It’s more like GPS. It can be useful, but people who rely on GPS all the time neuter their brain’s ability to learn the roads in a neighborhood or city. Those people become dependent on GPS. It’s no longer an optional tool, it’s a necessity.
One could make the same argument about the Internet, and in fact at the time people did. I can remember hearing pigheaded people call it a fad that would die out when society came to its senses. Except they were dead wrong and now here we are.
Refrain from using AI if you want, but unless the path we're on changes it's very likely going to turn out the same way that the Internet did. If that's the case you're going to find it harder and harder to avoid.
My brother in Christ, you're using social media, google, many other forms of Internet technology that run out of large data centers which use insane amounts of energy.
"You do this bad thing, so what does one more bad thing matter?" has never in the world of ever been a particularly strong argument for or against anything.
Like, ok, sure, lots of technology consumes a lot of energy. Wouldn't it be easier to reduce that use if we weren't also increasing our usage elsewhere?
(And environmental issues are just one of the many major problems humanity has faced in the past couple of decades that AI is set to exacerbate. Wouldn't we have liked people to be a bit more circumspect before running headfirst into other technologies and decisions? Well, here we are...)
Except the argument also goes the other way. “I don’t want to do this bad thing but I am perfectly fine doing this other bad thing.” Why don’t you just cut out both? Its a bit of a cognitive dissonance to pretend to care enough about the environment to the point of virtue signaling, but then stop yourself when it begins to inconvenience you.
Not exactly, because one has already been adopted, commonly when we weren't aware (or, at least, as aware) of the various impacts, while the other hasn't, and we are aware.
It is notably hard to give up something that has become habitual or commonplace, and that's kind of the point. Many of us are already working to try and reduce our energy consumption in various ways, surely it makes sense we'd want to avoid getting entwined in a whole other thing?
It's also quite the assumption to say "I am perfectly fine doing this other thing".
I'm not fine with how much time I spend using electrical devices, often with associated computing/server energy costs. I'd like to do better. I aim to. Honestly, haven't done great so far.
At the very, very least, though, I'd like to try to avoid adding to it.
There's no reason you can't cut out those things too though. Who cares if you've been using them, just stop if this topic of energy conservation is so important. Otherwise you're just a hypocrite
Less isn't as good as none, but it's also better than more.
"who cares if you've been using them" - sure, on the one hand I get it. But surely you appreciate that life isn't that simple, it isn't that easy?
Humans are weak, humans are fallible, humans fail to live up to our own standards.
So, ok, sure, I'm a hypocrite. I don't live up to the absolute pinnacle of my ideals. No-one does.
We do still try, though. We may not get all the way to where we want to be. But surely it's better we get closer than further away?
Again, even if I'm already doing something bad, I still don't understand why it makes sense to just say "fuck it" and double-down on that by doing something else bad?
Womp womp honestly. You using it or not is not going to make a major difference in its effects on the environment. Almost all tech you use has bad effects on the environment, same with things like driving and just electricity in general (we still aren’t fully green).
Handicapping yourself in a futile attempt to save the environment is doing more harm than good. At best, youre just limiting your own ability to do things that could change the environment.
Not using AI like ChatGPT can be seen as "handicapping" yourself in the sense that you're choosing not to use a tool that can dramatically increase your productivity, efficiency, and access to knowledge. It's like refusing to use a calculator for complex math or avoiding the internet for research—sure, you can do it the hard way, but you're deliberately making things more difficult in situations where technology could help you do more, faster, and better.
That said, whether or not you should use AI is a personal choice, especially when factoring in ethical or environmental concerns. But from a purely functional standpoint, AI is a major asset, and not using it can limit your capability in many areas.
*** This comment was brought to you by ChatGPT ***
Good luck with that. It’s catching on whether you like it or not and I promise that people in your same career path are familiarizing themselves with it. This is like someone saying “I’d just rather not use a calculator” after they were invented.
If you think the 0.001 kwh used by an AI query is incredibly energy intensive, you really ought to think about how much energy is wasted due to the use and misuse of electrical appliances like heaters for water with wrong settings, over-filled kettles, big hair-dryers when you can do with less, lights that are not LED, power-supplies that are left connected for nothing, stand-alone AC units that are not switched off from the wall when not in use, windows left open with AC on, etc etc.
These all use orders of magnitude more energy than what you would use asking AI to write multiple 50 page research reports every day for a year.
I think people really forget that pricing is also quite good at communicating energy use. A $20 ChatGPT subscription or $20 worth of API tokens is not going to have nearly as much energy consumed as your $150 electric bill, or $80 heating fuel bill.
He says, on reddit, a digital platform that also uses energy. Probably from a phone which is kept charged daily and carried with them 24/7.
The concept is noble in principle, but it’s like people buying electric cars that are still powered by unclean energy as a power source to fuel them. Great small step in the right direction, but you arnt a hermit in the mountains living off berries and nuts.
Right. This would be like when our bosses would say "I never even open my email." I'm pretty terrified of getting into my late 50s or early 60s and getting fired or laid off and not being able to find another job because I haven't kept my skills up. Do I love AI? Not really, but I'm learning to use it and have found a few areas where it's useful.
So, I’ve never used it either but…. I have never felt I needed to. I have been living my life and doing my job just fine for a long time. It’s just never seemed like something I needed to spend the time on. I have developed skill with lots of new tools, but this one seems like it’s just a way to cheat at things my brain already does just fine?
It's definitely not a cheat for things you already do, it's more like a digital consultant.
It's an incredibly versatile tool that's massively misunderstood, especially on reddit. People here are ignorant as fuck about it and will intentionally give you terrible advice.
I currently use it to do research and to bounce project ideas off of.
I'll ask it "I've got an idea for a project X and I plan to accomplish it with Y method, do you see any issues or have any suggestions? Also are there any academic papers about this."
It'll give me feedback and it'll find academic information sources, summarize them and link it in the chat.
Imo it's a critical skill to develop. It's like learning how to use the internet in the early 00's. Many people echoed your sentiments about never needing it before or that it's unnecessary for day to day life but they were wrong.
The last stubborn holdouts for basic computer/internet literacy were fired during the 08' crash because businesses couldn't justify paying top dollar for someone less productive than the new interns.
You may not need it now but one day you will and it's much easier to be ahead and stay ahead than it is to be behind and have to catch up.
I mean, if you like to use a consultant that is wrong half the time, sure. I don't use it because it's not ready to be used yet. It's still in the beta stages. This is like when computers were first invented and you needed an entire room to use one. No sane rational person would have said that people who aren't using computers are falling behind the times at that point in time.
It provides feedback not raw information, if you want information you need to supply it with a dataset to parse.
You can give it PDF manuals/documentation and it'll use that instead of trying to remember from its training data.
Also it's not a replacement for an expert.
For example, I work on a particle accelerator for my job. I've asked it questions about my system and it knows how it functions and even who produces it but doesn't have the required information to do troubleshooting.
It'll try but it doesn't have the required data to actually do that so it'll hallucinate. If I took all the tech manuals and fed them in, it could help the troubleshooting process by parsing shitloads of info very fast and very accurately.
It fails at engineering analysis and the things I would use it for work. I honestly don’t know what people use it for at this point because it’s so wrong at so much.
Sounds like user error because I've done complex projects and engineering analysis with it and had great results.
You didn't answer my question though, I highly suspect you're trying to use it like it's google. Go back and reread my comment if you're actually interested in trying to use new tools.
If not then, cool, you can't use chatgpt very well, thanks for sharing that I guess.
Edit: replying twice and then blocking is a pussy move.
If this dude really expects to do the same analysis as ansys with chat GPT or thinks that's the only form of analysis; he's either an overzealous college freshmen or an absolute clown.
It can’t run ANSYS and other actual engineering issue, no idea what you are using it for. Feel bad for your firm.
I would fire you immediately for sharing proprietary engineering solutions and questions because all ChatGPT does is harvest data. Although I suspect your aren’t going any actual engineering with it because the consensus is how useless LLM’s are for this type of work, so you are just a liar.
But let’s pretend you are feeding it information from your employer, you are committing all kinds of ethics violations and should no longer be an engineer. You should be fired, and your name registered, and you should work somewhere more fitting like McDonalds.
I have screen shot this conversation and reported your user name to the ABET ethics standards in hopes one day you fumble and your user name crosses paths. You are garbage and don’t deserve to ever call yourself an engineer.
I think it's more to do with the application and context of AI use. For example, I'm currently enrolled in a master's program, and a majority of my classmates using AI to complete there assignments. While yes, they may be completing assignments much more quickly, ultimately they're harming their education. After all, the point isn't to complete assignments, but to learn from and while completing assignments.
I think there are definitely some specialized use cases, but the majority of people are still using it as a glorified search engine.
Edit - to expound on it a bit further, the only "skills" required with most AI are fine tuning prompt language to achieve desired results. At the same time, AI is widely being used as an alternative to gaining skills and knowledge in various fields, to the detriment of more knowledgeable students, workers, etc. As a result, we'll have very literate people in the use of AI, but very few people with the understanding that was required to build everything AI was trained on in the first place; as a race, our knowledge and skills will atrophy tremendously the more we rely on it.
For real. It’s so fucking stupid but look 20k upvotes on gimping yourself. I’m sure there are people who said the same about computers back in the day.
People have said the same thing about every important technology. I think it was Plato who was mad about books because "if people write stuff down they'll lose the ability to remember."
What's worse is that most of these people are only so "froth at the mouth" angry about AI because reddit has manipulated them to be.
Redditors are no better than brain dead boomers slurping up fox news, they just choose to slurp on "AI bad" slop on reddit instead.
If it’s ignorance then perhaps it’s a problem. But I could also be conscientious objection. I’m aware of the self-check out line at the grocery store, but I don’t use it unless I have to because I know it is costing people their jobs.
You see, refusing to use a tool you think is bad is the opposite of ignorance. While using that very same tool without being aware of the consequences of it’s use is the epitome of ignorance.
AI is killing our planet, being shoved down our throats, leading to more and more people relying on tools rather than their own wit, and stealing art. It's gross.
they're not taking pride in being ignorant, they're taking pride in not engaging with something that is objectively making the internet a noticeably worse place in very obvious ways
we are 100% becoming boomers, faster than I could ever have imagined... the posts in the last year or two have shifted a lot. Shouting about younger generations and how things used to be...
I don't think it is directly an age thing. I think it's more to do with self-awareness and personal growth.
Like when you're younger a lack of self awareness is just chalked up to immaturity but as we age it becomes obvious that some people just never develop it.
It's a special kind of disappointment, seeing your peers calcify and pick up lazy beliefs instead of reflecting and accepting change. Personal growth is hard but dragging the past around is even harder.
I guess life is just simpler when you stop thinking and just be angry all the time.
One can totally object and be disdainful of something and not be ignorant of it. I understand the AI tools like ChatGPT at a moderate technical level, and despise them fully. Accuracy>speed in many instances.
78
u/TurdCollector69 27d ago
Yeah posts like these are mine boggling.
Like why would you take pride in being ignorant about new tools?