I have a love/ hate relationship. Sometimes I'm absolutely blown away by what it can do. But then I asked a compounded interest question. The first answer was AI, so I figured ok, why not. I should mention I don't know much about it. The answer was impressive. It gave the result, a brief explanation about how it came to the result and presented me with the equation it used. Since I needed it for all time sake, I entered the equation into a spreadsheet and got what I thought was the wrong answer. I spent quite a few minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and found a couple of things. But fixing them still didn't give me the correct result. After I had convinced myself I had done it correctly I looked up the equation. It was the right one. Then I put it into a non-AI calculator online to check my work. Sure enough, the AI had given me the wrong result with the right equation. So be rule, never accept the AI answer with verifying it. But you know what, if you have to verify it, what's the point of using it in the first place? You just have to do the same work as you would without it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

being anti-plastic is making me feel like i'm going insane. "you asked for a coffee to go and i grabbed a disposable cup." studies have proven its making people dumber. "i threw your leftovers in some cling film." its made from fossil fuels and leaves trash everywhere we look. "ill grab a bag at the register." it chokes rivers and beaches and then we act surprised. "ill print a cute label and call it recyclable." its spreading greenwashed nonsense. little arrows on stuff that still ends up in the landfill. "dont worry, it says compostable." only at some industrial facility youll never see. "i was unboxing a package" theres no way to verify where any of this ends up. burned, buried, or floating in the ocean. "the brand says advanced recycling." my work has an entire sustainability team and we still stock pallets of plastic water bottles and shrink wrapped everything. plastic cutlery. plastic wrap. bubble mailers. zip ties. everyone treats it as a novelty. every treats it as a mandatory part of life. am i the only one who sees it? am i paranoid? am i going insane? jesus fucking christ. if i have to hear one more "well at least" "but its convenient" "but you can" im about to lose it. i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to avoid the disposable default. have you no principles? no goddamn spine? am i the weird one here?

#ebb rambles #vent #i think #fuck plastics im so goddamn tired

No line breaks and capitalization? Can somebody ask AI to format it properly, please?

I don't think it's just you. Like it wasn't just one person thinking computers would make us dumb or the automobile making us lazy. I'm betting that someone somewhere thought that cooking food on the fire would make us weaker.

Technology has that ability to generate opposition from status quo.

And as with any technology, there are good uses, bad uses and frivolous uses.

Remember the awful nonsense web pages of the early 90's?

I think AI will make the life's of some of us easier. But I also think it will continue widening the digital divide.

The biggest concern is that, by nature, AI needs massive amounts of power which can only be paid by people with big resources and those people are training it. AI has the trainer's bias.

However, end consumer AI is the tip of the iceberg. AI will succeed when we don't even realize it's there.

People are overworked, underpaid, and struggling to make rent in this economy while juggling 3 jobs or taking care of their kids, or both.

They are at the limits of their mental load, especially women who shoulder it disproportionately in many households. AI is used to drastically reduce that mental load. People suffering from burnout use it for unlicensed therapy. I'm not advocating for it, I'm pointing out why people use it.

Treating AI users like a moral failure and disregarding their circumstances does nothing to discourage the use of AI. All you are doing is enforcing their alienation of anti-AI sentiment.

First, understand the person behind it. Address the root cause, which is that AI companies are exploiting the vulnerabilities of people with or close to burnout by selling the dream of a lightened workload.

It's like eating factory farmed meat. If you have eaten it recently, you know what horrors go into making it. Yet, you are exhausted from a long day of work and you just need a bite of that chicken to take the edge off to remain sane after all these years. There is a system at work here, greater than just you and the chicken. It's the industry as a whole exploiting consumer habits. AI users are no different.

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

Meanwhile, we have people making the web worse by not linking to source & giving us images of text instead of proper, accessible, searchable, failure tolerant text.

Me and the homies all hate ai. The only thing people around me seem to use ai for is essentially just snapchat filters. Those people couldn’t muster a single fuck about the harms ai has done though.

Billionaires: invests heavily in water.

Billionaires: "In the future there's going to be water wars. You need to invest NOW! Quick before it's too late. I swear I'm not just trying to pump the stock."

Billionaires: "Water isn't accruing value fast enough. Let's invent a product that uses a shit ton of it!"

Billionaires: "No one likes or is using the product. Force them to. Include it in literally all software and every website. Make it so they're using the product even when they don't know they're using it. Include it in every web search. I want that water gone by the end of this quarter!"

Unfortunately the masses will do as they're told. Our society has been trained to do this. Even those that resist are playing their part.

Early computers were massive and consumed a lot of electricity. They were heavy, prone to failure, and wildly expensive.

We learned to use transistors and integrated circuits to make them smaller and more affordable. We researched how to manufacture them, how to power them, and how to improve their abilities.

Critics at the time said they were a waste of time and money, and that we should stop sinking resources into them.

This is a great representation of why not to argue with someone who debates like this.

Arguments like these are like Hydras. Start tackling any one statement that may be taken out of context, or have more nuance, or is a complete misrepresentation, and two more pop up.

It sucks because true, good points get lost in the tangle.