I get quite irritated by people who seem to make it their life’s goal to bash AI.
— Yordi in AI Critics: You’re Using It Wrong
This morning, I read this post by Yordi, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.
While when I was still active on X, AI was coined the best thing ever happening to humanity, here on Mastodon (or the IndieWeb), the sentiment is quite the opposite.
I truly understand, that AI has its shortcomings. It hallucinates (or rather makes errors), it has to be trained on other people’s content (without them getting compensated) and it definitely makes some people lazy.
But why does everything have to be so black and white? Where are the gray tones in this conversation?
AI is not perfect yet, it’s far from it. But especially LLMs have become irreplaceable in my daily life. Particularly for coding and ideation, it’s like having a very knowledgeable friend always by your side.
Another example is learning something new: I often use ChatGPT to give me a primer on some topic I want to learn more about. That’s a really great use case in my opinion because when you know nothing about something, it’s really challenging to figure out, where to even start. But ChatGPT will happily give you some keywords that you can dive deeper into.
But guess what, I’m still going to google these keywords later on, visiting websites, going down rabbit holes. I’m not doing my whole research in ChatGPT. It’s just a tool in my arsenal, not the tool (or as we call it in German, an “Eierlegende Wollmilchsau”). And critical thinking is still needed very much.
Sure, there are people that will believe everything ChatGPT says and not check out the source. But hasn’t this been happening since, like, forever?
And if you’re worried that people won’t read your content because AI gives it to them as well… Do you think these sorts of people would have actually taken the time to read a full article if they hadn’t used the LLM?
Let’s not make this whole thing more controversial than it needs to be.
This post is part of the #JulyReply2024 challenge. More information in this post: Replies are this month’s comments.