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?
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.
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. 🤷️