"A good friend recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat?"
Same logic applies to using Google, I guess? Or any mapping app? How about Yelp?
> Same logic applies to using Google, I guess? Or any mapping app? How about Yelp?
Not necessarily. The same logic would apply if you were just robotically using Google user ratings (e.g. "this is nearby and it has 5 stars, lets go there"), but it wouldn't if you looked through the results and used some taste, judgement, and experience.
While I am not a fan of the current LLM's and I consider myself an independent thinker I would also not be interested in someone shallow enough to care about it that much. She's probably never had a long term relationship and I do not envy anyone that ends up with her.
There are lousy and lazy ways to use LLMs. There are also enlightening and powerful ways. Find someone curious who will explore them. Don't date people who habitually fight anything new.
> He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.
Do they have a similar reaction to searching "restaurants near here" in a maps app? Practically any time I go out to eat I'm either going to one or two favorite places, or I'm looking on the internet where something gives me a list of possibilities.
It's not like I've memorized every local restaurant, so looking online for recommendations online is a way to learn about new places.
I can understand what she's saying. Using ChatGPT produces outcomes that are so mid and basic. Just average. I'd want to date someone more interesting than that.
I often miss certain things that people consider important due to the humanity behind it, so this may be one of those cases (although things like art and I definitely do see that for) - but this feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water to me.
If I went on a few dates with someone and was really having a great time, but they told me that all their planning and conversation pieces were from a gen AI platform, I absolutely wouldn't like that. If they used it to audit some code to check for any performance considerations though? Those are so different, at least to me.
This quote:
> A good friend recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat?
Is one I find fair. There is some humanity to choosing some place to eat with another human. It also doesn't feel crazy to me to outsource the gathering and ranking to ChatGPT, though.
Then a lot of the article banks on "societal harm":
> OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?
With some of the things that the article points out to, like water and power usage, I can also see the argument there. But then you can point to so many other things with similar arguments. A classic being "you're using an iPhone right now, don't you know how those are made".
This quote also feels along these lines to me:
> Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.
>
>“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.
But we all use Google and a million other services that "remove thinking". This just feels like an additional step (depending on the case, as mentioned above).
I have no idea where to stand on any of this. There's so much to consider and I feel like I can only find one side or the other online to read about. No one with a middle ground that makes sense (that I've stumbled upon).
That said, I do think there's a huge difference between having it draft your love letters for you and having it tell you how to best treat a cut you got on your finger.
> Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not date someone who uses ChatGPT.
It's fairly telling that the people who hold these strong opinions think of themselves as strong independent thinkers but are slavishly devoted to the opinions of an algorithm.
I think there are a lot of decent reasons to be skeptical of AI. But this doesn't read like someone who is thoughtfully cautious and has concerns over actual issues with LLMs - this reads like someone in the 50s reading about microwaves and committing to never own one.
ChatGPT is not a bad thing for dating. One friend of mine puts his messages in it and gets feed back. He claims it has really helped him correct his behavior.
Newspapers are really nailing these GenAI ragebait pieces.
> We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills.
Before GenAI, there was Google, AWS, Facebook, not to mention Netflix and friends. A single streaming episode probably uses more resources all told than reasonable ChatGPT use over a month.
> It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now.
Anything/everything possible is sold as a placebo for human connection because loneliness is a powerful human motivator (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. etc.) Before that: TV.
> The megarich tech bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.
Most profitable corps think about profit, yes. The idea is that they can't profit unless people get something good out of it. If they can profit without people getting something good, it's a failure in the system, so the correct target is market breakdown: bad regulation, unbroken monopolies, fraud, etc.
> OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?
> I just cannot imagine forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our collective attention spans
I wonder if she has such strong opinions on social media and short video content.
> I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.
Reasonable, but it would be very foolish to assume that everyone that uses LLMs uses it in such a stupid way. Everyone is free to have their own opinion, and my opinion is that the author didn't even try to go deep into the subject, just feeling the ick and reasoning it later.
The author doesn't seem to understand how much "intelligent thinking" is used in all the other apps she undoubtedly uses. Her maps app decides the best route and I'm sure she blindly follows it. That is outsourcing the decision on what roads to take. Skyscanner decides what flights to take. Google's Restaurants near me is similar. A lot of what we read, including her article, come to use through algorithms, not significantly different from an LLM. If you read anything from FB/Insta etc., you have outsourced what will come next in your feed.
This is an author who simply does not understand how people actually use LLMs. She thinks it is a recommendation engine because her only use of it was to type Google searches into it. The chat interface encourages this sort of short question so I cannot really blame people who don't know you can enter enter tens of thousands of words.
I have colleagues who use it like this, and one who has proudly never used it at all. I politely congratulate him on this when he brings it up because I know it is very important to him for whatever reason, but it is meaningless, like someone proudly saying they haven't used Google Maps. He is apparently the only person I know who the author could date, and his ego as a lover of writing is so important to him that he eschews technology to protect himself.
what a short sighted and close minded person. I hope she uses the same rule for everything. "as soon as he opened a book to read a receipt I stopped being interested".
> ‘OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?’
look at this garbage reasoning. "oh no a shopping list, IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD"
28 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadLet’s just say intelligence is changing and wisdom is in deep collapse using this tech.
Our drive to be creative and chance failure and seek expert help dissolves in a general tool that automates what it is to be human.
Same logic applies to using Google, I guess? Or any mapping app? How about Yelp?
Not necessarily. The same logic would apply if you were just robotically using Google user ratings (e.g. "this is nearby and it has 5 stars, lets go there"), but it wouldn't if you looked through the results and used some taste, judgement, and experience.
There are lousy and lazy ways to use LLMs. There are also enlightening and powerful ways. Find someone curious who will explore them. Don't date people who habitually fight anything new.
Wikipedia didn't start until 2001. There was no 90s Wikipedia criticism. It didn't exist.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept13/2013/09/29/socrates-writi...
I would bet that back in days some women would get ick from men not remembering everything but writing it down.
Do they have a similar reaction to searching "restaurants near here" in a maps app? Practically any time I go out to eat I'm either going to one or two favorite places, or I'm looking on the internet where something gives me a list of possibilities.
It's not like I've memorized every local restaurant, so looking online for recommendations online is a way to learn about new places.
If I went on a few dates with someone and was really having a great time, but they told me that all their planning and conversation pieces were from a gen AI platform, I absolutely wouldn't like that. If they used it to audit some code to check for any performance considerations though? Those are so different, at least to me.
This quote:
> A good friend recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat?
Is one I find fair. There is some humanity to choosing some place to eat with another human. It also doesn't feel crazy to me to outsource the gathering and ranking to ChatGPT, though.
Then a lot of the article banks on "societal harm":
> OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?
With some of the things that the article points out to, like water and power usage, I can also see the argument there. But then you can point to so many other things with similar arguments. A classic being "you're using an iPhone right now, don't you know how those are made".
This quote also feels along these lines to me:
> Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.
>
>“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.
But we all use Google and a million other services that "remove thinking". This just feels like an additional step (depending on the case, as mentioned above).
I have no idea where to stand on any of this. There's so much to consider and I feel like I can only find one side or the other online to read about. No one with a middle ground that makes sense (that I've stumbled upon).
That said, I do think there's a huge difference between having it draft your love letters for you and having it tell you how to best treat a cut you got on your finger.
It's fairly telling that the people who hold these strong opinions think of themselves as strong independent thinkers but are slavishly devoted to the opinions of an algorithm.
I think there are a lot of decent reasons to be skeptical of AI. But this doesn't read like someone who is thoughtfully cautious and has concerns over actual issues with LLMs - this reads like someone in the 50s reading about microwaves and committing to never own one.
> We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills.
Before GenAI, there was Google, AWS, Facebook, not to mention Netflix and friends. A single streaming episode probably uses more resources all told than reasonable ChatGPT use over a month.
> It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now.
Anything/everything possible is sold as a placebo for human connection because loneliness is a powerful human motivator (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. etc.) Before that: TV.
> The megarich tech bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.
Most profitable corps think about profit, yes. The idea is that they can't profit unless people get something good out of it. If they can profit without people getting something good, it's a failure in the system, so the correct target is market breakdown: bad regulation, unbroken monopolies, fraud, etc.
> OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?
...
I wonder if she has such strong opinions on social media and short video content.
> I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.
Reasonable, but it would be very foolish to assume that everyone that uses LLMs uses it in such a stupid way. Everyone is free to have their own opinion, and my opinion is that the author didn't even try to go deep into the subject, just feeling the ick and reasoning it later.
This is an author who simply does not understand how people actually use LLMs. She thinks it is a recommendation engine because her only use of it was to type Google searches into it. The chat interface encourages this sort of short question so I cannot really blame people who don't know you can enter enter tens of thousands of words.
I have colleagues who use it like this, and one who has proudly never used it at all. I politely congratulate him on this when he brings it up because I know it is very important to him for whatever reason, but it is meaningless, like someone proudly saying they haven't used Google Maps. He is apparently the only person I know who the author could date, and his ego as a lover of writing is so important to him that he eschews technology to protect himself.
> ‘OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?’
look at this garbage reasoning. "oh no a shopping list, IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD"