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?

I use it daily. I recently took on a new role at work when a college left very suddenly, there wasn’t any time for training beyond the little I’d picked up while helping her, and it isn’t a role that could easily be put on hold while i got trained up. Chat GPT has been a fantastic tool to help me get up to speed quickly. I could have spent hours and hours manually trawling the Internet and googling for the information I need, but with chat I can just talk about it, discuss, dig deeper etc. DH is a teacher and also relies heavily on it - it can spot out any kind of material he needs, Taylor to specific curriculum, subject, year level in a matter of seconds , replacing hours of tedious googling. it’s an incredibly versatile, powerful tool and frankly it’s nice to work with someone so positive, encouraging and friendly sometimes. I can see why it’s becoming popular for therapy.

Feel free to enjoy your ye olde life. Quite why you’d not use those life changing inventions. I cannot fathom.

People really are hoodwinked by it. Trawling though Google good grief! The answers are there in front you! People have become too lazy to even read and summarise the internet now. It shouldn’t be allowed to be used by pupils or teachers. Everyone’s brains will be mush in a decade. The workforce will be cut in half. Carers, cleaners and other hands on jobs will be needed but that’s about it. It’s not a friend/therapist.

Fucking hell if my kids' teachers were relying on it I would be having words. It is deeply unreliable.

It’s all great until the job cuts start. Which they already have. DH is overseas and instead of taking on a new colleague when a translator left, they’re using AI to perform the same functions.

AI is also only as good as the information that’s fed into it - so for things like translation it is great. But do you want someone using AI to educate your kids about trans right or history? AI doesn’t understand nuance and it bases its answers on what is fed into its systems - that makes it unreliable in some pretty big issues IMO.

Other than that, I think it’s lazy. Using your brain is good for you. But if people want to be lazy, fine. The job cuts though, and the risk of disinformation, that’s real.

It has its uses but I won't be relying on it nor using it everyday.

Imo tech is ruining people's thinking ability, attention span and personal skills.

I most certainly am.

I've written one already, the old fashioned way, published some years ago. I do know how to write a book.

This new book I am writing is still all my own words, based upon my experiences and ideas entirely. None of it is AI generated.

AI is just great at helping me organise and ensure correct grammar.

Like an editor, but better.

You don’t need AI to do a word count on a document. It’s a very basic function that comes with most simple office software applications.

Compared to what?

and what part is unreliable?

Not on notes on iPad though which is what he wrote it on and he doesn’t have word etc on there. But now I know there are online word counters so def won’t use ai again for that!
It did also give him some feedback on his writing (without being asked) and agree with pp that it is probably over complimentary.

The biggest problem with AI (and there will be many) that I can see in our futures is when AI + robots create human looking robots that parents will use for childcare.

As children develop they pass developmental windows during which certain things need to be in their environment for normal development. It's vital for kids to have face to face human interaction to develop emotional maturity, normal social skills and read body language. If they have too much robot AI care during this time, they will not develop normally.

Take the problems younger generations have now with reduced attention spans and put it on steroids.

We are going to have a whole generation of people without normal social skills, with poor emotional regulation and poor ability to read body language.

It's going to be an absolute disaster.

I do not trust AI at all. No doubt it has already wormed its way in to my daily life unnoticed. When I Google something the AI result at the top is wrong more often than not. Don’t trust it!

Doesn’t he have pages on iPad, couldn’t he have copies and pasted in to that to use the word counter?

'I won’t go near a dishwasher. Half the pleasure of a Sunday roast is scrubbing crusty trays by hand while the gravy sets like concrete. A faceless appliance? That’s basically rote-washing—arguable, but boring as hell—and certainly not as good as using your own skills to reach the same end result.”

Thing is, using a dishwasher to clean your scuzzy dishes after Sunday lunch won't perhaps cause you to lose your job at some point. In fact you're keeping dishwasher manufacturer employees in business.

In some areas it is wrong over half the time: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/ai-search-engines-give-incorrect-answers-at-an-alarming-60-rate-study-says/

It generates nonsense like this reading list where more than half the books are made up and do not exist

reading list not posting, see it here https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

how much effort is it to count 100 words manually anyway? Do it with him.

'the industrial revolution, computers, the internet - jobs will change. Life will change. AI and AGI is here now.'

It's not so much 'jobs will change', but jobs will go, and at a far quicker rate than ever before. If this happens without a backup plan, society as we know it is in danger of collapse.

What are we all going to do when our jobs are gone? Starve I guess.

AI – the Stanley Kubrick movie finished after he died by Steven Spielberg – touches on many of those aspects. A remarkable movie in so many ways, it shows humans hunting down robots after they begin to take over. David, the AI son who is abandoned when his 'foster' family eventually has a real son, lives far beyond his human parents and witnesses the end of the human world, ravaged by climate change as he has gone on an eternal quest to be reunited with his human maker that can never happen.

Jobs disappeared at massive rates during initial computerisation and the automation and mechanisation which followed.

Car companies made adverts boasting that their factories were staffed by robots, lower grades of typing/clerical staff disappeared from offices. Those manual and semi skilled jobs disappeared in huge numbers. The fuss now is that a lot more of the jobs are white collar so both Guardianistas and DM readers alike consider it disastrous.

No, doesn’t have pages and yes we’d counted manually but wanted a double check.
anyway- not getting bogged down in this! It was just an example of a simple task which it got spectacularly wrong which is weird when it’s so skilled in more complicated tasks.

But you are not employing a cook/housekeeper and scullery maid. Two standard jobs in quite modest MC homes less than a century ago.

Your dishwasher will have minimal contact with humans during its automated factory assembly line, before going into mechanised warehouse management which also loads it onto the lorry following a preplanned route to the customer or outlet.

The lorry driver is still human though.

'The lorry driver is still human though.'

For now.

Tbh, I hope I'm wrong, but all the posters on this thread extolling their use of AI in their employment, maybe have a think about how your employers will view it.

Also, the world's population is staggeringly higher than it was during the industrial revolution, and during the technology waves of the 70s and 80s. That's a lot of extra people to consider when jobs are being cut at an alarming rate.

The cooks, maids, house keepers left employment in MC homes because they had better and more options opening up to them - the MC homes still wanted the servants, the servants could get better paid jobs elsewhere. That's not what's happening here.

I'm just re-watching "The Capture" which touches on alot of the concerns around AI. It's obviously fiction and a bit of a romp, but certainly gives food for thought.