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Comment by jhack | Hacker News Reader

"A good friend recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat?"

Same logic applies to using Google, I guess? Or any mapping app? How about Yelp?

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> Same logic applies to using Google, I guess? Or any mapping app? How about Yelp?

Not necessarily. The same logic would apply if you were just robotically using Google user ratings (e.g. "this is nearby and it has 5 stars, lets go there"), but it wouldn't if you looked through the results and used some taste, judgement, and experience.

There seems to be this assumption that if you ask AI for input, somehow you've turned into a slave that isn't capable of critiquing its response and integrating it into a larger decision-making process.

Why do people make that assumption? That would be the dumbest possible way to use AI.

One of the major stories from the rise of AI tooling was when people cooked a recipe that included glue.

I don’t think it’s unfair to assume some non-trivial percentage of people use these tools in a very dumb way.

That's fair. But refusing to date somebody because you assume they're using it in the dumbest possible way seems a bridge too far.

Maybe it is. Humans are weird creatures; we draw all manner of lines in the sand on different issues, some rational and others not.

I hope we get some interesting psychological studies out of this sort of story in the coming years. Maybe we can learn a thing or two about ourselves.

Op doesn't realize google has been using an LLM to compose and compile searches long before Gemini summaries appeared

Yeah, I didn’t really get that particular example. That seems functionally equivalent to a Google search. There is still a decision being made. You don’t have to go to the restaurant just because the AI suggests it.

I think it shows someone who is incapable of using Yelp or Google :P

I am familiar with both of those, and I sometimes ask ChatGPT because I am curious what it will come up with. I am curious to see if it comes up with something surprising or unexpected.

Perhaps the man in question is a thoughtful and curious person who was utilizing all of the resources available to him to provide a great experience to someone he cared about.

This take strongly resonates with my own attitude about AI use.

I suppose that’s a more charitable assessment. I will say I’m salty because whenever I’ve seen it used, it’s to avoid doing research and avoid understanding a problem. Anecdata, but in my day job, I see people accepting the first plausible answer to a problem and walking away with at most a surface level understanding. Curiosity would be digging deeper and looking at the problem from multiple angles.

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