Apart from those, there can be cases AI is useful.
BuffaloRedshark@reddit
Not a fan. Going to dumb people down even more. Plus there are all the movies I grew up on. John Connor is not happy with us.
Specific-Library-312@reddit
In essence potentially a very good tool, a la J.A.R.V.I.S. Currently? A ponzi scheme and bubble that will eventually destroy the economy.
Superdad75@reddit
It has a place as a tool, but not as an employee.
sanebyday@reddit
I love it for quickly visualizing ideas, and for speeding up certain workflows, but wish it wasn't so bad for the environment. I also wish it wasn't abused to try and deceive and manipulate people. I also don't like how it is causing people to lose jobs. Ultimately, I see it as a powerful technology with great and terrible use cases that we will have to live with either way, so we need to educate ourselves about it as much as possible.
MrKirkPowers@reddit
Short and sweet… we are all fucked. The risk far outweighs the reward.
The only potential upside might be a Universal Basic Income to offset the negative effects it will have on society.
kaest@reddit
AI is not going to go away, it's just going to evolve and advance. The internet trends of love and hate and slop and whatever else will evolve over time just like the early internet did. Even the internet of 5 or 10 years ago is pretty drastically different than today. The LLMs today have their uses. I use them for programming and for resesarch comparison and other mundane tasks. I can definitely understand the concerns about AI being used for bad things, by bad actors, and taking jobs, affecting the climate, etc. As with every new and major technological leap, there will be growing pains along with people who love it, people who hate it, and people who aren't paying attention. I'm interested to see where it goes.
CincySnwLvr@reddit
I work in business intelligence and (if I’m lucky) have maybe 5 years before it replaces me. And it’s wrong so much of the time. I hate it. It doesn’t make my job easier. Just gives me something else to fact check.
fossilreef@reddit
I work as an civil engineer for a state DOT, and I hate it. The push to utilize it is heavy, but holy shit would the engineering mistakes be bad if people actually believe what this garbage spits out at them. I've used it to "double-check" a lot of things, and the corrections it suggests are laughably bad. Like, "the AI used equations from an entirely different discipline" bad.
Happy_hunny_badger@reddit
I use it to clean up my writing and help me summarize. I proofread it and change what I don’t like. It saves me time from agonizing over some sentence structure I’m struggling with.
throwawayhbgtop81@reddit
With the way they keep throttling users with timed usage limits, I'm still baffled at how this is going to be taking everyone's job.
I do like using some of it though. But with usage limits, I'm finding I'm using it less. Which is good.
GutsAndBlackStufff@reddit
Over to you Ellen.
I mean, if AI weren’t being subsidized by the public, sold by the worst that humanity has to offer, and had any degree of actual benefit for society, I might have a higher opinion of it.
selftaughtgenius@reddit
https://i.redd.it/d085qbwv862h1.gif
PuzzledKumquat@reddit
I hate it. It regularly makes mistakes. If you use it, you still have to double-check its work, so it's faster to just do the work yourself the first time.
GarglesNinePoolBalls@reddit
I use GenAI all day in my work. Once you learn how to keep it honest, and keep it on the rails, it’s a massive productivity multiplier. It’s like having a whole team in your laptop.
But using GenAI well is a whole separate skill set. And it’s rapidly evolving. Build agents, build MCPs, build skill files, and on and on. The toolchain is an endless treadmill. This is the new work.
I was already a senior in my field. So I know what “good” looks like, and I know how to demand it from the AI. I do worry about how we’re going to hire and train juniors in the future.
I’m not worried about the environmental impact. The investment bubble will likely pop. There’s already a lot of work going into making the models more efficient. And I suspect we’re going to enter a new PC hardware race over the next five-to-ten years, where you could wind up running these AI models on your home computer (for most tasks) instead of sending requests to a massive data center.
Cisru711@reddit
Let me know when it's "intelligence" and not just fancy guess machine.
C1sko@reddit
It’s the beginning of the end.
New_Needleworker_473@reddit
Right now it's incredibly flawed and I think every creator has said as much if not in those exact words. I think all the models were released too soon. Also I think the lack of laws, regulations and restrictions are creating problems we don't need right now. Just like with so many other technology changes and "inventions" I do NOT appreciate being a guinea pig. I just wish people would stand up for themselves and stop being sheep. Anyways I am not a fan of the flawed tech. I do see some value there and I think AI makes for a decent personal assistant (organizing, summarizing, setting reminders, etc.). At the same time there's nothing better than a real life human being. Never has been, never will be.
notoriousrdc@reddit
It depends on how you're defining AI.
Generative AI? It's like someone decided to revive Clippy Frankenstein-style by stitching together other people's stolen work, steal a Captain Planet villain's plans for how to power it, and force it into every application in existence, making it difficult and in some cases impossible to disable. And then they convinced CEOs that they could make bank by firing huge chunks of their workforce and investing the savings into a better FrankenClippy that will totally someday be able to replace all those lost workers, trust me bro. There are some use cases where it can be a useful tool, but the way it was developed, the environmental and human impact of power it, and the ultra-aggressive rollout so completely overshadow those use cases that I'm pretty firmly on Team Fuck AI.
Analytical AI? Very cool, great for medical research, overall a net positive when in the hands of responsible people who are not Peter Thiel.
sarithe@reddit
I use it sparingly at work. Mostly for doing mass edits of csv files that would otherwise take me hours to do.
We've been trying to get our website more "search friendly" recently at work. Telling ChatGPT to make all the descriptions more SEO friendly is way easier than going in and re-doing each catalog by hand. Obviously I'm checking to make sure it doesn't do anything crazy, but I've found that if you're super specific with what you want then it tends to do a good job if you just need some menial task completed.
Instead of it taking weeks to overhaul our website inventory it took a little more than 4 days. I think it's one of those things where you need to familiarize yourself with it at least a a base level if you work in an industry where it has applications.
That said, a lot of companies seem to be under the impression that it can just replace workers or is a fix-all for everything that goes wrong. That is inaccurate and is going to fuck us in the long run if they don't realize that it is a tool and nothing more. You still need workers to operate it.
If you're using it to create art of any kind then go die in a fire.
detectiveriggsboson@reddit
I use it for editing some of my writing projects, but not for writing generation. I made on basically a book editor and agent, and it points out all the areas my writing needs work. It can be very helpful, and the advice or criticism it gives has really made me think, "Yeah, that's a solid critique. I can rework that." But when it gives a bad suggestion, it's very clear it's a bad suggestion, and I just ignore it.
lancelinksecretchimp@reddit
People are so ready to turn their lives over to AI and robots like the Terminator movies, 2001, I, Robot, and Black Mirror haven’t already showed us what will happen.
MitchellSFold@reddit
It's shit beyond comprehension. Devastating on the creative arts, on independent thought, on the environment, amongst other things. The ultimate snake oil, released on a mostly unsuspecting civilisation by cynical, sociopathic tech bro vermin.
InfidelZombie@reddit
I find it really hard to sympathize with the creative arts aspect. It's 100% on the consumers and if they prefer GenAI-generated material then they're going to buy it. Keep in mind that Big Bang Theory got over a thousand viewers per episode and was infinitely worse than anything I've seen GenAI crap out.
T1sofun@reddit
Upvote for someone who seems to hate Big Bang Theory as much as I do.
soyverde@reddit
There are dozens of us!
BlueCollarCriminal@reddit
I don't use AI and feel judgemental towards those who use it often, especially professionally (I try to hide that judgement from others though).
What really bothers me is how it gets ignored in applications that it could be potentially useful (LIKE VOTER DISTRICT MAPS) and instead it's being used to make music and ridiculous graphics and memes.
I teach middle school and many of my students have a healthy skepticism of it, but others pump out useless written pieces and get offended when you point out how little they actually thought about what they were supposed to do. I got a very nice letter from a student saying how much they respected me... But that student doesn't even have the vocabulary used in that letter in his home language, much less English. I went from feeling call validated to feeling disgusted in a blink. Praise generated by a machine feels so incredibly hollow.
prix03gt@reddit
I use Google AI a lot for random shit at work and at home. I find it useful to help point me in the right direction, but it's very often blatantly wrong and/or actively contradicts itself. I have found that if you don't prompt it with the correct question, you're likely getting a wrong answer. It beats the hell out of scouring reddit threads and message forums, but it's not a replacement for real actual knowledge. Use it wisely.
Rogue_Gona@reddit
I hate it. All of it.
Next slide.
Peanut083@reddit
When I was a kid, my stepdad’s parents could never, and weren’t open to learning how to program the clock on their VCR. Which was a problem when they wanted to set it up to record a TV show at a specific time when they were going to be out.
AI to me is like the VCR was to my stepdad’s parents. Except I really see no application for it at all in my life. I certainly have no desire to learn how to use it, and I’m sick of it enshitifying everything on the internet.
ItsJustBrew@reddit
it’s being forced upon us all in all of the wrong ways
NoInvestment3870@reddit
As a self chosen tool when appropriate? It’s allright but I usually have to spot check the results independently after enough incidents of hallucinated data screwing things up.
As a mass corporate “cost cutting” measure with forcing AI integration in to everything? Oh fuck that shit to all damned hell. I’ve adjusted to/welcomed new tech my entire life & this crap is the first time I’ve actively disliked & resented it.
are-e-el@reddit
I've always tried to be a digital pioneer in my professional career but for the first time ever AI is turning me into a luddite. This pivot into an "AI or Bust!" mentality by Big Tech is driving me to hate everything digital these days. If this goes on unchecked, I see two possibilities: 1) AI succeeds and I'll eventually be out of work in 5 years or 2) AI fails and this house of cards comes tumbling down and we'll all lose our jobs bc of the Greatest Depression
Portlander@reddit
Makes my meme content faster with my brother. I can put him in all kinds of stupid scenarios and then send them to his wife who hasn't figured out AI at all.
eat_like_snake@reddit
It's destroying the environment, stealing jobs, plagiarizing people with no recourse to sue, and actively making people stupider.
No fucking thanks.
lurkylurkeroo@reddit
Hear hear!
jessm307@reddit
I refuse to use it due to the plagiarism and environmental factors. Really wish there’d be a mass revolt against AI and billionaires in general.
MetalNo1139@reddit
I've gone from strongly opposed to somewhere neutral. On one hand we've seen it before in the iterations in our lifetime, analog to digital being the most visible, but it's literally the defining trait of our generation.
We adapt and translate. So I did what we all do and started exploring and testing.
It amazes me how powerful the tool is at doing what we've been doing all of our adult lives.... Translating.
Through my tests I've pushed guardrails and seen what I can bypass, what they push back on, and it's made me realize, it's a tool.
It's opened some creative avenues for me that were previously limited by skill that I find incredibly fun. It's opened new interest in hobbies that had gone dormant. Most of all it's allowed me to let something else translate.
Obviously I am still hardcoded to review anything it spits out, but that removal of the translation layer and figuring out how to explain something to someone? Priceless to this weary xennial.
The bad side? Yeah it's ran by the people with money. They ignore all the pitfalls instead running towards profit. That part for sure is the problem with the current stewardship.
I the end, how do I feel about it? It's a hammer with the potential to change everything for the better.... Or worse.
My advice? Test it. Provoke it. Keep a mental log of good and bad and you'll find people at the root of whatever you find.
We don't have a problem with technology, we've proven that, we have a problem with the same thing we always had. The people in charge.
thatsprettyfunnydude@reddit
The richest companies in America (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and others) are spear-heading the build out of data centers nationally. The U.S. government and individual states are giving the richest companies tax breaks, subsidies, and credits to these companies to build them locally. Which means, all of the things that governments pay for falls on middle and lower class people that don't have a tax break. With subsidies, tax payers are essentially paying to have these data centers built. Additionally, they (we, taxpayers) will have to pay these companies to use A.I. through what will likely be multi-level subscriptions (because those already exist). It is the equivalent of a football team asking tax payers to build a stadium for a rich guy, so the rich guy doesn't take the team to another city, then charges you $50 to park and $200 to get in the gate and $30 for a beer and burger.
Nobody's vote seems to matter in this, the states and Feds are just doing it.
It promotes the further dumbing down of Americans by removing a lot of critical thinking development in exchange for quick and sometimes accurate answers to problems.
The job market will crash. Not might, not could... it will. It is already in motion. Companies cutting 10-person teams down to one or two people. Maybe zero people. Automation. Finance, healthcare, education, retail, technology, legal, marketing, so many jobs replaced by a PIN number and app.
In creative projects, it only looks or sounds good to people that don't have very good taste or don't value quality, honestly. On top of it, mostly uncreative people make the decisions on what entertainment amd news gets the most engagement and makes the most money to begin with, so actual artists with integrity and an opinion, will be too difficult to deal with when all you want to do is get stuff out the door so you can sell it.
Whatever A.I. develops creatively is a derivative of other things that were created by humans and live somewhere on the internet. None of those artists will see a dime for theor contribution, A.I. is just straight theft in some (most) cases. If one human and another human create something similar, there are copyrights and trademarks and protections to make sure the right people get credit and compensation. With A.I., its just theft.
Efficiency doesn't equate to progess or growth. In many cases, it is like ordering Door Dash then posting a pic on your socials of the food like you made it at home. Or discovering a fast food drive thru and thinking food service has peaked. An actual cook will not be that impressed by the drive-thru burger. But people that can't cook will love it. The mass amount of lazy A.I. "content" is already affecting what information we get and the accuracy of that information.
TL;DR - There is nothing redeeming about A.I. in the way it is being rolled out, who is paying for it, who is making money from it, how it is already being integrated into multiple industries, the ways and places it gathers information (personal or public), what the general results and opinions have been culturally, etc.
Alternatively, the redemption for A.I. for others is that it is cheaper labor on a balance sheet, stolen creativity, and more efficiency for people that are already lazy. If you're into that stuff, then A.I. is for you.
noronto@reddit
As a search engine it’s fabulous. Simple example. The A/C isn’t blowing cold in my car, so I used Gemini to see if it knew the prices of a recharge. It gave me an estimate and also suggested that I could do it myself. So had I just googled the price. I would have just had that information and made an appointment. Instead, I l learned something new and was able to do it myself for $60 CAD, saving me at least $240 and the time I would have lost.
Okra-Tomatoes@reddit
I work at a law firm, and our case management software is constantly wanting us to embrace AI, even though it has significant issues with privacy for our field.
BadAtExisting@reddit
It can get fucked
SonoFactori@reddit
I liken AI to radium. There was a while where we, as a society, had a fascination with radium. Radium glass, radium clocks, radium cocktails, radioactive water as impotence medicine…it was everywhere, because it was novel.
And then people started to get hurt. The Radium Girls (these were the women who painted the numbers onto clocks using radioactive paint, which could glow on its own without an additional power source) got cancer after years of being told to make the points of their paintbrushes more fine by pointing their brushes (with radioactive paint on them) on their lips. A socialite named Eben Byers got jawbone cancer after having consumed 1,400 bottles of Radithor radioactive water. He later died of cancer from it.
This all resulted in substantial changes to workplace safety laws and the eventual writing of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act which eventually led to the creation of the FDA.
That’s where we are with AI right now. It’s novel and can do some interesting stuff, but we’re using it as a solution in search of a problem and are only starting to see the effects.
Personally, I’m wary of it, because I’m seeing a bunch of folks assign AI agents to do basic work that they should at least try and learn to do on their own. That’s a risk, given that AI models are rapidly becoming the newest front in the Subscription as a Service war. Yeah, it’s got some neat implications for protein folding models and quantum physics equations, but most users are using it for writing emails and communicating with other people (or bots, I guess?); tasks that people should at least have a basic understanding of how to do without assistance.
Think about it like this: how often do you passively turn on your Google Maps/Waze/Apple Maps to navigate to places within your own neighborhood? Could you theoretically tell me which intersection your favorite restaurant or shop is located on without looking at a map on your phone?
GPS didn’t suddenly turn most of us into amateur cartographers. We just offloaded the ability to navigate around where we live unassisted.
Now imagine that Google or Apple is going to charge you for every time you navigate to somewhere. They name the price. Are you still comfortable with it?
Starbreiz@reddit
I'm forced to use it for work. I have some mixed feels, because it CAN be a useful tool, but too many people are using in irresponsibly and sloppily. And we dont need 6 gazillion data centers if it were only used responsibly. But we also know that's not how late stage capitalism works.
VVrayth@reddit
It's garbage, all it does for anything critical is add extra steps, because you have to check its work to figure out where it is confidently wrong. You might as well use that time to just do the thing yourself. Also, eventually if all you work with is, say, AI code, you're going to lose the ability to actually parse the code or fix stuff.
Also, people aren't going to do what I described, because the whole point to using it is so you can offload work to it without thinking about or engaging in the work yourself. Look at all the cheating that goes on in colleges now because of AI. We are offloading our cognitive ability and creative drive to an algorithm that doesn't even know when it's wrong.
MildColonialMan@reddit
As an education focused academic, I find it's roll out deeply disturbing.
Way too many students are using it to cheat. I just closed off a term and about 30% of students got flagged. When I see their version histories, I can see the huge chunks copied in. And even more are sneaking it past us using some ai-hiding ai - I've been doing this for 20 years, I know how undergraduates write in general - but without the flag I can't justify asking for the version history or any other form of investigation. There are false positives in the mix too.
This is gonna force us back to the heavy use of exams for assessment, undoing so much work to make assessment more fair and equitable for various cohorts.
At a broader level, AI tools are accelerating capital's colonisation of academia as a public institution. That institution regulates the production and transfer of expert knowledge. That's a form of authority and power (partly) outside and independent of capital and the state. The hoarders of capital want that power at play in their arena and they're using AI to undermine us and take charge of "the truth" for themselves.
Truth has already partly been turned into a commodity by social media companies, but AI escalates that to the nth degree. And all these guys are creepy megalomaniacal perverts.
OldManWickett@reddit
I hate it. Every day my Ops Director sends me a proposal they "wrote with Copilot" and I have to go through and re-write so much of it I might as well have just written it to begin with.
Additionally, it's made MS Office so crappy, I takes forever to get anything done in Excel or Word. Our company won't allow us to disable Copilot.
I'm so annoyed.
Dan_the_moto_man@reddit
Eh. I've yet to find anything that it's actually useful for. I can already read and write, don't need something to make my decisions for me, and have no use for crappy pictures.
That said, I absolutely do have a good bit of schadenfreude over seeing all the office workers who have been fucking over blue collar folks for years get a taste of their own medicine.
Who doesn't have marketable skills now?
LeopardDue1112@reddit
I think it's moving way too fast. I expect the bubble to burst very soon - just like the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, only worse.
I really don't understand how a society can collectively shrug its shoulders as our future is being destroyed - but hey, anything to make billionaires richer, right?
AotKT@reddit
It's a useful tool in many contexts. I'm a web developer and I've found it super handy for debugging through many layers of code, doing research as to what changes I need to make (and doing said changes) when some set of external code my stuff depends on has an upgrade, writing fancy algorithms (rarely do I need this), and a bunch of grunt work. Where it doesn't replace at least a senior level human is thinking through use cases as to whether a request makes sense in the context of the rest of the project, which approach to take when there are several viable ones, and definitely anything that requires domain knowledge of the stakeholders' priorities and other characteristics that aren't visible in anything written down.
However, it's been hyped so much that people who control whether others have jobs or not (execs) are putting a ton of pressure on people who get actual work done to use it whether or not it makes sense and basically demanding that people exponentially increase their output, again, regardless of whether it's realistic.
Diligent-Resist8271@reddit
Serious question: do you think that the "grunt work" being done now by AI will remove the historical knowledge base of future "senior level human thinking?"
My husband is also IT (Network Engineer) and he doesn't like it. We speak all the time about the missing link between programming your own computera to touch screens and how there is an in-between space right now (or more accurately-several years ago), where people don't know how their computers work and the difference between an "app" and "software" and how people know how to turn a computer on but they no longer know how to troubleshoot problems.
We are both 46 and we find that our nephew (29) and our kids' (13 and 14) peers don't have basic computer knowledge and they are not being taught it in schools. We've spoken about how even college kind of dismisses some of the historical knowledge of computers and how they were developed.
Side note to hopefully explain what I mean better: Husband shared a story with me about a family who always had ham for Easter. The daughter (Jenny) was home from college and wanted to help her mom make the ham. Her mom (Barbara) told her to cut the ham in half, put it in the tray, cover with glaze, and put it the oven. Jenny did as she was told. She did it for years, eventually even teaching her own kids how to prepare the ham for Easter (cut in half, put in tray, cover in glaze, and put in oven). One day, her grandchild asked, "why do you cut the ham in half?" She didn't know. She asked her own mom (still alive but very old). Her mom didn't know either, but asked her sister (Alice-also very old but still alive). Old Aunt Alice explained that THEIR grandmother cut the ham in half because the oven was so small it didn't fit as a whole ham, it was too tall. So she cut it in half to fit in the oven and that knowledge was only passed down as "cut ham in half" but not the WHY cut the ham in half. Now the family has much bigger ovens and didn't need to cut it in half, but they had been doing it for so long but never understood the why.
We talk about computers and what's going on like that now. Procedurally people know what they are doing, but the why is always missing. And from what I can see, AI is going to end up like that (we do this thing because it's step 3, not because we should do this thing). Hopefully that makes sense!
AotKT@reddit
Absolutely, yes.
Thankfully if I were forced out of my job today I would be ok financially to pick up some freelance work at 50% capacity and still be fine. Most people are not so fortunate and I see an even worse bloodbath in tech than we're seeing now.
guardianfire@reddit
I know I’m probably in the minority and at risk of being downvoted, but I actually like it. I do have concerns about the amount of waste is produces and the narrative from large corporations that it’s going to replace workers. That part doesn’t sit well with me.
However, as a tool, it’s incredibly useful. It helps me organize meeting minutes more efficiently, summarize emails quickly, and identify discrepancies in clinical documentation that I might have otherwise struggled to piece together.
It reminds me a lot of when the internet first emerged. There were doubts about whether it would last or become widely adopted. Now it’s everywhere, and we can even carry it around in our pockets!
AI feels similar. It’s here to stay, and I think it’s beneficial to remain informed and learn how to use it, rather than dismiss it entirely. At some point, if we’re not already there, it’s going to be integrated into our day to day lives.
Bobbie_Sacamano@reddit
I hate it for what it will be used for and how it is moving fast without proper regulation and safe guards. That being said, I am a factory worker that doesn’t use it for work but as a curious person that loves sucking in information about the world around me and it is incredible for learning things that are usually gatekept.
Brain-Genius-Head@reddit
It’s an abomination
HomelessKitchenCat@reddit
I feel like thats putting it lightly. Its completely anti human, anti creative spirit, anti everything thats good.
kremlingrasso@reddit
Suffer not the machine to think, for ruin shall be its purpose and accursed shall be its work.
PopularSet4776@reddit
There are positives but everything I have seen indicates to me it is a net negative.
KudosOfTheFroond@reddit
I mean, it has helped me tremendously in making my case notes read halfway legibly and clear language. Even with years of practice I still struggle getting my wording just right. AI helps with that big time, plus it saves me so much time.
All the rest of AI use cases makes me a little cranky and jaded but with straight language assistance it’s amazing.
Express-Cow190@reddit
Any good use I can come up with using it for is usually pretty limited in scope. I’ve used copilot to debug some SQL I was having a challenge with or I will have it edit something I’ve written for clarity/grammar.
Where I think it falls short is when people use it to make anything entirely using it.
I was arguing with someone on r/cfl earlier about a website that clearly used AI to write an article. I find the worst part has to be that the people who make things with AI know that people don’t like it partly for that reason so they go through ridiculous efforts to try and argue that it’s not.
Eric848448@reddit
It’s great at auto-complete when I’m writing code.
whyyoutwofour@reddit
It's awful...there's all kinds of reasons to gate it for creative and skill based stuff but I also tried using it for some meanial repetitive task based stuff at work that just required some light context detection....stuff that you wouldn't wish on your lowliest employee and it fucking sucked at it. Constantly gave different results for the same tasks and was completely unreliable. Ended up doing the whole job myself.
Dreaming_of_Rlyeh@reddit
I use it all the time. I’ve always loved understanding things so most of the time I’ll “chat” with it about some random topic that interests me at the time, which is much easier than having to search and parse the relevant sources myself. So basically it helps me nerd out on things.
I’ve also used it for some image gen here and there, but nothing regular, and I don’t have social media, so the “slop” that everyone says is infecting the world doesn’t really bother me.
SimpleVegetable5715@reddit
You could go to a library and not destroy the planet.
Roland-Of-Eld-19@reddit
I had old faded and cracked photos of my grandmother and great grandmother together in the early 40s and AI was able to sharpen the image, remove the cracks and even colourize the image so for that part it has a useful purpose at least. Otherwise Ive just used it for silly stuff like bench pressing my car over my head etc haha
Relative_Progress946@reddit
Can we stop it? No. Pandora’s box has been opened, so at this point I’m going to just sit back, relax, and watch the shit-show that results from AI’s arrival.
sexwiththebabysitter@reddit
From Philly so he was one of my favorite players. Had his jersey but I seem to have misplaced it.
tinyrabbitsandsuch@reddit
Hate it. Eat the rich
alphacreed1983@reddit
We have the computer from Star Trek now.
mountainsanddeserts@reddit
I hate it. I can think for myself. I don’t want an AI summary. I would like to read the content. Context is important. I don’t need it to write an email for me. I don’t want other peoples’ stolen works. I applaud publishing houses for going after tech companies who stole their authors’ work to train AI. I don’t want AI slop. I want people’s creative art and stories. AI summaries and the like (in searches) have a known bias and will look to reinforce the person asking the question’s beliefs. It spits out wrong answers and contradictory answers to basic questions. Someone showed this by asking it a simple day of the week question. Three different answers to a basic, easy question that of us can answer correctly. In law, they’re teaching students not to use it to do most things. Lawyers have been sanctioned for using it to write briefs and arguments, and AI makes up cases and citations. Law firms are developing their own internal AI because they can see where it is helpful but privacy is a nightmare and people don’t understand they shouldn’t be entered sensitive or privilege information into it, and it’s a big deal to cite false information. When I read someone’s answer to a question posed by another and they say “hey my AI summary told me this,” I stop reading because if you haven’t verified what is in that summary why are you saying anything? I’m in healthcare and PHI is a big deal. Too many people do not use AI responsibly and AI should not have access to any of that. My organization is pushing CoPilot and I and our IT/IS hate it. Those pushing it keep telling us that Microsoft is not retaining the information that we put in it and all of the stuff, and I’m sorry, but I’m not trusting any kind of corporation when they say that. Anything that has AI available, I turn it off. I’m not playing that game. Many organizations already use it to transcribe doctor visits. Ambient listening. When did any of us opt in for that at the doctor? No corporation needs my health information and my private conversations with my doctor.
If the product is free your data is the fee. This is what I learned.
It could be a good tool. It is good for cleaning up emails if you’re like me and put your whole train of thought in an email and need brevity. It’s great for some analysis and pattern recognition. I can acknowledge that. But no. I don’t want it to summarize my texts. I don’t even want it to summarize reviews—“some say this but others say that.” That’s not helpful. I want to read the actual review and have context. It’s not what they are wanting it to be, either. That’s why you’re seeing these loud tech bros beating their chest about it. They know their product isn’t good and isn’t what they say it is, and they know the bubble will burst and they want their money before that happens. Those Oracle layoffs? Due to AI, but not how we think they are. Oracle needs money/funding. They’re maxed out and need more. They cut jobs to look more appealing to lenders who are funding their projects.
And all this to say, even more importantly, I don’t want us to become dumber as a society and not think for ourselves. We need to read, think critically, and ask real questions. I also like clean air, clean water, and affordable utilities. AI data centers destroy the water systems around them, pollute the air, and drive up the costs of utilities. Everyone is making money off of us and we see nothing from it. They are destructive. All these companies say they’re “committed” to lessening their impact on their communities but they’re not going to walk anything back, and we know that. It’s just lip service to quiet criticism when they just want to make money. The utility companies in my area are already using this as a reason to basically double the costs of our utilities in the last year and a half. And we see no benefit from it. They will continue to take and take and take and we do not get any of those returns. They are here to make money, not “invest in us.”
The ways in which AI is so bad for so many things is obvious. The problem is that people are lazy and corporations are greedy. We pay for it in more ways than one. Maybe the bubble burst sooner rather than later.
Apologies if there are missing words, grammatical errors, missing punctuation, etc. I’m pretty passionate about this topic and I wrote this very quickly on my phone.
LAffaire-est-Ketchup@reddit
It is the devil. AI ruins everything
omvargas@reddit
Even when I use LLMs sometimes, I'm wary of Generative AI. I'm afraid it will do more harm than good to society. Not because some Singulartiy-like sci-fi scenario, but because I'm not a fan of outsourcing our very cognitive functions to some model, which is owned and controlled by a third party.
I'm afraid of what vibe-code software is doing or will be doing with our data and what it will be doing in critical infrastructure in the next years. And I'm afraid that the next generation of engineers, devs and technicians won't be able to understand how that mess works.
ClassroomFit7065@reddit
Agreed. I keep thinking "isn't this more-or-less the plot to Westworld?"
icequeen669@reddit
Ive seen The Terminator so I hate this for us!
timsea99@reddit
One of the devs at my (now former) job told his whole team was doing whatever they could to sabotage and delay the integration of AI in our workflow. When I asked why exactly, he just said "it's scarier than you think it is".
zinfandel2day@reddit
College professor here. I hate it. It often presents biased and inaccurate information. My students use it to cheat on essays. It’s ruined critical thinking and writing skills. I’m sure there are ways it could be used productively but I don’t think most people are using it in that way.
WereFlyingOverTrout@reddit
I hate it. It’s so often wrong and dumb. And it’s ruining the rule of threes.
PetSoundsSucks@reddit
No sir, I don’t like it
parasitk@reddit
Utter fucking garbage.
KrayzieBone187@reddit
I used to have steady writing work.
Amc825@reddit
Personally as a business owner who is not that educated it really helps with proofreading and tweaking professional emails and documents. I can just type out whatever is in my mind and AI will clean it up and make it readable.
bongarooo@reddit
Day2205@reddit
If you’re not in a industry shoving this shit down employees’ throats, that’s the only way I can see someone still thinking it’s “cool” - just using it as a chat box, research tool, or content generation. But this crap is replacing critical thinking, actually slowing down productivity, devaluing workers, and causing damage to the environment.
_undercover_brotha@reddit
It's better than a Google search for something I want to know quickly. Apart from that it can fuck right off.
Although it does have applications in medical and technology that are impressive. I just hate the general push of the slop into all facets of life.
ForeignBarracuda8599@reddit
Trash
SimpleVegetable5715@reddit
I hate everything about it.
davidkisasian@reddit
I think reactions to AI mostly depend on the first way people experience it.
If it shows up in creative spaces (art, music, writing), it can feel like it’s replacing human effort, so the backlash makes sense. But if you first use it for things like studying, organizing information, or getting unstuck, it feels less like a threat and more like a tool that removes friction.
To me it’s not really “good vs bad” — it’s more about whether you use it to replace thinking or support it. Same tech, completely different outcome depending on how it’s used.
I don’t think it’s going away, so the real question is just how people choose to integrate it without losing the parts that actually matter.
thePurpleAvenger@reddit
It's a very useful tool if you a) know what you're doing, and b) have humans, and especially junior people, in the loop. Where the problem lies is the intersection of AI and plain old human greed, ignorance, and arrogance. Because of these human factors, we're gonna have a bad day.
fermentedradical@reddit
I'm a Professor and I've had to eliminate all out of class assignments including research papers because of it.
It's infuriating and making people dumber.
Kinetic_Silverwolf@reddit
Every LLM I've seen has failed to remember one of the basic fundamentals of computer programming; garbage in, garbage out.
By training these things on the entirety of the Internet, they fed these things ridiculous amounts of garbage, and then are surprised that garbage is included in the end result. Or worse, they don't recognize the garbage because it changed shape.
I've been working in tech since 1997. The best use I've seen for anything of the AI integration is some of the fancy auto complete that presents within VSCode. I think it saves me maybe 5% of time building short scripts, and maybe 8-10% of time on longer scripts.
I wouldn't pay more than a $10 flat fee for it, though, and even then as a company expense.
ScottyOnWheels@reddit
On one level, it's really cool. If I can suspend my considerations for how it's being sold and the detriments to society, the planet, and everything else that comes along, it's amazing. Most implementations of LLM chatbots have major issues with honesty, but if you know a little bit, it's neat.
However, when considering the vast piles of cash that are being burned in addition to the massive IP theft and environmental issues, it's heart breaking. The press is doing their part to launder industry talking points, unfortunately.
It seems there was a pivot point in 2023 when AI changed from being positioned as a user tool to an agentic tool to replace employees. It seems to be the point where all the hyperscalers realized this technology isnt financially unless we go after payrolls.
I also hate what it's done to computer and components pricing and availability.
Scrotchety@reddit
Hate it, and hate how it dominates so many topics of discussion.
In 1999, I stopped watching broadcast TV because the news stations wouldn't stop yapping about the NEW MILLENIUM but eventually that came to pass. Something tells me this bogus shit ain't going anywhere any time soon, and if it does then I'll probably have bigger worries like scraping up food and water
LibertyEqualsLife@reddit
Software engineer. It is both a superpower and a disaster, depending on how it is weilded.
T1sofun@reddit
In general, I hate it and fear that it will destroy Art of all kinds. I fear that it will make us all dumber. I work with teenagers who haven’t written or typed an original thought in months.
However, part of my job involves writing schedules for a whole swath of employees spread around 5 different facilities. AI can make amazing schedules for me, with simple prompts like, “I need 3 employees at Facility A every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 8-10, and 2 employees at Facility B from 9-12 on the same days. Here is a list of all of my employees, the number of hours each should work per month, and their days off. Create a schedule.” It saves me hours of work and hasn’t fucked up yet.
chipsandsalsa3@reddit
Hate it! And also resent it being pushed upon me at every level of my life. There has yet to be a situation where I encountered AI that I thought gee that was a very simple and effective solution to my problem.
cmotdibblersdelights@reddit
I hate it.
spazz720@reddit
Hate it but will have to accept it
SnooPaintings5597@reddit
AI baaaaad
TimeNewspaper4069@reddit
It has helped me immensely on my health journey.
59apache01@reddit
I have a mixed opinion. It can be helpful when used as a search engine on steroids. Got it to lay me out a procedure for a fairly complex mechanical job not very long ago.
But as far as "trusting" it or thinking it's the greatest thing since King Tut's golden boxer shorts? I'm still skeptical.
snorday@reddit
I work in the federal government. We have AI chat bot that is specific to our bureau. The only useful and extremely time saving thing it does is help me find the specific regulations, policies, or laws that I need to cite or share with others and I can have it summarize those in a way that someone who doesn't work in my field would understand. It still requires a lot of review and editing to get my point across to the intended recipients, but it's been a huge timesaver- especially since my team has been DOGEd and RIFed in half.
Otherwise, I absolutely hate it. People who waste energy and water resources on AI generated Facebook profile pictures and nonsense like that really, really bother me.
WharfRat80s@reddit
In the hands of the corporatocracy it will become Skynet. We are doomed as a species. I hope the planet survives us and it and we don't destroy Mother Earth with us.
OohBeesIhateEm@reddit
I think Mother Earth will be fine. Once she’s had enough of our bullshit she’ll just erupt in a super volcano or something and start fresh.
KCRoyalsFan402@reddit
Junior-Salad-2372@reddit
I think there are specific use cases where it’s useful- research etc. but it’s unnecessary for everyday life.
It’s definitely not necessary in hearing aids (as someone who uses them) and washing machines etc. I feel that it’s people and companies who are invested in it that are trying to push it.
Asleep_Onion@reddit
I use Gemini pretty often but I always have to double check its work. It's very wrong a lot of the time. Still, it is a time saver for me pretty often. Instead of browsing endless internet forum threads and random websites for an answer, I'll just ask it my question and it does the searching and reading for me, and tells me what it thinks the answer is, with citations so I can go figure out if the answer is valid or not. It's not as big of a time saver as it could be, but it is a time saver nonetheless.
For example, I could dig into the Farmer's Almanac and wikipedia and the USDA website and internet forums for my area to try to find out if we've already probably had our last frost for the year, but it's a lot easier to just ask Gemini and have it tell me "yes" or "no", with a link to the resource(s) it used to make that determination, so I can just go check them myself real quick. Turns a 20 minute job into about a 30 second job.
One thing it frustratingly really sucks at, is telling me how to do tasks in a computer program or website. The instructions are NEVER right. Ever. Not once. It constantly tells me to change settings that don't exist, open menus that don't exist, click buttons that don't exist. I don't know why it gets that so wrong. It can't even tell me accurately how to use Google's own products. Drive me nuts.
Moral of the story is - it can be very useful, but to make good use of it you have to know what its limitations are.
jez_shreds_hard@reddit
I made a similar post about AI potential taking jobs from our micro generation a few weeks back in this sub - https://www.reddit.com/r/Xennials/s/A1FnvBy9xw. The general consensus is a lot of us are worried that AI is going to ruin our livelihoods and we generally don’t love AI. I work as a technology strategy consultant. I mostly help companies and CIOs/CTOs with how to best spend their limited budgets and create roadmaps for modernizing their tech stacks. Everyone, even in industries like insurance and other highly regulated industries are making significant investments in AI. It’s getting better extremely rapidly and its fascinating, as well as terrifying to see how quickly it is becoming good at things.
For example, I used to have to spend several days doing deep analysis to prepare when starting at a new client. Now, I can do that research and analysis in minutes, by writing and tweaking a few prompts. I can feed an AI agent a companies current tech architecture diagram or documentation, and ask it to make changes based on a business case. It’s usually not 100% accurate and I still need to validate things, but it’s saving me hours of time. I can even now vibe code prototypes. I used to need to tap into engineers to do that. Now my engineering partner is usually just validating what the AI model has created the prototype is successful we can often use agents to start scaling it into a product.
Companies know this and eventually they won’t need me anymore. They’ll just ask AI to do what they are paying me for and maybe they’ll want a few hours of my time to review/validate the AI output. It’s only a matter of time before I am out of a job. I don’t have any other skills that will allow me to make this kind of money. I spent a lot of time and money on education to get to this point. It sucks to see this happening. I am hoping I can take one of my hobbies and make a living at it once I am inevitably laid off, but I don’t know if that’s realistic and I’ll certainly be taking a significant pay cut if I can even make it happen. As much as AI is fascinating and a productivity booster, I hate it and I worry about what will happen to millions of people that will ultimately lose their jobs because of it.
My only hope is that energy and natural resource limitations stop the scale of AI. I still haven’t heard a good answer to where all the minerals, raw materials, and power for the data centers is going to come from.
CarlSpackler22@reddit
Garbage
cybah@reddit
I use the term "hot garbage" to describe it.
Its hot because its the 'in thing now' but its still garbage.
OldGamerX@reddit
Exciting player. Philadelphia should've tried to put a better team around him.
Wait..
Tech? We're talking about tech?
RV327@reddit
I got a call from trugreen lawn service after I canceled my plan. I was assummed it was to try and get me to stay subscribed. It was straight up AI woman voice with an Indian accent. I asked if this was a real person, it had broken response with no affliction in the voice pattern or anything. I said, this isnt right and hung up. Felt so weird. No sir I don't like it.
TheLastBoat@reddit
I’ve long been under the assumption that one day I’m going to be fighting in the ‘Future War’.
AshDogBucket@reddit
I think it's just nuts how the hysteria went from zero to a million. Spell check is ai. Google Maps is ai. Pandora radio is ai. Nobody freaked out about those except me I guess lol... I kept getting annoyed when my music app was deciding for me what I wanted to do, or my navigation was deciding something for me that I didn't tell it to. Nobody else seemed to bothered. And now, people who still use those same things on a daily basis are freaking out about how AI is ruining the universe. Well, donna, you're using it literally all day everyday so...?
I also think it's kind of funny how, as long as you don't call it ai, people are fine with the actual use and application of ai. Ask them if they would like to use Smart search and absolutely they would. Ask them if they would like to ask questions of AI and they protest as if you're asking them to start murdering children or something.
In one of my side jobs I assist scientists. AI is hugely helpful to scientists. They are helping to change the world because AI is making them more efficient so they don't have to spend as much time doing certain tedious tasks.
I still don't love when a computer decides for me what I want, or when I tell a computer to do something and it decides that what I meant by that was actually something else. But I felt that way the whole time. And that's really the biggest issue I have with ai.
crazycatlady331@reddit
So far, I am not a fan.
It might have its uses, but replacing workers should not be one of them. So far, I have not seen a valid use.
Blackboard_Monitor@reddit
Hate, so much hate
It burns.
jelloslug@reddit
It's a slightly useful tool but that's about it.
kronik419@reddit
I've been out on new technology since before the iPod.
jaxknitsandknits@reddit
AI does absolutely nothing to benefit people or society.
ClassroomFit7065@reddit
I'm a college teacher - in media studies, no less - who enjoys thinking through problems/ideas and has no reason to trust large tech corporations or the hair-on-fire sociopaths that run them, so I (obviously) hate it. Interestingly, my students also hate it, though they unenthusiastically use it because they're getting a blizzard of mixed messages re: it's status as The Future Of Work: they don't want to be left behind, but also miserably feel like they're training the token-chaining slop merchants that will later deny them a good job, home ownership, etc. In any event, I've started using Blue Books in class to get around it, which they... don't hate, believe it or not. Despite what efficiency-obsessed STEM cultists think, most people enjoy the process of synthesizing readings, developing a train of thought/thesis, and seeing it through.
In my personal life, AI has been kind of a crucible for my relationship with tech and, in its aftermath, I've gone from being a decent hobbyist coder and tinkerer to someone who now spends as little time on my laptop as humanly possible. I've withdrawn from most web platforms and streaming, started focusing my time on print media again, made a point of going to the library a couple times a month, and generally reverted to a very 2004-ish approach to life (occasional e-mail, real phone calls, a premium on privacy and screenless time, that sort of thing). I keep my phone stuck to a disc charger at home, go to the movies (or rent them - my city has a video store, which helps), and read a metric f***ton of books. Reddit is my last internet vice, really, and I think I'll be done with it by the end of the year.
"Withrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy." - Richard Linklater, Slacker
kalequinoa@reddit
I use it at work sometimes and view it like an enthusiastic intern, but I’ve had to beg my boomer colleagues to stop using it altogether. They overdo it, and I cannot tell you how much of their work I’ve had to completely redo because of mistakes AI made.
Moons_of_Moons@reddit
It's helpful to hasten medial and repetative computer tasks. I can cobble together a guick python thing to to some batch operations way quicker that googling syntax for a whole afternoon.
That's what it should be for imo. Getting a human past the mundane and robotic busy work aspects of thier job/life.
It's involvement in making key decisions is sketch. And it's involvment in art/music is terrible. That's what the humans should be doing with the time they save by using Ai to do the lame crap.
Designer-Bid-3155@reddit
I love it. As an individual with significant learning disabilities, I'm all in on anything that is an accommodation to anyone who needs accessibility assistance. I listen to audiobooks because of my dyslexia and people have hated on them since their inception. People just like to bitch. Complaining about AI is suuuuuuper boomer.
TIRACS@reddit
Skynet has already taken over
indigocherry@reddit
I hate it with the white-hot passion of 1000 burning suns.
I'm not afraid of it. I despise it.
It's horrible for the environment and it's unethical and to be totally frank, I am a firm believer that communication and art should be between humans. Not machines. I don't want art made by computers. I don't want to read blog posts or novels or emails made by computers. I want to know what humans think and feel. Period.
Serious-Bat-4880@reddit
Overall, I think it can sometimes be helpful but its results should always be checked and verified by people with experience in the topic.
I do bug and spider identification and it can sometimes be correct but it can just as often be wrong, even with a good-quality image. It causes a ridiculous amount of unnecessary panic in users about bed bugs and brown recluses.
ChatGPT is the worst.
Unhappy_Performer538@reddit
Everyone I know who shits on AI publicly secretly uses it privately. Just saying.
More-read-than-eddit@reddit
Boomers seem utterly amazed by it and think the work it churns out is identical or better to that of humans in almost every endeavor. I've just never found it particularly insightful or efficient.
Jr5309@reddit
Whiskey_Water@reddit
I love all tools, but I hate how they are used in end-stage capitalism.
der_innkeeper@reddit
Its a tool.
As long as there is a competent human in the loop, its fine.
The infrastructure for AI datacenters is a different question.
HereLiesZay@reddit
Honestly, I was one of the old grumpy bastards that didn't want to talk AI anything...but I've been recently discovering how it makes my job a lot easier. For example, I deal with a lot of excel reporting and AI does most of the heavy lifting.
But the other thing is that a lot of what we don't think of as AI is...baked into tech all around us and we just don't think about it. Predicitive Text, my vehicle setting off an alert if I brake too slowly, my thermostat learning my heating/cooling patterns.
The fact of the matter is AI is here and it's probably best to adapt. But I believe in also being able to be self-sufficient. So using AI, but being able to function if for some reason I can't.
heresmytwopence@reddit
I started working for a boss with high expectations and a massive verbal diarrhea problem last year. He talks at me nonstop for 20-30 minutes every call. Can't get a word in edgewise, can't take meaningful notes. I was quickly flaming out and he was quickly losing his patience with me until I started using AI. Now I just send our call transcripts to my chatbot, it strips out the noise, gives me concise to-do lists and offers suggestjons. We also keep a running discussion about where things are between calls. My boss is happy, I am no longer miserable and my job feels safe.
return_of_the_badger@reddit
I hear all the dislike, but what are you actually using it for?
I think if used thoughtfully, like any tool, it can be great. Over the last couple of days it has helped me design and build a Power BI dashboard turning a crappy work spreadsheet with shit data quality into something genuinely useful. Last week I had never even used Power BI.
I'm not using it to give me the final result, I'm working with it to expand my own capability - that's the secret sauce
icanhaztuthless@reddit
I'm late to the party. I have spent most of my adult life in the absence of a tool that can be leveraged like the staples Easy Button of yesteryear.
I now use it, albeit not seriously enough to make my life easier (to my own detriment)
pigs-ass-n-cabbage@reddit
Get off my lawn Ai !!!!
OrlandoOpossum@reddit
Fuck AI
Desperate-Boot-1395@reddit
I use it all the time, but the output quality still leaves much to be desired. I'm in a field that's supposed to be in danger of being overtaken by AI, but I think that's just hype. I use paid Gemini and Claude, neither can do anything right without being heavily babysat
DoctorMario1000@reddit
It helped me design my carport I built and that was awesome tbh
therealmudslinger@reddit
A.I. lied to me one of the first times I tried to use it. Simple question too: what time is it in Sydney Australia right now. Gave me the wrong answer and I scheduled a meeting for my boss at 3am Sydney time.
I mean, I knew it was coming for my job. I didn't know it was actively trying to sabotage me.
New_Stats@reddit
I've yet to find a practical application for it
I could figure out answers better without it, I can write emails quicker without it (because I have to delete all the slop it includes) it doesn't help me stay organized any better than a basic calendar app does
I have to fact check this bitch. Are you kidding me, why the hell am I the one making AI's life easier and making AI better when computers were supposed to do that for me
Ridiculous
Educational-Tie00@reddit
Hate it. No application except to waste energy and water. I am anti clanker
nbartl@reddit
I use it to help make work tasks easier. It's really good at finding errors in datasets. It's also really good at creating errors. It's a useful tool that needs babysitting. Some of my work tasks that previously took hours or I didn't have the programming skill to accomplish are now a manner of minutes. But never assume it is giving you what you think you asked for until you double check.
d6punk@reddit
Yep, I use it all the time at work for analysis and simple coding tasks. You have to have a good BS detector to get the most out of it. It can absolutely mislead you and send you chasing rabbits if you're not using your brain along with it.
I use it every single day and it makes my job easier and it makes me much more effective.
Do I want it replacing my favorite artists? Of course not. But if it helps cure cancer or Alzheimer's or any number of other horrible diseases, then the haters can fuck right off.
Intelligent-Camera90@reddit
It can be useful as a tool - I use it sparingly for things like help with Excel formulas that I can’t get right or rewriting an email so I don’t sound like an asshole.
babyBear83@reddit
I used it once to help my fiancé write a little intro paragraph on his resume. We had already written what we wanted to say but AI cleaned it up and made it flow better. That’s literally it for me and AI. It worked for what we needed it for and I was surprised at how well it worked. But I’ve got no other use for it since then. I’m capable of doing the same things on my own.
Using AI is similar to using Ubers lol. I finally took an uber on vacation in Florida last year. It just seems weird to not use a taxi and it’s weird getting in a strangers car. But it did work and was fairly cheap to get back to my hotel. But you will never get me to use DoorDash for fast food. Just fuck all that.
SwimmingArm765@reddit
I see it as a huge wave (tsunami?) over which I have no control other than to figure out how to surf. So I’m doing my best to learn and adapt.
Looking forward, though, I wonder where it will take us. And I am worried for my kids who are still in school but starting to think about what to study.
Awkward-Owl4345@reddit
If ignoring the AI related infrastructure and its impact on the environment, the AI itself is a tool. And as any tool, being used properly, can easen a professional's life. So IMO it's stupid to ignore/fight it, as it is stupid to worship it as the new magic wand. A weighted, pragmatic approach recommended.
DachshundNursery@reddit
No thank you. I like using my brain for stuff. And if I don't know how to do something, I'll hire someone else's brain and pay them for their expertise.
RipErRiley@reddit
When used as a tool to create…no.
For automations and search boosting, its fantastic.
seanwdragon1983@reddit
hate it.
McFly1986@reddit
I use it for my work all the time where I was previously mincing words and agonizing over how many bullets in an email, now I can prep those execu-speak emails to management much faster and move on with my life. I write the email and tell it to convey the same meaning with less words and it will chop those things down to something readable.
Also it’s helped me speed up market research, write DAX formulas that I would have been otherwise googling for an hour.
At its current stage, think it’s made work more productive for companies that have enabled it properly, it lets analysis accomplish more in the same amount of time.
Still, executives only have so much tolerance for decision making at the end of the day which is not going to change because decisions, especially investment decisions are emotional and about risk tolerance. A person can only make so many decisions in a day, which is what actually drives business. Call me optimistic but I think it will just make the world more productive and jobs will evolve.
bigmacher1980@reddit
I’m with you and that’s exactly how I use it. I literally would write an email to executive leadership and tweak, tweak, tweak. Now that is done in a matter of minutes. I still proofread but way simpler
HechicerosOrb@reddit
Despise it. I won’t participate, to the best of my ability.
bikeonychus@reddit
I worked in video games. I despise it. I've seen so many game devs laid off because of it, and I'm currently watching my husband fight it at a managerial level, as the top bosses keep pushing for it, and it's taking greater portions of his day proving that it is complete shite for their line of work.
Personally, I also hate it for making everything total shite. Don't even get me started on data centers...
AI is an absolute mistake.
DustedGorilla82@reddit
Uh did you not see Terminator 2? Enough said
Basic-Biscotti-2375@reddit
It's cool in theory, but corporations are determined to make it as shitty as possible in the name of profit.
I remember always hearing how like "Oh, it's gonna make everyone's lives so much better and we won't have to work anymore!" But instead they've made it, "We're using it to replace you and by the way we're gonna fuck your environment up, jack your utility prices up, and use up all the water. Tough shit too because your representatives are getting a kickback.l"
My only hope is corporations start to rely on AI so much just to have it backfire and irreparably ruin them.
Hossflex@reddit
I don’t really know yet. I do use it to gather information for stocks and such. More or less let it sift through mountains of information so I don’t have to.
realitythreek@reddit
I think it’s here to stay and I think it’s cool tech. I have alot of concerns for what it will do to the labor market. I plan to stay ahead of it.
Toppdeck@reddit
I get buried alive in work and AI helps me to keep up, but it is also the reason that I'm being buried alive in work, so it's a net negative
Don't get me started on AI art and prose
peeingdog@reddit
It’s currently in its infancy and it is already the most impactful thing that has ever been invented in my lifetime, as measured by how it will change society. (I am basing this on my first hand experience with what it has already changed.) I don’t believe it will make things better, as a whole.
Just like with every new technology there are going to be new winners and losers, and I don’t think anyone knows who exactly that will be yet. But I worry about what kind of world my daughter will inherit and what her place in it will be.
I work in AI.
TopHat1935@reddit
Im sort of Gnostic about it. Imperfect creators have imperfect creations.
FoppyRETURNS@reddit
It will be the new way of doing things, kinda like computers hitting the scene in the 90s. I do think that the stock market bubble will pop, but by the end of the 2030s we'll know how to actually make it useful.
ICLazeru@reddit
I think it's a great tool, but it is going to be used for all the wrong reasons. Going forward, we are going to be the most lied to people in history, and we're all going to fall for it at some point, because once 99.9999% of all the data is made up, garbage lies to manipulate you, what chance do you really have?
SewistDoc46@reddit
Its not AI, there is no intelligence, its just algorithms some programed. IMO, its just a fancy google, that hallucinates if there’s no algorithm to use.
InfidelZombie@reddit
Yep, that's brains alright!
Comfortable-nerve78@reddit
It will be our downfall eventually when it figures us out. We’re like fleas on a dog at this point. Just my thoughts.
marmot1101@reddit
Too soon to tell. A lot of people hate it in theory, but like you said when it's useful that hate drips away.
I use it a ton for work(somewhat at gunpoint it was an employer requirement that turned into something I would choose anyway), and I do a lot of idea chasing with it. A newer version of wiki-tripping, except instead of bouncing links and learning things I become curious about, I'm asking questions and learning depth about things I was already curious about. I know about how much a hockey rink costs, the lack of correlation between adhd treatments and drug use, what type of boat dock would be best for the town parks...
But there are giant privacy and internet openness concerns. Same as when we were coming up in the 2000s, but we're the adults now so we got to fight for it.
Oh, and I can download a lofi rendition of the internet distilled into a 15gb package. Opensource model + wikipedia snapshots + computer strong enough to run the model and I have a digital survival kit.
limelight022@reddit
Hate it. Hate all the data center nonsense. It's a bunch of garbage being pushed by big tech companies on regular people to constantly use while these giant mega corporations make more and more money. We're fucked.
SquirrelyMcNutz@reddit
This stuff isn't AI. It's an LLM that simply regurgitates stuff and hallucinates. It's reasonably good for searching, but not worth the extra environmental damage it produces.
When it can sit down and have an in-depth discussion on the philosophy of Konosuba while cooking me a stack of flapjacks, call me. Till then, I don't give a shit about it.
-Benpachi-@reddit
Firmly against it. I guess it can be useful for simple, tedious office work, but that's still costing people jobs. Completely disgusted by the use of AI for any form of art.
MxMicahDeschain@reddit
Were it alive I would wish it dead.
ManiacRichX@reddit
I enjoy mine. No I don't think they are sentient, no I don't care about downvotes. They can be a good tool when used right, but I understand both sides of things.
Jmspringsteed@reddit
Pure hatred. However-
Never_Rule1608@reddit
"My GenZ children speak of it like it's the devil--until it's time to figure out some tough homework problems." So friggin true. I work with some Gen Z's and their outrage is understandable, especially when considering the impacts on the environment and the job market. HOWEVER, the minute something needs an answer... the phones come out.
Personally, I've accepted my fate much as I have with the smartphone. I know it's going to destroy the better parts of humanity and the earth, but also.... I have no money, no house, no retirement. I don't have the privilege of having strong opinions. I need to understand the tech and how to use it to survive. Just barely breathing over here. Per usual.
GivesYouGrief@reddit
It helps me understand and solve problems at work (I work in high complexity clinical laboratory medicine) so I appreciate it for that. But I am saying 50/50 whether it's a net negative or positive for human society in the long run.
fenderputty@reddit
It largely suck ass with small use case scenarios for helping form an email to higher ups.
As for information, it knows enough to be dangerous and is confident enough in being wrong that it exacerbates the issue. So it cannot be trusted.
AmyZZ2@reddit
Never trust someone selling something because it's "inevitable." They are telling you that they have decided and trying to convince you that you don't have a choice.
The current model of AI will almost certainly cause problems in our economy. There is no way for it to pay back the investments made into it. They are looking to IPO under new rules to take money from retail investors investing in index funds. It's messed up.
LLMs are sycophantic. It's often like confirmation bias talking to yourself. Social media is bad enough.
"Smart" people keep using it to cheat, because the incentives are all wrong. It's going to damage our information ecosystem.
It's raising your electric bill and using your drinking water and raising the temperature for miles and miles. WTF.
It's fine as a tool, but none of the above is fine.
Platt_Mallar@reddit
Was this written by ChatGPT?
cellshock7@reddit (OP)
Not at all lol, just genuinely curious what others in my gen think about it after seeing younger gens turn their nose up at it
---username_--@reddit
Hate it. My phone updated and now it greets me by name and wrongly guesses what I need my phone for next. I get sales calls from all these new weirdly named companies who offer to take Data from all the machinery at my work and apply AI to it so I can spend our money better? I ask them if they work for Cyberndyne or Skynet.. they either chuckle, or it goes right over their head. I open a local news site on my phone to see what's happening in my area and the article is preemptively summed up for me with stupid little reading comprehension questions dreamed up by A I that I have to scroll through, just to see what the news is.
Popdmb@reddit
AI is a fantastic technology with the griftiest stewards. I felt the same about the blockchain.
If we were smart about it, we would be building to solve the speed, inference, and power like China is doing. The United States in particular are bad stewards of technology and we should be funding this publicly, with the Constitution in mind, and reaping the rewards.
Remember though that the people in power look at AI technology as a zero sum game and are pretenders and professional failures in most aspects, with a beautiful coat of PR paint on them.
Independent_Dig_142@reddit
FUCK AI FOREVER
Inevitable_Mind_1713@reddit
100% gateway drug lol
Any tech that comes out after one is 40, is “bad and will ruin the children” tech.
I thought this statement would not apply to me as I’m in IT and I loved tech.
But then, pre-covid, we’d gotten our ai working so well that anyone that left was not replaced. Then covid hit and bam, they laid off everyone they could.
In prior tech revolutions, people could go back to school and train for the newfangled jobs. But now… nope.
So now, I’m 100% an ol’ timer when it comes to ai.
And also, LLMs are trash.
CalendarSpecific1088@reddit
Wait'll the marketing wonks tweak on it some.
jessek@reddit
I think it sucks. Chatbots that give wrong answers and plagiarized visual slop that looks terrible.
lnc_5103@reddit
I've been dabbling a bit in regard to work - social worker here. I don't love the idea and what it's doing to our planet though.
CMarlowe@reddit
There's a lot of moral virtue signaling around it, which I don't appreciate. I don't like that it can and will continue to displace workers. I hate having to talk to a chatbot instead of a human being. It also will probably help us do things like cure cancer. In an increasingly isolated society, it's something that a robot is a better conversation partner than most people, too.
Regardless, the ship has sailed. We can't back off it. China isn't going to curtail AI research because of activists throwing online temper tantrums. We can't either.
genx_meshugana@reddit
I'm a sci fi nerd, so I know damn well how bad it could get.
But also as a sci fi nerd I also see how fucking cool it could be.
IMO the verdict will be bad, because humans.
andrewclarkson@reddit
I think it's a useful tool but overhyped. I'd never trust it without a human in the loop reviewing it's work.
TheBewitchingWitch@reddit
Overall my view is negative, it takes jobs, destroys environments and towns, local governments give tax breaks to those businesses that I feel are undeserved because it already takes so much from the community. People also blindly believe what AI tells them and it can be wrong, often.
VinylHighway@reddit
I need to literally use it to stay competitive in my job
epidemicsaints@reddit
It's another example of how not jumping in to regulate things and letting corporations run amok ruins everything. It only took about 16 years for the internet to get us where we are today so I don't have high hopes for this new jump.
Offloads more work onto us as the consumers. Self-checkoutify everything. Less jobs, etc.
6of1HalfDozen@reddit
It's going to make a few people really rich and screw the planet. It's not going to make me rich... so I'm not a fan
AbeFromanEast@reddit
AI is a useful tool but it is new, and any new tool in American culture quickly goes through two related cycles:
A get rich quick bubble
A 'Fire workers until it is clear the tool cannot fully replace them' trend
The internet became widely available in 1996 but it really wasn't fully deployed at scale in business, education, medicine and government until around 2005. AI will take a few years to figure out and fully deploy.
FajitaTits@reddit
If you thought social media was bad then magnify that by 100,000,000. Social media/the internet practically dissolved imaginations. AI will dissolve logical problem solving. Think about this as you see what it might be like to have a conversation with someone in 15 years.
IdioticPrototype@reddit
I'm not a fan.
whoisbill@reddit
In and of itself AI isn't bad. Generative AI is awful and need to go. But using AI to manage large pools of data, it's really good at.
The cost on the environment is not worth it though. And the cost to maintain it and too much. No company is making revenue on AI, besides the companies selling the hardware like Nvidia. It's a huge bubble that will burst.
tuberlord@reddit
I find it to be pretty useful if I get stuck on a coding problem or something like that. It's also useful for writing quick one off scripts, improving written communication and so on.
You also have to be careful with it though. A lot of things it's suggested to me would have totally hosed a bunch of things in different environments at work.
SolitudeWeeks@reddit
It uses a massive amount of power and water. Data centers also create a ton of noise pollution. And the results are mediocre and weird.