They think AI is as life changing to our society as the internet is as steam engines were long ago. They're trying to promote its use because it doesn't have a good specific use for day to day. If anything AI has made the internet MUCH worse, there's so much AI Slop media on youtube and similar that I don't look at much new stuff anymore because of it.

It's a desperate marketing strategy based on the classic "peer pressure" technique. "Everyone's doing it. You don't want to be the only one who isn't."

They think there's some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason

My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:

Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.

You'll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.

Fuck 'em.

im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn't perform equally because you choose not to, and you're fired.

So yeah... it's crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.

AI/ATS has worsened job prospects thats for sure.

It's very similar to learning how to use a computer in 1995. I'm just old enough to remember meeting these people.

There is this thing, which, supposedly, can help you do your job better, it's being pushed by management, and it is sometimes expensive, often confusing, and obsoletes the skills you spent years to acquire.

Fast-forward 30 years, and it's very, very, very difficult to find people to talk to who still argue computing doesn't belong in the workplace, and that using a computer isn't essential for virtually all work.

The reason it is difficult to find these people, is because they were left behind.

AI is the first major technology that I have have actively worked against.

I am a person who strongly believe that technology should make us better, and I can only see AI/LLMs making us weaker.

I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, "ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?"

When the AI bubble pops like the overstuffed bubble it is, and prices are going up, will you remember how to do your job without it?

Or, even simpler, what about if the AI service goes down, will you still be able to do your tasks?

For many, I suspect the answer is no.

Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.

For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)

They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it's just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.

The difference being we don't actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it's like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.

They mean that they have lost all ability to think for themselves.

Blindly trusting google results when copy/pasting into the terminal is sketchy. Doing that with AI is even worse.

Go ahead and blindly follow the LLM, have fun.

If like you can't drive a car, that makes it harder to find a good paying job.

people who can afford to pay for LLM tokens are always going to be fine as tokens get more expensive. this is just a thinly veiled way to say an increasing amount of people are going to end up poor and completely fucked as AI pushes all of the resources upwards.

The people who espouse such nonsense as "if you don't use AI you'll fall behind" believe that using AI will become an absolute necessity in the future, and that those who use AI now will have more expertise in using AI than those who don't, giving them better prospects. Those same people end up saying "you're just not prompting it right" when you point out flaws in the LLM's responses.

If you're actually curious, same idea as not knowing how to use a search engine in the 2000s/2010s

It's widely ubiquitous technology that can be extremely useful if used properly and not knowing how will waste a lot of time and likely frustrate you to the point you just give up or ask you family tech person.

Gonna be the odd one out here so I'm gonna start with this. The companies that push AI and the way they are powering large models you'd use only is to the detriment of working class people and the planet.

That being said it's a tool and a useful one. It makes mistakes and it's not as smart as a person but it can make certain tasks much easier and faster. It's like having a fleet of interns ready to rush through something. It makes certain kinds of office tasks much much faster. So if you don't use it and your coworkers do suddenly it looks like you're the weak link.

I've found a lot of uses for it myself. Of course I always need to double check and correct it which takes time but that is often easier and faster than starting from scratch.

Remember NFTs? when people were buying pictures of cartoon monkeys and people were saying, if you don't buy it now you will be left behind

Kinda like that statement about no one being able to go a day without using it. Its weird and does not hold water logic wise. This seems to be the same, it is just a desperate sales tactic from people who put to much of themselves into the tech. Sunk cost and all that.

However the over use of AI seems to be a great way of being wrong faster.

They do it to protect their feelings. They’ve normalized the use of something most people hate, so they want everyone else to adopt it, too. That way, they won’t feel judged, when they 100% deserve to feel judged.

They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that "not using AI" would be like "not using electricity". There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered "behind" the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.

The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.

I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I'm just asking the "wrong" questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I'm also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright "minefield" around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we've lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for "more compute".

So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be "falling behind".

I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I'm staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It'll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.

(If it really does improve society, I'm sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)

AI: They probably can't define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.

I think when people talk about "falling behind" they're actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

People who say that don't mean anything. They are either trying to sell something or repeating bullshit they heard somewhere.

It really is that simple.

And remember, the AI salesmen will never, ever, define "AI". They can't, because the minute they do, their product sales will evaporate. If all you have is vaporware, you desperately need to pass it off as something else.

I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”

If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.

I'm in software engineering. AI is pretty far along in my field, and also very suited for it. I've spent two decades writing everything from very low-level to high-level code. I enjoy it, but it's just labor at this point. What LLMs allows me to do is move to the role of systems architect. I have an endless supply of tireless jr engineers to execute my designs.

I get quick results. But I'm not as in touch with the codebase as if I had written it myself. You can do things wrong, and you can do things right. I like to compare it with a chainsaw. You get the job done a lot faster than with a regular saw, but you can fuck up a lot harder, too.

The field is moving fast. In the last two years it's gone from helpful auto-complete to finishing projects on its own.

I expect to be downvoted.

Its people falling for propaganda.

The fact of the matter is, AI can be useful for minor coding help. The reality is its stealing advice from one or a few sources and spitting out an answer based on them, but it can be a quick delivery of advice.

The major problem is

1. AI (these LLMs) hallucinate ALL THE TIME. Relying on them to code for you is fucking moronic. Every coworker I've seen who does vibe coding is constantly getting dunked on, their pull requests are torn to pieces, and its baffling why they still get a paycheck.
2. AI can only, in the best circumstances, do exactly what you tell it to do. That is to say, you need to explicitly spell out what you want for it, including explicitly covering edge cases. If you don't, you end up with situations like Microsoft making Notepad code executable (which actually fucking happened.

Promotion of AI is total horseshit by the fascist tech broligarchs being done so they can replace the worker and, and I'm serious, achieve immortality by transferring their consciousness to machine. That isn't a fucking joke, that's an actual belief they hold. The AI and general tech CEOs are all in a massive death cult. This is real.

Yes to everything you said. It's basic FOMO, the same behavior with people who were selling bitcoins.

If it was good, we would use it. And any way, it's like learning how to use Google, it doesn't take weeks to understand how to write a basic sentence. It's a skill that you could acquire in 24 hours at most if you speak English.

Put simply, it's propaganda by the LLM salesman and liars like scam altman.

Avoid LLMs. Preserve your brain and skills. Don't become a slophead.

The only think you'll fall behind on is humanity's race to the bottom into total idiocracy.

I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.

Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were "left behind" because now almost all documentation is written digitally.

It's from the same people who tell you to "GET IN EARLY" for whatever hot trend is about to take off, usually involving markets and trade.

AI is a tool. Learning to wield it effectively is a skill. What they're saying is that if you don't learn it now, you'll have to learn it later when everyone is an expert and you'll still be a beginner.

IMO it's a bit like computers. I imagine at some point AI-resistant people will be like the "not computer people" that still do everything using paper and faxes.

I know every 2-3 years there's a new hype in tech that eventually fizzes out: Web 2.0, social media, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, etc. All of them were supposed to revolutionize the world, but not all of them actually did. I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it's here to stay. I think the best possible outcome at this point is that the open-source models eventually get good enough and small enough to run on our local hardware, but things sadly don't seem headed that way...