My GF uses AI
Hi everyone. I'm a senior Computer Engineering student and my girlfriend is a senior Mechanical Engineering student.
She is caring, cute, clever and really thoughtful. I love everything about her. But the one thing that always bugs me out is the amount of AI she uses.
When we met 2 years ago the first topic we talked about was about AI and ever since that day I always mentioned her the advancements and dangers of AI. I said how there can't be ethical AI and any use of it is harmful.
She agrees with me every time and says she will decrease her usage but at the end she uses it still. Projects, reports, homeworks all go through the LLM. She shows me her work and I can't congratulate her without forcing myself because I know it's AI.
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.
I don't want to upset her but also seeing someone this close to me do this is saddening to me. What should I do? Should I just ignore it?
92 replies
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.
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.
I'm anti-AI but these two things are not remotely similar. You can't slowly Claude yourself to death over a number of years as your friends and family are forced to watch.
Wut? That's what I see in a lot of my friends on instagram. Which had lead to a lot of suicides.
And it's the same with AI chat bots. I've completely lost some friends. When I ask then a question, they just paste it into their chat and paste that slop response back to me
The first step is admitting they have a problem.
See that's where I'm going to disagree with you. I can name a handful of people who are logically dead already. Tons of people have destroyed their lives (and lost their lives) due to the psychosis they were allowed to build up while conversing only with AI.
South Park had a pretty entertaining (fictional) demonstration of this
I really have to find a way to catch up on that show, I hear they now call it South America.
Probably not worth it. Just watch an episode here and there where someone recommends it
The episode I was talking about is Season 27 Episode 3: Sickofancy. In it, Randy gets addicted to chatgpt, and decides he's going to get VP funding for a startup, takes a bunch of ketamine, and realizes that he's gone bankrupt by the terrible advice from his AI chat bot.
I also recommend Season 26 Episode 4: Deep Learning. In it, the kids start writing all their school essays with AI (and also all their romantic responses to girlfriends) while their teacher grades all the essays with AI. Then the school AI police start to investigate, and both the students and the teachers are terrified they'll be found out.
That's much more upbeat from the real stories I've learned about!
AI psychosis is a real thing, and multiple people have committed suicide because of it.
There are lawsuits against AI companies for those deaths.
So yes, you can in fact "Claude yourself to death".
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.
Having a partner doing something that don't align can definitely be hard to deal with. My fiance is the best person I know, I love everything about her, but sometimes she endorses the murder, rape, torture and breeding of animals for the sake of taste.
To me it makes no sense, but I accept that we have different priorities. If I were to look down on all people that make different choices than me I would be lonely and I don't think hanging out with vegans gives me better life quality than being with my friends and family.
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¢
Now try saying that about audio books. See the hypocrisy in action.
I could say that about audio books... but it wouldn't be true.
🧐
I have to disagree here.
If you listen to an audiobook, you still take in all the same info as you would reading the book yourself.
If you use AI to help you with a research paper you will always be offloading part of the task. Use it to gather your sources? You just offloaded the skills of looking for credible evidence to back up your claim. Use it to write the paper after doing the research yourself? You still offload the skill of crafting your arguments, word choice, persuasion, etc.
You are also taking a big risk assuming that the output of the clanker is correct as it usually doesn’t provide you sources to double check yourself.
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.
Yours is the best answer here, bravo!
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.
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.
The issue is we humans are awful at drawing that line. You eat meat too much no big deal. Drink coffee 3 times a day it's fine. Spend too much money on ethical chocolate it's fine. But AI is different.
Eventually there is a high probability of that moderate usage turning into frequent usage. If everyone used AI responsibly (like an advanced Google and sometimes grammar checks) it would be a great tool. But %99.9 people does not do that.
Idk, part of being in a relationship with an adult is acknowledging their autonomy. Where is the line between having an active college social life and a drug or alcohol problem? Sometimes that's clear cut sometimes not. If it starts affecting their academic life you can voice your concerns but if you're not ok with how they respond including ignoring you, you have to choose between not bringing it up again or leaving.
Maybe you also aren't seeing the issue objectively either maybe the AI usage is being done responsibly and your GF is actually getting a real understanding of the material. I'm not saying I know everything, but might be worth considering if this is you externalizing your fears and concerns and this is maybe a legitimate difference in how both of you choose to engage with this technology.
Do you not understand how harmful the factory farming of meat is to the environment? It's orders of magnitude worse for the environment than data centres used for AI are.
I understand that there are other considerations in the overuse of AI beyond just the environment, but downplaying how bad our species mass consumption of meat actually is, is a pretty shitty thing to do.
A person "eating to much meat" isn't "no big deal"
Meat eating is not the bad part here. It's the manufacturing of that said meat. We are animals and eating other animals is natural. Again the issue how we treat them and feed them.
Also I meant "no big deal" for the person. As in health benefits or dangers. Of course meat industry is awful.
And the only realistic way to eat that meat is to get it from the manufacturers you numpty. They create the environment destroying supply to meet the astronomical demand. If everyone ate much less meat, the demand would go down and thus the manufacturers would create less supply.
I mean with those prices I don't think anyone can eat that much meat lol
Are you purposefully being obtuse? Most people eat meat at least once a day. That's a massive demand.
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
Nah, political views seem pretty important for relationships—like, where do you draw the line? Is racism okay? Is pro-capitalism fine? Is fascism tolerable?
Also, in my opinion, AI is akin to mind-altering drugs: there's withdrawl, pyschosis, dependency, et cetera. At best, it's comparable to caffine. At worst... well, people have ended their lives because of it.
I agree. I think it has the potential to cause impairment of thinking if left rampant. It’s like watching a religion take over.
The issue you have is now widening ideas on who the person you love is. It’s easy to say oh just seperate them from thier role, but it’s not that simple, once it’s in your head. If you said my partner has adopted a new religion and it is at odds of how we were, you would likely get more understanding.
Whilst it sounds crazy I think you have to look at hypothetical situations, what if she decided to disclose your data or identifiers to AI? Or what if you have a heated discussion and she chooses its decision over yours?
Is it simple a professional tool then or is it a crutch?
You're highly unlikely to date someone for a extended period of time and then suddenly learn they actually heavily Catholic or part of the Klan. Generally if you share some basic general interest you share broader interests like politics just because they are related. If I met a girl/guy fishing I shouldn't be surprised to see a rebel flag tramp stamp on the second date.
If you date someone for 3-6 months then suddenly you notice all the ww2 natzi medals, and marble busts of elon musk in his master bed room then you are also the hot mess.
Most of the things you're going to have disagreements about politically are minor and trivial. If you do that's just luck of the bag. No one can just start drawing moral standards and making lines in the sand for you and your relationship that's just insanity.
I think
would be the issue more than the AI usage in and of itself.
Why?
If your partner tells you they're going to do x and repeatedly does y instead, that's somewhere between inconsiderate and deceptive. That's not a good thing in a relationship and should be addressed.
What a shocking (for this platform)-ly helpful, mature, honest, and direct response! Absolutely.
She's a STUDENT? Why the hell would you cheat as a student? That seems incredibly counterproductive
A little understanding may help here - some people don’t think of the learning part here or long term. Something new is difficult and an LLM is easier.
It’s not counterproductive if your goal is to complete whatever assignment.
So a better approach might be helping the student focus on the longer term learning goal
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
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.
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.
Accept her for who she is. If you can't, move on.
That is probably what I will do.
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.
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 recently used AI in Solidworks to generate a ladder and said everyone at the internship is doing the same and telling her its the future.
Do you think that's the case? Atleast for CAD in particular.
She may be considered for an entry level mech eng role, but based on her workflow her knowledge of fundamentals of mechanical design would be questioned. Generating models is very minor. She needs to understand basics of construction, manufacturing, material selection, design limitations and most critically overlooked, tolerances. She won't become a senior engineer without being a junior engineer and the learning curve is steep. The CAD portion is general grunt work, which to be clear is what she is offloading here. That grunt work is where a mech eng refines their knowledge of the previously mentioned topics and learns how to apply them to mechanical design for manufacturing, assembly and user experience, skills which a good mech eng is trying to develop. This isn't even touching on designing for strict constraints like regulatory standards. Engineering is a delicate balance of a million different compromises, and she must understand the compromises she is making with her designs. If it was about just chugging out models she would be screwed along with every other junior mech eng, and would be replaced by AI. This won't happen because AI is not trustworthy, lies and hallucinates. The design review method is done by a person with whom you can have meaningful dialogue with. AI erodes critical thinking, which is what she needs to learn, but isn't while using AI.
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.
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.comand 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.
Eh you are overreacting. But one thing is crucial, is she using any proprietary software out of her own volition?
Play some games / do activities together that don't involve internet / computer or any technology and best if it require focus and attention. ex yoga, board games, but also cooking from physical book or just experimenting in kitchen.
Try to look up guides on helping people out of AI dependency.
You don't need to ignore it. She should understand your stance on AI. You don't need to come off strong with pure hatred, but she should understand your dislike of AI. On the topic of her homework, keep it light. You don't need to fixate on it, just say it looks good (if it does). I don't know if you can help her reduce her usage. Maybe someone else here can figure that out.
Every time she gives you a paper to review, quiz her on the content within it.
@SPRUNTnsfw @ducktumn even without AI this would be a good way to learn.
You make a fair few judgments there. A relationship doesn’t mean you get to control each other’s behaviour. I digress. What I’m curious about is
That’s pretty blanket. Did you mean just LLMs or all forms of AI?
Dump that zero, and get a hero.
Your passion for the well being of your girlfriend is admirable.
Are you in a position to collaborate on a project with her, to challenge yourselves and increase your understanding?
I'm sure that the lecturers/teachers will be tailoring their subjects in light of AI already. So I wouldn't focus there, but on collaboration and real world problem solving ... something that won't kill the relationship either!
My own experience MANY years ago showed me that around 2/3rds of my classmates had only superficial understanding of the topics at the time (note: I was a geek, and was often well ahead of the course material, and I was bored in most classes as a result). Some really struggled but persisted (much respect to them!), while others left or switched.
I'm sure most of my class ended up in gainful employment and benefited from their studies regardless. I suspect that those who enjoyed a good working life are those who could collaborate well, who could talk with their colleagues and explain their viewpoints and positions, and listen and understand others viewpoints as they worked toward shared solutions to real world problems.
Shift it from a merely theoretical conversation about the negatives of AI to a personal, relationship-focused conversation. Make it clear to her that it would mean a lot to you, personally, if she could make that change or at least open a discussion about why she continues to use it.
Hey here’s something you should probably hear: You’re wrong.
You claim there’s no ethical use of AI, yet you don’t ever actually prove that claim. Your GF sits there, ethically using it in front of you and you can’t see it because your ideology blinds you. You literally ran to the fuck_ai forum for ideological relief. It’s kind of pathetic. Leave your GF alone.
Until everything made by LLMs trained on copyleft materials are legally forced to have all generated content be automatically licensed under copy-left licenses I don't wanna hear that "ethical use" bullshit.
That being said, yeah that's rough and you're probably gonna have to just accept it if a coupla conversations aren't doing it, because trying to 'fix' your partners like they're a project is both unhealthy and condescending.
Also make sure all the training infrastructure uses renewable energy, landmass, and water.
If any profit is made, donate enough to cover environmental damage.
Make sure the AI products won't take away any job on earth.
Or just, you know, don't fucking bother.
I agree with all of the above, but also think UBI should also be implemented as a safety measure for those losing jobs to automation as a whole.
You’re making a legitimate argument, but an argument isn’t a fact. he can say to his gf til he’s blue in the face that she’s being unethical, but he hasn’t demonstrated (nor can he really beyond theoretical hand waving) who is actually harmed by her use of AI. That isn’t to say there aren’t real harms that can happen and do happen, but it’s a bit ridiculous to tell someone who’s using an LLM to summarize an email that they’re responsible for the downfall of society. Get a grip
It is a fact that LLMs took the teeth away from copy left licenses.
You can now legally make a proprietary version of a copyleft licensed work by having an llm gobble it up and regurgitate it.
As someone who has donated money to, daily drives, and has even written software under a copyleft license? Yes that tangibly hurt me. It undermined my work, and others work I helped pay for, and even just work I use for free, and gave businesses a legal pathway to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish said software.
Don't believe me? Some asshole who thinks he's doing the lords work already started doing it to GIMP. Even if its open source, its still stealing the spotlight and funding from the actual FLOSS solutions worth using.
Taking the teeth away from a license many rely on isn't an intangible harm, its a very real problem. We used to be able to legally threaten companies into playing nice, that needs to be brought back.
…ok, so are you saying that this guy should start talking about copyleft licenses and that will resolve his relationship dispute? Because I’m saying he should accept that she has a different opinion and that he may even be wrong since she’s demonstrably not using it unethically (assuming she’s not trying to LLM-wash some open source software), I’m not really sure how what you mentioned is a relevant harm that would change his gf’s opinion?
ETA: To give you a better idea what I’m talking about, let’s say that the gf really just ethically thinks playing video games is a massive waste of time, and she raises that concern. And that he thinks that playing video games is a social outlet so that he can spend time with friends from high school, and have a fun time, and that the time he spends with it is in balance with the rest of his priorities and life.
The GF has a valid opinion about video games, but she’s not going to win any arguments with someone who is enjoying their usage in a balanced way with random ideological arguments, and moreover, she needs to either accept that this is something he enjoys to do in the balance of his life, and/or that she gasp may be wrong and/or leave the relationship if it’s really that big of a deal, but it would seem like she’s a bit of a nutter if she does that, to me at least.
You can say the same about any creative commons media they may have swallowed. There are copyleft forms of licenses for all creations in all domains. By using LLM generated content, you're using that training data.
Keep backpeddling all you want, I demonstrated one of tbe many ways that LLMs create inherit and tangible harm as asked.
As for this guys girlfriend? I'll refer to my first comment. (Admittedly edited a coupla mins after its original posting, so ya nights missed it):
I wasn’t asking for an abstract concept of how LLMs can cause ethical harms, I was asking how this person ever made the case that his GF’s particular use of AI was causing ethical harm. As I said in my last comment, responding with esoteric random arguments (arguments, not facts, I still remember when ‘theft’ required actually having to lose property) is not how you resolve a dispute in a relationship or a difference of opinion. I’m not backpedaling, you just demonstrated exactly what OP is doing and why it isn’t relevant to the situation.
If you create with an LLM you're relicensing work under an incompatible license.
Even if you do release under a copy left license, which one do you use? Many of them are incompatible. No matter what your breaking someones terms (or you would if AI companies wherent allowed to get away with murder.)
Again, as someone with publicly released works under copy-left licenses, that is doing anyone who's contributed to such works, in effort or donation, a tangible disservice.
Unless your work is so fucking innately important as to be above that issue, like improving quality of life for someone who's disabled, or curing some horrible disease, I don't wanna fucking hear it. Using LLM's to create is unethical.
If you actually read the comments you will see most people don't act like a circle jerk. Some say I'm wrong, some say I should break up with her and some say we should talk instead. I wrote here because people here might understand me.
You should phrase your concerns to her in the form ‘Your use of AI harms me in <specific way(s)>’ to her, then. Don’t talk about the planet, don’t talk about licenses. Is she not spending time with you that she’s spending with the AI? Is she spending excessive money on tokens and hurting your family? What is she doing that’s actually hurting you? Having a different opinion than you doesn’t count as a harm.
ETA: I also read every comment in the thread before I responded. No one just proferred that maybe you’re just flat out wrong and need to stop pushing your weird opinion this deep into your relationship. And I think the fact that you ran to the fuck_ai community to ask for relationship advice is testament to that. Come on bro.
Hurting the planet is actually hurting us too. We're all going to die in screaming fucking agony from mass starvation, mega disasters, wars for resources, collapsing infrastructure, and the eventual collapse of all civilization. Everyone dead forever because greedy piggies needed to cheat on their homework and generate images of Sonic with big tiddies.
there’s a big giant line between buying up 2.5 times the world’s capacity for data and gpu compute and speculatively trying to build thousands of community-destroying data centers because you have some deluded idea that it will ‘solve work’ or generate infinite value or whatever the fuck is going on with those people and someone using an LLM to summarize their fucking emails. If you seem them as being literally exactly the same, then I guess OP came to the right place, good lord. If you can acknowledge that when this hysteria passes there will still be tools out there that parse data and return it as text and that people will still use that and can do so without being cartoon villains, then I think OP should centralize his concerns around whether it’s actually harming him vs this henny penny bullshit.
My point is that talking about the planet is talking about what is actually hurting us.
And she's plainly not using it for "summarizing emails" as the OP clearly says "Projects, reports, homeworks all go through the LLM."
That sounds like she's a heavy user burning through a bunch of tokens, which means she is helping fuel the people buying up 2.5 times the world’s capacity for data and gpu compute and speculatively trying to build thousands of community-destroying data centers and all that other horseshit. You can't give these people your money and then pretend you aren't part of the problem.
Maybe she's not. Maybe she's a conscientious user using a lightweight open Chinese model that doesn't require destroying the world to run (I really don't care if people do this by the way), but that doesn't sound like the situation.
Yeah but that usage isn’t going to kill the planet, it pales in comparison to a single lazy system admin who uses it to generate all of his work or analyze through a company’s entire codebase. I don’t think the buildout is sustainable (or going to happen), and I think over time more people will shift into the usage model that you mention - running capable models locally on their own devices. They’re trying to essentially capture the entire industry before that happens.
It still helps keep the bubble inflated. They do need all those individual retail level customers to keep their valuations pumped up; relying solely on institutional customers and b2b isn't enough. Obviously a single user can't change anything, but if individual customers didn't matter they wouldn't bother advertising or trying to get us to use AI in our lives outside of work.
We absolutely should pressure the people we know in our lives to not use AI - or at least, stop buying tokens from hyperscalers.
Why are you so violent? Do you also use AI and feel bad to be called out?
Is the violence in the room with us right now?
As I suspected you’re just looking for agreement and not advice. So yeah, you’re right dude just keep pressing her on this, it would be a great idea.
Ah, I remember when MAGA was upset they couldn't get dates with normal women anymore. That sure was funny.
If you're ending it, can I get her number? /s
Y'all need to chill it with crucifying anyone and everyone who uses ai. Like any other tool it depends on how it's used. (If you can put aside the environmental factors cause a single person using it is not going to even scratch the surface of how much companies are)
As someone with ADHD, it's an amazing way to organize thoughts and to destill ideas into actual writing. And before you go on about how you can do that without ai, yes you can, but it requires someone to sit down with you and help you through the executive functioning process that I don't have. Would you be willing to spend that time and become her brain's crutch?
Before you do anything drastic, talk to her, figure out what she uses it for, how it helps her process. Don't blanket dismiss it cause it's ai.
Of course I won't break up with her. I want to support her with her work but I don't feel like her work is genuine. And the issue is I am not good at lying or acting.
So when she talks about the things she did I can't help myself and say "you could've done that by yourself". She claims she doesn't use it for everything but I saw the chats.
I know I sound like a jerk but this is important to me. I will probably try to ignore her use of AI and support her regardless.
How often are you "explaining" to her the dangers of AI? Honestly, yes, just ignore it. Outside looking in, you sound tedious and mildly controlling.
I probably am but she always talks about how much she wants to succeed and be an engineer. I don't see an engineer using AI and becoming successful so I am trying to guide her for her sake.
But I should probably stop you are right.