The abbreviation I saw recently and loved was:
tai;dr
Oh, well I can’t help that.
I normally don’t use AI for my posts but it was a bit of a wink to the other thread were we were discussing AI relationships.
I just thought with a user name like @The_Librarian they might be some sort of compulsive book hoarder who took offense to the mere suggestion they might have a problem.
Let’s also be super transparent. He was there because he is the real life subject of a film that was nominated for 6 BAFTAs. A film intending to bring awareness to Tourette’s.
He isn’t some random industry insider or plus one who happens to have Tourette’s and they unthinkingly placed him next to a crowd microphone. His affliction is the entire reason he was invited, and the film highlighting his personal struggle with it is being handed awards.
It’s a perfect storm of incompetence.
So your contention is that any random post you find on the internet that was not written by AI is worth reading because it’s guaranteed to be correct?
Look, I admit that simply posting an AI response in a conversation is lazy. But refusing to read it simply because it’s an AI response is also lazy.
False dichotomy and stupid gotcha attempt. If we say we don’t like using Russian propaganda sites as sources, we aren’t saying every post not citing them is guaranteed to be correct either. This is a massive logical fallacy.
ChatGPT is a thing that assembles words into competently organized text based on prompts, rather than a human being who has experienced normal collecting and hoarding disorders, and is capable of understanding the issues.
If YOU wrote something about collecting vs hoarding, we could ask you followup questions, because it would be something from your experience. Regurgitating the words spit out of a word salad machine is not adding to anyone’s knowledge. Because maybe it referenced legitimate works on the subject, maybe it’s referencing someone who doesn’t know jack, and maybe it just hallucinated the entire thing.
No, it’s really a reductio ad absurdum. He refuses to read an AI-generated post because “it may well be incorrect”. Any freaking thing you read on the internet may well be incorrect!
Your analogy with Russian propaganda is really the false dichotomy, because this is a source well-known for being so egregiously dishonest that it’s safe to assume that just about everything they say is false. Whereas I can safely attest that ChatGPT is usually right, if occasionally incomplete and on rare occasions completely wrong, because it’s helped me out on so many practical issues. If I felt that I shouldn’t read or act on its responses or not interact with it at all, I would be the poorer for it.
This is a faceless, anonymous message board. All you have is the text you write - it’s not only what you say, as far as the rest of us are concerned, it’s who you are. That’s why the text of your post is supposed to be something you yourself wrote.
So if you’re quoting someone or some thing, put it in a quote box.
No, people make mistakes and people lie for reasons, and part of navigating the internet is trying to figure out what those reasons are, and trying to find the truth underneath. AI, OTOH, makes mistakes and tells lies for no reason at all. How are we supposed to deal with that?
It’s great that you like it, but it’s still not a journalist or expert on a subject. It’s not reliable. Wikipedia is more often right then not, but it’s still not something that should be trusted on its own.
I’m not saying that it’s not useful, and ChatGPT 5 is especially good, but it falls short of being a reliable source.
I come here to read things written by humans. If I wanted to read what an AI writes about any topic, I can just ask the AI. I don’t need some copypasta on my human message board.
If you’re going to let AI write your posts, at least have the courtesy to lie about it. /s (maybe?)
I agree, no argument with that. The LXW ("Lovely eX-Wife) is so enamoured of ChatGPT that she has a paid subscription to it. Despite constantly being accused here of being a ChatGPT fanboi, I’ve warned her repeatedly about its potential inaccuracies. But the relevant thing here is that she doesn’t engage with it as a time-waster – she runs a very successful business and is extremely busy. She uses it, as I do, as an information resource and potential time-saver.
The argument that AI should be ignored because “it might be wrong” is a rather feeble one – what it does is provide information directly targeted to a specific question, which can then be expanded and verified.
This is it exactly. Take your AI slop somewhere else. Just like @Joey_P , if someone pastes AI content here, I just skip right past it; it’s not worth my time. (In other contexts, it may or may not be useful, but not for me on this Board).
Yeah, I’d call you an “evangelist” but I wouldn’t go so far as to call you a “fanboi”.
If you’re acting on what AI says without first checking its supposed cites and sources, I strongly advise not doing that. Especially when your actions may affect other people.
So do that and then post your results here. The idea of the message boards, as has been said, is to hear from the posters, in our own voices.
I’m not talking about anything especially profound here. Aside from general medical questions that I use to elicit better information from my doctor, it’s mostly mundane stuff, like the fish-frying question that elicited such a heated discussion in another thread.
Here’s an example of an interaction I had with ChatGPT just yesterday. I asked it about the various controls on the power seat in my current car, and particularly the multi-function control which apparently did a number of different things with one single lever, and how it was done wasn’t clear from the owner’s manual.
Two responses from ChatGPT were noteworthy. One was the insight: “don’t think of it as a lever, think of it as a joystick that moves in many different directions”. When I had more questions, GPT said it wanted to have a look at the diagram in the manual. I uploaded the picture, and it told me exactly what I needed to know (along with a snide comment that Toyota should write more explicit instructions in their manuals!)
This is freaking amazing technology.
I’ll endorse this and go so far as to say it should be enshrined as a rule on this board.
I think there used to be a rule that you couldn’t post things written by people off-board as your post, I.e., I couldn’t say, “My wife’s not a member, but she’s an expert in rattlesnakes, and so I’m letting her take over the keyboard to write….”
Perhaps an AI rule could be written similarly?
That’s not my contention, that’s not what I said and fuck you for implying it.
If I said “whenever I walk in the rain, my clothes get wet” does that imply that if my clothes are wet I must’ve been walking in the rain? No, no it doesn’t.
You want me to put effort into reading something, put effort into writing it. All I’m asking for is something letting me know it’s written by AI and for the cites.
And what do you think it more likely to be incorrect, a random, uncited AI answer or the source it came from? Like I said, I wouldn’t give it much more weight than some random poster on some random board. Without a cite to back something up,
Can this please not be another thread where wolfpup tells everybody else how great AI is? We already have one of those.