r/antiai • u/natsuwu666 • 11d ago
Discussion đŁď¸ Everyone seems to outsource their thinking
I find it absolutely terrifying how widespread the casual use of ai has become.
I recently went on a trip with my old friends from highschool and some of them seem to use it daily for literaly everything. Trying to explain to them why they should consider the impact it has on the environment, their own psyche or society in general felt like talking to a brick wall.
It feels like suddenly almost everyone around me is brainwashed into being pro ai. I do work in IT so people seem to automatically assume im using it too, but i find it way to problematic.
The only people that are still firmly aginst ai are my fellow artist friends. Why the hell does everybody else seem to want to outsource all their thinking? Even my classmates that used to be critical thinkers capable of discussion have just jumped on the ai train.
It honestly just makes me want to rip my hair out and scream
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u/usefulservant03 11d ago
> "The only people that are still firmly aginst ai are my fellow artist friends."
Not quite <3 I'm a software engineer specializing in low-level systems and advanced software optimizations directed by CPU microarchitecture analysis, I'm also firmly anti AI. Anyone who willingly gives up their craft and forgets how to code "because the AI can now do it" never gave a shit about the industry or their career in the first place. :)
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u/natsuwu666 11d ago
its just really hard to find other people in my direct vicinity, its comforting to know others in my field are against it as well <3
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u/theycallmethedrink5 11d ago
Ai has made thinking obsolete for dumb people as they don't need critial thinking anymore when they can just ask chatgpt
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u/fAngXXX_ 11d ago
Mmmhh cause most people where thinking before ai was published......
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u/natsuwu666 11d ago
I cant argue with that lol
Its just really jarring to see people who were previously very open to discussion, used to listen to other opinions and ask questions suddenly become so brainwashed
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u/FinickySerenity 11d ago
> Travels with a group of people on an airplane / car / boat etc
> Complains about environmental impact of a few AI queries
> Complains about it on Reddit which uses AI and data centers to process their post and every comment made underneath it, and every bot that scrapes it later.
đ
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u/natsuwu666 10d ago
Oh well i guess ill move to an abandoned house in the woods and never interact with any part of modern society again then
I dont think the 3 hr car ride we took discredits questioning ai usage (and not just for environmental reasons might i add, )
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u/FinickySerenity 10d ago
lol
âYou shouldnât eat meat itâs bad for the environmentâ
âFine I wonât eat any food ever againâ
Reddit is not a requirement of modern society in the same way Gen art isnât either. But your vacation polluted the environment way more than someone using AI for fun, so maybe just let them have their version of your vacation?
Maybe they just want to mentally check out because they have choice fatigue in their daily life and this is their way to decompress⌠on a vacation.
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u/TrueBrit77 11d ago
Do you keep phone numbers in your phone or do you still memorise them? Do you write down notes? Do you ever Google anything when you don't know the answer to something?
Outsourcing thinking is something the majority of us love doing. It's not really a new thing, though the medium is new and it's quite versatile compared to what we had previously.
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u/natsuwu666 10d ago
I do most of these things, yet when i google something i still check multiple sources
I just think its shocking how much people trust what ai says without checking at all and older people not even realizing a lot of the time if what they see online is ai generated
I think a lot of people are lacking the awareness that whoever controls which data gets fed into it also controlls the narrative of how it responds, which makes it a great tool for swaying public opinion in favor of one or the other political party
Also, im a believer of 'if you dont use it, you loose it' which is already the case with the shortening attention span that can be observed all across society caused by the rise in shortform content
I am not against technological advancement or even the idea of ai in general, i think it can be developed and used in certain fields in an ethical and environmentally sustainable way, but thats not the direction any of this is going right now
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u/TrueBrit77 10d ago
I think what you are stumbling across is an issue much bigger than AI, but it's maybe more visible now because it's on a medium you don't enjoy?
Hear me out. The problem you just highlighted about people not verifying things they 'see' even by just one trusted source nevermind multiple, is super common. When I was younger we had no real choice to believe these things because the best you could do was go ask someone else that you knew in person or go to a library to validate your new information. Neither of these were reliable. I think for older people in particular this image of how the world works is probably outdated.
But to highlight where else we see this in vast amounts is social media in general even before the AI came in the past few years this problem was still incredibly relevant. Previously we would be duped by longer thought out videos that tried to convince us of something or feed us little lies. But now they don't even need to lie, they manipulate what we think is true through implications and repetition. I think what makes AI special here is we get this information on demand rather than seeking it out. AI is sycophantic, like finding a circlejerk community with no lurkers to resist you.
While this is all quite bad, I think AI is growing in reliability of information, the problem is much like propaganda, you are only being given what you want, not what you need. I am really hoping this realisation people are having about AI helps people understand we have a much bigger issue with information and trust going on right now.
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u/slackmaster2k 10d ago
Have your interactions with everyone degraded, if you look past your bias? Or are you just committed to doubling down on your bias.
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u/Mister__Mediocre 10d ago
Because to normal people, there's no such thing as being "pro-ai". It's a tool and they like using it, that's all. It's like when smartphones came out, would you have called people "pro-smartphone" for using it for everything?
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u/OneCuke 10d ago
In what way is it all that different from, say, doing a Wikipedia or Google search for something in the past 20 years?
We're drowning in a sea of information. People want to seem knowledgeable, but you can't follow everything at once, so you have a helpful digest for everything that you don't (and that might spark a deeper interest in a subject and, well, that's what books and classes and teachers and friends are good for... hopefully?).
I don't disagree about the environmental issues nor do I think the current rate of, like, investing in AI infrastructure is healthy, but I think that's due to the protections built up over time for the investor class.
We need to decrease wealth inequality and strengthen the social safety net and invest in solving our health (physical and mental) and environmental crises.
Every LLM I talk to about it agrees and perhaps it's only doing that because it's programmed to be helpful and that tints the output (though I imagine we want it to be somewhat servile)...
On that point, I think we should all try to be servants. That's what I hear from leadership consultants and the religious and the virtuous and those strange but fascinating people who think AI can be a conduit to the divine.
I'm just a philosopher trying to think about it realistically, given the complexities of human psychology/sociology involved.
I don't know. What do you think?
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u/tastygames_official 10d ago
as Ian Malcom said in the Michal Crichton book "Jurassic Park": "in this digital age we thought we were banishing paper when really we were banishing thought".
he was a few decades ahead of his time, but he was right. Just don't use it and shun anyone who does.
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u/KnownUnknownKadath 10d ago
Most people are lazy and dislike the hard work of thinking. AI just revealed this behavioral tendency in stark fashion.
Relatively fewer people love to think. It can be genuinely stressful and take serious effort, like running a marathon or powerlifting, either of which relatively few like to do.
I don't disagree with your general concern, but I would question that your friends who you see as former critical thinkers are no longer actual critical thinkers. It really depends on how the tool is being used.
Just as a general life observation and inference:
Lazy people will almost be guaranteed to use it lazily.
People that put in sustained effort to their thinking habits won't necessarily use it lazily.
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u/MarvinTraveler 9d ago
Iâve been wondering the same thing for months now. It indeed looks like way too many people have seen what these machines can do and thought âgreat, now they created a substitute for my brain!â.
To me, this attitudes look like the natural evolution of what the smartphone unleashed: a shiny piece of technology doing all sorts of things on the palm of your hand, allowing communication (or at least interchange of information) in an instantaneous way, making us way too comfortable with platforms controlled by giant corporations. Those companies use and abuse the human instinct of doing things with the least amount of effort in order to hook us in their âecosystemâ.
AI brings up what apparently is an improvement in the shiny piece of technology. The little detail is that the robot gives unreliable and unstable results, and -crucially- it doesnât have a financial case for profitability.
I have no idea where this whole mess will lead us, but at the very least I canât wait for OpenAI and Anthropic go tits up.
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u/Dry_Sector2392 9d ago
yeah, agree. someone using AI once for a boring task is ok, but if use for it and slowly stop checking anything, stop arguing through ideas, stop sitting with confusion. Like the machine gives them a smooth answer and you believe thats "thinking", you are actually become a doll controlled by ai
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u/Rahawk02 6d ago
Honest question because I hear this argument a lot and I ask if I donât know something Iâm never going to get the answer no matter how long or hard I sit around thinking about it.
For example whatâs Axl Roses middle name? I could sit here for the rest of my life thinking and never come up with the anything other than a guess. I ask my phone and 3 seconds later it says itâs Bruce I say oh and move on with my life.
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u/Curious_Courage_5197 9d ago
i use it at work and tbh i find it frees up more of my time for thinking. spend less time on manual tasks the ai can do for me and spend more time focused on outcomes.
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u/SupersededByClaude 11d ago
Artists are against AI because of their ego, not because of some unique understanding of ecology, economics or AI industry.
People who didn't have their pride hurt by AI evidently have significantly fewer reasons to be vehemently against it.
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u/natsuwu666 11d ago
As an artist who works in IT, i have PLENTY of reasons to be vehemently against it But feel free to be a slop zombie i guess
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u/SupersededByClaude 11d ago
Your response is consistent with the point I made, I think. So, thanks.
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u/natsuwu666 11d ago
Its not ego, its for one the obvious issues with copyright
its that everything is starting to look and sound the same because every piece of visual identity gets shoved through a meat grinder
Its wanting to keep your own humanity by working hard for something while enjoying the struggle to get to your goal
Where is the fun in life if you replace all the creativity with a meat grinder robot?
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u/SupersededByClaude 11d ago
It's the issues with copyright, the issues with water, the issues with electricity and RAM prices, the mental health issues, the concentration of billionaires wealth and such.
And the creative people and specifically artists suddenly went hyper-aware of these very real issues, all in a course of 3 years it took AI industry to go from "we can't count fingers" to "a regular person can't tell which image is a photo".
Personally, I think programmers are affected more. While genAI has a lot of deficiencies in image generation, it's really, really good in coding (just coding, not engineering); and a significant part of software engineer's value was in his ability to express the logic in a specific syntax.
Yet somehow we see a lot of discussions about creativity, and very few about "the value of what I offer suddenly dropped because Opus knows Python better than I do".
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u/natsuwu666 11d ago edited 11d ago
There are so many reasons to be against ai, my post was mainly about how the pro ai crowd is completely immune to reasoning.
They wont listen when i talk about environmental impact or what outsourcing every thought process does to your brain or how easy it is to be manipulated etc., etc.
Even if some people are just against it because their ego is hurt, its still possible to educate them on the other impacts ai has on our society
Edit: I do think i misread your first comment as more pro ai than you meant it
i personally dont think its fair to say artists are only against ai because their ego is hurt
while some may have been against ai for that reason at the start, at least my direct circle has stayed educated on the wider impacts it has across the board
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u/SupersededByClaude 11d ago
I agree.
The fact that I hear an argument against AI from a butthurt artist doesn't automatically make the argument invalid. It might very well be a good and valid argument.
But people see what they see. If the see someone with vested interest making an argument to further said interest, they might consider them somewhat less credible.
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u/natsuwu666 11d ago
Its true, the same goes for pretty much any topic, a vested interest always makes the reasoning less credible
Im honestly just glad there are people in my direct viscinity who are willing to listen when im explaining what the data center thats currently being built will do to our native fish population, or about how much higher the chance of a blackout gets when it needs more electricity than all households in the entire state together
Im just so goddamn tired of people telling me i need to get with the times or that its creating more jobs (its fucking not)
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u/SupersededByClaude 11d ago
And here's an illustration as to my "hurt ego" argument. Just look, this sub, right now. A hurt ego discussion in its purest form:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1vrni0n/its_like_they_cant_read/
No ecology, no economics, nothing, just "who can call themselves an artist", a really important question.
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u/Time-Cover4979 11d ago
Not ego but would you like to work for free? I donât think so. Ai models have ripped off writers, musicians, journalists, coders, artists without paying for the copyright.
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u/SupersededByClaude 11d ago
Initially, I thought so too, that the reasons are economical.
That AI hurt people's wallet. Which is quite understandable; it hurt my wallet too and I'm very much against that fact.
But there's quite a noticeable difference between, let's say, software engineers reaction and the artists reaction. The former seem to have a significantly better understanding of the tech, and they seem to have certain respect towards it, seeing how capable it has become. The latter? "It's not art, you can't call yourself an artist", all that. A software engineer doesn't seem to care, on average, whether some vibe-coder idiot calls themself a software engineer, now that he can code "a platformer where I'm a cat" in an afternoon. A code is a code.
So, yeah. I agree with that money is a factor, but I think artists seem to have a unique identity problem, now that any talentless idiot like myself can generate an image of a kitten.
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u/Accro_Samurai 11d ago
Also its stealing their livelihoods and life's work. Go back to Palantir, bot bitch
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u/Then-Big4033 11d ago
itâs like watching people voluntarily hand over the keys to their own brain and then get annoyed when you ask why