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?
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.