Wondering why people run every aspect of life through ChatGPT

[MiddleChildX]

Seriously. There seem to be swathes of adults who cannot function without running every single thing through an AI assistant. What should I feed my cat? Why did the postman look at me funny? How do I tell my neighbour I’m moving?
How have so many folk lost the cognitive ability and emotional resilience to deal with life? There’s something very wrong if you cannot make simple decisions or be confident in the most mundane social interactions without a computer telling you what to do. At this rate the machines will take over way before we ever thought. And that has not even touched on the horrors of the human and environmental cost of it all!!
I despair of humanity.

I think you'll find you are wrong - soon. You cannot outperform AI - if correctly used it's far superior in its thinking and honing than you are . The divide will be those who use it to deliver superior work and those that struggle manually and not able to meet either the quality nor the volume of output. My company now won't even consider taking anyone on that cannot explain how they've used AI creatively in problem solving. Those that resist it do so at their peril .... just My view . Plenty of things in your day job like stakeholder relationships etc that cannot be done by AI - that's where human time should be spent.... not on repetitive stuff. It's about figuring out how and where to apply this tool effectively and where not. It's not all or nothing . I don't go to my chosen AI model saying ' start from scratch to do xyz". By the time I consult it I've done outlines already - I ask it to refine, poke holes in my thinking etc. I learn in the process too and get better . If you just use it to do everything with no thought- that's where the issue lies

It gave you 'precise feedback"? Did it tell you what you wanted to hear? I think it's better to take parenting advice from actual humans.

I don't think the OP is talking about a work context - but rather mundane questions everyone should be able to think and reason out for themselves .... for the daily stuff it's either loneliness, boredom or amusement

"its thinking"

It doesn't think. Do you know how AI works? It's a stochastic parrot.

I see why you use it. If English was taught to a higher standard at school lots of people wouldn't need to use AI to write things.

Of course I do - I said MY thinking. But do you think YOU have access to all the information it does - and can assimilate that data effectively ? I'd rather have the parrot effectively structured and amended than ONE view . What negative experience have you had with AI as you are very anti it ?

I’m quite capable of picking out good ideas and bad ideas from any resource thank you. Not everyone wants burden and bore other people talking about a 5 year old’s tantrum.

If English were taught to a higher standard…

I'd like to say that that proves my point! But I didn't go to school in this country and English isn't my first language and I have no idea whether it should be was or were in this case. Perhaps I should get AI to write my posts instead.

No you're not, I have no idea how it works and from what I've heard of the results I'm not bothered at my time of life to learn! Even in my youth I was never a bandwagon jumper.

It is taught to a high standard but learning needs to be a two way activity and if someone can't be bothered to learn then they won't learn.

Yes, I agree. I was correcting the grammar of the pp who was in turn trying to belittle the language skills of the pp they were quoting. (I realise you may have been joining in that mild joke… )

How do you know it’s the native language of the person you quoted? Maybe just don’t criticise others linguistic skills or imply they need ai while indicating you think you’re above it. That makes you look silly in any language.

If you're talking about me I wasn't trying to belittle anyone. I was saying that schools need to do better.

That's not at all what I meant.

"Im sorry, Dave. I'm afraid i can't do that."

Then I apologise. It read is as if you were saying you could see why the pp would use AI to help with their writing because you though there was something wrong with it.

Well, seeing as many on here have no idea how LLM works, and have no idea of the advancements being made in and by AI, I am quite happy not to care about the opinions of those on Mumsnet.

Most on here are stuck 1-2 years in the past and believing what they read on social media, where AI is concerned

AI are capable of passing The Turing test. It has identified and developed 2 new antibiotics. It is even solving difficult maths problems it couldn't 2 months ago. Claude code wrote it's own new very powerful cowork from scratch. New, stronger, better models are released every few months.

AI is moving quick. And people who don't embrace it, are going to be left behind. The new anthropic Claude model Opus 4.6 is incredible on the benchmarking.

AI is NOT just Chatgpt.

The original post was about ChatGPT and similar models being used to manage the most mundane life skills. It didn’t say there was no place for technology advancement using sophisticated AI.

The thread moved on and I was answering that.

I'm very excited about the possibilities that AI offers while also being concerned that it's dumbing people down and we're getting accustomed to not thinking for ourselves.

A friend of mine works for a pharmaceutical company where AI is being used to develop new cancer drugs.

I've used AI to create a reading programme for myself to help me learn more about art history. It has broken the programme down into different topics and suggested a mix of fiction and non-fiction books along with other activities like visiting museums near me to view certain paintings. So far the readings have been excellent.

I've also used it to talk through an argument between two of my friends where I fell caught in the middle and it has given good advice on how to stay neutral while offering reassurance to both my friends. I could have done this myself but I've found it a good sounding board especially as I'm neuro diverse.

I also use it for style advice. I'm trying to change my style and I've described the look I'm going for then asked it about whether particular purchases would help me move towards my goal. I feel like it's helping me avoid expensive mistakes. I would never buy something just because chatgpt told me to but it's been brilliant helping me avoid poor quality items and gently steering me away from the slouchy look it said I tend to go for.

I don't ever copy and paste messages to people from it or to Mumsnet. I would find it very depressing if we all end up taking to each other via chatgpt instead of directly.

I mostly worry about its effect ls on young people. A friend of mine caught her teenage son feeding homework questions into it and copying the results while playing Fortnite with his friends.

I agree. It’s an assistant, and sometimes it’s flawed, but just like human assistants you need to give good instructions and specify how you want the answer. It’s like the saying only bad workmen blame their tools. When your human assistant doesn’t get something quite right, you give feedback and more specific direction. If chat gpt can’t understand what you are asking it to do, explain it better.

As for the OP, I use it for mundane stuff sometimes when I’m tired or can’t be bothered and as a busy adult I get to make that choice. Sometimes I enjoy meal planning and like looking through recipe books for new ideas and sometimes I can’t be bothered. On those occasions, being able to outsource the mental effort of planning a weeks meals and writing a shopping list in order, all within my preferred parameters makes my life easier.

That’s nice.

Are you okay? Do you understand how this works?