I think in general they’re all of their era, and that era’s humour in general isn’t for me. I find Fibber McGee & Molly funny, and things of that ilk, but a lot of the comedy isn’t very funny now. Younger me liked it better.
“How are current world events affecting your mental state?”
Probably a lot more than I’m willing to admit. The “Don’t let him live in your head” mantra is pretty damn superficial. The whole damn world is going to come out of this with PTSD.
I answered “somewhat.” The Trump administration is a source of great stress at work, as they’ve been trying to dismantle and control nonprofits and we are facing major funding issues. Just keeping up with all the executive orders attacking nonprofits and radical changes to funding expectations, many of them illegal, has been a lot of stress.
I’m pretty stressed about AI. I guess that counts.
Beyond that, I really don’t have the mental energy to ruminate on it. I follow some threads here to learn more, but I’m pretty disconnected from the news. It’s not uncommon to hear someone breathlessly report on the latest outrage and it’s completely new information to me and I realize it’s been two weeks since I checked the news.
I suspect it has some unconscious effect on me. Maybe it adds to all the fatigue and stress I’ve been feeling.
But really I have my hands full dealing with what’s in my immediate sphere of influence - my job, my family and my health.
It’s been so long since I used ChatGPT I don’t even remember my password. I’ve never even used any other AI.
I’ve really only seen two of the movies up for Oscars, Sinners and One Battle After Another. I voted Sinners in every category except I think best supporting actor should go to Benicio del Toro in One Battle After Another. He was half of my enjoyment of that film.
We have co-pilot through my office. I actually find it very useful when google doesn’t do the trick.
I’ve used AI Chatbots approximately three times and didn’t find them particularly useful for any of my issues.
The case where they are helpful is helping me figure out how to structure documents - in this case, SOPs for federal grant applications. They seem to do a better job than me at organizing information. However the Word document they made for me was garbage. The formatting was so bad I had to manually type everything into a different document. This did not save me time.
One potential positive use case I haven’t had to try yet is searching 2 CFR Part 200, the 200-page government policy document governing federal grants, for useful information. It could at least tell me what page to look on.
I generally hate LLMs, but I’ve been pressured to use them at work. I’d probably hate them less if I found them more helpful.
I’m flabbergasted by people telling me that they “asked ChatGPT” for solutions to credit card problems, tax issues or bugs in software.
Now, the help received was generally useful and not disastrous BUT knowing the AI tendence to hallucinate I would never trust it.
May be for software because I can more or less check what it says but for credit card or tax issues? hell no.
I’ve never found much use for chatbots, but my employer asked me to test an interface where you could choose the AI engine, so I played around with ChatGPT once. It did actually help me with a weird request - I was trying to come up with a name for the project sailboat I got for free and wanted something in the style of Rocinante (Don Q’s horse), but not so trite as just naming it Rocinante (which has been done thousands of times). My Spanish is pretty good and I have even read Don Q in Spanish, but I couldn’t think of an archaic Spanish word for a shitty worthless boat. ChatGPT offered me ‘Cascaron’ (related to the word for shell), so my little shitty boat that I now use for racing has been officially named Cascaronante.
I dislike being told I am a “Luddite” just because I totally eschew the horrid and mindless world of AI. So that is the option I chose, despite being miffed at the term used.
Yeah, it’s sort of offensive, so if I don’t like a particular technology I’m supposed to be against all new tech?
Not to mention the actual Luddites were not IIRC actually against technology, that was propaganda, they destroyed machines as a form of labor protest, not because they hated them.
I retired as a software engineer just before AI came into wide use for coding. So I never had an opportunity to use it for work. And in retired life it’s rare that have any issue that can’t be solved with a quick Google search.
I use ChatGPT semi-frequently, for two specific purposes:
- Assistance in developing tabletop role-playing game adventures (descriptions of people and places, names, plotlines, etc.)
- Revising/rewriting things which I’ve written, but want another opinion before I share it with others
In both cases, I take what ChatGPT provides, and then do my own further revisions.
The only other AI tool I use is a graphical one, Midjourney.
Yeah, I’m not against technology. I’m not even against AI in certain use cases. I am against the general public doing constant cognitive offloading because I think the effects will be very bad. I’m also against the US government (or any government) using it to surveil citizens and kill people.
I won’t say I will never use AI but I will try to use it rarely.
I think it comes down to convenience at what cost. I considered buying an automatic mini snow blower for clearing off my car this winter, but I didn’t end up buying it, because I had this thought, that maybe convenience isn’t the end-all be-all when it comes to quality of life. Maybe it’s good in some undefined way for me to stand out in the snow and scrape it off with a scraper the old fashioned way, to feel the wind and get my hands all cold while the ice melts and seeps into my gloves. Maybe sometimes there’s something to be said for doing things the hard way.
I haven’t watched any of the nominated movies but voted anyway. I think you can make pretty good guesses by paying attention to trends and outside factors. Especially in the actor categories you can’t discount sentimentality and body of work. I think Delroy Lindo is going to to get a lot of votes because he’s great in everything he does and that will be recognized.
My knowledge of the old comedians vary greatly depending on the guy. I used a very liberal definition of funny. Abbot and Costello and the Three Stooges were on weekend TV throughout my childhood. I found both funny but A&C were far superior. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin I found later in life. Both are brilliant. Chaplin’s comedy was smarter. Keaton was funnier. I always thought the Marx Brothers were funny. I’m much less familiar with Harold Lloyd but what I’ve seen is good. March of the Wooden Soldiers was on every Thanksgiving. Laurel and Hardy: funny. Bob Hope may have been funny at one time but I was exposed to too many horrible TV specials at the end of his career to think of him as funny. W.C. Fields I never found to be funny. I actively hated Jerry Lewis although I do like his dramatic work.
I am a mod here. I’m also a mod/admin on a few veterans facebook pages for old units I was in. Thankfully those are politics free pages and mostly I just have to boot the occasional spammers that gets through.
As for AI I’ve played around with the free version of ChatGPT to just see what the fuss is about. I have no real need to use any of it.
I was a volunteer moderator for a couple of years on the message boards for Wizards of the Coast (a game-publishing company); I specifically moderated the forum for the RPGA: their “organized play” organization at that time, which provided adventures for people to run at gaming conventions and local game stores. That’s probably close to 20 years ago, now.
These days, I administer a Facebook page for an RPG gamemaster group of which I’m a member; that role consists of making posts to promote our presence at gaming conventions, and occasionally going through the membership list to cull bots.
I voted for Benicio del Toro but I’m not put out in the least if Delroy Lindo wins. He is great. I loved him in The Good Fight, and I loved him in Sinners. That’s a fine actor right there.
But if One Battle After Another takes Best Picture, I’m gonna be miffed.
There was a missing option for the Oscar poll meta poll:
“I haven’t seen or watched many/most of these movies, so I, showing great fortitude of will, refrained from voting!” , so I chose other.
For AI, I’m mostly in the camp that it does poor work in terms of generalities, so I’m very, very cautions in using them, and not at all past the AI enhanced searches which are nearly unavoidable without more work than I want to bother with. But it’s not appreciably different then any other search engine result - check the source and determine if it’s accurate, misleading, out of date, or just pain wrong.
So I voted, no, I don’t use it, but don’t hate it. What I do hate is industry jumping in with both boots to use it without any of the above guardrails, often after already downsizing, or in search of profit margins. Or alternately, just keep working at blowing the bubble bigger.
And of course, I do hate users who blindly put their faith in it, either because of excessive belief it it’s accuracy or because they’re too lazy to double check - this categories includes well paid executives who don’t want to justify million dollar salaries by paying attention at meetings or even reading their own emails, lawyers who use it to write briefs, and down to the average schlub on the streets.
TBC - almost all the posters who have discussed AI on these boards make the same sort of effort I do, or are using it to handle low-consequence (not low effort!) drudgework. In that case, no problemo.
You have not even seen “Who’s On First”?
Bob Hope could be hilarious- but not always.
The only “AI” I use is the info Google shows me after i search, but only for a deeper dive or just to get a stat- “What is the population of the USA?”. Google AI is fine for those things.
I have seen only Zootopia 2.
Oh, I think I have seen that once. I thought it was funny. I was a kid.