I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone
For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with
I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it.
I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file handling” and “logging” and syntax wrangling and caring if some “variable” is on the “stack” or the “heap” I can live without very happily. It’s not that they are uninteresting in and of themselves but I find it hard to justify keeping my focus on these microscopic issues again and again and again and again.
I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.
Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
I do agree on the "existential crisis" part of it. At work, every time I see someone sign-off of something AI generated without much edits, I feel this fear that we're on to slippery slope where there's no turning back.
It's like we no longer understand the purpose of language itself: to get thoughts out of our head and share them with other people.
I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction.
At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me.
We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery.
Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
No, I reject that. If there are to be pictures and shirts, let them be real, or let us forego them. If it's acceptable to offload something like this to AI, maybe it wasn't really that important anyway.
The AI wasn't picking the font, it was picking the words.
Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue.
AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like.
Your shirt? Go to town! Draw something yourself and let AI patch up some rough edges. Do some style transfer. Or don’t use it. That’s still an option. As you said it is hard to create with AI without losing your soul but that’s not inherent to the tech. It’s a massive skill and tooling issue.
Instead of choosing between “do it fully myself” and “let someone else do it” you get a slider now. You get to pick! How awesome is that?
It definitely appears inherent so far. You could say infinite feeds optimized for engagement is just neutral tech too. The biggest mistake we made in the last tech revolution of ”social” media was to judge tech by its potential rather than the business model.
> You get to pick! How awesome is that?
It's awesome if you don’t derive meaning from the process. Like cheating in a single player game, you can just skip and watch the credits.
Ironically one of my most memorable game experiences ever is just walking and climbing for ages in Death Stranding, in poor weather, slipping, picking up baggage. It was miserable. But effort seems to create meaning.
I think you may have misread the parent comment.
And currently AI has no creativity nor does it enhance a human's creativity. It simply regurgitates and at best the human user can lie to themselves that they did it. Look at the "rinse and repeat" of animated movies. Humanity has been in a cycle of regurgitation for quite some time and AI is only going to make it worse.
That is a very black and white view you got there mate. I’m not sure I agree. Creativity does not need to be in the AI nor does the human need “enhancing”. We can just be creative in new and to me interesting ways. Just like how synthesizers enabled new sounds but you still need to be a musician to get anything good.
Society is still adapting. I say give it time.
The ONLY point of the words is to express a sentiment shared by the group, creating a bond and solidarity.
But if the sentiment did not come from anyone in the group or from the group as a collective, why put words on the shirt at all?
It's the lie of a shared connection without the reality. Just like social media "friends" or the "intimacy" of porn. Just another way to destroy a little more of our souls.
ironic statment in ai slop comment
My wife has an ongoing frustration with a colleague who has adopted the mindset, "I reviewed it, so I wrote it". I guess he must sleep well at night, and probably votes in the "AI gives me superpowers bloc", but it is pretty apparent he doesn't really review it much either, because it is full of flaws and absurdity.
realization was that you had been generating slop all this while before ai and somehow convinced yourself that it was original and human ?
"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."
AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.
Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
There’s also limit to how much you can expect coworkers, friends, and family to review your work. An LLM can act as a rubber duck debug partner or a reviewer hundreds of times per time. You cannot have friends and family at your service all day.
No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find purpose and meaning, even motivation and inspiration in others. It is not anyone's "job" to make you a better person.
That's precisely the kind of thinking that's landed us in the mess we're in. Abdication of personal responsibility. Shifting blame and responsibility from yourself onto anyone nearby. It is your job to make yourself a better person for the people around you. Not the other way around.
Keeping the speech in mind, the "job" there would be "hey Joe, can I run this speech by you?"
In that scenario, they'd (A) feel valued, (B) connect with you, (C) have something to do socially instead of "sooo uh whatcha been up to... uh... nice weather..." (D) get to hone their own speech skills by critiquing in a safe environment.
That is to say - Yeah his actual statement in that sentence, that the "job" of our friends is to "push us harder" is not the best way to say it maybe, but if he had said it slightly differently as "We used to lean on and learn from our friends, families, and coworkers, and insodoing we ourselves improved in a symbiotic way" it would've been less contentious.
It's about community. And real people often like to help. If your circle doesn't, find someone who does. Find a community.
I enjoy helping people be better, to reach new heights in their personal lives. It's about relationships.
My thoughts aren't about "abdication of personal responsibility" or "Shifting blame".
It's about humanity and people and community.
You will always grow faster spending time with someone who says "couldn't you also try X" than someone who always says "that's good enough, why don't you relax and watch some TV".
Some say we're losing our humanity: that can be seen as good or bad, depending on whether or not you think you are more useful than someone else.
If anything an underlying truth about humanity is being exposed: we take the easy way out far more often than we’d like to admit.
Perhaps, this truth being made explicit is a wakeup call that will teach us the value of that hard work anew.
After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.
Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them.
> After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.
There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.
Speak for yourself. This is a sweeping generalization.
> There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.
Oh yeah, and that other new-fangled technology the Greeks were complaining about – books.
Citation needed. People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.
For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.
Speeches haven't gone away, videos are more popular than ever, and consulting within our social circle will continue on.
I think there's something to be said about there being an isolationist phenomenon in society that might be contributing in part to low fertility, but that significantly pre-dates LLMs. It's easy and convenient for us to be alone - people create friction. We've been entertained by the TV set for a century now. That said, we remain social creatures and enduringly have a need to be with others, at least to some extent.
I'd like for it to be a choice. AI is injected into search now, when you install vscode they have a prompt input sitting there and they nudge you to use it. Of course you can opt out of this stuff but it has become the default.
As someone teaching their nephew how to code i really want him to struggle and exercise his problem solving skills instead of having every touchpoint offer him an instant answer.
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
Isn't the point of the poem that you should, instead, ask a human? You'll get sidetracked and drawn into unrelated conversations, sure, but that's what it means being human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?
That's my take from the poem, anyway.
Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.
The reality was replacing human interaction with addiction to an algorithmic feed and endless hours of mindless consumption and very little creation and rapidly deteriorating mental health.
It is good to be skeptical of similar grandiose claims about AI, and consider what the reality might turn out to be.
Start there.
I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context.
I thought this was amazing!
But I'm sure someone could point out that I took a mental shortcut, that I made myself dumber by not grasping Serbian and Cyrillic to have a go at translating myself. Or they could say that I lost the human connection that would have come by finding a resident who spoke English and asking about what that meant.
In a sense, this are plausible critiques. But the reality is that I was on a run, and I almost certainly never would have done those things if Claude (or smartphones with cameras, for that matter) didn't exist. I didn't become lazier or lose the imperfections of human connections, the whole thing was a net add for me.
And so, in that light - it's okay to use a recipe book, or ask an LLM about fly fishing, or do some web searches to get some advice about how to write a wedding toast.
If that's missing the point somehow, so be it. Perhaps you could enlighten me (and thus cultivate a human connection)!
I remember calling the library reference desk from the phone behind a bar to settle bar bets (once free long distance became a thing, you could justify calling west coast libraries during east coast happy hour). Now they're settled before they even really get going, and it doesn't even feel fun to bet on, so people don't.
I've also taken several trips to Europe and only on the most recent one did it make financial sense for me to get a local data plan. I admit that the language of the country we visit is kind of a hobby of mine, and so talking to the locals is a lot of the fun of going, but even if that's not the case, what's wrong with a little mystery? You can snap the photo, and then for years down the rode if you show it to somebody, you can say "Here's a cool statue I saw in Serbia, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the inscription on the plinth says." Or even 3 years ago, you probably would have posted it to $SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM with a caption like "Who can tell me what this says?" and perhaps even gotten a reply from somebody in the same city you were in and made a little connection.
I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:
- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.
- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.
- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.
And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.
>it's their job to tell them how wrong they are
lol.
To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so.
If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: people on the Internet have a way of replying to arguments that people aren't actually making, and I'm certainly not immune from that. But the structure of the piece is clearly making emotional arguments so I don't think I'm wrong in that regard.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
I was suggesting that telling people to avoid a technical solution because there is a preferable solution does not guarantee the preferrable solution is possible.
It's a channel that increases access to knowledge for those who wouldn't otherwise have it, but disrupts a status quo in a way that some might find harmful. But in that case people seemed to pretty universally recognize that the pros outweighed the cons.
A YouTube channel about stuff your dad might know does not have the same potential for negative impact on human interaction as genAI. And the author never even claims "the cons outweigh the pros". Maybe they feel that way, but the dangers they advise against are absolutely real and do not require a broad stance like "everybody who ever uses AI should feel bad" in order to recognize those dangers. I use AI every single day, yet I do not feel the least bit browbeaten and my heart bleeds in agreement with this blog post.
I love a good strawman argument myself, but this is just madness. Who the heck finds substitute "dad advice" harmful?
The author of the poem, however, is clearly portraying that as a negative.
The author believes if you have a friend who cooks, see if they have a recipe. You believe there's no harm in going straight to Claude in the same scenario.
That's the whole disagreement.
I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.
The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.
So much to unpack here!
First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.
The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.
Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.
Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)
And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.
Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.
You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:
* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media
The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.
Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.
I love when I get someone to talk about something they clearly love, and they're giddy with joy and struggling to contain themselves. It's one of the finer pleasures of talking to strangers and not machines.
Mot everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.
Not every dad is good at everything.
I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish
You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.
I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.
But this is the thing. Many people don't, or have some other real or imagined barrier preventing them from it. Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.
While I relate to the heart of the poem, there is an aspect of it that's essentially criticizing people for their suffering. There's a "just stop drinking" vibe.
Then let's talk about that, and encourage them to speak up and reach out, rather than entombing them and throwing away the key.
I can stand someone who is lonely, and awkward, or sad. I have been all those things. I cannot stand someone who is so hospitalized by talking to LLM constantly that they treat me like a jukebox, too. That they're not even stupid or bad with words, but cannot think at all, and do it in a high volume, high confidence manner, with lots of big words and things that seem to make sense until you put weight on them. So unless someone more patient than me comes along, as far as I'm concerned, they are now lonely for good, unless I can avoid it. And that's not a state of things I want for myself or others.
"It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love."
-- Stephen Hawking
I think we may be approaching some sort of watershed moment, if not conflict between those who hold such sentiments and those whose response is "oh yeah? hold my beer".
Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.
So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.
Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.
Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.
Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.
Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.
And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.
Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.
AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.
This is backwards. This false dichotomy is what irrational reactions against anti-AI sentiment use, not the anti-AI sentiment itself. It is exactly the false dichotomy the parent you are replying to is using.
On the other hand, maybe we should stop doing bullshit things instead of doing them more and faster. Maybe we ought to have fewer, shorter speeches, simpler websites and so on. Instead, we're drowning the world in noise. Speeches written by nobody, about nothing, for nobody in particular.
Sure, humans repeat patterns, but they add their own delightful uniqueness and imperfection to the mix. Tiny random mutations that eventually evolve the genre. Humans get really good at following rules, but then they develop the taste to break them. Wisdom shapes their craft in unpredictable ways.
And I guess that's what being an internet dad is. You live a long, imperfect life and you learn all sorts of lessons, many of which are subtle and never written down, then you apply those lessons to your craft. What can a machine teach us about fatherhood?
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.
-Max Frisch
Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic? How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. If your best you is a baseline human, then, great! More power to you! I know that mine sure as fuck isn't.
Will there be lots of trouble on the way towards teching up so that everyone can be the best version of themselves possible? Absolutely. Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
Come on, by that vague of a definition, Aristotle and Confucius were apparently transhumanists.
This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.
At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
Look. I am a massive fan of the janky old manually created website. <marquee> will never die and it is hilarious that browsers will have to retain the feature for years to come.
But "the blog was generated by a machine" isn't the problem with Substack. "Machine Generated" blog sites have been around ever since blogs went big. Blogspot and Wordpress were practically a duopoly in the peak days of blogging. The problem with Substack is two (really, only the latter):
1) It's gotten the Post-Zuckerberg "everything must follow our company letterhead" disease. That's not a substack exclusive problem and designers need to be bullied harder for it.
2) It's the nazi bar where all the nazi blogs are. This one is the actual reason you should not be using substack.
The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content, and works on most people's devices. I would rather have read this on substack, than the author get frustrated at having to learn how to publish pages by hand and give up.
Maybe we just need a better alternative to substack if that's the problem.
I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.
When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”
Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.
I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.
The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.
Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.
I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.
Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.
I’m still very conflicted about it.
I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.
Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?
Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
Hasn't it always been the case that technology reduces the contact with other people? Now with cars we don't need to sit next to others on trains, we don't need to ask pedestrians for directions thanks to GPS etc.
Technology has drawbacks, the question is are the drawbacks greater than it's benefits. Part of the answer is personal, some people can handle them better than others. Other parts are societal, what's the impact on society of the people that's can't handle it (mass shooters, roadrage, suicides etc).
It's a tough nut to crack.
If they actually showed and picked you up, somehow the credit card machine wouldn't be working and then they'd aggressively insist they'd drive you to an ATM to get cash. It would magically start working if you told them that cash was not an option
The taxi service got what was coming to them, at least here they did. They had decades to make their service at least non-hostile to the consumer and instead it just got worse. I'll gladly pay for a rideshare where I can just put in my destination address vs have to deal with that nonsense
Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.
Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.
Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.
How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...
Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...
And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.
Anecdotally, I've seen the effects that people delegating their executive functions to AI have had and the damage is quick and harrowing