AI is starting to undermine our trust in ourselves.

[turquoiseshell]

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

I was dead against using it, however someone on here suggested using it for self representing in court, and it's been a godsend for a lot of complicated legal things.

I honestly can't imagine using it for anything else though. But it definitely has its uses.

One of the things that really, really pisses me off is when I spend time using my intelligence, skills and experience to create reports from data I know inside out and back to front, a senior person who doesn't have a fucking clue what I'm talking about doesn't believe any of it unless ChatGPT agrees with it.

Every time I hear from them, there's another AI generated email saying 'I have studied this and this needs to have

(Bold heading, bullet point when they don't know how to do this formatting themselves)

Data, Information and interpretation

Massive bullet pointed list <of data, information and interpretation that is already there.

Conclusion

This shows that...<the exact opposite of what it not only demonstrates in high quality data, but has been clearly explained in actual words for those who are too important to learn about this matter>.

No because I read books!

Switch away from google to ecosia and toggle off AI permanently. Ecosia runs on solar and has a tree planting programme.

DH has been going through a complicated year. He was signed off with burnout and depression last year. We’re in France, his French is good but not native level, and while the benefits / support are good you really have to fight / advocate for yourself in a very complex, paperwork heavy system. He had to see multiple people / drs - his own dr, psychologist, work doctor. He had to ‘justify’ his absence to the social security via phone appointments. He had to keep a close eye on how he was getting paid and basically keeping his employer HR correct. He then had to apply for handicapped status and for an invalidity pension. Chat GPT helped him hugely, immeasurably with all of this. Helping him complete forms including writing answers in French, telling him what and how to get the evidence he needed, advising him on strategy It alerted him when he was getting duff information from HR and from social security staff and helped him challenge them. It helped him find a way forward through a very complicated and challenging situation, in a country, culture and language that is not his his own And it never ever ran out of patience or told him’ times up’, or told him he was stupid or weak. Quite the contrary - it was endlessly patient, encouraging, sympathetic, ready to help, and knowledgeable.

so no, it doesn’t mate me doubt myself: it makes me more capable.

I'm retired, so will not encounter it in my working life. I have used it twice, once to help write a presentation for a Spanish class that I was in (short of time) and again to suggest Christmas presents for six year olds. It was adequate, but a bit mechanical.

@TheLivelyAzureHedgehog AI has clearly been immensely valuable for you and your DH. Translation is one of the things it does really well.

Yes it’s just so much more than translation. It’s Counselling, hand holding, interpretation, guidance, advice, strategising. And drafting documents and text, then tweaking it over and over until it’s perfect. it He has the paid version for work and it’s almost indefatigable - never runs out of capacity or patience (unlike me!). Anyone that has complex government forms or applications to complete - they should try it.

I used our AI at work for a couple of things. The first was my annual PDP. I asked it to rewrite it as a SMART objective with a 70/20/10 plan, then I wrote what I wanted to do and achieve in the year. Took me a few minutes and what came out scored me above the score of 25 out of 30 our business looks for for a quality PDP. I obviously read through it and checked I was happy with it, which I was.

the second thing I used it for was only last week. I had a document I wanted to launch to the wider business, and I was asked to present it in our periodic huddle. I was absolutely swamped, it got to the day before and I hadn’t had time to create the presentation yet. So I decided to see if the AI could do it for me. In under 5 mins (I uploaded the document for it to read) it had given me the content to paste into power point (I then used the design options to pretty it up) and then wrote me speaker notes. I read through them, and the style was very much in line with a presentation I had written completely on my own a month previously. I asked people afterwards and they also felt it sounded like I had written it.

So I’ve used it and found it helpful. But I wouldn’t use it for writing a post on here or facebook. Or for writing an email or letter. But I’m good at writing job notes, emails, etc, and enjoy writing in general! So I wouldn’t want to use AI.

It hallucinates as much in translation as it does everywhere else and should not be used for anything of consequence.

That is what trained experts are for.

Trained experts, who still make mistakes, fail to listen, don’t keep up with the latest r&d in their field. Are we holding AI to higher standards than human trained experts?

Trained experts working with AI - now you’re talking. Experts using AIs to do the grunt work that graduate entry and junior employees would usually do in coding, software design, building websites, law, finance, accounting etc etc. with massive productivity gains because the AIs don’t need time off, don’t get stuck, don’t need to sleep or eat or have babies or get bored. I think we are shielded from this in the UK atm, because we lag so far behind the US in tech development, same with Europe. It’s early days.

Trained experts who can take liability if they get something badly wrong. Unlike a machine.

I think AI is a pretty good search engine but it cant be anything more. Ie: “where can I go tomorrow (date) that is good for children aged (x and x) within an hour journey from x postcode?” And even sometimes things will be more than an hour, or not open etc. But it is a faster way to get there than googling.

Plus I know from talking to friends that young people are putting their covering letters and CVs through it and everything is starting to look like a bland robotic lump.

Experts using AIs to do the grunt work that graduate entry and junior employees would usually do in coding

Where are those experts coming from in 10 years when the current experts retire and AI has removed the ladder of junior grunt work?

with massive productivity gains because the AIs don’t need time off, don’t get stuck, don’t need to sleep or eat or have babies

Humans are so inconvenient 😒 keep taking the soma

Absolutely this. Are people really so shortsighted that they cannot see that younger generations are rapidly going to lose the opportunity to develop skills we take for granted? Of course it's lovely to opt out of the boring stuff and choose to do the creative bits IF you have those skills. Which you develop by doing the boring stuff.

Claude is so sycophantic it's hilarious. I know you can cue it to be less so, but by default. Everything is "incredibly insightful" and "razor sharp" and "rare". Must be a narcissist's dream come true.

ChatGPT is good at translating short texts and emails though. That is very useful.

Which will be especially fun when the “lack of trained up talent” mountain meets the “now you have to pay enough to cover the cost of your usage” hard place.

I nearly fell over when I discovered the gap between what I pay and how many tokens (the unit used by the industry to quantify the cost to produce output) I burn through. My subscription covered maybe the first week usage of every month. And I’m not doing anything complicated or demanding.

The "burning through tokens" is another huge issue that isn't talked about nearly enough. We're undoing all the pitiful gains we've made in protecting the environment with this AI nonsense.

Unfortunately the people who are developing AI at speed don’t give a crap about the environment.
Nor do users, who spend hours chatting with their new friend or developing stupid videos, asking stupid questions, moving further away from reality.

True and very depressing.

I deliberately never use it. I have set my Google search to not use AI, I use Firefox which has a no-AI option, I never use AI to give me summaries or help me write...

I cannot see any possible gain for me in using AI tools to do something I can do perfectly well myself, without trashing the environment still further.

I’m curious though. I do fewer google searches and such using AI first. I think it reduces my browsing clicks. I am wondering if that is actually better environmentally, but also if we reduce or stop “normal” free search engines, what happens if AI doesn’t have the source material to mine in the first place