Ask Lemmy

I generally take everything they say with a giant grain of salt, but that was somewhat true even before 2022. Most of the AI-reliant people I know were never that great at evaluating sources of information. It’s just that the problem is far more pronounced now.

Boss brought in a guy from some neighboring company doing smart screens or something, hyped how innovative they were. So we did an informal chat over lunch where I got to explain our domain and approach. Asked him his thoughts and he said I should ask AI. Like why am I even talking to the guy.

For a couple years, the ChatBOT reliance was isolated to people I didn't trust for answers in the first place. But now I see it creeping into the circles I thought would never trust it. I just hope they're vetting anything beyond trivial information (but I mean, why blindly trust trivial information from a chatbot in the first place? You wanted the correct answer, didn't you?)

It's not like trusting Wikipedia. It's not like trusting an encyclopedia. It's not like trusting a textbook. All of those take a plethora of sources to write their articles, cite their sources, then publish a single, public article that anyone can review. ChatBOTs take unspecified sources, summarizes them, and provides you a private response that undergoes no review. The only way to confirm accuracy is to already know the facts. If you did, you probably wouldn't be asking.

I almost kicked a D&D player for asking AI everything at my table. I begged him to ask me instead. He left shortly after for unrelated reasons.

Yes. It's a clear sign that someone is... well, slow.

I definitely would, yes.

I immediately ignore anything they have to say if they can't do a lick of critical thinking of their own.

As far as possible, yes.

On the other side of things, I need to evaluate an AI debugging tool and I feel like a tool any time I need to ask a colleague if what it just said makes any sense when I don't know an area that well that they are better with. I don't get how people can cite LLM output without being embarrassed about it, mortified even.

I don't disregard them, but I do think less of them.

I have coworkers who use AI. Im in education. The kids fucking hate it. But then the little shits use it on their assignments.

Most of the people I know who do that are people who I already don't respect. It really pisses me off when people who are smart and should know better do it.

i'm just worried, thasall

I do the same. The worst perpetrators I personally know are the management in the company I work for. My boss knows nothing about the field he is managing and uses ChatGPT all the time. Before I knew this, I thought he was technically ignorant but a fairly intelligent person. Now I can see ChatGPT's influence in every single email he sends out, and every half baked idea he has. He's influenced at least 3 other people in management to do the same thing. It's all so generic and infuriating when I have to interact with them through the written word.

Unfortunately I can't totally ignore them, and I've had to shoot down more stupid ideas in the past year than any other time in my life...

Depends what it's used for. Coworkers use it to generate memes a fair bit. I also use it as a starting point for looking stuff up occasionally, partly because so many fucking websites are AI generated now I may as well ask a more direct question to AI instead. Then once I have a more specific answer I can look that up somewhere more reliable.

Recent example there being looking up things to grow in my allotment, give general goals and conditions and get a list of things. Then see what sounds interesting from that list and look that up on the RHS website.

It depends what they ask.

A lot of questions are fairly accurate to ask AI.

Also, some people are smart enough to habe configured their pre-prompt to reduce common issues with AI platforms.

There's a big difference between:

"Hey whats the answer to (esoteric question)"

Vs

"Hey can you find me a paper on (well documented topic)" (and then opening the paper up and reading the actual source)

Using it as a powerful fuzzy search tool with semantic intent is fine.

Its the difference between asking a librarian how to cure cancer, vs asking the librarian to help you quickly find a book on cancer treatments.

Tbh I kiiind of do that with everyone. Well, not quite, I take what they say with a big grain of salt and just continue the conversation. A couple exceptions: they are experts in what they're talking about. Or, its some personal experience

I use it a bit, but generally only for checking my own work and helping me rewrite things so they're less harsh

Its a tool, thats frequently wrong and I'm pretty much against it... but no, I don't disregard people who use it and I have used it plenty at work for menial tasks.

Depends on how you use it. I respect people who generally try to improve their knowledge before just talking shit. Most important think is to process and criticize the info you are searching and not spewing it out like a parrot.