Please Use AI

JSR_FDED

Beautifully expressed. Using AI to remove even more opportunities for human contact is a tragedy.

Hovertruck

Really beautiful piece.

stellalo

This is really beautiful and tragic at the same time. Very well written.

yanis_t

Or just use AI when it makes sense, and call your friends too. Why do we have to over-dramatize everything?

causal

This does not just apply to AI. Uber, AirBNB, Facebook, etc. all basically serve as paid surrogates for what once was done by community. Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.

Chinjut

Hypocrite didn't even use AI to write this lovely poem.

frankest

The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human. At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog. There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).

steve_adams_86

This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now. When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?” Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question. I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear. The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like. Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird. I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers. Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to. I’m still very conflicted about it. I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc. Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?

willguest

I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN. I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E. I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better. Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased

randusername

Reminds me of that silly Adam Sandler movie Click (2006). In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction. But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?

artemonster

I asked Claude what he thinks about this blog post and was surprised by the level of self awareness (you cant call it like that but I dont have better word)

nathanfig

I've been pondering the question: "What does it mean to live well with AI?" We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.

eunoia

Beautiful piece. I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.

Brendinooo

This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck? I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.

faangguyindia

I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India. AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India. As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.

tiborsaas

Meh, here's a haiku from gemini > write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff Let humans create, Leave the soul to living minds, Let code do the chores.

josefritzishere

Every interaction I've had with AI has been negative. It's just not very good.

moralestapia

Wow, so powerful, I could barely type this comment with tears in my eyes. OP should consider a side career in poetry.

yanis_t

Be sure to use a mobile phone when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not come in person to your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals

postalcoder

I agree with this sentiment. I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them. People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me. I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.