The Internet being mostly broken at this point is driving me a little insane, and I can’t believe that people who have the power to keep a functioning search engine for themselves wouldn’t go ahead and do it.
I wonder about this every time I see people(?) crowing about how amazing AI is. Like, is there some secret useful AI out there that plebs like me don’t get to use? Because otherwise, huh?
You’re correct that there’s a massive flood of bots pushing it everywhere. But regardless of what the subject is, once someone has “bought in” to a scam they tend to stick with it and defend it no matter what. Because the alternative is admitting they were fooled, and that’s basically an uncrossable bridge for most folks.
People on their literal death beds were using their literal last words (before being intubated with covid) to threaten nurses not to go near them with “the jab”. So it really doesn’t surprise me that people continue using “AI” despite it being worse than worthless for literally everything
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan
On the contrary, AI’s been extraordinarily useful for me this year. BUT-- I try my best to understand its ins and outs… i.e., where it’s most accurate, and when it’s most prone to hallucinating confidently incorrect replies.
Pretty much any tool has a narrow range of uses, and is useless for everything else. So it kinda makes sense to me that a ‘do all’ tool would naturally have plenty of flaws in its early stages.
Yeah we’re 3 years past where the scam artists claimed this shit will have already evolved out of its early stages. It ain’t happening.
It takes no effort at all to understand the ins and outs btw. It’s “accurate” for the most abundantly well documented problems you used to solve in half the time by just copy/pasting from stack overflow. The rest of the time it contradicts the advice your mom’s doctor gave her. Sooooo useful wow. But sure shoot your shot, I’d love to hear about how you used it to build a grocery list app or whatever you’re so excited about
Huh, well aren’t you absolutely dripping with cynicism.
Anyway, GPT5.1 and 5.2 have been hugely useful to me across a variety of topics, mainly functioning as a sort of enhanced search engine. For example, loads of searches would take me a lot of time to fully explore the various nuances of that GPT can typically pull together in a coherent way in only seconds.
Probably the most use of all is in helping with my issues that come from learning French, but it’s also helped me with graphics tasks that would have taken me ages in GIMP, helped ID various unknown animals, helped with stats analysis in sports, and easily 2-3 dozen other things I’ve needed help with in the past year.
So you can hang on to your sourpuss attitude all you like, while I reap the growing number of benefits AI has offered me. And no-- that doesn’t mean I love AI or don’t see its very real dangers down the road to human workforces. That stuff I’m indeed very concerned about in the late-stage capitalist reality we live in.
Okay so this time it’s “I like to fuck around with irrelevant sports statistics and I’m really excited to eventually humiliate myself the first time I try my French with a native speaker”
Listen. Thanks for sharing. I genuinely mean that btw I’m aware I’m being abrasive but you’re putting out your perspective in good faith and I appreciate that. That being said I obviously strongly disagree with any of what you’ve listed being a “benefit”, and I especially caution you against considering SlopGPT to be a “nuanced” source of information for your search queries.
There is a difference between believing you have benefitted and actually benefitting. It’s astonishing to me that you would be concerned about the capitalists yet trust them so adamantly in this moment to manage your very relationship with information. Regardless, I hope you have a happy and safe new year. Cheers
That simply isn’t the case, whether or not you choose to believe it, or tot it up on the massive axe you obviously have to grind in these matters. For whatever reasons, you’re choosing to lump me in to a group of people I never belonged to in the first place, which is a -you- problem, and not mine.
And no, GPT is certainly not my primary learning aid upon French. In fact, it’s one of about half a dozen tools I use, which I’m constantly cross-checking against each other for accuracy, forming an overall highly-useful ‘teacher’ of sorts. So when you lead with that pedantic little bit of fluff, what you’re really telling me is that you have no idea what you’re talking about. You seem to see these things in highly binary terms, once again a “you” problem.
Yeah sure, bonne année and cheers, mate.
I’m sorry, you literally openly praised Scam Altman’s product as a massively superior option to web searching yes? Highly nuanced, saves you a ton of time, remember? And your response to the most obvious flaw with this use case is to deny you are affected by the problem in any way and to deflect the topic onto my attitude?
You genuinely remind me of my late uncle who snapped at us every time we told him to quit smoking. He was so convinced it wouldn’t catch up to him, had a hundred justifications. I’ll never forget the way his young daughter cried at the funeral. And before you and your “AI enhanced workflow” get into a whole thing about how cigarettes are different from computer programs, I’m not calling ChatGPT a Marlborough Red, I’m calling you bull headed. I could have just said as much, but as you’ve noticed, I like my fluff.
Anyway, I love how on the one point you addressed, your actual argument shifts from “it’s incredibly beneficial” to “it’s merely an insignificant fraction of my workflow!” Like, notice how your literal first instinct isn’t to defend the usefulness of chatgpt in this instance but to defend the integrity of your French by assuring me you are using legitimate sources as well.
This is the same pattern all AI victims I’ve spoken with have fallen into. It begins with “oh it saves me so much time it’s so useful!” Then as we interrogate how it’s useful to them it turns out all it does is waste their time with a bunch of bullshit they need to verify when they could have just gone directly to the source they use to verify in the first place.
That is if they even bother to verify, btw. But I honestly don’t know which direction is worse. A huge issue is the ones who “verify” are then always completely convinced that they have verified everything correctly. You can imagine the dangers of this mentality
Yeah, that’s probably the case. But hell, the bots are working. They got me second-guessing myself and wondering if I just haven’t seen the “good” AI that the elites are keeping for themselves.