I started using chatbots yesterday and it surprised me how complete and articulate answers are. Main topics would be apparel, sewing, cooking, finance, ETFs, taxes, house maintenance, retirement.
Do you consider AI good enough to substitute human interaction? Because I remember a south park episode where randy marsh ignores his wife to interact exclusively with a bot. A parody of course but we have already plenty of AI porn and AI short stories for gullible people… and it works because they don’t stop watching (and sometimes believe it to be real).
I was always kind of an anti AI guy due to privacy, to avoid LLMs monetizing my questions and because I didn’t want to be a moron who has nothing better to do than to watch AI slop, but this is a tool so pervasive and practical I’m only isolating myself if I opt out of it. Thoughts?
Are there any questions you won’t ask a bot so the company behind it doesn’t monetize your input?
While it certainly appears that you’ve abandoned this thread, with little interest in responding…
Before you start asking any chatbot about finance, taxes, or retirement, try asking it about things you’re already an expert in.
I suspect you will find that the answers are often nonsense, or even counter to what its citations write.
Chatbots do not have any intelligence they are just autocomplete.
If I wanted something to answer my questions with info from the ether, I’d rather take a tab of acid and talk to the cat that hangs around my apartment’s dumpster than ask an ai. Most simple questions that I have are easily solved with a simple web search and there is no point in asking ai, and anything more complicated where the answer isn’t on the first page of the web search, the ai hallucinated something that was wrong and made zero sense. Absolutely atrocious use of power, water, land, and DRAM.
substitute human interaction. of course not. heck im someone who is pretty fine alone. I could go be a hermit. Interacting with an ai is unnecessary and won’t help me. Its the next abstraction of search though and it basically allows you to get the data from several searches where you visited several sites. so it is more efficient. just like web searching and actually a bit more than it you need to review and assess the answers and the sources used for accuracy. A big problem is many answers will be from its training and it can’t give you a source besides a black box. you can press it to search the web and find sources to backup what it knows though just like people do in forums.
People have their reasons for hating AI, and they are largely valid. However, the blind hate leads to proclamations that are untrue and undermine their whole argument. I’ll do my best to give a sober analysis from the point of view of a skeptic who believes AI does have a place in the world.
The answers AI provides are often pretty good because it goes out and pulls information from websites and puts together a cohesive answer. It does the search for you and it summarizes the results for you in seconds. However, inaccuracies can creep in such as flipping left and right because they are closely related conceptually. A domain expert can often catch these errors but a “layperson” doesn’t have all the tools to question and push back against such inaccuracies.
What I’m saying is responses can look accurate and complete, and often are, but until you validate them, they shouldn’t be used for anything important. You are in the wow stage of discovering AI but the first time you rely on it and it steers you wrong, you’re going to flip to AI is useless and wrong pretty quickly. That’s not right, either but it feels right. Use it to speed up things you can already do, but don’t rely on answers just because they are articulate.
Lastly, be careful about sycophancy or agreement. Chatbots are simple to argue into any position. But because you win an argument with AI, don’t think that means your position is right or your argument holds water. If you go at a bot with barely coherent reasons to be anti-vax, it’ll support you.
That all being said…
They are pretty good for rubber ducking and brainstorming. They aren’t as good as another actual person but if it’s you by yourself or you with AI, the AI at least comes with a different perspective.
However inaccurate they may be when searching for answers, google is such a cesspit these days that AI is no less accurate and substantially faster. That’s why they I order the ai summary now and attempt to block use by AI searchers.
They can be helpful for organizing if you are a disorganized person. They can a offer proofreading and editing help BUT don’t have it rewrite the final copy. Give it a first draft, have it revise that or give feedback, and then rewrite the final version in your own voice.
Final advice:
Never, ever, pass ai work product off as your own. I like to say AI is a tool, not a product. Incorporate its input, but the moment you substitute ai words or judgment for your own you’ve removed any value or authority from what you are providing. If someone else has to validate every word of what you provide, you’ve pushed the work that was yours onto the recipients. Think of it this way: any supporting fact is provisional until verified by someone qualified to do so. Even if the ai is 98% accurate, ever cited fact has the potential to be wrong until it is proven. If you don’t (or can’t) prove them, what you have is a suggestion phrased as fact.
I am an adult and I have the self-respect and cognitive skill to manage my life without a robot babysitter holding my hand.
I’m only isolating myself if I opt out of it.
Please explain how this isolates you.
Please do not use llm as a substitute for relationships or relationship counselor or psychologist or so, it’s extremely harmful to you even in ways you can not see. And it doesn’t even tell you the truth, it just tells you what you probably want to hear based on the huge dataset that was fed to it. If you must, use it for work if you are in technical field, but remember we all pay for it with everything that is more expensive because of it (and that includes even food) and of course our environment pays for it dearly.
I do not use any AI chatbots. I have ethical, sociological, religious, and environmental reasons for never ever using them.
If I’m isolating myself by opting out, so be it. I do not want to cook the planet for fucking markov chains.
a markov chain is a very specific and different thing
Meanwhile, I am driven first and foremost by my desire for correct information, but have reached the same conclusion.
Same.
Furthermore, I actively look down on anyone who uses them. I regard them with humanity, as I watch their intelligence and independence and capacity for critical thought dwindle until they’re nothing more than a shell who instinctively reaches for some slop machine when presented with anything of any difficulty.
My brother was once a masterful artist. He is now nothing more than a meatbag with ChatGPT access, and he is incapable of creating what he made just five years ago.
None. Because chatting with AI is cringy as hell.
I don’t use one at all. I was kinda the opposite of you. I started out thinking AI seemed pretty cool, and i tried using a local model for a little bit, but aside from asking it some simple questions i couldn’t get into the habit of using it. To me it still seems faster to just search the internet myself, plus you already have to factcheck what an AI tells you anyway, so may as well look it up myself. Over the years seeing the mess that it is causing i’ve grown to hate the technology, and i hope people are right about this “bubble” existing, cause i can’t wait for it to pop.
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, use AI.
Just to put it in perspective:
If you saw a man at a fancy restaurant sitting across from a Real Doll, and watched him order for his “date” and have a conversation with her while he ate, would you think “This is a totally reasonable substitution for a wife.”?
That’s exactly what you just described to us.
The chat bots are specifically built to keep you engaged and interested the same way social media feeds give you that rush of endorphins.
It’s built to give more complete answers, but definitely not always correct.
Ai is far better at faking the appearance of intelligence than it was a couple years ago, but it’s still just algorithms built of data sets.
Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s truly beneficial, or you’re somehow left out for not using it. I avoid it after using it and then learning how horrible it is for surrounding areas. The inefficiency, the pollution, the damage. It’s not ethical. And yes they absolutely save every search or question asked, and repeatedly leak info about others. It’s also incorrectly been used as a “friend” and to reinforce its use, convinced users to kill themselves-and several did!!
Best of luck!
Ai is far better at faking the appearance of intelligence than it was a couple years ago, but it’s still just algorithms built of data sets.
Well it’s also getting large swaths of it’s ‘knowledge’ from the internet. It’s just able to process and digest it all faster than a human could. It’s like calling a phone a ‘smartphone’ because it can do multiple functions than a human could.
It’s not hard to not see the little bubble icons as it searches through multiple sources before giving you an answer. It’s essentially a very pricey shopping advisor/guide.
I use local LLMs on my own hardware pretty much exclusively; that solves the privacy and rugpull concerns.
I mostly use an uncensored version of Qwen3.8 these days; previously I used an uncensored version of Qwen3.6. Occasionally I’ll use other models (e.g. ones derived from Gemma4) as well, but more rarely. The censorship removal gets rid of a lot of the “As an AI model” hedging crap, and refusal to talk about “sensitive subjects” that could get the model maker in hot water (e.g. “a certain famous event that happened in China in 1989” for Chinese models). That also means it can talk about sexual subjects or tell me to go kill myself, technically, but it doesn’t unless I push it to.
It’s pretty good at OCR; quick coding questions like the kind of stuff Google would’ve sent me to Stack Overflow for a few years ago; summarizing text; and offline translation (up to a point). Sometimes I bounce ideas off it, have it proofread/look for mistakes in code or other text I’ve written, and stuff like that.
Do you consider AI good enough to substitute human interaction?
I spend a lot of time alone. It’s a pretty mediocre substitute for real human interaction. It was pretty fun to poke at LLMs via chat when I first got the ability to run them on my own hardware, but the novelty wore off pretty quick. I wrote my own tooling and saved chat logs I thought were interesting. I had 78 in May when this stuff was still really new to me, 50 in June, 14 in July… and just 1 last month that I thought was actually worth saving. 🤷️
I don’t, because no chatbot or llm is able to dispatch a fibre tech to investigate why my fibre service dropped by 10dB overnight.
Yes, I do make that call more then you think when managing a couple thousand fibre services.
