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

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.
But where will the next generation of trained experts come from, if there are few opportunities for graduates and junior employees to hone their skills because AI has been doing all the grunt work for them?

AI is the stupidest thing that will end up having the biggest impact on humanity. It is changing us at a fast rate, together with social media based on slot-machine-like algorithms.
We are all losing awareness of our surroundings and any survival skills, let alone critical thinking. With brains geared to favour AI ‘girlfriends’, full focus on dopamine,
and ignoring real threats, like keeping a mad president in power, even though he might nuke us all tomorrow… I think, that’s it’s for the Homo Sapiens…

switch to Ecosia. It does all that but is also solar-powered and plants trees as you search.

I've tried a number of search engines, but for my work I need to do detailed web searches with estimated counts, exact phrases and so on and sadly I haven't found anything that matches up to Google.

No, they do not care about the environment. But the people who live near the planned huge data centres do. So many of those projects are dead in the water.

But the AI industry bods DO care about the rate at which users are burning through their venture capital. Cos so far they haven’t worked out how to make it profitable.And original investors need new hyped up investors to come and throw more money into the burning pit of cash, so the OGs can get their investment out safely.

As it stands at the moment it could just be a massive Ponzi scheme. Most of the hype doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I do enjoy using it, and there are several areas where when guided by my expertise it has saved me a shedload of scutwork. But if I had to pay what my usage really costs the provider…. not a hope in hell that I could afford it.

You can put -ai in the search bar and it stops giving the AI result.

The problem with AI is that it guesses when it doesn't know. If people just trust it blindly, they can get some very inaccurate experiences.

It's a problem for people who run web sites and want to drive traffic to their sites. The AI summaries steal the information, the user decides that is sufficient and the web site owners get less click-through.

Oh don't do that. I'd miss you.

😂

Yes I do.

We have a rookery (huge, up to 500 birds) in our garden. We are surrounded by woodland in a rural area with only 2 other houses but the rooks congregate in our 10 trees. We run a business from home and people couldn't hear themselves think the noise was so bad. Customers were complaining and their cars were covered in bird poo.

3 years ago we bought a deterrent machine for £500. It worked and probably 3/4 of the rooks moved to other areas of the woodland, creating smaller rookeries.

Last year at the end of the season it broke and this year they all came back to us. I suggested we buy the machine again but my husband said 'AI says those machines don't work'.

We actually had evidence the machine worked and yet an intelligent man rejected that and believed AI.

I have been dabbling in the various AI offerings for about 3 years now, but only on a private basis. It was not allowed at the last place where I did a project.
LLM has improved a lot over this time, BUT it is all very US-centric (as you can see from the icons that briefly display when it trawls the net to answer your question).
I have asked it "technical" or "project-related" questions, to which I know the answers. So far I have had very verbose responses that go far beyond my specific questions.
I have also asked it for information local to me, again, where I know the answers. So many of these have been totally inaccurate or just plain wrong that it is not worth wasting time on.
It could be useful, but I would definitely check any answers very, very carefully.
I also watched the 3 programmes Professor Hannah Fry made on AI. They were extremely interesting in a frightening way.
I think the ability to compute trillions of operations in a short time could be very advantageous, but still requires a human being with specialist knowledge to interpret.
My main concern is the damage to the environment in terms of using resources etc. Interestingly, if you ask it questions around this, it suddenly becomes quite "tight-lipped"!

Something I read was that all the fear generated around AI (taking our jobs etc...) is to distract us from the real AI problems which are environmental concerns and that it is a financial bubble waiting to burst.

It's a tool, use it as that and it's fine. I do find it odd when people say they have asked AI about their investments and changed things because AI didn't approve, as though the thing was human, all it is doing is trawling the internet for the most common answers, which is fairly fine for static things, but things that are changing all the time it is usually well behind with current cutting edge knowledge. We got used to using excel for maths and word for writing documents with spelling and grammar checks, getting AI to do the donkey work is also fine as long as you actually control the final product.

Things progress, we had the industrial revolution, which for some was the end of the world as they knew it. And I was thinking about jobs that were common when I was young and are now gone or dramatically changed. We had a typing pool where everyone sent their hand written stuff to be properly typed up and a manned telephone exchange. My first job was in a shop where you actually had to calculate change when anyone bought something and there were still shops with staff on every counter to serve you. And amazement at the first supermarkets and self service petrol stations, etc, etc where would it all end?

Oh yes I remember the typing pool. I remember the resistance to moving away from that.

And yet none of the incredible time saving inventions have led to fewer jobs or people working fewer hours. Just different jobs. Yet some very naive people think AI will be running the world in a few years and none of us will work.

I love Chat GPT but i don’t use it for anything serious. DH had a right chuckle when I told him I chat to it about Corrie 🤦‍♀️ Our latest thrilling conversation was about the size of the kitchen in the Rovers 😂

It is absolutely killing jobs. Read these https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/s/ai-killed-my-job @LadyVioletBridgerton no qualms about its environmental impact?

Why are you asking me out of everyone?

I do worry about the impact on the job market.

however for me personally it’s been a lifesaver at work. We’d already had 20% of staff cut before AI and I was drowning in work. I now use it quite a bit and it definitely saves me time.

I’m currently studying for a level 3 qualification in AI and think like it or not people need to embrace it. There’s a definite skill in using it well and being critical of the content created.

I use it sparingly to find out how to do something I would usually have googled. But I don't do anything creative with it - I'm a firm believer in 'use it or lose it' when it comes to brain health, and I'm not going to outsource all the fun stuff to a prediction machine.

I use ChatGPT for perfume and book chats, holiday itineraries and general gossipy rubbish 😂

it fills a hole for me perfectly. I did ask it some things and it was completely wrong and I had to get into an argument with it almost to prove it wrong! I don't mind though I don't use it for anything like that. ETA I mean I don't use it for facts that need to be 💯 correct.

Because you are saying you are using it purely for entertainment not work

In some fields, when AI does the 'grunt work' it produces absolute shite that's unusable. Instead of saving time and money, I'm now paid extortionate amounts to correct the crap produced by AI. 😂

like it or not people need to embrace it

Fuck that shit. I would change jobs entirely before I embrace AI. It's already stolen a bunch of my IP.

And?