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?

Ai will make up sources. It will cite studies that were never carried out and experts who don't exist.

I hope you don't really think that those 2 examples have much in common.

What is the fucking point of it all though? What is the pressing human problem we were all struggling with three years ago that is solved by ChatfuckingGPT? Fuck all, that's what. We are poisoning the well of human knowledge and society so that people like the poster just upthread can have their faces ground into the dust by their jobs a bit faster.

I would high five you in real life, if we were in a real pub , having a real debate because this - this that you have written with your actual tactile fingers, with the clear tone of bewildered exasperation, and relatable vernacular is absolutely how I feel. I would then buy you a real drink, we'd clink our real glasses, shake our real confuzzled heads and probably share our quiet existential crisis in companiable silence. I wouldn't even care if we were in a real beer garden with real wasps and we got caught in real drizzle, nor if real children were being noisy or someone's real dog ate my real crisps.

I want real, even if it's imperfect. That's my holy grail.

And this is the problem with inventing a load of stuff we don't really need or actually want if we sat down and thought about it at all in any meaningful way. Give me a book over a kindle any day!

To be fair I love my Kindle. Pre Kindle I used to take 7-10 books away with me on holiday which took up a lot of room in my case! Now I can just take my Kindle.

Someone asked what I’ve used AI for this week and how it’s helped.

helped me draft my EHCP documents for my daughter. I had to send some info to a client ahead of a meeting - it helped me pull my jumbled up notes into a clear email that I was able to then adapt very quickly.

It helped me tidy up a document I had written for another client.

it helped me find a consultant and draft a letter for my elder daughter’s health needs.

all these things save me masses of time
snd make my day more productive and less stressful. I have an ND daughter who has PDA and Autism sometimes I’m completely stuck as to how to get something done - if she’s in the middle of a meltdown I can walk away and ask AI and it will give me suggestions - one of them always works.

everyday it can take hours for her to fall asleep. AI helps me with tips and stories. The list goes on. It’s made a huge impact to my mental health and physical - I’ve been able to do so much more in a busy day that needs doing reducing the pressure.

Yes, I think Kindles are great tech – portable library! Not a fair comparison to AI. AI is more like: too busy to read a book? Just ask ChatGPT to condense it into a couple of sentences.

Everyone dies (Romeo & Juliet)
It was all a dream (Life of Pi)
Enemies to lovers, in costumes (P&P)

God, you could save so much time. Read thousands of books a day and still get your 12 hours in at the dystopian coalface.

AI is more like: too busy to read a book? Just ask ChatGPT to condense it into a couple of sentences.

This is now a thing in academic publishing. No need to read any articles any more. What could possibly go wrong? 😒

@Swirlythingy2025 if you think we're overstating the risks, would you use a genAI mushroom foraging guide? https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foraging-mycological-society

Just like the bloke in the pub then!

Oh FFS. Don't be disingenuous. Bloke in the pub versus AI is no kind of comparison, because bloke in the pub is probably five pints down, and his repertoire is highly unlikely to include legal citations that don't actually exist, but if it does your local barrister isn't likely to scribble it down on a fag packet and present it in legal proceedings.

Rightly or wrongly, things that look and sound credible on the Internet but that are blatantly wrong are being accepted because "Claude" says, or "ChatGPT" says, because AI is being pushed as more reliable than bloke in the pub with not enough caveats for those who have had their colours done, got a good recipe, or been offered meth by their virtual therapist.

AI is being pushed as a superior alternative to human interaction. Society is being further and further divided by the day. We're being subtly encouraged to believe we don't need other humans. At what point will AI agree with us, formulate a solution to the problem of our existence? I honestly think it could convince people to eliminate themselves in the long run, just by careful psychological manipulation. Maybe all those depopulation NWO "conspiracies" aren't that far fetched any more....

Except that the bloke in the pub is a real person who lives in the real world and will remember the conversation days later so you can go back for clarification. With ChatGPT I get the impression that every interaction is a new thought process. There is no learning or understanding there. It can tell you something stupid, you correct it and then it repeats the same nonsense again because it is only predicting the next word. It is not thinking about your problem at all.

The bloke down the pub is not embedding his bullshit in all our daily lives and irrevocably tainting our collective archives and institutions.

Would you use the AI field mushroom guide taxguru? What reason is there for an unreliable field mushroom guide to exist?

There are loads of bollocks ai created nature photos on fb and probably on other sm sites that I don't use - cue thousands of comments under them with 'I didn't know that'. Of course you didn't, it's fake!

Edited to add this

Collective experience has been eroded ever since the advent of subscription tv for one. Then the internet made even more content available. When tv came out everyone had the same content and so a commonality of what they watched.
I think wfh is good but it is another way to estrange people from each other.

@chaosmaker Completely agree. And it's probably no accident that general xenophobia is on the rise as well.

You can ask your ChatGPT to learn from previous conversations with you, this is something you can turn on in settings.

Yes, but that is equivalent to asking a call centre operator to read your case notes. It is not comparable with a real human who might have had second thoughts, or gone away and read more on the subject etc. It is a facsimile of human interaction and people are easily fooled, it seems.

but you surely asked that bot something you didn't know, so what exactly is it supposed to learn from what you didn't know?

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/act-mp-why-i-held-up-my-nude-photo-in-parliament/I4SI7ELBJZBTHP4SDHYMJDBWQ4/

It can tell you something stupid, you correct it and then it repeats the same nonsense again because it is only predicting the next word. It is not thinking about your problem at all.

I work in a pub, behind the bar. I can confirm that that is exactly how blokes in the pub interract 😄

With ChatGPT I get the impression that

That is exactly how "blokes in the pub" expound. They don't really know what they're talking about, but they're going to talk about it anyway. Just like you are.

Rude. I an an actual human so I will definitely remember this unpleasant interaction with you, @CapitalAtRisk. I am not impressed with AI, if that hurts your feelings then oh dear, never mind.

Why would my feelings be hurt?!

Anyone who says "I get the impression that" hasn't actually had any experience of the thing they are talking about.

Try logging into ChatGPT. Or Claude. They will remember your interractions, and adapt their responses.

They have been very useful to me, writing modules for a CMS. But sure, they weren't thinking about my problem at all 🙄

You can actually ask ChatGPT how much energy it used to answer your query