AI is starting to undermine our trust in ourselves.

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Some people (how many I wonder?) are starting to use AI to write or to check everything for them. So their thoughts in emails and so on are being expressed by AI rather than directly by them. And AI is doing the research and then summarising it, saving people the time of doing their own online research - and we know that AI comes out with a biased view, due to what's been fed into it. And so on and so on. I see that on Mumsnet AI now suggests a "better" thread title than the one we've chosen for ourselves. Though it's refused to offer a thread title for this thread, which is ominous...

I attach an article about how easy it is to stop trusting yourself do to anything without the assistance of AI. And of course it's worse with children, who haven't even developed their communication skills yet.

Are any of you deliberately limiting your use of AI, and helping your children to do the same? Are our brains (what's left of them after reading social media all evening) going to rot as we hand over more and more tasks to AI, first because it's easier that way, then because we lose our confidence to do the tasks, and then because we're no longer capable of doing them?

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/mindandbody/i-let-ai-into-my-life-and-then-i-started-to-doubt-my-own-intelligence/ar-AA1YxHT7?ocid=msedgntp&pc

It depends - if you use AI then you don't need to learn to spell but if you don't use AI then you do.

I find it good for directing it to fetch the info I need and organising it fast. But its output is never my end product. And once you start challengng it, pointing out the flaws in its thinking, its limitations become very clear. Its a useful tool, if you use it as one. If you are using it to do the thinking for you, maybe you werent great at thinking to start with.

I don’t use it. I don’t like changes.

AI is gross and I'm glad the younger generation is revolting against it.

Same here. I keep telling DH to use his brain and making comments about wasting water. But he doesn't stop. I have got to the point of ignoring him if he tries to ask/tell me something based on an AI search.

I got drawn into using it very quickly and sadly yes I am increasingly tempted to feed whatever I’ve written through it. I think the problem is that when I first did it, I preferred and thought it had improved my own work. Having perfectionism and low confidence make checking and running things through it irresistible. Whereas actually what I do without it is perfectly acceptable. Also it seems to make me lazier and sloppy with what I write as I know I have the AI helper. It’s scarily addictive. I’m glad I don’t have many more years of work to go.

Ironically that link was written by AI. MSN have been using it for a while iirc

There is a brilliant podcast about AI on BBC Sounds - Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares. It conned me and I found much of the content disconcerting. It's well worth a listen.

Is anyone currently studying and using it in that context?

That's really worrying. Have you tried going cold turkey?

Why would you trust the (out of date) library book? Or the other websites that you might find after trawling online? Why do you think they are more reliable or up to date than chat GPT?

I think a lot of skeptic / anti tech people tried out an early version and decided it was rubbish because it gave false info or failed to do the talk they set. Every time it comes up at work (school) one of our teachers tells us that when chat GPT first came out she asked it to write a limerick, and it was rubbish - so there! She’s written it off on that basis.

But the newer, bigger, paid-for models are nothing like the older ones. They are incredible. And they are going to get more so. They aren’t ‘intelligent’ like humans are and we shouldn’t judging them on that basis: they are something else entirely.

And yes they are coming for our jobs because big employers actively want to use them: coding, administration, law, finance, medical, research etc. I listened to a podcast this morning, British guy who started a big tech company now living in SF, who was basically predicting the end of income tax in 4-5 years. Because so many white collar jobs will be gone by then - and governments haven’t even begun to think about how they will fill that gap.

Never used it purposely. I -AI for Google most of the time as well, unless I forget. I find the whole thing is dumbing people down and getting rid of critical thinking skills.

I need to find out how to turn off that thing that means that every time you google something, what you get back is an AI response. Multiply that by billions of people worldwide - that's got to be a massive environmental impact, presumably just aimed at getting people addicted to using AI when they haven't even asked for it.

Oh and to answer your question, I use chat gpt all the time at work. I know my field pretty well, so despite only using the free version, I am confident that I can spot glaring errors. In 18 months there has only been once that it’s got into a loop of giving an incorrect answer and we sorted it out. I am able to take on a role, on my own, that used to be done by 2/3 people, and I’m doing it to a much higher standard than they did because Chat helps me learn, research, write, organise, strategise and saves me doing all that tedious googling / scrolling through endless websites to find information.

I use it a fair bit at work, but sparingly and where it can actually save time or add value.

Outside of work it’s just going to become another way for people delegate normal human decision making to something else. Some people just cannot function without this stuff; they’re crap at life.

People already delegate parenting to screens. Now they’re delegating thinking for themselves to AI.

I work in a job where we see this all at the time - correspondence and written work that’s pointlessly long, meaningless, with no depth or actual thought behind it. At worst, total
inaccuracies or made up info.

It’s the future but for some people it’s already become a crutch.

@TheLivelyAzureHedgehog I don’t just blindly trust any source, that’s my point. I wouldn’t trust an out of date book, I’d find a recent edition and one that was written by a credible expert that had references I could check. Ditto for my own online research. They may not be more up to date or reliable than the content from an AI - my point was that I would need to check the content, so I may as well just skip that step and go direct myself.

Yes I have forced myself not to use it a few times, I’ve managed to sit through the discomfort! Then try to have faith that I have produced something good enough. I fear for people like me who have anxiety traits, self doubt and low confidence as it’s like feeding a compulsion to be certain that my work reads ok. Or actually as good as possible. Or to avoid errors or things I could word more succinctly or whatever. I don’t think it saves me much time as then review and tweak. I missed a deadline recently with fannying about with AI for edits.

And I think it has done the opposite - it’s actually made me far more confident in my role. A lot the time it’s confirming what I already think I know and it often suggests ideas I haven’t thought of. It has made me far more effective and productive in a short space of time and has stopped me making some mistakes. I can’t say I write from scratch all the time, but it’s not because I can’t - it’s because it’s quicker to get chat to write for me then tweak it myself.

I use it daily for work. It's a massive time-saver for me, and the results are effective. I do read everything it churns out and make changes as needed, however, and I never use it to write something like a post on a forum or a blog entry. (Yes, I still have an arts/crafts-related blog—more of a record for myself than anything else.) I think there are many possible negative results of using AI, but I also believe that many of us need to learn how to use it simply to keep up with the evolving world of work. It won't just go away if I pretend it's not there, so I plan to use it for all it's worth while I can.

As an aside, it's annoying when people assume anything with an em dash in it is AI generated, because I can assure you, many of us were using them for decades before AI entered the scene.

It's a tool depends how it's used TBH.

DH recently wanted a quick script rather than write it himself as first AI - chatgpt - didn't work fiiddled for a bit - tried another - didn't work but then realised he's spent longer than intended last ditch effort before doing it himself google search found code second link down just worked.

If you are spending more time checking on references and links to make sure they aren't hallucinations (or made up lies) - then probably not best use of time.

I don't use it much and kids don't use it much - it has it's place but like all tools can be misused.

I feel like this about predictive text/auto correct - even spell check. My spelling and typing skills have definitely got worse over time in part due to a reliance on it, it's made me lazier. Which is infuriating to myself in a work context because attention to detail is what I built myself on, from small things to big things. That's a personal failing of mine and AI would exacerbate that x 100000

I trust humans more. And so does everyone who double checks the output.