I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
my friend just had an art show and they were communicating with the gallerist over email. They could clearly tell that the gallerist was using AI to respond to their emails, but just rolled their eyes and moved on.
and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"
gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"
my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."
gallerist: "that isn't true."
and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.
so my friend had done all of this communication about their needs and expectations to be able to make the show possible, and the person whose job it was to read that information and get it done had simply.... not read the information and not done it. because AI.
My biggest issue with AI currently, not even delving into the pressing environmental issues, is how it's affecting cognition and mental endurance. We are legitimately dumbing ourselves down as a society, people are offloading the most mundane, everyday, minimal-brain power required tasks to AI and it's STUNTING them!
I'm actively watching people around me lose their critical thinking skills, their linguistic ability, their decision making skills - empathy! My parents ask AI everything, and accept it as gospel even when it's blatantly feeding them misinformation or clearly doesn't know.
My brother's girlfriend lost her grandad recently, and her family used AI to write the eulogies and speeches for the funeral - she was CRESTFALLEN - nothing from the heart, no personal words to honour or remember the man she loved! And I work with high school kids, where AI was blocked from their computers in an IT lesson, and they had to write ONE sentence on a simple newspaper article...they spent the hour lesson trying to find ways to bypass the AI block and use chatgpt, rather than write the sentence because its "too hard. I don't know what to write. I ain't reading allat".
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ - Please please read this MIT study on chat gpt's effects on critical thinking - it's terrifying.
"ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study."
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if in a couple decades time, AI use is attributed to links with something like dementia. Your brain operates on a use it or lose it principle, cognitive stimulation is so vital - and too many people are passing the buck to LLM's. I know people who don't know how to even write an email, make decisions, or REPLY TO A FRIENDS MESSAGE without using AI now.
Rant over. AI fucking sucks.
