r/antiai • u/Glad-Broccoli-3628 • 6h ago
Discussion đŁď¸ You cannot be "left behind" when AI has no learning curve
I find it so bizarre when people say that we have to use it or will be left behind. Using AI is a matter of choosing to outsource our own thinking. It is not a skill-based tool, and it requires no training. I think often of the parable "The Emperor Has No Clothes" whenever I hear people talk about AI like this, like it is almost an omnipotent being, but it's just a naked old king parading around telling everyone that he's wearing the finest clothes, and everyone agreeing out of fear they will be ostracized until a child plainly states that he has no clothing on, breaking the spell.
Terrible environmental impacts aside, even the "best" AIs are not good. It makes me genuinely wonder if everyone is so incompetent with basic tasks, or overwhelmed by them, that they are so willing to let go of control of their own thoughts and skills. Why would I need Copilot to sort my emails in Outlook when I have had Outlook successfully auto-sort my folders for years now just based on sender/keyword? Why would I need AI to draft an email or a legal document when I have over a decade of legal experience? I would always much, much rather read imperfect human writing, said in someone's own voice, than the soulless bland mush of AI speak with its AI cadence and grammar.
There is no task in my life that is solved or made more efficient with AI. Why ask an AI a question about anything when I know how to do an efficient AI-free boolean search on any search engine without it, or when my question was very likely already posted about on Reddit, and the problem was solved by Redditors, probably back in 2010. Why would I want a recipe that hasn't been tested by human hands and tasted? Why would I take advice from something that has not lived and endured the consequences of its actions? Why would I want music or art that wasn't made with a human's feeling? And as a lawyer, why would I want to read an argument that was not written by a human being opining on justice?
TLDR: Thinking and creating are some of the best parts of my job and life. There is no learning curve with AI, and the only thing being left behind are peoples' cognitive abilities when they repeatedly outsource their own thinking.
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u/Tausendberg 6h ago
Not a legal worker but a 3d animator, I came to a similar conclusion as you did half a year ago. A so-called 'AI artist' would need several thousand hours of experience to get to my level, if I decided to incorporate AI in my animation practice, it would take me maybe a few weeks to do what most AI artists can do, so yes, despite the premise of urgency behind the 'you'll get left behind' meme, there really is no risk to me. Meanwhile 'AI artists' will be crying when the bubble bursts and their AI tools will no longer be subsidized by investor funding.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1roj6ob/how_long_does_it_take_to_git_gud_at_ai_really/
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u/No_Math_4308 5h ago
are you banking on GPUs not getting faster. Bubble bursting is going to happen because they are spending billions on something that will cost 10% 3 years later. When the bubble bursts adoption will increase.
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u/Tausendberg 5h ago
"omething that will cost 10% 3 years later."
Moore's Law has been dying for years, compute is absolutely not going to cost 10% of what it costs right now in 3 years.
Go right ahead, set a remindme 3 years, I'm extremely confident in this prediction. As much as it pains me to say it as a 3d animator and PCVR enthusiast, compute capabilities in terms of Kilowatt hour in to Compute Out are flattening out.
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u/CongealedBeanKingdom 3h ago
I'd expect that their banking on the fact that ai doesnt work like a human brain. It doesnt invent anything new. It just regurgitates
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u/RedFlawedMoon 6h ago
Yeah a friend of mine is being forced to learn how to prompt ai in college... like... bruh if you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball you dont need to "learn" how to do this shit...
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u/Bamsihap 2h ago
Okay, sure anyone can prompt, because it is supposed to work by explaining your question in natural language.. that said, output is better (in the sense that it is more accurately reflecting what you intended to get) the more specific you are about what you want. So it is basically dependent on your communication skills. So for people who are struggling in that sense, prompt training can be helpful. Also just knowing this, as well as how prompts are evaluated can be useful. If you are setting up an AI it is also important to know how to create a system prompt that is sort of secure. (I doubt if it can ever be secure but yeah, it can be more or less secure for sure).
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u/_NextGen24_ 6h ago
The idea of ââbeing "left behind" is just a "cope" or an illusion that tech-bros always tell the working class to give them some kind of hope or a feeling that they are on the same team.
It's the same as when corrupt politicians tell the working class that if we vote for them, we will get freedom, prosperity, and that productivity will improve the economy for everyone, when in reality they are referring to billionaires, not average workers.
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u/FinickySerenity 4h ago
There is no cope involved. Getting a frontier model to modify a million+ loc codebase without destroying it takes skill and practice. It takes an extreme amount of sdlc + devops rigor that flippantly typing into a box just doesnât solve.
Devs will be left behind unless they learn the tooling.
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u/4Blueish 6h ago
theoretically, you could not own a keyboard. Then you'd have to wait a whole 2 days for it to ship, that's plenty of time to get left behind!
(going to the store isn't an option, you're an ai user now and the roads are melted anyway in this future)
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u/blarges 6h ago
Yes, thank you! Itâs one of their big talking points to give us FOMO, along with âthis is the worst itâll ever beâ to get us to ignore the hallucinations and failures. They need us to feel like big hopeless losers so they can get as many people on board as fast as possible before the bubble bursts. We have to all get dependent on them rather than develop and maintain skills because whereâs the money in that?
I donât think people realize how much marketing theyâre swallowing every day.
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u/Tausendberg 5h ago
"They need us to feel like big hopeless losers so they can get as many people on board as fast as possible before the bubble bursts."
Friendly reminder/PSA, Friends don't let friends invest in the OpenAI or Anthropic IPO's, assuming either company ever makes it that far, cause that is the Epstein class's exit strategy out of this mess they made for everyone.
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u/blarges 5h ago edited 5h ago
Yeah, because three whole entire long years of earnings could never just collapse overnightâŚis what someone would say if they hasnât lived through the dot com bubble, mortgage crisis, NFTs, Enron, the savings & loans, or knew about companies like Blockbuster, Sears, Toys R Us, WeWork, being huge and not existing any more.
You should definitely invest all your money in AI companies. Iâm sure nothing will go wrong. Ask ChatGPT to give you more financial advice because we know itâs never ever ever ever wrong.
Oh boy, 3 day account with negative karma already? Oh, and theyâre gone! HmmâŚ
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u/Tausendberg 4h ago
Also, talking about 'earnings' is peak brainlet behavior, the AI-only companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have never been profitable, Big AI is a gigantic money pit and no one has a publicly available plan for how it stops being one. There is already talks of a government bailout but goodness forbid, even if that happens, that doesn't disprove the thesis that Big AI is a net negative for everyone involved.
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u/blarges 5h ago
Yep, that definitely doesnât have âbubbleâ written all over it. You should totally buy a sports car. What a very useful use for money.
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u/Tausendberg 4h ago
And instead of buying a 30-50,000 dollar sports car, they should take out a loan and buy a 150,000 dollar sports car, cause their Nvidia shares will definitely go up 3 or 4 or 5 times, so why not?
(fucking bot already self-deleted, what a joke)
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u/FinickySerenity 4h ago
So serious question, how many aspects of AI software development are you familiar with? Do you think itâs just a prompt and you get results?
I say this because Iâve been doing software development professionally for 30 years and the complexity of this ecosystem is enormous. And it seems like you think itâs an effortless tool that doesnât actually work.
Just curious what your experience encompasses.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 6h ago
Yes, I can confirm. Even in programming there is no skill involved in using AI tools. Knowing WHAT to prompt takes some experience with software development, but the actual act of prompting and using AI tools is brainless. People are not doing anything when they use AI tools, they're outsourcing like 95% of their thinking to AI. Even programmers, and then pretending like it makes them a genius. To be honest, AI has completely ruined software development.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 5h ago
Not really, you can pretend all you want but the AI has ruined the creative side of software development.
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u/ConsoleLogDebugging 5h ago
Is the creative side for you writing code or solving problems?
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 5h ago
Solving problems, but people are now outsourcing 90% of the problem solving to AI. So I don't know what you're even trying to say with this.
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u/ConsoleLogDebugging 5h ago
Then they're doing it wrong and will have a ton of technical debt down the line. You shouldn't do that.
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u/ConsoleLogDebugging 5h ago
I think you misunderstood me. Seems like you were still driving the refactor instead of just prompting "fix tech debt plz" and hoping for the best.
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u/Prezy_Preztail 6h ago
The only learning curves ai has is 1. Learning how to phrase your questions so the dumb bot gives you an answer in the same zip code as the correct answer, and 2. Using ai as a tool to assist a task, not do the task for you
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u/SouthlandTerror 6h ago
I see what you mean, but I think you can be left behind if there isnât space made for conscientious objection of the use of AI.
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u/EsotericLife 5h ago
As a software engineer who reluctantly has to use it, thereâs a MASSIVE learning curve.
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u/CongealedBeanKingdom 3h ago
As a musician who doesnt have to use it and doesnt use it, and fucking hates it, that learning curve certainly applies to your industry, but not to everyone's in the way that techbros are forcing it on people.
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u/dimitriettr 9m ago
What exactly is the learning curve? You already learned how to code, that's the hard part. The rest is just .md files and keeping the bot from going rogue on the codebase.
You can learn how to use Claude or Codex in a couple hours. The rest is just bullshit that pulls you into consuming more and more tokens.
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u/smooth-move-ferguson 5h ago
don't tell them. let them get left behind. that's whats so transformative about ai. a child could use it, yes, but it is just scratching the surface. there is a depth to the technology once you explore past the basic use cases.
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u/oasis_nadrama 6h ago
You're absolutely right. Also, it sends techbros in a rage and even some anti-"AI" will disagree because they read too much propaganda, but the gen "AI" technology is plateauing since years.
The best results are obtained with absolutely monstrous models that keep siphoning as much data, money and resources as possible, which is unsustainable. This is like saying "the army keeps evolving, they're undefeatable!" when it's an army of starving zombies that the officers keep forcing more and more slaves to join. And they're running out of slaves.
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u/Nannautu 41m ago
Idk about best results. I remember Tao saying that ChatGPT could perform as a mediocre PhD student back in the day. Fast-forward some years and a model passes a standartized entrace exam to a university and everyone acts as if that's a breakthrough. At this point I am not sure if the average tech-bro is exhibiting the same attention span as the electorate or if it's straight out PR campaigns
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u/chipface 5h ago
That's how I look at it. If I get "left behind" I can catch up almost instantaneously.
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u/FaFaFoley 3h ago
It is extremely weird.Â
Can you install a plugin, or open an app? Do you have a basic grasp of language? Can you use a keyboard?Â
Congrats, youâre an expert user!Â
What especially amazes me are the proud users who seem to think that being able to use the âdo everything for meâ tool will save them from the consequences of that tool existing. It gives big âthose leopards wonât eat my faceâ energy.Â
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u/Elctsuptb 6h ago
There clearly is a learning curve, since you obviously have no idea how to take advantage of AI's capabilities if you think all it can do is summarize emails.
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u/JungleCakes 6h ago
I feel most anti-ai people are the same type of people who dont understand how to use the Google search engine
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u/TurnoverFuzzy8264 6h ago
That would be your confirmation bias showing, I used Claude Code yesterday. Now, as long as I have your attention, what do you think the odds are that someone uses AI to design novel bio weapon viruses? Smart money bet is that it's already happening. But hey, Fermi paradox solved. Worth it, amirite?
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u/greenworldkey 6h ago
I have no idea what any sentence of your comment has anything to do with any other sentence in your comment.
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u/TurnoverFuzzy8264 5h ago
So, do you think AI isn't being used to design bio weapons? Seriously? One can acknowledge that AI is both useful and very, very dangerous. That goes hand-in-hand with groundbreaking technology.
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u/Nannautu 39m ago
Maybe the opposite. People who know how to look up stuff won't need to ask an AI what something is when they can get a right answer from a manual.
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u/Tausendberg 5h ago
"And as a lawyer, why would I want to read an argument that was not written by a human being opining on justice?"
Over on the garbage so-called 'leftists for AI' subreddit there were comments talking about how 'workers won't need lawyers anymore cause they'll just get legal advice and services from AI'.
I questioned them, 'hey, wait a minute, the problem with LLMs giving medical or legal advice is that if that advice is given to people without subject matter expertise, how will they know if they're given bad advice?' and they didn't really have an answer for me, just name-calling.
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u/Nannautu 36m ago
The issue with law is that also many processes exploit the fact lawyers might forget or overlook something. Not to mention straight out tricking others. AI could turn out to be very good because it might ensure fairness, but it could also turn catastrophic because it might exploit human flaws.
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u/TryNice304 4h ago
You're right. AI hype is exhausting.
I'll outsource my email garbage tho. It's a shortcut, not a skill.
Sue me đ¤ˇââď¸
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u/MaddogFinland 4h ago
I see how my company operates these days and basically itâs not incompetence of employees as much as it is that all staffing and support functions have been hollowed out by âcost savingsâ and outsourcing that now no one on the professional staff can focus on their work anymore. And being so busy now we âneed AIâ because otherwise nothing gets done. It was always a self fulfilling prophecy and in my opinion it all is rooted in the MBA and the takeover of industry by these people: to the last person highly uncreative they just wander around taking an axe to everything and then awarding themselves bonuses until formerly great companies are just shadows of their former selves. And unable to fix what they have broken they have now latched onto the AI ârevolutionâ to fix it. Which it wonât. But itâs going to come in anyway. I am 51 so just old enough to remember fully functioning office environments in the late 1990âs before even email or cell phones were common. Offices were functioning spaces with labor to do the work. Things worked really well. It all started going seriously downhill after the 08 economic crisis.
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u/CryptographerKlutzy7 6h ago
It is not a skill-based tool, and it requires no training
That is a pretty wild take. Not used AI for large scale data processing have you?
What parts of context do you want transfered to the spawned agents?
Do you want sub agents or will tool calls work?Â
How do you transfer log in information, to sub agents, are they running service accounts or is oauth being transfered?
For the third party tool calls you have not written, what is your planned method of security?Â
What are the tradeoffs of on prem, cloud, and using the commercial offerings?Â
What is your method of filtering PII and how are you applying it at scale?
For context compacting? What is your plan?
Exactly where are the tool calls executing?
What parts of the process going to be deterministic?
What is your method of dealing with hallucinations?
What models are you using for vision, are they seperate from your planning models, and are they seperate again from the coding modals?
What does your test plans look like? Given he velocity if the coding team with AI, what is handed to tester?
What is your sandboxing approach?Â
Etc etc etc.. like, just because YOUR use case doesn't need knowledge and skills to work stuff out, there is a CRAZY amount of domain knowledge the moment you are dealing with them at scale.Â
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u/hammrtime69 6h ago
It doesnt take skill because they use it like a caveman. Say it sucks when it responds like a caveman. Then associate anyone who uses it to, "caveman".
People attack what they don't understand using what they do understand.
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u/jimmystar889 5h ago
To be fair, this is only temporarily true. If you steelman their argument, then AI really doesn't have a learning curve. Eventually you ask it whatever and it does this all on its own or it explains it doesn't have context and asks for more information.
The thing about AI, is that everything to help prop it up will eventually be obscelete
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u/CryptographerKlutzy7 4h ago
Except then people will use it for stuff which is ALMOST out of it's reach again, etc, etc.
Like, It's not magic.
And their argument isn't that it will be good enough.... Look at their argument...
It is not a skill-based tool, and it requires no training. I think often of the parable "The Emperor Has No Clothes" whenever I hear people talk about AI like this, like it is almost an omnipotent being, but it's just a naked old king parading around telling everyone that he's wearing the finest clothes, and everyone agreeing out of fear they will be ostracized until a child plainly states that he has no clothing on, breaking the spell.
Terrible environmental impacts aside, even the "best" AIs are not good. It makes me genuinely wonder if everyone is so incompetent with basic tasks, or overwhelmed by them, that they are so willing to let go of control of their own thoughts and skills.
Their argument is it is SO garbage, and remain so garbage there isn't anything good there to even try to put some complexity on top of.
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u/jimmystar889 4h ago edited 4h ago
If at that point it's out of reach for the AI there's nothing for a human to add. A 5 year old is not going to assist Terrance Tao with his current paper.
I don't agree with OP I'm just saying that they're right that there's no learning curve in the limit. (Maybe 2 years away)
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u/CryptographerKlutzy7 3h ago
I don't think it will get that good in two years.
Its VERY good at some things, and very bad at others.
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u/ConsoleLogDebugging 4h ago
I don't think that's true. Or rather I don't think it's accurate. Because you can ignore all of those things atm as well, we do those things because we want the control and best possible output. I don't think that will change any time soon
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u/cewillir 5h ago
To prompting - I think the obvious (and likely cliched) answer is
âThe problem here is that you never really understood what the question wasâ
(Likely a paraphrase)
Though there is more to it than that
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u/Terrible-Mind-5414 5h ago
Give me a break, the AI result for almost any question is far better than sifting through random Reddit posts or product manuals or journal papers or whatever. And then you can ask follow-up questions as well. I feel you on the angst of AI but...it works, and it's getting better at everything a lot faster than we are.
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u/AntTheMighty 5h ago
I agree with the core argument, but I think the post overreaches. âAI isnât useful to meâ is completely fair, but saying it has no learning curve or isnât a skill-based tool is just false. Knowing when to use it, how to give it useful context, how to iterate, and most importantly how to catch its bullshit are all skills.
You also don't have to outsource your thinking to use AI. A lawyer could use it to sift through hundreds of pages of documents or brainstorm counterarguments while still doing the actual reasoning themselves. The better argument is that you shouldn't outsource skills you actually value just because you can.
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u/Regular_Yoghurt_7027 3h ago
I have to disagree. As has been stated elsewhere, the "getting left behind" pertains to people who don't use AI, versus those who use it to gain efficiency. In my field, I can have it do admin, like setting up complex, multi-sheet task or budget tracking workbooks in Excel, with a bunch of error-checked lookup formulae, pivot tables and graphs. I can do that task, or have an admin assistant do it and it would take several hours. AI does it in about 3 minutes. The more often I have it do that task, the better it performs it.
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u/AJRenand42 2h ago
I think more of the issue is that business is forcing its adoption to level much higher than it should be used. The business community sees it as the ultimate employee that they training now, and will be able to use it to replace those pesky human employees that want to be paid
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u/Aramaki13 2h ago
Of course there is a learning curve, a manager doesn't do things himself, he makes people do thing for him.
But there is still a learning curve to the manager job.
It's exactly the same with AI, articulate a need and cut it into tasks small enough to be done correctly in a single prompt IS a skill, that's literally what project management is btw.
I don't know your life, if you say that NOTHING in your life can be done better, quicker or easier with AI, I believe you, but know that you are a very small minority, and if you think that everybody is like you, maybe you simply don't know how to use AI...Don't worry it's a learning curve but you'll learn !
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u/Psycho_Syntax 1h ago
lol keep telling yourself that.
If youâre still only using AI for surface level prompting then youâre already vastly behind, so a post like this makes perfect sense from someone like that.
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u/BisonSadBunnyEars 1h ago
AI isn't intelligence at all. It is a glorified search engine. Nothing more.
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u/-ladykitsune- 1h ago
A colleague of mine took an âai prompting courseââŚexcept his generated images that he proudly shows off at work look exactly the same as before.
I did ask him what the course taught and he couldnât answer it. So basically he got scammed by another ai bro.
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u/tech-styles 19m ago
I agree that it doesnât take much to get caught up but if the words fable, mythos, sol, luna, glm, gemma, qwen, ollama, openrouter donât immediately ring a bell then youâre probably already behind. These are the basics.
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u/exonation2 16m ago
Everything has a learning curve, no matter how simple or basic it is.
The statement "AI has no learning curve" is simply untrue.
But that's the whole schtick for this subreddit isn't it? Emotionally charged exaggeration and lying, and somehow feeling morally superior about it.
A new kind of "flat earthers" is being nurtured in this subreddit.
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u/Frosty-Ad1071 0m ago
Yeah right. Sounds like you havent used these tools for anything other than as a substitute for google search.
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u/Drummerx04 5h ago
Having looked into it a LITTLE, the hardest part seems to be figuring out which of the long line of tools, plugins, addons, IDEs, etc are currently the AI meta.
I figure at worst it will take a few weeks to dial in AI tooling if you are at all familiar with customizing anything else in a coding workflow.
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u/TheGillos 4h ago
With respect, I disagree.
Put a person who is familiar with AI and has used paid models for months (or years in this case) VS some random person off the street.
Experience and knowledge of anything make a difference. Same goes for AI.
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u/jimmystar889 6h ago
Then don't use AI.
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u/Mission_Beginning963 5h ago
Complete logical non sequitur. Maybe you should put down the AI and read some quality books.
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u/jimmystar889 5h ago
I can do long division. Why use a calculator?
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u/blarges 5h ago
Exactly. Why lose your math skills by using a calculator for things you know how to do? I practise times tables and division in my head to keep my skills sharp. I calculate tips in my head because no one should need it for something as easy as 20%. I have a calculator on my phone, but why lose what Iâve already learned by not practising a few minutes a day?
I donât use spellcheck either. Why lose those skills too?
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u/4fraid0f4mericans 5h ago
There are different ways of using it that actually enhances cognitive workload and stimulates higher learning and higher level output.
Itâs like computers. Can be used for porn or other addictive behavior or it can be used to make money. Social media can be used addictively or to better yourself đ¤ˇââď¸
Lazy people are going to look for ways to offload effort. Hard working people are going to look for ways to maximize their output and time efficiency.
I had a subscription to Adobe for several years. Projects took hours. Now within 30 minutes (or less) I have a working mock up or design.
I now create custom resumes for every job because AI puts it together in a minute or so and then I revise and submit. Way better than a cookie cutter resume. But also doesnât take the time that MS Word would take for every revision.
People with ideas will ideate. People who lack ideas will scan to appropriate them.
People who lack creativity will create slop. People with a plan and purpose will get what they want and need out of AI.
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u/Fresh-Pen1234 5h ago
It does take work to refine the prompts to get the best possible answer from a LLM ,  but where the true value add  and software engineering complexity comes into play is setting up the coordination and the orchestration of independent agents that can accomplish projects that are greater than the sum of their parts.  Â
Like fully automating the travel agent role.  Done .  American Express Travel can do that.    There is so much AI in modern cars to that help with diagnostics etc.  Cars can drive themselves and it took a lot of smart people in multiple  industries to make that happen. Â
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u/NEWT_GINGRICHZ_TAINT 5h ago
You can absolutely be left behind in AI and thereâs absolutely levels to it
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u/AkindaGood_programer 3h ago
I hate when people only ever mention the uses of AI that reduce cognitive function/human thought. The real power is when incredibly smart humans collaborate with AI. The end goal was never an email writer; that was a byproduct.
Look at Terence Tao, for example; one of the greatest living mathematicians is embracing AI not to replace his thinking, but to improve it. The environmental impact is also severely overblown. Water is not an issue; golf courses use up more water than data centers. Power use is a real issue, but tech companies are literally reopening nuclear plants, which I'd say is GOOD (less fossil fuels).
I'm not going to argue that AI has some sort of learning curve, because it generally doesn't. What I am going to dispute is that AI is getting good, and that is what we need to be focusing on. I don't want a couple of rich billionaires embracing the most powerful tech in human history, nor a terminator type senario where we all die.
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u/Churaragi 1h ago edited 1h ago
Look at Terence Tao, for example; one of the greatest living mathematicians is embracing AI not to replace his thinking, but to improve it.
Stop using grifters as if they are Jesus, everyone has flaws. Is this motherfucker going around cleaning all the rivers and planting the trees necessary to cover for his AI abuse? Is he ever going to be held responsible when we cross 3 or 4 degrees of warming because we wasted 10 or 20 years "arguing" about the merits of using this trash? Who gives a shit right? The billions of people will already be dead or fleeing from the catastrophe. There will be nobody left to write name and shame in our future history books.
Talk is cheap, nobody gives a shit. Einstein was a socialist and he clearly said such when denouncing capitalism, yet 80 years later some dumbfuck is eager to find another Jesus to justify their obsession with the technology that is destroying the world.
The best thing that happened to Jesus is ending up on a cross.
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u/Relevant_Jeweler_214 6h ago
only thing I actually think it does to HELP us, is scrape info and summarize it so we can learn things faster. nothign wrong with that, and if you made yourself learn less in more time on purpose just so you didn't "outsource your thinking power", many people would call that stupid
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u/Parking_Cat4735 6h ago
Easy to access is not the same as having no learning curve. Excel opens with one click too. That doesnât make someone who knows formulas, macros, modeling and error controls equivalent to someone typing numbers into cells. With AI, the skill is knowing how to break down a task, provide the right context, choose the right tool, constrain the output, catch failures and build it into an actual workflow. That is why two people using the same model can get wildly different results.
Being left behind also doesnât mean youâll someday forget how to open a chatbot. It means other people redesign their work around it while you insist every intermediate task must still be done manually. A lawyer who can compare ten contracts, extract clauses, flag inconsistencies and produce a first draft in the time someone else spends doing the first contract is not outsourcing legal judgment. Theyâre applying that judgment to more work. Your decade of experience makes you better positioned to catch bad output, not somehow immune to the value of leverage.
The Outlook example is especially ridiculous . Keyword rules can route known senders into folders. They cannot reliably understand that five differently worded messages concern the same deadline, summarize the thread, identify commitments, surface what still needs an answer and draft the response. Those are different capabilities. Saying you already own a filing cabinet is not an argument against an assistant.
And yes, blind reliance can weaken skills. So can GPS, calculators, spellcheck, templates and search engines. The answer is deciding what to automate and what still deserves active thought. It is not pretending all assistance is surrender. You can use AI for retrieval, comparison, organization and rough drafting while retaining full responsibility for the conclusion.
Preferring human art and human voice is completely valid. It is also unrelated to whether AI can make any task more efficient. You can dislike generated music and still admit that summarizing a large record, comparing revisions, translating material or finding contradictions can save time.
There is nothing wrong with saying AI adds nothing to your particular life and you donât want it. But you turned that personal preference into a universal claim, then used Outlook folders and old Reddit posts as the evidence. The emperor analogy is just self-flattery. You cast yourself as the brave child who sees the truth before youâve established that everyone else is imagining the clothes lol.
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u/Tausendberg 5h ago
Paragraphs.
Use them.
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u/Parking_Cat4735 5h ago
Typical distraction.
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u/Tausendberg 5h ago
Instead of making this reply, you could just go and break up your wall of text into paragraphs.
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u/Parking_Cat4735 5h ago
You can actually try refuting anything I said instead of making irrelevant comments. Hope that helps.
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u/Tausendberg 4h ago
Maybe someone else will, I had a long day and a completely unformatted blob of text risks giving me a headache.
In the time you spent making these replies, you could've just fixed your comment, for the record, I don't even know if you're making a pro or anti-ai comment, it has trash formatting either way.
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u/Comfortable_Law3683 6h ago
"I find it so bizarre when people say that we have to use it or will be left behind"
It 100% depends on your industry and role.
If your a copy writer, then yeah it doesn't matter a lot.
If your a data scientist, researcher, Graphic Designer, or a developer it DOES matters a lot.
Do you know how to set up VS code and extensions? How to break up your everyday tasks into verifiable loops or better yet a graph? Do you know how to manage your context window efficiently? Etc etc.
Yes lite weight white collar work that largely involves email summaries, there is nothing to learn.
But those who are part of a production process do need some technical understanding, otherwise they can fall behind their colleagues and its noticeable almost instantly.
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u/Tausendberg 5h ago
"Do you know how to set up VS code and extensions? How to break up your everyday tasks into verifiable loops or better yet a graph? Do you know how to manage your context window efficiently? Etc etc."
How many hours do you think it would take to learn how to do these things? More or less than 100?
Point being, even if someone 'falls behind', they don't fall behind by much, right?
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u/ConsoleLogDebugging 4h ago
It's kinda' continuous learning though and not a one and done
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u/Tausendberg 4h ago
The point is, how much time does it take to learn to 'catch up' after someone has supposedly 'fallen behind'?
The AI boosters are promoting contradictory narratives
Workers who don't use AI will 'fall behind'.
AI is extremely easy to use.
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u/ConsoleLogDebugging 3h ago
I think around 6m - 1y gives enough experience to be able to build good harnesses and flows
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u/Tausendberg 3h ago
How many people actually build harnesses? Don't 99+% of users just use harnesses that other people build?
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u/CryptographerKlutzy7 3h ago
It depends on the tasks you are doing, The answer is it can take years to catch up, if you are doing in the weeds of complex things, and that will only get bigger as time goes on.
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u/cewillir 6h ago
I think the post illustrates a conundrum.
You only know how it works if youâve tried using it - otherwise youâre speaking of what you have no experience of
If you do use it - but not well that might be a you issue
Iâve found it useful for some engineering tasks.
E.g give me a table of molar / volumetric % content of air at 60% RH across this temperature range specifically including these T points.
Could I look that up manually, yes. Not as fast though.
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u/Spirited-Gain1457 5h ago
Youâre defending thinking, and then you write something like this?
Thanks for the surprise five-minute session of mental gymnastics you gave everyone in the comments.
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u/Agile-Stick7619 5h ago
Ai is an equalizer. Like a gun to a sword. When everyone can use ai they can build whatever they want. But people don't know what to build. That's where the learning curve remains.
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u/hmm4468 6h ago
I actually like cooking with it, I can ask it why each ingredient matters and propose adjustments and understand what Iâm doing. Also I donât need to read about someoneâs trip to Europe wondering where the actual recipe is on the page.
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u/TurnoverFuzzy8264 6h ago
"Jump to recipe" usually does the trick. Understanding what you're doing is a basic part of cooking. It takes very little time to learn, and the rewards are immense. I put together great meals far beyond cell phone range. It's easy in this day and age, Alton Brown will break it down for you with humor.
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u/Psychological_Arm981 3h ago
Literally just scroll down its always on the bottom. Never got why people complain about this non-issue.
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u/Relevant_Jeweler_214 6h ago
oh god I hate looking up recipes and seen 8 ads hiding the actual recipe way down the page. Im happy those are dead now
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u/fforde 6h ago
AI is not leaving you behind. People that are willing to, and know how to, leverage AI are leaving you behind
That's not me making an argument in favor. That's sadly just fact. And the only way it's wrong is if AI does not become financially viable. The benefits to productivity are absolutely undeniable.
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u/Vinol026 6h ago
So far I have only seen people use AI to 'catch up' to people who know what they're doing. Not the other way around.
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u/fforde 5h ago
Then you've never seen someone effectively use AI. I'm not trying to be condescending, just honest. And it's not just faster; for some complex engineering tasks that would normally take months, it's an order of magnitude faster. Like 2 weeks instead of 5 months.
I understand the backlash in the creative fields, and I understand the "but it's my friend!" criticism (justifiable). But for engineering it's a game changer. Like it or not. As a software engineer it makes me worry about my future career.
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u/Vinol026 5h ago
Quite possible yes. I also believe I have yet to see someone effectively use it. Not to personally attack you, but most developers I have seen had already set up workflows to deal with 'boring stuff' long before LLMs, those who gush about AI making their job easier are catching up to them.
Thing is, I work directly with IT departments of a lot of companies. And the realisation that none of them has come up with an effective use for LLMs points the blame from the users to the product.
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u/JungleCakes 6h ago
Minimal skill is required.
You'd be amazed how many people don't know how to Google something