She has diagnosed ADHD and I think this might be one of the reasons but I still don’t understand. She sometimes spends hours working. If she had spent that time with pen and paper she could’ve reached the same conclusions she did with AI but with more understanding of her work.

This is absolutely a thing. ADHD fucks the reward center of your brain, so you don't really feel a lot of satisfaction from working (or any at all). If you spend that time with a pen and paper it just feels like a waste of time, even if you complete the job you set out to do. There's still the reward at the end of the task, but the work itself does not feel rewarding. Medication helps, but it's not magic.

What you're basically telling her is "spend more time miserable" and are surprised she won't.

Unpopular opinion, but I think the degree to which AI doomerism plays out feels like Internet purity culture.

Eating meat or non-fair trade coffee and chocolate is unethical, driving a car, buying electronics with slave labor mined rare earth metals all do active harm to the world.

I feel like moderate AI use to save time isn't a huge deal. Text generation is fairly cheap and not that harmful at small scale, if you're running a swarm trying to solve millennium prizes that's a much heavier lift.

There is danger in missing out on learning and developing core instincts and judgement when you outsource some of that to AI, but asking it to find something in a disorganized readme or something like that isn't a huge deal.

I also have ADHD and dont use AI.

What i do with my partner who also uses AI to do stuff on their website or the server, and when ever I call them out for it, they get defensive. So i just ignore it now. It is not a thing i want to throw the relationship away for.

We are both IT. Them Sys. Admin, me Software Dev..

Replace "uses AI" with "is an alcoholic" and follow similar advice.

Aside from the AI subject just agreeing with you everytime, then not changing, is a form of fawning. It’s avoidant, it usually comes from a disorganized attachment style. I only bring this up because this isn’t really about AI it’s about her behavior around it and taking inventory on the relationship and each partners attachment style can help communication, understanding and decision making.

Using it for school work is demonstrably not learning. In fact using an LLM is antithical to learning: it's cognitive offloading.

If she cares about actually learning she'd do her own school work.

That's the problem I see here... my 2¢

Commenting just to reiterate what a lot of the other comments are saying. It's ok if AI use is a dealbreaker for you, it would be for me. I personally have a list of companies I boycott and if my partner didn't care enough to also boycott them then in my opinion we just wouldn't align enough to stay together. That being said, you can also just decide that not using AI is important to you but you will tolerate it in a partner. My main advice if that's the route you go would be to be clear that you don't personally use it and draw clear boundaries. It's ok to say for example "if you use AI for a project I'm not interested in reviewing/discussing it". Maybe that's a dealbreaker for her, I don't know, but I'd just sit down with yourself and determine 1) if it's a dealbreaker or not and 2) if it's not a dealbreaker what your boundaries about it are. You just have to be ready for whatever her decision is regarding that. If you tell her it's not a dealbreaker then you should just let it go. No one likes being nagged. But you also don't have to support it, just be clear about that and keep consistent with whatever you said you were/weren't going to do when she brings it up.

Also, I think the comments calling you controlling are out of line. You can have preferences regarding your partners behavior. It only becomes controlling in very specific conditions. If you're unclear about your desires and then retaliate against her without her knowing why that would be one way of being controlling. If you're open and honest and communicate that you have a preference and are open to her response then you're probably perfectly fine. The most important thing is clear communication and respecting each others boundaries.

All I can tell you is that had I been you, I would have told her that her brain is every bit as beautiful as the rest of her, and that I'd hate to see that beauty eroded by her outsourcing her ability to think to a jumped-up Markov Chain.

She's a STUDENT? Why the hell would you cheat as a student? That seems incredibly counterproductive

Have you explained to her why you're against LLMs? How they work? This is how I got some of my friends to stop using ChatGPT or Character.ai

When you peek behind the curtain and see these are just algorithms, at their core, they become a lot less impressive.

If nothing else, at least push her to use Local AI models using something like ollama or odysseus or LMstudio. This helped get one other friend off AI because, guess what, running this on your own machine makes you feel the consequences of it.

wife developed a tictoc/youtube habit but actually does many of the subjects she watches; gardening, cooking, sewing, etc. I can't stand the snail's pace of information from most videos and have to skip around. she also asks her phone AI for details like 'how to plant tomatoes?', which gives an acceptable answer, I guess. I'm RTFM old school and look up such things starting from an index. skip around a lot. I've tried asking questions but AI always misunderstands my questions, so I don't use it. If she can make money working with an LLM, it will be okay. I wouldn't want to be the first to operate any machine designed that way.

Below is one of the best sourced comments that I've seen about listing the negative aspects of LLMs/AI.

One of my main ones is, thinking about spinning up a jet engine, next to someone's backyard, each time a LLM is used for a web search.

Stick to the facts when you explain your views, explore ways to run local models for her if you can stretch that far.

Reasons not to use AI-LLM artificial intelligence. (There is probably a bunch more in the 7 months since this list was written.)

https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045

It's AI, not heroin. Hating AI is great but shouldn't lead all the way to serious relationship trouble IMO, as long as she doesn't use LLMs to talk to you directly or something. You can try to understand why she uses it and how it helps her. You can also tell her it feels wrong to you or bothers you that her work is done with AI, or that you don't want to read it, but at the same time you can still accept that it's working for her. Dogma doesn't fair well in relationships

Yeah ignore it. Really if it bugs you that much I would do something about it, but that feels dramatic to me. But I'm not in your shoes and I don't know your moral compass or how annoying this girlfriend is with her ai use. This is really a you issue though and I would not ask peoples advice, and if you wanted real advice I wouldn't ask the anti ai space for one.

I can tell you though, there's tons of things I can tell you about my partner and what they do and how it bugs me. Every time they use our stove I say never put it above 6 just give it time. And everytime we Cook the stove is blasted on full.

I could get up set and argue about it which I did for a short period of time. But clearly they aren't going to change and I'm being obnoxious about it.

That doesn't mean i don't love them, its just a balance of learning eachothers quirks and embracing them rather than making things more adversarial than it needs to be. But again I can't draw those lines for you, you can't ignore something that really bugs you. Really just talk to them about it.

I'd say it's about the same as other issues in relationships. People ain't perfect. I have a few habits which don't really resonate with my partner at all. And I see other people discuss other stuff as well. The amount of partying someone does, friends, kids, doomscrolling and TikTok addiction, chores, leisure time, relationship to someone's parents... There's a million things to fundamentally disagree on.

Somehow you need to work it out. Talk. Make up your own mind, think about where to compromise, what are hard limits for you. And what's more important to you. That thing or her. And where do you all want to go. And then find a effective ways to talk. Seems to me what you've been doing is talk, but from the description, it doesn't seem like it's all that effective.

I personally don't think policing someone's work is the job of a spouse. I'll ask my partner what's up with their job, take interest, empathize... But I don't tell them how to do their work. On the other hand I have expectations for personal life. I wouldn't like it at all if someone brings AI slop into the shared living room. I might be able to compromise on some of it, especially if I disagree on the way to do it but there's no bad consequences. But there's hard no's for me. And you do you.

I think most important is to come to some kind of agreement which makes everyone comfortable at least to some degree. If you wanna make the relationship work, that is. But I feel if she's saying one thing but does another... There's still some things to work out. Either you're not really communicating and she just says yes to make you stop. Or she's struggling to pull it off. (Might not be easy at all to quit AI?) Or you both have different opinions and avoid conflict.

Edit: Maybe another option is to remove your own opinion for now, and just listen for a while. Find out what she wants. Where she's at and where she wants to go with this? Maybe she feels like she's okay with AI? Maybe it's some proxy for something else? Maybe she wants to quit, maybe she doesn't? I feel that's all important information for any further considerations. (I mean your post is mainly you writing down what you want. That's perfectly alright. You also write what she does but there isn't really anything about what she wants. So we're missing a substantial chunk of the equation here.)

Honestly I get you, I hate the world GenAI is making... but you can't control what your partner does. You've told her your stance on AI, and that you don't like how dependent she is on it - but it's her decision and responsibility as to whether she acts on what you've said.

If her rampant AI use is a deal-breaker to you, then act on that. Otherwise, if she refuses to stop - then it'll have to be something to disagree on. Draw the line on things you do together.

Eh you are overreacting. But one thing is crucial, is she using any proprietary software out of her own volition?

Perhaps address the impact this will have in the future in her career. From decades of experience in the mechanical field, I will tell you that if she doesn't have the knowledge in her head she will get laughed at and fired. AI has not really penetrated the mechanical field. Yes, there is AI in CAD and other software, but at best it is for tinkerers and not scalable. Without the knowledge she won't last a month in a mech eng role, assuming she manages to even get one.

She is caring, cute, clever and really thoughtful. I love everything about her.

Accept her for who she is. If you can't, move on.

I'm sure enough people have told you to yeet her into the sun. I empathize if you decide you want to work this through with her. I have had issues like this with my own partner.

I found this video essay by Dr. Fatima helpful to empathize in my case. You agree on some of the fundamentals it seems. She has a habit and somewhat agrees that it's bad. But due to stress or whatever reason she can't kick it. So try to help her to work on this. It's good to keep in mind that even half-measures can do lots of good. Maybe she isn't super principaled in her AI abstention like you, but there's a wide range between occasional indulgance and full-on dependency.

One seemingly small thing that reduced a lot of conflict for us was me replacing her search widget on her android. She kept quoting AI summaries from Google at me and I kept getting annoyed until I offered to help by changing it to DuckDuckGo. Maybe you're better skilled in configuring your devices and can offer to protect her from addictive design patterns she is barely aware of.

I've had experiences that relate to your post, and I understand how difficult it can be to be in your position. I can't really make your decisions for you, but hopefully some of the following will help:

First, since I made the post I linked here, my mother made an abrupt and unexpected reversal. One day out of the blue, she asked me to help her switch her default search engine on her computer to noai.duckduckgo.com and switch her phone's browser to the Duck Duck Go browser and disable all AI features. (She's not technical, so she appreciated, wanted, and requested the tech support assistance.) I don't really know what prompted her to make the switch, but I'm elated by it. She's still quite addicted to YouTube/Facebook shorts and some of the videos I see just by virtue of the fact that they're playing in my viscinity are slop, but she usually makes the comment that "oh, that's AI". (Hell, we watched something on some streaming platform that had a slop scam ad targeting seniors with promises of some "Medicare grocery card" or something and my mother was the one who pointed out it was AI.) Her attitude has changed on the topic quite drastically. Between that post and my mother's reversal, I did tell her "don't read me that slop" or "yeah, but you can't trust that because it's LLM output" not terribly infrequently when she read me Google AI summaries or "oh, that's not real though" when she'd show me a slop YouTube short. So it's not like she didn't get that I disapproved, and I think part of the reason for the reversal was probably for my benefit specifically. I've always been careful not to make any demands on her about things that aren't my business. If she wants to consume slop content, that's not really on me to correct. (To express concern, maybe, but not to demand she changes how she stewards her own brain.) But I don't want that shit infecting my brain with LLM-hallucinated misconceptions, and I've been careful to make it clear that the boundaries I'm setting are where she ends and I begin. I'm not trying to control her, I'm trying to control me.

Second, I usually try to avoid making predictions about the future, but more and more voices are saying now that there's a strong possibility the AI bubble will pop within a couple of years. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are all giving away LLM access at a huge loss. They've already bumped prices and gamed the system to extract more revenue, but it isn't enough. At some point they'll have to either shutter their generative AI efforts or start charging what they actually cost (and then shutter their generative AI efforts when it becomes even more clear that virtually nobody is willing to pay anywhere near that). Assuming that all goes down the way I'm hoping, at that point your girlfriend may well basically lose access to LLMs. (Running LLMs locally is a little cheaper in the long run, but there's a steep effort curve and a steep up-front-cost curve (not to mention ongoing power usage bills) to get anything that even the boosters would call acceptable results. I doubt any significant portion of people using LLMs today will undertake such and effort or cost.) All that to say, there's a strong possibility she'll quit using Generative AI just by virtue of an impending massive bubble pop.

I dunno. I probably am not one to take advice from when it comes to relationships (or economics, for that matter). You'll have to decide how to address and/or deal with this issue yourself. I told you what I did and what resulted. I think boundaries, done properly, are generally a good thing. I didn't think it would work for me to pretend I was fine with being force-fed slop frequently and it worked out. But whatever you end up doing, I hope your situation resolves similarly positively. Good luck.

Personally that is a dealbreaker for me, but honestly- no one here can tell you what to do. And this is true about anything you can ask of complete strangers online.