It definitely colors my opinion knowing someone routinely uses GenAI and LLM's, especially if it's for little things like writing an email, because I write my own emails and a unique voice is important to me. I feel like writing something in my own voice is a way of showing respect for other people and their time.

Basically it makes me think a person is either lazy or ignorant.

I separate those people.

If they said, "Chatgpt said... " And they are completely confident that it's correct, I disregard them. This includes the AI cucks who send literal screenshots from AI as some sort of "proof".

If they said, "The AI slop I got was... " Then they're more likely to critically think about it. They know this is a third voice, rather than the definite answer.

I don't know anyone like you describe (at least, not nearly this level of bad).

But I want to offer a more positive contra-example. Since AI has become ubiquitous, I have become a lot more forgiving of mediocrity in human made stuff, whether that's a piece of art or other media, or simply someone trying to articulate themselves, but poorly. I'm way more likely to work harder to try to understand the point that someone is making, and to see the thing I'm engaging with as an earnest attempt to communicate with another person.

In a weird way, I think that AI has made me a better person because of this. It's reminded me of what things truly have value

Yes. Husbands brother is in education, literal librarian/research background and has a chatgpt subscription and won't stfu about it. Can't stand it. Use your brain, fuck AI.

That it has been labeled AI was one of the biggest tricks they ever could pull Off. People literally think there is intelligence.

People like to Take what the First google result jacked Out. With "AI" it got even worse. "Nobody" is questioning shit anymore.

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.

Yes, I disregard idiots but that was true before AI too.

I also disregard any screenshots of Google ai overview, it's been proven to be easily manipulated.

I disregard all of these people where I can. I can't disregard my CEO, and he does it more than anyone I have encountered.

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

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.

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 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...

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

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

Well, I would trust a 9th century BCE doctor from anywhere in the world to diagnose me for internal bleeding before I trust anything someone who relies on genAI says to me. Could literally be just their name and I would immediately presume it's fake and they asked genAI for a name.

As far as possible, yes.

Yes. I have a family member who has to ask Claude everything, and he gets back these self-affirming answers that further cement his already-held opinions.

Its existence depends on you liking it, and it is programmed to suck up to you

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

I was having an existential crisis about climate change, talking to a woman about it, and she used AI to summarize why I shouldn't be so worried.

It, uh, didn't help.

I do because those people are fascists or catering to them. AI in its present form is unethical by its nature. Imprison the thieving billionaire surveillance cartel and more options open up.

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.

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.

i'm just worried, thasall

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.

How many times until you disregard them?. Is it like if you see someone using it one time or is it after the tenth time? What's the cutoff or frequency compared to a standard search? Is it if 50%+ of their searches are through AI or is it like 5%+?

disregard? mostly. they can be somewhat entertaining once in a while long as theyre not in charge of anything

That's not my criteria.

I also don't disregard people who spurt out everything they hear on TicTok either, though that's arguably worse.

At least AI ingested it somewhere and isn't directly fabricating a problem so it can sell me a product to fix it. It's still reasonably likely to be either wrong or at least somewhat misleading.

I give the annoying AI "researchers" at least some small amount of credit for trying to look stuff up.

And it's kind of fun to inform them they were misinformed. Extra credit points if you ask an AI right after they ask theirs with qualifiers like cite your source for this answer and don't include any quotes that didn't come from subject matter experts.

No, it's the same as searching the web or your local library. Perfect information simply doesn't exist at scale so one must know how to verify any source and use basic baysian thought.

Yes. It's getting weird. Had a coworker ask me a question if something was possible. I said yes. He said: no, ai said it wasn't. I didn't understand why he asked me if he knew the answer already lol. They just accept ai as truth, can't take those people seriously.

I know a guy who does that. He used to be smart, but it feels like those antivax who refer to other people instead of using their brain. When he begins to talk about AI results, I zone out, and I'm starting to disregard everything he says, AI or not.

I know only one person who's completely fallen under the spell, but yes.

Though to be fair, I already disregarded most of what he said since he's a reactionary conservative who spends his days pouring right-wing podcasts into his ears at 1.5x. But at least on topics other than politics, he used to be fairly knowledgeable and trustworthy.

But since he's started telling me how impressed he is by how smart Claude is (since it tells him what he wants to hear), I've started disregarding everything he says, regardless of topic.

Yes. It's getting to be more of a problem where it's easier not to think. I don't see this trend ending well.

I know whenever I'm at work and someone uses AI to try to answer a question where they are not qualified to validate an AI response, I don't trust anything that person says.

Yes. A friend's brother developed the habit to look up stuff during conversation when something is unclear. He uses voice for that, so you see him whisper to his phone all the time when you or others are speaking. Weirded me out.

I've gotten my llm using friends to preface it with "the lying liar that lies says" which has in turn led to a sharp upturn in "but also the top link says" and generally helps keep me alert.

Yes i do; My sister and her husband work in tech and they have become that kind of people that ask chat GTP for everything. I think what gets me the most is not that they ask AI but that they do so on the most obvious inconsequential things. I also hate when they use it as a research tool or to get a quick superficial answer. I often tell them I don't care what AI has to say.

For some reason when people share AI music; it really grinds my gears. I am not a musician but a long time music fan and for some reason any type of AI generated music is an existential insult to me, aside from the fact that it all sucks.

I don't think I know anyone who does that.

I think those people are in need of a good hard rl slap across the face

yes.

there's someone at work that doesn't read emails or reports, has AI generate the answers for them and just regurgitates the slop unfiltered.

I interact with them until they start posting slop, then I just ignore that they posted it. when I say ignore, I literally pretend that it doesn't even exist.

if they can pretend that slop has value, I can pretend that it doesn't exist.

yes i ignore their input

Just start asking your 5-year-old for counter arguments, as they are likely to be more valid.

Personally, it's people who get answers from some so-called "book" or "university" or "expert" that grind my gears. Like think for yourself maybe?

It bugs me, yes. The anthromorphic "ask AI" makes it even worse.

Yes. I know a few folk who've fallen way down the rabbit hole and believe anything the lying machines spit out. When they would get on their soapbox about LLMs or write very obviously ai-generated messages, I made it clear to them that I wanted to hear their thoughts or nothing at all.

For the most part, I got the latter. My mom actually backed down a bit and uses chatgpt at least more judiciously now, especially after I showed her how it makes shit up about stuff within her knowledge base and explained how it was doing that for everything.

Just using slop generators at all makes you a moron in my books. Unfortunately I am something of a moron myself when I use free services in an anonymous browser tab to find out something not clear from documentation.

Put simply, YES.

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.

If I knew anyone IRL, damn straight I would.

I've stop reading one source of tech news and at least one fitness youtuber who uses AI. I can do no less for IRL interactions.

I definitely would, yes.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I don't know if anyone I know does this. Im sure most or all use it somewhat but also still use standard searching.

I use AI a ton to find sources for information. Then check sources they used. Just made searching faster for me.

Not totally, but if they ask for an answer or ask AI to do something for them so they dont have to think im suspect.

I think AI can be useful, I use it to help me edit and proof my writing, but I specifically wont let it rewrite my words. I will let it make suggestions for clarity and grammar but thats the limit.

I will use AI to generate a meme level image, but im not going to use it for a presentation or as part of something that would have been a paid element.

I have played with using it to help me prototype some software, but I still read all the code, and I still take the time to understand what its writing.

AI replacing your own thoughts is bad, AI helping you refine and extend your thoughts is mostly ok.

Do you disregard people IRL who you know use a calculator for everything?

If that sounds like a ridiculous question, it's because the use of that tool has become so ingrained in our society that we don't question its use anymore. AI is a new tool and one which can offload a lot of mental work. Such tools have always been controversial. If Plato is to be believed (and that isn't necessarily a given), Socrates complained that writing made men lazy and their minds weak, because they didn't have to exercise their memories and were not taught things, just read facts.

AI is a tool, and it's going to be worked into the fabric of our society, for good or ill. It's also facing a lot of push-back, as have many tools, but that is unlikely to stop it. Will AI make us lazier? Absolutely. That's kinda the point. If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father. So much of human invention is all about ways to not work as hard. Sometimes, this is because we need to improve how we do something, sometimes its because we'd rather be down at the pub sipping a brew while a machine does the hard stuff. Often, it's both.

That said, there is likely to be a lot of pain in the short term as we adjust to the new reality. And it will likely cause another shift in how work happens. Businesses used to have hundreds of people doing nothing but tabulating accounts. Rooms would be full of people just doing math. Now, we have Excel and most of that tedious work is now done by one person at the click of a button. The main problem with the rollout of AI may be one of speed. The same speed which empowers Excel is making the disruption of AI happen at a much faster speed than many of our institutions may be equipped to handle. Or not, there's been some reporting lately that the promises of AI have been severely over-hyped (shocker, AI companies over sold the capabilities of AI, whodathunkit?). We won't really know until we're well past the point of disruption.

So, does it annoy me that people use (and believe) AI to answer relatively simple questions? No not really. Sure, they could take the time to look it up with google, but that is slower and harder. Or they could look it up in a book, which is even slower and harder. Or they could just memorize it and avoid that new fangled writing thing, which is making kids lazy. But, that sort of thing is a dead end. Ai is here, it's a tool people will use. We just need to find a way to educate people about its strengths and limitations. And that is a hard problem, but maybe AI will help us solve it.