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Posted by garycomtois 7 hours ago

Please Use AI(shawnsmucker.substack.com)
682 points | 350 commentspage 8
artemonster 6 hours ago|
I asked Claude what he thinks about this blog post and was surprised by the level of self awareness (you cant call it like that but I dont have better word)
tiborsaas 6 hours ago||
Meh, here's a haiku from gemini

> write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff

    Let humans create,
    Leave the soul to living minds,
    Let code do the chores.
bko 6 hours ago||
When your router is not working, please use AI. Don't call your friend who is "good with computers" have him drop everything he's doing and have him trouble shoot the problem for you over the phone.

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.

jjulius 4 hours ago||
I'm the friend and family member who's "good with computers" and gets the brunt of those calls. I appreciate them, because it's nice to chat with folk I don't chat as frequently with as others in my life. The problems are often relatively easy and don't take much time. There's never been any pressure felt on my end to "drop everything [I'm] doing" - if I'm not available, I'm not available, and I'll get back to them when I can (after all, I am in control of what my priorities are in my life - aside from my children, my life isn't dictated by others, but I do appreciate that sometimes things might be urgent for those with tech problems). Sometimes they've figured it out by that point and we chat for a bit longer.

There's nothing "obnoxious" about this. It might be for you, and that's cool beans, but your post speaks in a broad generalization that just isn't accurate for everyone.

SuperV1234 6 hours ago||
And if my router wasn't working 5 years ago, I would have first used a search engine and tried to figure it out on my own.

Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.

bko 5 hours ago||
Congrats. I'm pretty sure I've helped more than a few friends and family members debug a router. Most of them didn't even know what a router was. Much harder to Google for specific issues like that, hence the 1 billion people that use AI globally.

Pretending that AI is not incredibly useful is... disingeuous

SuperV1234 5 hours ago||
How'd you infer that I don't find AI useful from my statement? Of course I do. I am merely saying that the argumentation in the "poem" is not specific to AI.
bko 5 hours ago||
It was based on:

> Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.

yes, being able to debug your router through a simple conversation without bothering people is a novelty

SuperV1234 5 hours ago||
It's not that simple.

The grandma that would have phoned her nephew to fix the phone will still do the same thing now. She will not have magically switched to querying LLMs after a lifetime of technological illiteracy.

The tech-savvy person that uses AI today would have been more than capable than figuring out how to fix their router by using Google even without prior networking skills/experience 5-10 years ago.

Using AI to solve these problems is a novelty for a specific subset of the population. And the topic does matter.

Even the somewhat tech-illiterate mom would have been able to Google a recipe 10 years ago, or watch an Instagram reel 5 years ago. They were surely not going to call their friends to ask instructions on how to make an apple pie.

Pretending this is an AI novelty is indeed disingeneous.

willguest 6 hours ago||
I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.

I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.

I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.

Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased

jamwil 6 hours ago||
The author’s point was more nuanced than ‘tool bad’.
willguest 3 hours ago||
tell me, where in this piece is there any acknowledgement that the technology, if used well, can bring people together?

show me, and i will accept there is nuance

CivBase 6 hours ago||
> thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.

It's a pretty big stretch to liken a ranking algorithm based entirely on direct, intentional human inputs to what most people understand to be "AI".

willguest 3 hours ago||
> what most people understand to be "AI"

most people understand it to be an LLM, but that doesn't make the term mean only that. the point was illustrative, perhaps Meta's attention maximization algos would be a better example

my point was not that they are the same, but that the author seems to advocate for some technologies, like video calling and text messages, but cannot make the leap to see that it is how we use that matters. It is a selective diabtribe, framed in a positive voice, hence my counter-examples to match

SuperV1234 6 hours ago|
I found this quite cringy and an attempt at pulling at one's heartstrings due to the lack of a strong argumentation.

I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.

If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.

The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.

jjulius 4 hours ago|
As others have echoed elsewhere in these responses, this idea can very easily be applied to the broader internet (eg, your Google searches) as well. Not everything is answered with Google. To your point about figuring out a hiking path, I backpack very regularly - search engines consistently return the same sets of results, and I've found wonderful places by talking to friends or others in the community that I, to this day, don't come across when searching for things online.

Just because it gets results doesn't mean there isn't more out there, and that there isn't a benefit to engaging with your community.

I see the same sameness in the results when I use AI to explore such subjects. There's a certain level of homogeneity that comes with relying on Google, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, and AI for our answers.