Microblog Memes

I absolutely agree that AI is becoming a mental crutch that a disturbing number of people are snatching up and hobbling around on. It feels like the setup of Wall-E, where everyone is rooted in their floating rambler scooters.

I think the fixation on individual consumer use of AI is overstated. The bulk of the AI's energy/water use is in the modeling and endless polling. The random guy asking "@Grok is this true?" is having a negligible impact on energy usage, particularly in light of the number of automated processes that are hammering the various AI interfaces far faster than any collection of humans could.

I'm not going to use AI to write my next adventure or generate my next character. I'm not going to bemoan a player who shows up to game with a portrait with melted fingers, because they couldn't find "elf wizard in bearskin holding ice wand while standing on top of glacier" in DeviantArt.

For the vast majority of users, this is a novelty. What's more, its a novelty that's become a stand-in for the OG AI of highly optimized search engines that used to fulfill the needs we're now plugging into the chatbot machine. I get why people think it sucks and abstain from using it. I get why people who use it too much can straight up drive themselves insane. I get that our Cyberpunk style waste management strategy is going to get one of the news few generations into a nightmarish blight. But I'm not going to hang that on the head of someone who wants to sit down at a table with their friends, look them in the eye, and say "Check out this cool new idea I turned into a playable character".

Because if you're at the table and you're excited to play with other humans in a game about going out into the world on adventures, that's as good an antedote to AI as I could come up with.

And hey, as a DM? If you want to introduce the Mind Flayer "Idea Sucker" machine that lures people into its brain-eating maw by promising to give them genius powers? And maybe you want to name the Mind Flayer Lord behind the insidious plot Beff Jezos or Mealon Husk or something? Maybe that's a good way to express your frustration with the state of things.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/ai-is-a-mass-delusion-event/ar-AA1KKUeN

Fuck Acosta btw.

It did help me make a basic script and add it to task scheduler so it runs and fixes my broken WiFi card so I don't have to manually do it. (or better said, helped me avoid asking arrogant people that feel smug when I tell them I haven't opened a command prompt in ten years)

i remember this same conversation once the internet became a thing.

A lot of people also mix generative AI with predictive. Like they will mention the hurricane predictor or cancer cell finder AI as a "good use case for chatgpt."

I don't know if there's data out there (yet) to support this, but I'm pretty sure constantly using AI rather than doing things yourself degrades your skills in the long run. It's like if you're not constantly using a language or practicing a skill, you get worse at it. The marginal effort that it might save you now will probably have a worse net effect in the long run.

It might just be like that social media fad from 10 years ago where everyone was doing it, and then research started popping up that it's actually really fucking terrible for your health.