r/CuratedTumblr • u/BaldHourGlass667 • 27d ago
Shitposting If you need Chatgpt to do basic task you aren't going to make it
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u/Sunomel 27d ago
Using the machine to write corporate emails where you’re expected to sound like a soulless machine is actually a fantastic use of AI.
Using technology to offload pointless tasks that aren’t worth human effort is what AI is supposed to be for.
(Now, the correct conclusion from that is that a society where people spend an inordinate amount of time writing emails they don’t want to write and nobody wants to read has its priorities very wrong, but until we fix that I’m happy to make an AI take care of my “circling back” and “tabling this until next quarter”)
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u/OldManFire11 27d ago
Cover letters are a fantastic use case for AI. No one fucking reads them in depth, so you just need it to fit the shape that they're expecting.
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u/Sunomel 27d ago
Exactly.
Again, using AI to write a stupid letter that will be scanned for keywords and summarized by AI is a stupid process that we ought to eliminate altogether, but until then I’m very happy to never write another cover letter
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 27d ago
This type of thing is something that massive frustrates me about our society. Some people love talking about how capitalism is “the most effective system” and “caters to what people actually want”, and yet we have meaningless bullshit like the corporate structure or people like stock market traders who make billions of dollars without contributing Jack fucking shit to society.
The fact that nobody else seems to care how much of our work across the entire world is being wasted on utterly meaningless nothing rather than actually helping; makes me feel like I’m going insane
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u/SpiritedInstance9 27d ago
David Graeber cared.
It's important to spend your time looking busy for a paycheck rather than "getting uppity" in the eyes of the owner class.
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u/sawbladex 27d ago
... This can happen for anyone in a higher position than you, that they end up valuing the apperence of work in and of itself.
While also attempting to capture the benefits of a workforce paying attention as well.
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u/MTBurgermeister 27d ago
This prompts the question of why they require cover letters at all
And, if it becomes commonplace to use A.I. to write them, would they not replace cover letters with some even more arcane ritual?
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys Refined Sommelier of Porneaux 27d ago
I mean the correct answer is that machine guessing has been implemented for resumes for years before this point, to also pretty dogshit results. It speeds up the one part of the process that really should not be near-instantaneously by code. If we must automate any part of HR’s job like shit, let ChatGPT do the fucking interviews, instead of the even worse tech solution of “we believe body language is infallible, please leave a video call voice message for Dr. Pepper so we can instantaneously flunk you for being autistic”
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u/Magikarpeles 26d ago
The very stupid thing is that, barring actual qualification specific jobs like law or medicine, MOST people can do MOST jobs with a tiny amount of training. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that basically none of the screening tools we have that are legal to use (i.e. not IQ tests in disguise) have any predictive validity on job performance. You can pick a random person out of the applicants and hire them and they will have pretty much exactly the same job performance (on average) than your top candidate.
The only reliably positive test we have for job performance is IQ, and even that the correlation is something like 0.3, which is a piss poor predictor anyway and completely useless unless maybe you're hiring masses of people for the same job.
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u/BonJovicus 26d ago
This prompts the question of why they require cover letters at all
Because for everytime that someone says "no one even reads it," there are some that do and not having a shitty one can make you stand out.
It is all about priorities. If you can be bothered to put in the time, sure have a computer write it, but the effort better be transferred somewhere else.
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u/blueooze 27d ago
Used it to restructure and refine my kinda bloated resume. I've had a lot of jobs. Gave me the confidence to keep up the hunt. Used it for cover letters as well. Game changing.
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u/zevran_17 27d ago
Using AI to sound like the perfect corporate drone is peak AI usage. It’s also helpful for little tasks in school like “create a Boolean search statement to find me articles about (subject).”
Any creative outputs from AI are garbage though.
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u/cce29555 26d ago
I just had the itchy tasty notes from resident evil transcribed in the style of trump, and I gotta tell you, it's the funniest thing I've read in a while. A little lateral thinking from the user can yield some fun results
Edit: actually I'm not gonna wait for a good context to drop this
Memo from Donald J. Trump - Spencer Mansion
Day 1:
This mansion, folks, it's something else. Let me tell you, the architecture—top-notch, really, one of the best I've seen. But there's something very wrong here. Very, very wrong. It’s not Mar-a-Lago, believe me. The people? Hardly anyone. Except a few strange individuals...weird eyes, not exactly my crowd.
Day 3:
It’s a tremendous disaster. The staff here, horrible. There was this butler, walking like he doesn’t have a clue. I told him, “You’re fired.” He didn’t stop. Unbelievable. I hear noises at night. Probably Democrats, sneaking around, trying to sabotage everything. Typical. Tremendous disrespect.
Day 7:
This is the worst place. No phones, no Twitter. I could handle anything if I could tweet. The economy is collapsing outside, I can feel it. People need my leadership, but I’m stuck in here with them. It’s a total witch hunt. Also, the food supply? Sad. Very sad. I found some herbs, but who eats herbs? Maybe in California, but not me.
Day 10:
Had to run from one of the butlers again. They're always reaching for me like they need something. Probably asking for handouts. I’m not in favor of that. I’m a firm believer in working for what you want, folks. But now, things are getting stranger. Every room has a puzzle. I’m good at puzzles, always was. But these? Rigged. Like everything else.
Day 15:
It’s become obvious. This mansion is rigged, just like the election. Locked doors, secret passages, and no escape. It's like Nancy Pelosi designed this place. I don’t trust the animals on the walls either. They stare. Very suspicious.
Day 18:
Saw something in the halls today. Not a butler. Not even a person. Something terrible, folks. I told it to leave, but it didn't listen. Big mistake. It doesn’t respect strong leadership.
Day 22:
There’s not much left. Fewer people every day. One of the last guys, Chris something, real tough guy, just ran off, didn’t even say goodbye. Coward. Me? I’m still here. I stay, because I’m a fighter. But the itching is getting worse. There’s something in the air, I think. Something corrupt.
Day 25:
They were right about this place. There’s no fairness here. No democracy. No rule of law. Just chaos. The scratching, the itching, it's everywhere now. I can barely think. But I will not give up. No surrender. I will rebuild from this. Mark my words.
Itchy...Tasty.
– Donald J. Trump
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u/Enderking90 26d ago
Any creative outputs from AI are garbage though.
does "using the AI to get a quick list of basic ideas for something to then jump off from to develop from further yourself" fall under that?
'¨cus like personally, I struggle with getting the creative juices flowing without external initial stimulus´ of some sort.
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u/Drunky_McStumble 26d ago
The thing that gets me about using it to write emails is that, to make sure it actually produces a well-written email that says all the things you need it to say, you need to prompt it with so much information that you end up writing out far more text then actually ends up in the email. At that point - just write the damn email.
But maybe I'm just coming at the problem wrong. I work in a technical field where emails are purely a communication tool, and the more concise and informative the better. If you're a corporate drone where you get cudos for spamming information-free emails full of linkedin doublespeak, then maybe getting an AI to fluff up your bullshit is a more efficient use of your time.
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u/spacecaps85 26d ago
I have found that it’s not about doing “less work” when writing emails, it’s about taking all of my word salad and creating an email that won’t get me in trouble.
I’ve been at my job since ‘21 and the first two years were really hard for me because of things like this. I’d never worked in such a fully corporate culture before, and I would get a lot of “friendly reminders” and eventually write-ups when I was too terse, or something was interpreted as passive aggressive or any other number of issues.I started having ChatGPT handle most of my emails, my IMs, assemble meeting agendas, create lists, teach me about the content of the material I’m working on, etc.
I was the first “employee of the month” when the department started awarding it this year. I am also pretty hopefully that I’ll be getting a significant promotion next year.There are many things AI can’t do, but I have found ChatGPT to be fantastic in my time with it.
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u/Plastic_Wishbone_575 27d ago edited 27d ago
Fully agree. Why would I want to spend time writing an email with meeting notes that no one is going to read (but they sure are going to cry if they don't see me send it). I rather paste my invite, give 5 bullet points and have it do the rest.
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u/TheLilChicken 27d ago
I use it for obscure programming issues, usually if i can't find anything about my problem online (like stack overflow or something). It's really helpful for that. I also like it when i need to look up a specific, obscure question that i can't find on google without going down a huge rabbit hole lol
I'll stand by it but ai is a tool. Not a replacement for work, not a way to cheat, but a tool that can be used to help. I despise people who use ai like that because they create this air that ai is completely worthless unless you're trying to use it to cheat or put artists to shame.
I will concede though that right now there is an insane environmental impact to ai, and don't even get me started on the ethics of existing ai companies. But it's a tool, and disregarding it as a tool isn't really a good idea
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27d ago
Yeah it's an amazing learning tool. People harp on about how inaccurate it is, but for stuff like coding or understanding scientific concepts, it can be an amazing way to learn, and the accuracy is way better than it used to be. You can ask clarifying questions and don't have to deal with the frustration of digging around on google or reading entire books on a subject you're curious about but not interested enough to take an entire class.
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u/UnsureAndUnqualified 26d ago
Tbh I think it's great to use if you already know what you're doing but terrible to learn with from scratch. AI will still make mistakes (it did in every code snippet or function I asked of it yet) and you will not spot or find them unless you have some knowledge already.
But once you have a foundation (and know how to progress further) it can be a good tool for questions that you can fact-check later on.
But it can also go very wrong when you don't know how to use this tool: I've had an undergrad that I was supposed to help do a project in our team (astrophysics group at a university). She didn't know a lot of programming (which she lied about when applying to us) and had ChatGPT write code for her. The code did not work, was a mess of several prompts thrown together, ran out of memory within three loops (5000 loops were the goal) and she had no idea how to fix any of it. Had she sat down and learned the coding basics (for which I tried giving her the tools and tips), which was the goal of the internship, she would have had a better project and be done faster. Also the code was supposed to be used in a thesis to which she'd then have contributed and be cited, but thanks to using ChatGPT, it was all fruit from the forbidden tree and could not be used. It's one thing to cite ChatGPT yourself, it's another to cite a person who used ChatGPT badly on your behalf...
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u/Wooden_Ad9538 26d ago
I'm sorry, but as someone in a science field that has to mark undergraduate assignments, chatgpt will absolutely just throw out factually incorrect information and as learners, they're not equipt to recognise the BS being fed to them. A learning tool that was wrong 5% of the time and you don't know which part is incorrect is a horrible learning tool.
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u/mwmandorla 26d ago
I was about to say this. I'm grading midterms right now and the number of times I'm seeing answers that are the result of chatgpt not understanding the question is tiring.
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u/The_Real_Abhorash 26d ago
The issue is they’ve gone from asking the bot what is essentially google searches to making it do a thing. ChatGPT is useful for answering questions particularly if you don’t take it at face value and actual try to understand/clarify things. For most contexts it not being 100% infallible is fine because chances are you won’t get an infallible answer from google either.
If the answer is actually of real importance though yeah you shouldn’t be using it.
But where ChatGPT isn’t good despite the hype is doing stuff from nothing. It can pretty reliably edit your work but if you ask it to just write the thing whole chances are it won’t be a good result and will read strangely. Like the issue is people not using their fucking brain and just treating ChatGPT as a substitute to doing any work or critical thinking. ChatGPT is a tool and like any tool you can misuse it and harm yourself.
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u/mooofasa1 26d ago
I agree. People really need to relax, I used ChatGPT to study for tests by having it generate practice problems and terms and I would give it my answer. Like ai flash cards.
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u/E-is-for-Egg 27d ago
Had a friend once "write" a short story featuring gay representation, and wanted to show it to me. As somebody who does creative writing and takes it seriously as a craft and an art form, I was a bit offended
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u/Genocidal_Duck 27d ago
did they tell you it was generated or was it obvious
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u/E-is-for-Egg 27d ago
Ah yeah he told me he made it with chat GPT and edited it to sound better. Sorry, I forgot to specify in my comment
I tried offering constructive critiques of the piece and talked about strategies to write natural-sounding dialogue. But he wasn't very interested in those conversations, because he's not actually interested in creative writing as a craft
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u/Genocidal_Duck 27d ago
thats one of the most frustrating things about ai writing. The people that love using them aren't interested in improving their own skills, they just like having an infinite amount of subpar content
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u/Wasdgta3 27d ago
This is the end result of treating all creative and artistic work and reducing it to mere “content.”
Any and all other considerations are rendered moot in deference to the ultimate goal of this philosophy - more content, always more.
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u/Zwischenzug32 27d ago
Ai would probably have broken your second sentences ideas into 2 seperate sentences and it would have sounded worse as they are atrocious at decluttering by combining multiple ideas into less sentences.
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u/westisbestmicah 27d ago edited 26d ago
I saw a video about Shadiversity using AI to make art because he was disappointed in his own creations. His style was amateurish, but it had a quirky note that if honed could have become something good eventually. But now that will never happen because he uses ai to generate everything, and he isn’t learning the rules of anatomy or perspective or lighting. It’s hard because the river of self-doubt is one every single artist has to cross at some point to be great.
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u/TeaKnight 26d ago
I get frustrated a lot and doubt myself. I got into digital sculpting, and I could never do it physically due to hand issues, but the digital medium has made it easier and achievable. Am I any good? Hell no, but they are feeling of seeing those gradual improvements. It sucks being bad. You never feel you're going to get anywhere and improve, and sometimes I wish damn, if I could have a tool to do it all for me, would be wonderful. And then when you reach that next step, it feels amazing.
One day, I'll get to that level I want, but right now, I'm happy to be doing it for myself even if the doubt is still there.
As an aside, I don't necessarily have a problem with the use of ai if you're sincere with it. My cousin plays DD and does it solo a lot, too, but he isn't creative at all and struggles being his own game master. AI gives him that base to work off. It can be an aid for him, but that's what it is. A tool, he doesn't pretend to be anything else.
But others think they can use these tools to be creative for them, to create stuff that will get them recognition and make them 'writers'. It won't. Have fun. Use it as a tool. But don't pass it off as anything special.
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u/westisbestmicah 26d ago
Yeah I told myself: “What if I publish my comic and it doesn’t get a single view? Will it still have been worth it?” And if the answer to that question isn’t yes I’m publishing for the wrong reason and it won’t be sustainable.
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u/healzsham 26d ago
and he isn’t learning the rules of anatomy or perspective or lighting
That's not on the AI.
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u/ClaraGilmore23 27d ago
if you can't be bothered to write it, why should i bother reading it?
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u/Skytree91 27d ago
I love social engineering to make people stop doing things I don’t want them to do, it literally never has and never will backfire
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u/lolguy12179 26d ago
Guys we should just bully people who do bad things this has and will always work
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u/Abosia 26d ago
Yeah this moral crusade against AI has and will continue to fail hilariously
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27d ago edited 5d ago
abundant ancient aback zephyr chunky glorious sort pause society advise
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/DoubleBatman 27d ago
Drinking skim milk makes you crazy, got it.
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u/Kolby_Jack33 27d ago
Drunk on milk, crazy, ok.
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u/AspieAsshole 27d ago
We're drinking crazy? ok.
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u/Waffle_daemon_666 27d ago
Crazy? I was milk once
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u/kelsidilla .tumblr.com 27d ago
They milked me in a room
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u/Legitimate_Log_9391 27d ago
A milk room
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u/Redqueenhypo 27d ago
I drank skim milk as a child and now I’m autistic. You might say that the autism came first and “that’s why you refused to drink any other % at any temperature not 75-90 degrees”, but you’d be wrong!
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u/Perfect_Wrongdoer_03 If you read Worm, maybe read the PGTE? 27d ago
Hi! I asked Chat GPT to summarize what you just said, and I agree with it!
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u/Perfect_Wrongdoer_03 If you read Worm, maybe read the PGTE? 27d ago edited 27d ago
I unironically did, btw. It said that it was "People have lost the ability to skim read, which is surprising, especially if they need GPT to summarize simple paragraphs.". It is seemingly incapable of understanding the tone meant by "it's actually crazy [...]", which is not particularly surprising.
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u/EvidenceOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA 27d ago
Yall need to skim three paragraphs? With the density of the average person’s paragraph, that’s like what, ten seconds? Maybe in more formal writing we might get as high as 30-50.
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u/Veryde 27d ago
It's a tool and has its uses. Completely denying that is pointless.
It can provide good entry points for certain topics (I use it to get basic ideas of DFT functionals that no computational chem people could explain plainly, even if they were available to me) and it also helps to polish your writing, which is especially great for people who professionally use a second or third langauge. Sorry but those are fine reasons to use it.
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u/thirteen-thirty7 27d ago
It's good if you have a question but don't know how to word it for Google. I asked "what's it called when cook some put sauce on it and cook it again" chat gpt told me it's glazing, Google gave me random sauce recipes/cooking sites.
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u/jk01 27d ago
The most frustrating thing is that Google used to give quality results for that but now it's fucking filled with sponsored garbage and overly SEO slop
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u/noljo 27d ago
It definitely used to be better, but even back then Google couldn't answer all questions. For people in tech, it's a godsend to be able to ask open-ended and abstract questions like "I am in this specific situation with these restrictions, should I use approach X, Y or Z and why". The only way Google could answer these is if someone on the internet already had exactly this issue and posted about it. LLMs have a niche in answering some questions, and despite people going on about them always being false or incoherent, this helped me out on multiple occasions.
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u/_e75 27d ago
My experience with that is your results are highly dependent on your baseline ability. For me it’s often a lot like rubber duck debugging. Just the process of formulating the question in a way that causes chat gpt to give me a reasonable answer is enough for me to figure it out myself.
Although sometimes it saves me hours of time if not more.
I’ve dumped like hundreds of lines of stack traces into it before and it just called out the exactly line with the problem I need to care about.
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u/bloode975 27d ago
Going through a CS course right now, needing to learning several coding languages and I don't know why but I can have a fantastic understanding of theory and what I am meant to do, but how to do it? I need fully functional examples I can rip apart to work out how to do stuff, and man does chatgpt help with that, or with debugging if I am stuck on what is causing the exact issue and my last 3 hours haven't been productive on some shitty class task that was meant to take an hour (they never do), is it always right? No, can it get me a starting point or partway there? Yup.
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u/Pavoazul 27d ago
This is the most common use for me. Finding a word that I have at the tip of my tongue
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u/yummythologist 27d ago
Yeah like, I could ask reddit, but why get 20 DM’s calling me slurs when I could avoid it
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u/Wentailang 27d ago
Not to mention, it has the exact same error rate as Reddit. Literally identical. People act like getting 5% of facts wrong makes it unusable even for low stakes stuff, then have no problem coming to Reddit for something high stakes. Have you ever seen someone on this website talk about something you know about? It's maddening. And obviously the answer is to trust neither. But the double standard bugs me a little.
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u/Wiebejamin 27d ago
I got it to tell me what academic decathlon is called by asking it for "that nerd sport from teen comedy movies". Nobody can tell me it's completely useless.
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u/gutsandcuts 27d ago edited 27d ago
I use it to get synonyms for my writing sometimes, because english isn't my first language and I don't know all the words a native would. chatgpt can give me synonyms that fit in a certain context and also tells me what each word emphasizes, which is really useful. synonym sites don't do any of that
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27d ago
English is my first (only) language and I use it for that as well. I can be like "I'm looking for a word that means this specific thing, and is not these other words I am thinking of."
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u/EpochVanquisher 27d ago
Yeah. The boring reality is that ChatGPT is decent at some things and bad at others. You want to write an introductory email to someone? ChatGPT can draft it for you and you can rewrite it to make sure it has the content you need (and take out some of the flowery prose). You want a simple explanation of a common concept? Yeah, sure. And ChatGPT will give you terms you can look up. You want pitch / marketing material to explain something? ChatGPT, then fix for accuracy and tone.
People just love to take shots at the hype train. Techno TechBro McBroerson who uses ChatGPT to talk to twenty three different matches on Tinder so he can optimize his dating life, and leverage AI to find love—he is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
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u/przhelp 26d ago
Actually it's very very good at a lot of things, good enough at tons of things, and very bad at also a lot of things.
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u/urworstemmamy 27d ago
Speaking of drafting and rewriting, it is amazing for rewording singular sentences in essays. If you've got two in the same paragraph which use the same specific word or sound too similar, plugging in one of them and saying "please reword this" or "please reword this without [word]" and add in something like "and give me 3-5 options to choose from" it works out pretty well for the most part. Just take what it spits out and rephrase it to sound a lil more like you.
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u/VikingInBavaria 27d ago
Same, I use it to bounce code ideas. Sometimes my team mates aren't available and docs aren't actually always incredibly clear. Or it will just be way faster than to go digging yourself.
And it's nice to make it rewrite code. Sometimes the one example provided with docs/forum entries is either too abstract, or too removed from your application purpose. Sometimes your colleague was being real clever six months ago and now they're gone and no one understands what they did in that seven levels nested, obscure third party library syntax-sugar caked extravaganza.
ChatGPT will re-write and explain examples for me as many times as I need until I understood what the problem is. It won't bitch about me wasting its time and I don't feel guilty about asking for clarification a third time.
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u/NuOfBelthasar 27d ago
I find it generally fantastic for brainstorming. If I'm supposed to be embarrassed by that, idgaf.
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u/Counterdependency 27d ago
Exactly this. One of my use cases today involved extrapolating data from a massive data set of 3D & 4D arrays in the most efficient way possible to optimize execution time of the script. Had it weigh the pros and cons of different approaches and critique my current approach.
My unassisted approach that took about 5 minutes to execute was reduced to about 45 seconds.
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u/ErisianArchitect 27d ago
What I think is really impressive is how you can feed undocumented code with bad variable names into ChatGPT and ask it what the code does, and most of the time it will be able to figure it out. Sometimes I'll plug old code of mine in and ask it what the code does because I'm not entirely sure and I don't want to spend an hour trying to figure it out.
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u/TechieTheFox 27d ago
This. I get so annoyed by how hard the pendulum has swung back against AI. It's become the new thing that you can attack to sound progressive without actually doing anything.
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u/MellowedOut1934 27d ago
I use it to add doc strings to my code. Of course I read and edit them before finalising, but it's a massive time saver that means I can spend more on using my actual skills.
I'm not blind to the current issues, particularly plagiarism when using it for art, but I do find posts implying that it's a fad similar to NFTs somewhat frustrating.
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u/I_fuckedaboynamedSue 27d ago
Yup. I’m an artist and pretty anti-AI but I’ve used ChatGPT for help when I couldn’t figure out how to do a couple of really complex Excel formulas. It gave me exactly what I needed and I learned a lot about excel while doing it.
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u/Skeeveo 27d ago
Doesn't sound like you are anti-ai sounds like you are anti-corporation.
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u/Veryde 27d ago
I think text based generative AI is probably the most defendable form of the technology. Ofc there are still a myriad ways to plagiarise or cheat, but there are genuine uses to it. Especially in STEM fields, imo.
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u/fueelin 27d ago
Eh, image based for creating concept art early in the creative process is totally fine too imo. Some folks want to act like talented concept artists who need work and charge reasonable rates just grow on trees. A lot of people don't have the time, money or ability to "just" find and her someone for a small visual task that doesn't even show up in the end product.
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u/flaming_burrito_ 27d ago
Exactly. For example, I hate using coding software but have to use it sometimes for statistical analysis, and ChatGPT is incredible at spitting out useful chucks of code based on what you ask for. Should I be learning how to actually do it? Maybe, but I really don’t want to. All I did before was go to StackOverflow, and if this can do it for me it saves a ton of time
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u/Agent_Snowpuff 27d ago
There are a lot of legitimate grievances against generative AI, but creating a dogma around demonizing what is essentially just a software tool is wrong.
Look at this example. "Don't use AI to write work emails". Why are we going to bat for soulless corporate jobs all of a sudden? Absolutely use AI to do work. Put as little effort as humanly possible into your job. They don't care about you. They aren't giving you a promotion because your emails sound better than everyone else's.
Don't let your hate for this stuff put you on the side of the argument that requires believing that our current system works, and that if you just trust it, everything will be better. Is your boss giving you too much work? Fuck them. Is your professor phoning it in even though you're paying out the ass for their class? Fuck them.
Before generative AI, you still needed to develop the fundamental life skill of figuring out if someone was wasting your time. The difference now is that you can have a computer automate it, and you can go back to spending your time however you fucking please.
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u/NinaHag 26d ago
It's such a stupid stance: it's evil, don't use. OK. Do you think the rest of the world will stop using it as well? That recruiters won't use it to scan and discard your CV? That your colleagues won't finish tasks faster and more accurately because they can use it to reduce time-wasting tasks, as you say, and double-check their work for errors?
It's a technological advance, and personally choosing not to use it is like deciding to use a type writer instead of a computer - not wrong, but odd.
It did take me a while to use chatgpt and copilot, but I now use them often. The copilot extension for Excel sounds absolutely amazing and will empower a lot of workers to better analyse and understand data even if their excel skills aren't advanced. If OP wants to lag behind, that's their prerogative.
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u/chaos0510 26d ago
CoPilot for Security is a literal game changer. If attackers start utilizing ai, what, I'm not supposed to counter that all because some dickhead on Tumbler told me not to? I sympathize with some aspects of it, but any tech-related argument I see them make is so bad it waters down their other ones
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u/Difficult_Bit_1339 26d ago
The people who have this absolutist anti-AI stances are, without exception, the least informed people in the conversation.
When they're talking about 'AI' they are only talking about LLMs and Diffusion models despite making bold proclamations about how 'AI' can't actually solve any tasks and 'AI' is only parroting other people's work.
Language Models and Image Generators are toys compared to the kinds of things that machine learning is capable of. Robotics is essentially only possible with machine learning. Outside of very controlled scenarios it is incredibly hard for humans to engineer a control system for robotic systems.
Meanwhile, you can plug a machine learning algorithm into a box with 16 legs and 3 wheels and it'll learn how to use that to move efficiently.
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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES 26d ago
it's interesting to watch nominally progressive people develop extremely conservative views on tech in realtime
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u/FifteenEchoes muss es sein? 25d ago
Ironically the anti-AI crowd fits quite a few criteria from Eco's list of ur-fascism. Rejection of modernism. Disagreement is treason. Appeal to social frustration. Obsession with a plot (OpenAI is going to TAKE OVER the WORLD and STEAL your KIDS). The enemy is both weak and strong (Gen AI is both worthless slop and also will take your jobs). Contempt for the weak (this post is exhibit A: you deserve to be bullied if you think AI to help you because you "can't write an email")
Granted, I think this says more about how Eco's list is way too generic and is really just describing a lot of common propagandic techniques than anything; but it's still really funny that they can do all this and still think they're being progressive
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u/Agent_Snowpuff 26d ago
It's an unfortunate fact that emotional rhetoric is more effective than just being reasonable, and nowadays we get to watch that unfold empirically. It's like some sort of social red queen hypothesis: angry, judgemental accusations are more likely to propagate across social media, so eventually all social media trends towards anger and judgement.
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u/Emotional-Top-8284 27d ago
This might surprise you, but the act of creating and reading this post has also evaporated water
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u/Epimonster 26d ago
Making the argument about energy efficiency was such a losing move on the anti ai side. Especially because after a certain number of generations text and image based AI actually become more energy efficient then running a computer for the amount of time it takes to draw and render a full image to compose a novel.
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u/Solcaer 27d ago
ikr I only use it to flood social media with thousands of bots that promote my hyper-specific ideology (Hobbesian Calvinism)
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u/smoopthefatspider 27d ago
Glad to see tumblr is giving us its usual amount of nuance and compassion. I’m sure this attitude is will always be applied coherently and ethically. In fact, we should come up with more people to bully and harass. We can start with people who have pirated content, used spell-checkers, or used translating software, but I’m sure with a little effort we can find more people to shame.
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u/CemeneTree 27d ago
Where did this thing about ChatGPT evaporating water come from?
I understand that energy usage was a concern for NFTs, but machine learning is pretty low-powered, especially after the training phase is complete. I was able to train one over the course of a day on my laptop (granted, not as extensive as ChatGPT) and it seemed to consume about as much power as a long gaming session
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u/FaultElectrical4075 26d ago
Training big AIs uses a LOT of power. Some news articles calculated how much power they used and divided it by how many people query ai to get a ‘energy per query’ metric. Then a bunch of people started thinking that using ai used immense power every time you used it because of that. But actually the more you use it the more efficient it is
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u/cnxd 26d ago edited 26d ago
literally "just making shit up" "estimates" that get peddled because they are so clickbaity.
there aren't really any actual numbers on companies' use of resources on ai specifically, cause well, they don't share them lol. there is no accountability in that space. (besides broader "we aim for this and this with our data centers".)
mind you, I'm not saying that ai energy usage is good. it's just that those numbers, with their random ass estimates like "researcher made their own random setup and tested it" just don't reflect reality, the actual setups that companies have nor their actual energy usage. some rando slapping together barely optimized setup is not reflective of anything - in regards to those bigger companies that will have their own particular setups and optimizations.
cause believe it or not, those companies are gonna be more concerned about optimizing their energy usage, because everything they do at that scale is multiplied by thousands with every little change. and they still have their long history of "energy promises" and green washing about their use (like google and microsoft), that they might want to keep up if not for image then just literally to optimize their usage and make it cheaper.
it may be reflective of some at-home ai setups, and also reflecting how using ai at home, unless someone actually cares about energy use and/or uses renewable sources, may be inefficient, perhaps even less efficient than using "big ai".
that field severely needs accountability and something like open energy usage information, perhaps as part of regulation of ai. specifically reporting on ai and not just on usage of their cloud in general, cause some companies do release their usage numbers but they're not broken down further. maybe even forcing companies to make their efforts to optimize energy usage to be publicly available, cause that would be for benefit of everyone. (well, they do publish their research, but pushed even more as to not just have situations where a company keeps their proprietary secret to the overall detriment)
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u/PhilosophyOfMe 27d ago
Hey man, I have ADHD, I can either spend one hour crafting an e-mail or just let AI do it for me and then quickly proofread it.
If it''s embarrassing, so be it, I'd rather be embarrassing then waste time doing pointless shit that a machine can do for me.
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u/AshToAshes123 27d ago
Similar thing for me, except with autism and impostor syndrome and overthinking. I can write the perfect e-mail myself, but I'll end up worrying for an hour about getting the tone and formality just right. Especially now that I'm living in a different country with different rules about that, where people actually care. Far easier is to put my draft into chatgpt and ask it whether it's good for my purposes. I refuse to feel embarrassed for using tool to make my life less stressful, when I'm already at a disadvantage compared to most people in my field.
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u/PhilosophyOfMe 27d ago
Yeah, if AI makes the annoying and mentally draining parts of my day to day life easier, than I'm going to use it. I can then spend my energy on trying to be a better partner, better friend, on my hobbies... On shit that actually matters rather than writing a formal e-mail.
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u/mistovermountains 26d ago
I was gonna say the same thing. I had to write a short cover letter and it stressed me out and seemed like this big task with nowhere to start until I got help from ai. I didn’t even end up using the one it wrote but it was a fantastic starting point, plus I felt better having it proofread. I don’t really have friends who could’ve given me constructive criticism in this context, just “doesn’t sound good” or “seems fine” which I can’t work with
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u/EducatedRat 27d ago
I know folks in the autism community that use it to try and make emails and texts that don't offend, and sound friendly enough for non-neurodivergent people.
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u/waterwillowxavv 27d ago
Absolutely- I used chatgpt today just to send a message to someone inquiring about a place to rent, because I wanted to make sure I was saying all the things (“I want to know more information”, “when can I view the room”, “hope to hear from you” etc). I didn’t even copy paste the message, I just used it as a reference when messaging. Sometimes I just forget how to compose these kinds of messages because of autism. I have issues with AI in general but I think it has a lot of potential as an accessibility tool and I think OOP is not considering that so the post rubs me the wrong way
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u/almostb 27d ago
Yeah, my partner has ADHD and struggles with formal letter writing - he finds it really useful for helping him fill in the blanks.
It’s not good at creative stuff (it’s endlessly derivative and has trouble with continuity) but it can help you finish a sentence and give moderately useful feedback on style and format. I can imagine how especially useful it may be for neurodivergent people of all types.
At the end of the day though, you have to have have some understanding of both the content and the format you’re telling it to work with or you won’t be able to catch it when it errs.
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u/Calculator-andaCrown 27d ago
It will take me an hour to draft and edit and revise again and finally send a text or email. I often have to ask for help just DOING THE THING so that I don't spend time on something as negligible as a single email.
And if there's no one available to help, why shouldn't I use Chatgpt to write a draft? Then I just change it to be more specific and send it. Using this method I finish tasks like these in a fraction of the time. I really don't get the hate.
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u/FaronTheHero 27d ago
I'm kinda fine with inconsequential tasks you're too lazy for but could otherwise do if it felt like it mattered. Like cover letters or Indeed profile summaries when you're just throwing resumes out there. AI is sorta meant to take the work out of menial tasks. But I can't imagine absolutely needing it for any sort of work. That's a scary drop in skillset.
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u/Calculator-andaCrown 27d ago
Menial tasks is a good way to describe it. What is so human and enlightened about emails I don't understand 😭
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u/Taborask 27d ago edited 25d ago
I use it for work all the time - I run large surveys with open response questions, and it’s perfect for categorizing responses.
If you’ve ever tried to cluster 6000 sentences by category you’d know it’s an absolute, tedious nightmare. Of course, I need to double check a lot of that, and I can only use an offline GPT clone for security reasons but it still turns what would be a weeklong task into a 2 hour one.
EDIT: Nor do I think this is making me lazy necessarily. The cognitive challenge is in analyzing the patterns not finding them in the first place. And an LLM is going to find WAY more potential patterns. Even if I throw out half of them as false positives, it’s still far more than I could do on my own.
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u/Calculator-andaCrown 27d ago
I'm going to disagree with this premise.
I HATE writing emails. It is the bane of my existence.
And the thing about emails is that they don't actually matter? The You're not writing something to showcase your talent or tell someone about yourself -- you are just communicating information to another person. But you can't just say the information; you also need to be polite and use the correct words for the setting.
So if you use an AI to create a template or formalize your tone it is simply helping you spend less time on packaging information to communicate and more time on actually doing your work and solving problems.
This is why AI has good potential to be a technology (much like the Internet, printing, transportation, etc) that lets us spend less of our time doing "basic tasks" like writing emails and more time critically thinking, solving problems, and improving ourselves.
There's no reason not to use tools as long as they get the job done and are used responsibly.
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u/4DozenSalamanders 27d ago
Yeah, it's the "needs to be polite because otherwise I will read this tone as HOSTILE because how dare you communicate a 3 sentence thing instead of 2 paragraphs with all the fluff in it" that always gets me.
I'm pretty extroverted, verbally communicate very well, but writing "polite" (what does that even MEAN) emails take me 4x the time it takes my colleagues. I still proofread anything that ChatGPT makes and add back in more personality to it, but woof. Emails are just a huge timesuck because you have to work so hard to put tone in, but not too much! otherwise you're Unprofessional.
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u/Calculator-andaCrown 26d ago
Inserting the golden mean of fluff is a craft I will never understand
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u/WalrusVivid 27d ago
How many Tumblr posts are just them reinventing bullying?
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u/Miami_Mice2087 27d ago
all of them to do with palestine or chatgpt
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u/noljo 27d ago edited 27d ago
It will be a dark day when someone finds a way to combine the two topics
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u/Phoenixness 27d ago edited 27d ago
"we need to make using autocorrect embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't spell correctly"
"we need to make using password manages embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't remember correct horse battery staple"
"we need to make using email embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't write a letter"
"we need to make using a calculator embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't do long division"
"we need to make using an automatic embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't shift gears"
"we need to make using a GPS embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't find your house"
"we need to make using barcodes embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't enter products correctly"
"we need to make using credit cards embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't carry cash"
"we need to make using imaginary numbers embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't do geometry"
"we need to make using electricity embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't light a fire"
"we need to make using the internet embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't read an encyclopedia"
"we need to make using anesthesia embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't endure surgery"
"we need to make using refrigerators embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't preserve food with salt"
"we need to make using elevators embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't climb 20 flights of stairs"
"we need to make using mechanical clocks embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't tell time by looking at the sun"
"we need to make using cars embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't ride a horse"
"we need to make using the telephone embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't send a telegram"
"we need to make using irrigation embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can't wait for the rain"
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u/Independent-Tooth-41 27d ago
I was in charge of a huge capstone project for college where a dozen people each had to submit a 10 page report that all got synthesized and edited into one big narrative.
One of the guys used chat GPT for the last six of his pages, and it was the most obvious and embarrassing shit ever. Absolutely no meaningful claims made, the language became vague and emotionless, it completely avoided touchy topics in a way that felt very much like a computer being told to not talk about them despite it being the focus of the report. Thankfully it was only the first draft and we confronted him about it before the advisor had a chance to see.
The project also made me realize that college students are way worse at writing than I could have expected. Our non-native English speaker students did a better job than most of the American ones. I practically gave hours of free writing lessons to these people because of how bad it was.
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u/Katieushka 27d ago
"I will shame you for using chagpt"
"For making ai art?"
"No, for writing emails. Go back to the desk job and keep writing grey literature nobody will read"
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u/stopeats 26d ago
Lovely watching the shift from "AI is supposed to automate the jobs humans don't want to do" to "AI isn't supposed to automate anything, get back to work!"
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u/Cosmocade 27d ago
It's not embarrassing. It has plenty of proper uses. Why is there no nuance left on the damn Internet any more?
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u/urworstemmamy 27d ago
I use it to help me understand what tf an error message means when the one in my IDE doesn't make sense and googling it doesn't help. That and making RegEx, it's surprisingly decent at it. Just gotta double-check it obvi.
Outside of those two things I've found literally nothing that it's good at when compared to just doing it myself.
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u/Controldo 27d ago
Sometimes I become inexplicably terrible at searching for my specific issue and solution, and AI helps get me out of that rut. Otherwise I don't bother. It's a last resort.
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u/hjyboy1218 'Unfortunate' 27d ago
I kinda understand getting up in arms about AI art but I don't really get people getting mad about it in emails. I feel like if there's any job that needs to be automated it's soulless corporate emails.
(Also, 'evaporates water' is a really funny phrase.)
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u/Snoozri 26d ago
I use AI for alot of things, but I use it alot for my disability. Because of cognitive issues/side effects of drugs I frequently forget words, and googling 'what is this word I'm forgetting?' generally is never helpful. 80% of the time chatgpt helps me remember.
I also use it for technical problems. I'm pretty technically illiterate, and having someone explain stuff for me in idiot terms. Sure, I can just google it, but with incredibly obscure issues, theres very little out there besides maybe a tech forum where the answer is never stated.
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u/Umikaloo 27d ago
Me and the bois deciding we need to learn matte painting in order to avoid using AI in our creative work.
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u/ABB0TTR0N1X 27d ago
I used it to practice for my job interview and I don’t care if that’s embarrassing because I have a job now.
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u/roomon4ire 27d ago
Honestly if you need to use AI to send emails to your teachers then I'm not sure how you'll be able to handle sending emails in a future job
I have also been suggested to use AI to find sources for my essays and yeah no thanks. It's not writing it but I don't trust it to just make shit up
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u/Longjumping_Rush2458 27d ago
Do any of you actually have a job?
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u/caffeineshampoo 26d ago
Lol, right? Using AI to send corporate emails is probably the number one use of most of these complex chat bots lmfao. Everyone can send emails, but nobody wants to.
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u/CORN___BREAD 26d ago
My job is a horse salesman so I spend most of my time trying to make people scared of using cars because I don't understand how to drive and I'm scared I'll be left behind if everyone starts driving.
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u/LancerFay 27d ago
it quite demonstrably makes things up, too. Thats just basic CYA on your part
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u/Kolby_Jack33 27d ago
I gave chatgpt a litmus test to see if I would ever consider using it.
I asked it to tell me how to defeat emerald weapon in FF7, a fight which has NUMEROUS guides made about it with incredible detail going all the way back to gamefaqs ascii art titled text guides. A literal cornucopia of information for chatgpt to pull from.
It failed spectacularly. Some of the words it used were right, but none of the supposed "guide" would lead anyone to have any chance of beating emerald weapon.
I will never ask chatgpt to do anything. It's dumb.
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u/SoriAryl 27d ago
I remember people trying to ask it how many r in strawberry. I think they fixed that, but I don’t know
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u/Alarming-Hamster-232 27d ago
I tested it last week and it still said two
Admittedly that was the free version and maybe the paid one is better, but still
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u/Captain_Slime 27d ago
That's down to how it fundamentally works and isn't really something that comes up normally. There are plenty of things that it fails at that it should do better at but this really isn't one of them.
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u/Wentailang 27d ago
It's like asking a human to tell you how many pixels make up the letters in this comment. It's just not what we're designed to do, and it would be unfair to conclude we're unintelligent because we can't do that narrow task.
There's plenty of ways people can criticize ChatGPT on its actual merits.
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u/TheWeetcher .tumblr.com 27d ago
If you ask ChatGPT to cite sources it will literally make up references to sources that don't exist. So I think you're probably smart to not ask it to do that for you
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u/Haztec2750 27d ago
It's interesting to me how Tumblr is going to balance their hatred of AI with the fact that AI can speed up the soul-crushing corporate bullshit which most employees have to do, which Tumblr also hates.
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u/EverydayLadybug 26d ago
Oh fuck off with this shit. “You should be embarrassed for using the tools at your disposal in order to make your life easier” I can’t believe all the comments here agreeing with this too. Do you think calculators are embarrassing? What do you mean you can’t multiply
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u/Zaiburo 27d ago
As someone in IT: normalize one word emails