All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI. “Another brick in the wall” hits stronger than ever now.
Citing “Another Brick In The Wall” is suspiciously generic and uncreative.
And not even relevant to OPs metaphor
I recently tried using AI as a test for therapy. Omg. It has no idea what it’s talking about. It makes wild assumptions, defends the indefensible, and will always tell you it doesn’t really know once you push back on it a little bit.
It’s honestly useless for information. It’s an auto-coder. That’s all.
I see generative AI the same way I see anabolic steroids. If you’re already versed enough in whatever field, it might not be that bad a thing, but you’re 100% gonna deal with some consequences.
Take me for example, by the time I really got into generative AI in 2023-2024, I already worked IT for like 10-11 years, had several certs, and so I was able to get it to be mostly useful to me because I already knew my job well enough.
Others? I had some coworkers get straight up brainrotted and couldn’t configure a damn Cisco Router without asking ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Deepseek or Gemini or whatever.
And shit, even for people who say, “WHY DON’T WE USE AI TO SOLVE CANCER!?” Like doctors who use AI to do that wind up becoming worse at spotting cancer on their own. Even me, guy with over a decade of IT experience? I felt myself becoming dumber when I use AI too much and have to take like tolerence breaks to go back to the old ways of scrolling old tech forums to find the answer.
shoutouts to simpleflips
There are many, many effective ways to oppose AI. Dehumanizing everyone that uses it isn’t one of them.
Dehumanization is a line I won’t cross, maybe with the exception of Nazis. This is a little too casual.
wow, you’re so quick to humanize people who believe their VMware friends than actual humans.
Dehumanization
Feels a bit unproductive to just call this dehumanization. It could be that sure, but it could also be discussing a kind of real issue of people turning off their higher reasoning and just handing it all over to LLMs. People are treating anything the LLM says as an absolute source of truth and that’s incredibly dangerous as a society - they’re essentially willingly becoming literal NPCs whose thoughts are set by whoever decides whatever stances the LLMs should take.
E.g. I’ve recently seen LLMs take ultra conservative stances towards safety calling benign actions dangerous and when asked to find sources literally lie about what sources they find and cite say.
This is exactly the kind of black and white reasoning that annoys me about online discourse. The camps of “neverslop” and “techbro shill” are extremely vocal, and squeeze out anyone in between with a nuanced opinion (like myself). And I know I’m not the only one because I get upvotes!
Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now? If anyone might be an authority on the ethical use of ai, it would be him.
“But Glitch, that’s an appeal to authority fallacy!”
Okay, hypothetical strawman, you have a point.
Sure, there’s people who exist who operate like how op describes. I’m not disputing that. But saying everyone who uses ai at all is braindead is both incorrect and insulting. I use ai for some shit, it’s genuinely a somewhat useful tool and middling quality entertainment. But did ai write this comment? No, it did not, nor has ai told me what my opinions should be. So, proposal disproved by counterexample.
Someone is going to tell me I’m taking this too seriously, i can feel it.
Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now?
yep.
imho you’re not taking it seriously enough sport. if you were, you’d have stopped using AI.
The AI discourse is rather pointless when you see how much people are willing to bend their own opinions. So that it’s always in the right, and one step further is the sloppery slope to hell
As you mentioned. Look at the Linux communities. Before Linus came out in support it was “Microslop” this “vibe coded OS” that. And now suddenly, AI is actually a good thing.
Or G*mers. On the one hand they’re complaining about AI games being sold on Steam. But on the other hand they’ll also defend Steam selling AI games. But on the other hand complain when Epic sells AI games. And then on the other hand they’ll praise AI piracy and emulators.
The AI discourse is rather pointless when you see how much people are willing to bend their own opinions. So that it’s always in the right, and one step further is the sloppery slope to hell
yup, guilty of that myself.
As you mentioned. Look at the Linux communities. Before Linus came out in support it was “Microslop” this “vibe coded OS” that. And now suddenly, AI is actually a good thing.
Both things are true. Linus has a proven track record of being good at his job and knowing what he’s talking about. Microsoft has a proven track record of producing shit, and making their products worse. Giving them ai just makes them do what they were already doing faster. Linus speaking out didn’t change my opinion on the matter, it only confirmed the current iteration of my opinions on ai that I’ve been slowly developing over the past few years.
Or G*mers. On the one hand they’re complaining about AI games being sold on Steam. But on the other hand they’ll also defend Steam selling AI games. But on the other hand complain when Epic sells AI games. And then on the other hand they’ll praise AI piracy and emulators.
Gamers as a collective are fucking morons. That aside, I don’t hold all developers to the same standard. A solo dev with no funding is not the same as a 200 man team with the backing of a multi billion dollar publisher. Holding them both to the same standards is asinine. So if the next GTA/Elder Scrolls/Call of Duty/Final Fantasy/Whatever has vibe code or slop assets, gamers are absolutely right to rake those studios over the coals. They have the money to pay for programmers and artists. There is no excuse.
On the other hand, our nameless ideal solo dev who’s struggling to so much as pay rent, fuckit go nuts. Vibe code the whole thing, slop out the assets, whatever. Just review the damn code, and curate the assets. If the project has any creative passion whatsoever, that will come through in how the slop is put together. I see using ai assets the same as using packaged assets from, say, the unity store: you didn’t make it, but what’s more important is how you use it.
And on ai piracy and emulators, I’m just tickled by the giant ai shaped middle finger pointed at nintendo and the ai companies.
this one time I had a huge 200 file folder full of ugly filenames i needed to be standardized to use in a script. Renaming them all manually was easily a 3 hour job at least. I described the end result name syntax i wanted and gave the full list of the current file names to an llm, and it gave me a powershell script that renamed every file for me perfectly in 2 minutes.
could i have coded that myself? sure. but then I’d be deciding between “three hours making a complicated file renaming script or 3 hours or manually renaming 200 files for 3 hours”. The llm solved my problem for me and allowed me to continue with my actual work rather than wasting time doing data entry.
is this stupid npc behavior? if it is then it sure seems like only npc idiots like saving time.
Yup, that is where I also use AI for. The boring stuff. Clicking on repeat for 3 hours and then it turns out you made a mistake and need to do it all over again. No thanks.
The creative things I do myself.
I think that’s perfectly reasonable, just review the script first for anything that might break your pc.
It sounds like, for the purposes of this post, you and many other people would not be in the “People who use AI” category:
All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI.
I have coworkers who are effectively meat proxies. I think the term NPC applies well to how interacting with these folks feels, since it does feel like I’m not talking to a real human, but a computer trying to appear human.
Is OPs net too wide? Probably, yeah. But the sentiment is real, the frustration is real, and contextualizing those interactions as with NPCs resonates.
Have your fun with using AI, but there’s no need to yum our yuck.
Oh I’m right there with you (and op) in your annoyance with meat proxies. I just don’t want to be lumped in with them. The amount of times I deal with someone telling me “chat gpt said I need xyz thing” and I have to explain that what they’re asking for is impractical/impossible/expensive/doesn’t exist. And then they get mad at me about it! Fuckers.
For those who say “what about ethical uses of AI?” and “but what if it actually useful?”:
Two things can be true at the same time:
- Technology is legitimately useful.
- Technology is so harmful it shouldn’t exist.
We didn’t “cancel” asbestos for an all-around better material. We got rid of it wherever we could due to the harms of it. AI is harming our society, since it attempts to replace human communication with technology.
when AI poses an actual threat to quality of life, whether it’s access to affordable power, water, ram, gpus etc., it should always take the back seat.
Not this stupid silly bullshit:
All the outrage about AI around here is the outrage that should have been targeted towards social media in the past 10 years. The corporations that want to control societies communication while injecting their nefarious plots are already doing so.
Very few critics hit the point, which is the tech Bros promise to make us all superfluous as workers. Whether that’s actually achievable with the technology remains to be seen, and is nothing a workers boycott will change.
All the outrage about AI around here is the outrage that should have been targeted towards social media in the past 10 years
Agreed, but AI has grown the movement against them. So we are where we are.
People who use AI to outsource their creativity and ideas are NPCs. People who have ideas and use AI to bring those ideas into fruition are at least neutral.
This
My favorite is calling them meat proxies.
Ironic.
Antis saying the same thing over and over and then accusing others of being NPCs. Classic.
ever spoken to a person that heavily uses llms, thier response is to use CHATGPT every single time.
I have a coworker who I used to bounce ideas off of all the time. Even just “hey am I over engineering this?”, which was great. I don’t have that anymore because the response is always “chat says …”. If I wanted to ask an llm why wouldn’t I just do it myself?
A question for them: Why live anymore?
Okay, a bit more friendly version: where did you gave up living your own life?Using AI is not “giving up living one’s own life”…
Maybe it’s not about whether they are or are not NPCs, but the time they spend being as one. I also think spending time scrolling, having all your content delivered to you via an algorithm, also is kind of like spending time being an NPC.
And driving in traffic is usually time spent being an NPC
Using AI is way more pro-active than all those examples.
What about opensource self hosted AI?
There are still major ethical issues with how they get training data, but the problem with hijacking the economy and society seems resolved. I feel like I can more easily forgive the copyright theft for someone just fucking around in their homelab, replacing Google assistant.
Maybe I’m just bean-souping.
don’t forget that frequent LLM use erodes patience and skills. even with the training ethics and environmental ethics set aside, they make you measurably dumber.
LLM users consistently underperform at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels
People using this study to spread misinformation is what erodes my patience.
care to expand on that stance, maybe cite some counter references? or at least explain why you feel it’s misinformation?
You can read the paper and see for yourself : putting aside the usual weaknesses of such study (low number of participants, very specific situation, etc.), its goal is to see whether AI can replace training in the process of learning a skill. They are comparing students who trained and students who didn’t train a specific skill, it has absolutely nothing to do with the daily use of AI chatbots.
This kinda gets philosophy-of-cognative-science-ey, but it kinda smells like “measuring a fish by its tree climbing ability”. Or maybe like goodharts law.
There are many different kinds of smart, is the kind of smart they’re measuring the one that will be relevant?
Again, I don’t want to carry too much water for AI, but I also don’t want to propagate arguments that also apply to other tools I like. Consider: externalizing memory. Without the tool you used to capture that memory, you’re completely unable to function. Dependency on it reduces your ability to remember things yourself. By many measures, it makes your dumber and less productive. But I wouldn’t personally consider taking notes to be detrimental.
So I want to be very careful when we make claims that externalizing some aspect of our cognition makes us worse somehow.I think it’s also worth pointing out that we’re all working with the limited currencies of time and our own processing bandwidth and that tradeoffs that shift those resources to activities we value more can still be net positives even if a widely valued skill is taking a loss.
Is using GPS making me worse at on-the-fly navigation? Yes. Am I willing to make that tradeoff to free up that brain power for better experiencing my surroundings, listening to an audiobook, etc. while also getting basically a sixth sense of awareness about traffic, obstructions, etc.? Also, absolutely yes. (I do try to temper the loss in several ways though.)
I use (local) LLMs semi-frequently, and I think “net positive” usage of them is definitely possible, but it requires a few things: 1) Be self-aware enough to recognize the tradeoffs you’re making. 2) Be tech and math literate enough to at least have a surface level understanding of how they work, so your tradeoffs are informed. (And yes, I’m aware the vast majority of LLM users do not adhere to either.)
Books and calculators externalise skills that we see as tedious, like memorisation and calculation. LLMs externalise skills that we value in and of themselves, like decision making, art, and socialisation.
Would you rather live with people who can’t memorise dates and perform arithmetic? Or people who can’t make a decision or write a beautiful story?
These other things were also once valued.
Do you want to create a society where storytelling isn’t valued?
I am pretty sure if you asked people with knowledge if they want a society where accumulating knowledge is no longer an exceptional trait, they would have also said “no”. When I was a kid we were still told using calculators is bad; yet having calculators everywhere meant we could suddenly solve bigger issues at a larger scale.
Lots of technological progress has brought significant change. And no doubt all of them also brought big issues with them. But ultimately all of them helped us advance further.
I also don’t like that my (work) life changes considerably due to LLMs. But that cat is out of the bag. Now I can only try to adjust accordingly or I will simply be left behind.
Because you seem to be giving measured responses, even though I and other vehemently disagree with you, here’s where I think you’re missing things:
computers, the internet, and calculators make many tasks significantly easier. That’s the point of technology. However, if you don’t understand the how and why of math, you’ll have no idea how to use a calculator. If you just take whatever the first result of an internet search tells you at face value, you’re demonstrating a complete lack of critical thought. You have to be able to analyse sources, or you’ll just be mired in mis- and disinformation. If the only thing you know how to do on a smartphone is search the internet or download and use an app, then not only are you inefficiently using the technology, but you are also making yourself incredibly vulnerable to security and privacy threats.
The same is true for LLMs, but doubly so, because everything they output is in natural language (or code output, in the case of coding). If you are an expert coder, then it is possible to use LLMs to significantly increase your efficiency. If not, though, you completely offload the entire problem to the LLM, and can’t even check if the solution is valid because, like the internet, you have to have the knowledge necessary to question the source. If you make the assumption that it’s responding to you as a person would, then you’re screwed, because you’re incorrectly ascribing knowledge to a stochastic parrot. LLMs have all the worst cognitive pitfalls of the smartphone, the calculator, and the internet, but only actually have the strengths of the internet, because they’re only as good as the training data. Every single thing an LLM outputs must be treated with scepticism because the issues aren’t in every output, but could be in any output.
In a world filled with LLMs being used as expert systems, the low-skill users will, inevitably, fail to actually gain skill from using the tool, because the flaw in the tool is inherent (it isn’t actually an expert), and you require preexisting knowledge to be able to check its output. In exactly the same way that an LLM cannot reliably check its own output for errors, low-skill users are similarly unable to do so, and will simply offload their own cognition. This leads to a decreasing number of experts who are actually able to use the system efficiently, and an ever-growing layer of untermenschen who must simply trust the mechanical parrot like some oracle, with about the same level of accuracy as your average cold-reading psychic.
This is not an issue of those with knowledge trying to privilege their own skills. It is that experts are warning that this abomination, which the public wants to use like an expert system, is not and can never be an “expert”. Non-experts simply think it’s entrenched power trying to protect itself, but it’s not. The data agrees with my points above. I can show you several particularly damning studies which demonstrate my point.
Everyone I know who uses LLMs is becoming a more boring person. I don’t use LLMs because I don’t want to turn out like them.
the cats out of the bag… for now. i wonder if it will remain financially feasible
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm9qzdqpxy48o
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/tech-stocks-nasdaq-ai-boom-fears-deepen-rcna606512
I think it means people who use AI to talk to people.
need something?
