I have begun relying on AI and I don’t know how I feel about it.

[Tusktusk]

So far this month I have used AI to:

Analyse my colours (thanks MN) and suggest outfits

Create a menu of packed lunches around my dietary requirements and preferences, complete with a shopping list

Plan a holiday itinerary

Save me hours and hours of work and stress by suggesting really useful ways to overcome very particular work difficulties, having been thrown into an out of my comfort zone situation. I have used AI for this on a daily basis this week

Tonight, instead of posting my current family dilemma on mumsnet I chatted about it with Claude. The responses were really good. Wise, thoughtful, non judgemental, practical, understanding… like the best mumsnetters.

Am I starting to rely on it too much?

What have you been using it for?

So lets not be hypocritical and virtue signal about not using it. Lets push for it to be used in a less damaging way.

Where is the option for those of us who have no wish to live in this computerised slavery?

AI has driven a 48% increase in greenhouse emissions as of July 2024. Mindless morons who think their colours are more important than the colours of living forests are driving this.

Try to stop lying to yourselves. You’re wasting your time trying to lie to me.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c51yvz51k2xo

Im not lying about anything. Im pointing out the hypocrisy of being on Mumsnet complaining about it. Focus your anger on datacenter sustainability issues as there is no option for you unless you stay off the internet entirely and data.centers arent going away.

I hope over time it will optimise and have less of an environmental footprint?
It's a great tool for linking various aspects, which would not be possible without huge amounts of work / time - eg 'Recommend 10 drought tolerant plants that can take full sun, clay soil, have a max width of 50cm, pink flowers that are good for cut flowers, bloom May-Sept. List in order of how easy they are to grow, and recommend AGM varieties. Oh and slug proof'.

Good god. ‘A great deal of work and time’?

The web has been going since 1995 and managed without AI. The internet has been going for much, much longer without AI. Voyager is still travelling right now in outer interstellar space, created in a time when mainframes were the size of rooms. Yes, that caused a huge increase in energy requirements, but at least it went towards something: plus we are now forcing the entire world’s biome to fund bone idleness. We can and we must find a better relationship with tech than this.

Absolute rubbish.

> everyone’s gonna be using it

And those of us that don't will produce work that is clearly not bland gruel splurged out by a glorified autocomplete

so to seperate the two and pretend doing a google search is somehwow more virtuous or less damaging environmentaly than asking a question on an AI tool is silly. I'm sure all search engines are the same.

Incorrect. ChatGPT is a much more complex system than Google, despite Google's recent inclusion of AI. A search on ChatGPT uses 10x the energy of a Google search, on average.

AI is here, whether we like it or not. Arguably there are ethical/important ways to use it (for example, medical experts are using AI to try and spot patterns in cancer patients in the hope that we may be able to use it to treat people earlier) vs irreverent ways of using it (is making a funny picture of your cat riding a motorcycle worth the several gallons of water it took to make? I'm not sure). However the genie is out of the bottle now.

I use AI every day- I work for myself, so AI is sort of my team mate so I don't feel completely alone. I have ADHD and sometimes have severe task paralysis- dumping some thoughts into my AI tool helps me get started. I work for several different clients and sometimes get overwhelmed trying to organise my week- I tell my AI tool what work I have and it time blocks each day of the week for me. For me, it's saved my life- and I mean that quite literally. Previously my ADHD and anxiety made work incredibly difficult and would often make me feel depressed and worthless.

It's undeniably terrible for the environment. But so are lots of things, and like all those things you have to make your choice. I don't have children, or eat meat, or drive. I have reckoned that means I can use AI and my net energy usage is still acceptable to me.

For some of the same concerns that have come up on this thread- if you add -ai to the end of your google search, you won't be shown an AI result. Also for those worried about security or AI scraping data from you, you can switch off this option in the settings of your AI tool.

Become reliant.

But please see the connection between your reliance on this technology and how it is making a certain class of men obscenely wealthy and able to remake society in their image. Men that includes Sam Altman, Peter Theil, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Karp. Making a society that is One not good for women and children with ethics and human decency sacrificed for making more obscene wealth.

A society in which they know everything about you including the most banal and intimate details and you know almost nothing about them.

What you do in the privacy of your home with this technology will and does have repercussions.

Consider these three points from Carole Cadwalladr (who broke the Cambridge Analytica story):

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

This is not hyperbole and I’m increasingly depressed by these pro Gen AI threads spreading the poison. Ask yourself, why would these tech billionaires give you a free product that took billions to create?

> I use it all the time for work. For writing talks, presentations, policies.
It is (painfully) obvious to anyone who knows a subject when a talk, presentation, or policy has been written by a bot
If someone gave me a paper written by one, I'd return it, unread, and refuse to accept it
Students are warned that they will fail the entire module if they submit AI written coursework
In your private life, it's entirely up to you and (probably) no one will judge you, but in a work environment it's clear that people who use it are lazy and/or stupid, and they will be treated as such

Thanks, whoever mentioned Ecosia. I'd seen the (unwanted) AI answer at the top of each Google search, but didn't know how to avoid it.

It's one thing burning energy for something I'm actually using; burning it for something unnecessary and unwanted isn't on. If I want an AI answer (almost never), I'll ask for one. Don't set fire to things to give it me by default.

I've now switched my search to Ecosia.

Tbh, AI terrifies me. We've heard how it'll take the grunt work on, leaving humans to be more creative, but AI can already produce art, create music. Plus, there are millions in the world who currently do the grunt work. What will happen when AI can do all those jobs? Redundancies are already happening due to tech. AI will exacerbate the problem 100 fold.

I work in education, and it's already impacting student learning - some good, ways but more bad.

And that will go the way of the arts and become nice but not valued - businesses (society) want efficiency and speed generally. Sad as I am in the arts! But fully aware it’s a luxury and the first thing to go when people are cutting costs.

youre laughably deluded. Get off the internet if you dont want to contribute to the environmental impact of AI in data ceters.

One barrel of oil has the equivalent power of 5 'man' years of manual labour on the land or such like. The pivot from agrarian to industrial ages was the moment of no return for humanity. We don't have an off switch so we must use it for good and solving problems or else we are doomed.

out of the same microsoft or google data centre ....

Isn’t there a GDPR/confidentiality issue when using AI for work?

I’ve started using AI - but I agree with you - I hate the reliance on it and I hate that the environmental impact isn’t discussed.

It has definitely made life so so much easier as I write copy for work and often need a second opinion.

At the moment I use it to speed things up (like creating a dietary plan which would take me time) or to do a skill I can’t do and would have to pay lots to have such as drawing something.

Everyone is using it and it’s now part of every software that I use. It’s hard to escape it.

I avoid using AI like the plague. One of the first lessons I learned about the use of the internet back in 1996 was never to say anything or do anything on it that was too personal. Everything we put out there stays out there, and can be traced back to us individually - possibly forever.

There absolutely is, if you are feeding company knowledge or personal data into it.

I suspect that this is already being widely ignored.

ecactly, so we should disucss the environmental imapct more and hold Google and MS more accoubatble for that, as well as governments. There is no way now to not use it, if you use the Internet.

I was sent a 42 page document yesterday that had been transcribed by AI to sense check against the original. It would be quicker for me to transcribe it from scratch I think. Gobbledegook. I wouldn’t trust it for anything important.

I used AI for the first time to replan our garden, finally got something we like but it was quite stupid giving images of gardens nothing like mine even though I’d uploaded an image of my garden.

it was helpful for a planting plan, layout and amounts. Other than that I can’t see me using it. I call chat GPT dumbo.

I often use it in a work capacity when I'm trying to put a formula in excel and the skill is beyond my basic "sumif" level. I'll give it cell references and explain exactly what I want a formula to achieve and it gives me an answer I can just copy and paste into my spreadsheet. If it doesn't work perfectly I explain where the answer isn't quite what I was expecting and it gives me an alternative formula to use which normally works perfectly.

Separately we've been having a sync issue with a shared network folder and I asked ChatGPT what could be causing it and potential solutions and it explained it.

I know what people say about the energy it uses, but for me it's so much more productive than a google search. If I'd been trying to use google to help me write a formula it would have taken me a hell of a long time.

"do a skill I can’t do and would have to pay lots to have such as drawing something."

This is why so many creative businesses are closing up and shutting down.

Which would be less painful if the AI systems you're using weren't trained on stolen data - no one has been paid for the words, images, drawings, photos they own that have been used for training AI, which can now produce work in the same styles.