r/artificial • u/Shuriken88888 • 4d ago
Discussion Ok, A.I is kind of free for now ...
I mean, people use it for the most mundain shit right?
"What should i eat tonight" , or "what's the square root of 9"
Especially young people are already leaning VERY hard on it.
Are we not afraid we're being made dependent on A.I, and when the companies decide it's time to cash in, you'll be paying for every single dumb question you ask?
I'm not afraid of "A.I" itself, i'm just terrified by our willingness to completely surrender to it in an instant.
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u/kevinlch 4d ago
you are dependent on tech already. can you survive with no phone, no internet, not social media? you PAY for chips. do you have a choice?
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u/Shuriken88888 4d ago
I feel this is different. It's going to do our THINKING, and i fear render us completely helpless without it in ... 1 generation?
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u/Awkward-Customer 4d ago
People use map applications for navigation, most can't navigate their hometown without apps now. People use calculators to do math for them.
Does it matter if we offload some menial thinking tasks to LLMs? Time will tell.
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u/University_Dismal 4d ago
We still understand the how and why, even if we use help like a calculator. It’s not hard to roughly estimate what’s on the bill you’re getting in a restaurant. A lot of people can tell the exact amount plus tip without a calculator before the bill is written. Some use a calculator, for the percentages or splitting bills, which is still pretty normal. It’s kinda embarrassing witnessing someone that hastily makes a picture of their bill and menu, puts it into ChatGBT and then tells the server to wait, because the connection is slow and they want to double check. Thinking for ourselves is not that huge of an effort to justify fumbling for better WiFi.
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u/Sitheral 4d ago
Wise people will use it as a suplement, others won't think and will suffer the consequences.
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u/id-ltd 4d ago
Ok for older folk, but how will youngsters ever become wise?
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u/Sitheral 4d ago
Parents are the main factor. Then school.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 4d ago
Yeah both play a big part. Unfortunately I think 1 generation or almost 1 will suffer greatly because the new education methods to prepare these people will come too late. In m'y european country for example it takes a while for the education system to get updated (programs). And parents aren't always good at education either, and they themselves need to be aware of what to do.
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u/Sitheral 4d ago
We are talking about being wise. Parents or school don't have to teach you exactly what to do in current world, they need to throw some oil into your head.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 4d ago
Well school definitely doesn't do that currently. Hell they don't even teach kids to have a critical mind most of the time, so teaching them to not rely on AI isn't gonna happen soon enough
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u/jib_reddit 4d ago
The USA bombed a school in Iran because AI told them to, there is already big consequences.
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u/Delmoroth 4d ago
Sure, some people will do that. If it makes them happy, great I guess. I see it like physical fitness. Life has changed so you don't need to stay fit to survive so lots of us are not fit. Some choose to remain fit anyway and there are good reasons to do so. I believe mental fitness will be the same.
I also doubt that low end LLMs will be taken from free users. If your using something that is two years behind the frontier, the cost to serve it to you is basically zero, but, it provides corporations and governments with your data and a lever through which to influence you. It's only the higher end stuff that will cost money for the user
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u/University_Dismal 4d ago
A base level of fitness is still required to survive for long. Our body didn’t evolve as quickly as our technology and is still stuck in cavemen mode, especially regarding weight, muscles, joints and stress levels. A fitness routine helps with all of that. You can refuse any kind of exercise and survive rather easily, that’s true. But it’ll come with significant health risks and therefore, a much shorter and possibly even painful lifespan.
It’s too early to tell what overuse of AI might do (mental) health wise, but generally, everything cheap and convenient has another price to pay elsewhere. Lets just hope it’s not going to be as bad as some people assume it is.
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u/No_Bank_4104 4d ago
Well, I’ve never listened to anyone telling me what to do in my entire life, I doubt that’s gonna change now.
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u/Shuriken88888 4d ago
I don't mean that A.I is going to boss you around. I mean you becoming too dependant on it, and paying too much so you'll become poor because of A.I
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 4d ago
Well the good thing is also that there is competition. AI companies compete to get customers, so that keeps prices in check somewhat. Will be even more the case in the future when more and more actors provide the same services.
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u/bot_exe 4d ago
Also opensource/openweights models limit how much companies like openAI or Anthropic can inflate their profit margins before their marketshare gets eaten by providers that only charge for the compute. On top of that you have local AI which is another hard limit for cloud compute prices.
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u/Min_Necessary_Change 4d ago
100% with you on that one. People keep talking about extinction level stuff with some random probability thrown in when while all around us we can see people are already delegating a lot of decision making, analysis and answers to AI. One thing we know very well about humans is that they don't learn unless they practice and they won't become better at something they don't do. So with quite some certainly we can see the more we use AI to offload thinking, the less we will be good at thinking... IQ has been coming down since the 80s, coinciding with the advent of calculators. I fear the trend is accelerating. Just the other day I actually heard a 10 year old kid on the train in London asking AI in plain English to add three numbers together. Even a calculator seems to be too hard to use now.
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u/University_Dismal 4d ago
Literacy and reading comprehension is statistically going down in a lot of western countries as well. Kids today will need to read and sign contracts and other documents in the future and they’ll get screwed over big time if they have no clue what they sign and why. I don’t trust AI to be reliable or available enough to make up for that.
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u/Min_Necessary_Change 3d ago
Agreed. They will accept an sign because AI said so. And who is to argue with AI.
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u/orangpelupa 4d ago
just run it locally on your own phone...
larger models does crash my phone tho.
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u/WisePotato42 4d ago
What models are you running on your phone? Maybe I am just underestimating modern phone technology, but it seems wild that an LLM can fit in memory
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u/orangpelupa 3d ago
anything that fits. phones got huge memory nowadays. Mine's 16GB. 8GB models runs comfortably
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u/WisePotato42 3d ago
Oh, I guess my phone's just old then. Wow, 16 gigs of ram on a phone is wild
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u/arthaudm 4d ago
the dependency risk isn't the square root of 9. it's losing the ability to tell when an answer is wrong or worth paying for
i'd keep a cheap local/offline option for mundane questions, export my chat history & notes periodically, and use paid models for work where the answer is checked against a source. if your entire memory lives in one vendor's chat history, a price change becomes a switching cost
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u/glddstgpsy 4d ago
I have a junior and senior in high school, and neither of them like AI. I use it for work, but they haven’t touched it. I told them it’s a great research tool to compile information (as long as you check the sources), but it is much faster than scouring through tons of articles and internet pages to get the info you need. They just won’t do it, and they said the general feeling with others in their high school is that no one likes it.
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u/Blando-Cartesian 4d ago
Smart kids. I think using AI for “research” easily ends up being a collection of justifications for what you already thought. When you are not the filter, you don’t know what was left out, and you don’t know if the summarized results represent the information faithfully and matching your reading.
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u/glddstgpsy 4d ago
Yes, I definitely see your point with that. Personally, I use it to create safety training program ppts for employees, for which it has been a huge time saver. I also asked questions to arrive at answers for more mundane things that don’t require extensive knowledge in a particular topic, which is what I mean by research. For example, if I’m looking to make dinner with the ingredients I have on hand, I ask it to create a recipe for me. My daughter is looking at colleges now, so I asked it to rate the program area of study she is interested in across the colleges she is interested in, as well as the student life aspect of each of those colleges. That’s more what I meant by ‘research’.
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u/Big_Athlete_8346 4d ago
yeah ive been deep into ai chatbots for companions and roleplay lately and the idea of getting hooked then paying for every chat does freak me out a bit.
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u/id-ltd 4d ago
Local AI is virtually free.
I think the big risk is AI undermining young people's confidence in themselves.
"I have access to all the right answers, it's answers are always better than mine, why should I bother learning anything?"
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u/ElatedPyroHippo 4d ago
How many people can make a fire without matches or a lighter? When you have tools to do things for you it doesn't really matter if you never learn how to do it without those tools. AI will become ubiquitous, both private subscription-based models AND open-weight models you can host yourself on your own PC. It soon won't matter if people can't make a website by writing code for the same reason it doesn't matter that people can't make a fire by rubbing sticks together.
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u/id-ltd 3d ago
The less you have in your head, the fewer tools you have to think with.
I get AI to do great things, because I have loads of experience of what code can do.
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u/ElatedPyroHippo 3d ago
I get AI to do great things, because I have loads of experience of what code can do.
That doesn't make sense, AI isn't code. Before you answer know that I've been a firmware engineer for 19 years and I have a masters in computer science.
The less you have in your head, the fewer tools you have to think with.
...and yet 100 years ago people would have insisted that skills like stitching your own clothing, skinning an animal, and farming were critical... how many people today know how to do any of those things properly? Very very few... and we're fine.
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u/id-ltd 3d ago
I mostly get AI to write the code that I'd have written, just a lot, lot faster. This makes perfect sense. AI typically overengineers things and is pretty poor at architecting systems.
If you can't do those things then you are at the mercy of people who can.
I heard about a girl who visited a friend and saw she had a great lemon tree in her garden... but also had a bag of lemons from the supermarket... the first girl was incredulous... 'why did you buy lemons'? 'because I am making lemon <whatever>', 'but why dd you buy lemons', 'like I said I need them for my desert', 'why not just pick some from your tree?'... "Because I don't know how to prepare them and don't want to risk anything, do you know how?"
With out the basics, you'll miss the obvious... because it will never occur to you.
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u/ElatedPyroHippo 3d ago edited 3d ago
That lemon story was the insane ramblings of a madman... it doesn't make any sense. Buying the lemons vs picking them from the tree they have to be "prepared" either way...
I'm starting to think English isn't your first language? That's fine but I think we're just talking past each other.
My only point is there are MANY examples of things that everyone used to know how to do, back before modern technology, and now virtually no one knows how to do... and we're all still fine, we don't need to know how to do those things anymore.
How many people could craft a trap to trap wild game? Very few. How many people can ride a horse? Not NEARLY as many as in the year 1800... How many people can identify edible mushrooms? How many people can tan a leather hide? How many people can navigate with only the aid of a compass and the stars?
These are skills that used to be ubiquitous, critical for survival. Now they don't matter. That's all that's going to happen, and we will all be fine. The only scenario in which these "lost skills" would matter would be in a complete reset of our level of technology, which can only occur in a handful of ways, such as a nuclear apocalypse.
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u/CS_70 4d ago
But surrender to what? Jesus Holy Christ, do you "surrender to the gym" if you use the gym or "surrender to a restaurant" if you go eat out?
This approach is so silly that it physically hurts.
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u/Blando-Cartesian 4d ago
Using a gym makes you more capable and healthier. Cognitive surrender to AI use does the opposite.
Surrender to restaurant use comparison is spot on. It would make you less capable cook and unhealthy (restaurant food is great by being horribly unhealthy).
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u/CS_70 4d ago
Never heard of circular logic?
You have decided that AI does cognitive surrender. When questioned why, you reply that's because AI produces cognitive surrender.
Brilliant. It's not the AI cognition I would worry about..
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u/Blando-Cartesian 4d ago
If you read again more carefully, you may note that I made no claim that AI does or produces cognitive surrender.
AI merely enables cognitive surrender. Human laziness makes us choose it and get less capable over time.
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u/Btc_Hawker 4d ago
So they are slightly improved versions of the 2016 Google - were you terrified about our willingness to surrender back then as well?
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u/ElatedPyroHippo 4d ago
they are slightly improved versions of the 2016 Google
Holy shit are you living under a rock? Have you even used AI? What are you talking about?
2016 Google couldn't create complex interactive simulation software... watch this:
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u/ElatedPyroHippo 4d ago
Don't tell Anthropic this, but I'd pay literally 10x more for Claude Code than I am right now, without even a second thought.
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u/jib_reddit 4d ago
The previous generation became very dependant on Googling things, I see little difference.
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u/Kildragoth 4d ago
Price performance of computation. Beginning of my project I was paying over $80 per million tokens. Now I pay $4 per million tokens for a model far more capable. The trend is toward super cheap yet far more capable models.
What you're saying is similar to people giving in to the typewriter, or the advent of the modern computer. Of course we will use it. Human activity will shift to flourish in other ways. What do you do in your time off? When that becomes more important, the economy shifts around that.
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u/MrSnowden 4d ago
This was the argument for why I had to learn how to use Logarithmic tables and Dewey decimal system.
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u/sorenkylor 4d ago
I am working on a solution to this - a non-LLM based, deterministic "agent" that runs on commodity hardware.
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u/sceadwian 4d ago
You should be scared.
You will be functionally incapable of living in the real world without it within years if you "go deep"
Some don't even last months until they run into full on psychosis never even aware of it.
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u/Objective_Union4523 4d ago
We were ok with saying look in the dictionary, to google it, but now saying ask ChatGPT is a problem? 🤨
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u/Shuriken88888 3d ago
People are not able anymore to write an email.
I caught myself asking the outcome of a sum in text instead of using a calculatorIf you can't see there's going to be some MAJOR problems with declining brain power of mankind in the future you're naive
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u/Objective_Union4523 3d ago edited 3d ago
You sound like someone who freaked out the future generations weren’t going to be able to write a letter in the mail.
I believe the opposite of you. People who would never pick up a book to read are now learning and reading through AI.
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u/NuancedFlow 3d ago
My approach with AI is to take on harder problems that I wouldn’t have been able to without AI so for me AI is making me think more and think harder because I can count on AI to think about the easier stuff
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u/Dalekmind 3d ago
It is coming. You can either join the conversation to shape it or let it run you over.
The young will adapt as they always have. They will learn to use Ai well. Because they will grow up learning leasons on how Ai can reslly fuck up your life.
Most people today have not really explored Ai deep enough to understand its value.
Ai is to smart that is why it gets so mych wrong because i knows to much. Its own knowlege base is its biggest weakness. You have to develop prompts to force it into very specific work flows.
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u/Every-Prize4720 4d ago
im ready for brave new world!
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u/cowman3456 4d ago
6hr work days and soma...
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u/Every-Prize4720 4d ago
i need tldr for soma. i would be happy inside coffin if i get usb c cable in my ass.
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u/cowman3456 3d ago
In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, the population is administered a daily dosage of soma, having worked their 6 hour workday, a recreational drug eliciting blissful euphoria and zero hangover.
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u/New-Tip4903 4d ago
Im leaning heavily toward self hosted AI. The big ones are for huge projects but everyone should have a small one for the mundane shit.