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 wrote a personalised children story for my grandsons. It was very good. Haven't bothered since. But my adult children use it in the work place. My DIL refurbished the exterior of a house that they considered buying. It looked very good.

yanbu. I have used it to help me withdraw from alcohol. I’ve also used it to help me diagnose a healthcare concern. It’s terrifyingly better as a friend and a professional at both. So we need to use it and we need to learn to live with it and we need to adjust our energy production and use to include it

I didnt know you could use it for all these things

I dont get the energy use issue, whats the issue over and above using computers in general?

@changedusernameforthis1 noticing you said you hope people complaining about AI use
don't use air con or run fans etc in summer,.
I know air con is bad but fans? What's so bad about a fan? Or is all electricity use now evil?

I don’t know, I haven’t particularly taken to it yet but I think using it in the circumstances you described is fine.

My DD has started using it for everything and frankly I’m about to chuck her phone out the window when we watch tv. She watches, wants to know what’s happening, asks AI and then proceeds to tell me everything and spoil it. It’s like she’s losing the ability (quickly) to wait. AI just gives you immediate answers for everything.

I've avoided for ages, I don't really like giving all of my data away. But life got busy, I gave it a go and bloody hell it's excellent.

Asked it to recommend a holiday based on all my criteria then kept chatting to refine it. Get recipes and alterations when I need to sub ingredients. Took a photo of some hand written notes I couldn't decipher and it read them. Took photo of sons chemistry homework and asked if it was right, nearly was and explained where he'd gone wrong.

I'm not using it to chat to but really it's possibly better than randoms online.

I think I'm old school using the chatgpt app.

I use it all the time for work. For writing talks, presentations, policies.

looking up recipes etc.

All electricity use impacts the environment. Fans not so much, not compared to AC at least. But in summer the amount of people using them rises, and they end up being ineffective as they just blow warm air around, so people turn them up, buy stronger fans etc.

I'm not saying we shouldn't - I have one in every room. But I think if we want people to not use something that helps them then we should look at all things people use. Hopefully that makes sense 😅

I like the idea of recipes, I hadnt thought of that

Going by the many threads on MN where posters already can't seem to make the simplest decision by themselves it worries me that if people start to rely on AI then decision making and critical thinking skills are soon going to disappear completely. People have already lost so many skills because of technology.

100% agree with this. Why do people need so much input into making simple decisions, or carrying out simple tasks? I can’t think of one thing I’ve needed AI for in the past month.

Fine to use it as another useful tool, but it is concerning that people don't seem to be able to think for themselves and use their own creativity and ideas anymore and instead spend more and more of their lives staring at phone/computer screens rather than living an actual life.

My workplace, a charity, has become obsessed with AI and people use it routinely for strategies, emails and more. It worries me that they don't stop for a minute to think whether they really need to rely on it to that extent and it is one of the many reasons why I want to leave that organisation ASAP.

Well AI is fun, but also many times factually incorrect. I created an article yesterday with chat gpt and it gave me incorrect historical facts about a place and I knew them to be incorrect. I asked it to correct and fact check itself. Imagine if I had not spotted that and posted the article.
Then AI would be scraping that article too, so it would snowball and our history reduced to an AI fantasy.
Chat gpt is just stuff put together from other stuff in the internet that people have written.it is not to be trusted as a soure of truth.
Use it to outline some ideas then fact check and research yourself or you are living life based on any old crap chat gpt spouts out.

Hello from another clueless dinosaur here! 👋
Are you all just using ChatGP? Or other Apps?

Particularly for the Colours and good haircuts and advice… I want to give it a go. Many thanks

Am genuinely curious how people are finding it so good and useful - I have been using it for a few years on and off and have yet to get it to produce or do anything I couldn't already do better or faster.

Like all social media, search engines, etc - we are the product. We do not own this technology and if it's pulled or manipulated or changed we have no control over that, which I dislike. It's why I don't rely on social media to market my own business - it could change at any time and I'd be fucked if it was my main or only marketing and communication channel.

But everyone around me is obsessed with AI and using it constantly. I am also seeing the very real impact on tiny creative businesses and experiences so far suggest no one will care enough until it comes for their work.

I don't want to read robot recipes, I don't want to look at robot art or read robot books or watch robot plays which have all been cobbled together from stolen data. I don't really understand why anyone would want this even if it is cheaper and quicker - it's all slightly shit and a bit depressing.

And more depressing that seemingly a huge part of the population don't really see the difference and are happy with the shit to mediocre AI output 🤷‍♀️

A friend posted a recipe of some slightly sad cupcakes the other day - said "oh it didn't do too badly with the recipe". Well no, it gave you a recipe which produced mediocre cupcakes which sank in the middle, but why are you asking something which basically guesses the next word rather than looking at the many millions of excellent tested recipes by real humans which already exist? Why would you even want a shit amalgamation of them which has never been tested in real life? Genuinely, what do you gain from that?!

I don't understand the hype at all, and as someone who is fairly techie and works in a creative industry, I am also baffled because nothing it has created or I've seen so far has been that good - but the world at large seems determined to embed it into everything and give up all critical thinking ability to let the AI do everything.

I can see its use as a tool, and at the beginning I could see its possibility for improving work life balance for a lot of people.

It is not going to improve that, because of the people who created it and who are pushing it.

I massively resent that it is in everything from Google to WhatsApp to Instagram private messages, and you cannot opt out of the useless and often wrong summaries.

I also feel very alone because even the creatives I know think it's novel and fun and great, and are seemingly oblivious to the fact we're hurtling towards a world where at least on a business front, there's likely to be a lot less choice and a lot fewer small businesses, less creativity and human innovation because the tiniest businesses won't ever start - they won't be able to compete with AI on cost and speed.

They are already closing in their dozens each day - embroidery pattern creators, illustrators, clothes designers and so many more.

So yes, I think relying on it is a bloody terrible idea.

I haven’t used it yet. Unless you count the AI google results that you can’t opt out of. Some of those summaries have been very inaccurate for the things I’ve googled, in one instance saying the total opposite of something that I know to be true.

That happens a lot and makes me rage. I would be less negative about it if it was accurate even 60% of the time! And people keep saying "oh but humans make errors too and you have to check stuff AI produces" - so why am I wasting time prompting it and then checking its output when I could just find the sources myself and know it's accurate? I don't want to have to manage a shit employee!

Edited both posts for rogue grammar

I caved and let ds ask it a homework question the other day when an hour of googling had failed us and it presented us with everything he needed-goodness knows how it found it all when we couldn’t.

I would very cautious about the information it produced in that case. Like you said you don't know where the information came from and if it is reliable. AI hallucination is a very real thing.

@hilariousnamehere I couldn't agree more with your eloquent assessment.

I’m in a new job and still on a steep learning curve. Today I got sent a complicated chart with a lot of headings I didn’t understand. ChatGPT explained it all to me. I replied to the person who sent it to me, with an intelligent response instead of ‘what does this mean?’

In my working life, it’s invaluable.

I’ve also used it to help me diagnose a healthcare concern.

Oh my God this is seriously worrying 😟

I think using AI is really unhealthy and will push people out of jobs ! What employment will people have in the future and how is it better to communicate with a bot rather than a human being ? Think it’s bloody scary for our children and grandchildren..what kind of world do people think that they will be coping with?
MH is a massive problem already for the younger generation,I blame SM and everything involved that interferes with normal verbal communication .

Do you know how much energy Google queries need?
Do you know how much energy websites that Google sends you to need?

And I'm sorry you're so worried about your skills and power of critical thought, but today I made a mod for a CMS I use with Claude and ChatGPT, and I'm not even sorry.

I think using AI is really unhealthy and will push people out of jobs !

Unlike computers, @Lovemydoggie , which I'm sure you never use.

....Unless you count the AI google results that you can’t opt out of.

I skip over those without reading, since the AI summary at the top of my Google results told me Neville Chamberlain was PM in 1929. That wasn't even what I'd asked - I just wanted to check the date of a particular piece of legislation.