Please Use AI

I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results.

I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone

For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with

I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70) from a year ago.

"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."

AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.

Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.

So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.

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.

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.

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?

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).

A great many today find themselves surrounded by people staring at phones, who express irritation any time they are asked to look up.

I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act.

It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.

Why can't you use technology and communicate with your friends? The same can be said for how people abuse TV, fast food, etc. It's up to you to live with care and attention or not.

On the other hand, tech in general (not just AI) does make an easier and easier path for people to go inward and neglect their community/family/friends. This does suck.

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.

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

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

We're optimizing the soul out of being human.

I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.

But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player.

I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.

OK, but you could write the same thing as "Please read books". Many times I have learned things from reading I could have learned, e.g., from a crotchety old neighbor in return for interacting with him.

Or, more accurately, Please don't.

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

If AI is not that special, just a tool, then treat it as such.

If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?

I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.

It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.

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?

I found this quite cringy and an attempt at pulling at one's heartstrings due to the lack of a strong argumentation.

I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.

If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.

The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.

For the sake of it: Just do everything manually.

Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.

Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.

Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.

How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...

Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...

And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.

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.

I am truly envious of people who have the luxury of a supportive environment that allows them to write a post like this.

For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete.

I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming.

It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.

After skimming through this, I want to write a post about how others are living their lives wrong. It must really feel great to be right about things on the internet. How do I start? I guess I'll just ask AI ...

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.

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

Though I deeply agree with this sentiment, the author fails to address that there can be multiple goals to an action. And writing can be for art or communication or both but not always both, and removing the art from communication doesn’t destroy its ability to communicate.

"Please use social media" would be equally apt.

Please use books.

Please use the internet.

Please use search engines.

Please use AI.

Everything old is good and everything new is evil. The irony of this being posted online in written form is lost on the author. Socrates would probably have an aneurysm.

I find these kinds of posts to be elitist and self-important. They draw a false dichotomy between tool use and lifestyle. I'm glad the poster has a lifestyle that works for them personally. This post really has nothing to do with AI. It's really just saying, spend more time talking to the people in your life. It seems to be written for the purposes of gaining clicks and engagement by using the phrase AI.

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

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.

Really beautiful piece.

I love the trend of using AI to generate flyers/advertisements for everything: family reunion, restaurant, yard sale...

The shit all looks the same. Every taco truck in town uses the same crappy style advertisements, all the food looks the same (AI tacos, not pictures of actual food...)

I liked small business advertisements better when it was full of crappy fonts, clashing color choices, horrifying JPEG artifacts and all.

what is up with the formatting on this post? does substack not have wordwrap and the guy is using manual carriage returns?

Soulfully! AI just a tool. Person constantly uses the tool instead of itself is felt as a robot.

Oh to be human!

Choosing AI over human authenticity is a death sentence.

Misses the mark IMO. You can already do all of these things. Just do them. As long as I get to fire half of my employees and you hit the token quota it’s all good.

Beautiful poem. Well said and hard cutting

I found

the weird line breaks

extremely jarring.

But it was an interesting

article nevertheless.

As someone who uses AI constantly - mandated at work. I fucking hate it. I hate what it makes me become: a mall cop of creativity. Endlessly directing little agents with feigned authority.

This is beautiful.

Wow, so powerful, I could barely type this comment with tears in my eyes.

OP should consider a side career in poetry.

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

I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology.

I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.

I sometimes wonder if these same people pushing AI onto devs would ask the same of their lawyers and accountants.

If someone hasn't gotten the memo yet, writing code got that serious at least a decade ago when web ate the world and chrome had won the web. Probably even earlier for certain industries like financial institutions.

This isn't just about "human imperfections" or something else sentimental. It's the fact that quality really does matter in a huge number of situations and the consequences are not forgiving in the slightest.

Human condition slop

Beautiful.

Thank you!

I really dislike the condescending tone of the person who thinks they discovered the secret of happiness, but instead of distilling their wisdom for joy chooses to shame others in a passive aggressive poem.

Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?

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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)

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.

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

When your router is not working, please use AI. Don't call your friend who is "good with computers" have him drop everything he's doing and have him trouble shoot the problem for you over the phone.

This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.