Answering your question, no matter how much I personally degrade or improve, I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days.
1) AI is basically useless, a mere semi-random word generator. 2) And it is so powerful that it is going to hurt (or even destroy) humanity.
This is this is called "having your cake, and letting it eat you too".
You're inserting "destroy humanity" when OP is suggesting the problem is offloading all thinking to an unreliable tool (I don't entirely agree with their position but it's defensible and not as you stated).
There are basically no conditions under which one party can or will reach a legitimate common ground with the other. Sucks, but that's HN nowadays.
My input is: water, nutrition, a bit of electricity, and beliefs and the output is a fairly complex logical system like software. AI's input is billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of people's lives spent in screen time daily, gigawatts of electricity, and still produces very questionable results.
To answer your question in other words: if you spent the same amount of resources on human intelligence, it might bring much more impressive results in one year. However, taking into account the resources already paid into these AI technologies, humanity is unlikely to have a chance to buy out of this new 'dependency'.
If AI tools don't amplify and magnify your own intelligence, it's not their fault.
If the advances turn out to be illusory, on the other hand, they'll be unwound soon enough. We generally don't stick with expensive technology that doesn't work. At the same time, fortunately, we also don't generally wait for your approval before trying new things.
Homeopathy is still around…
With LLMs, the destruction is less immediate and overt, but chatbots do provable harm to people, and can be manipulated to warp our sense of reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis
People are having romantic relationships with their chatbots and committing suicide because of them. That is harm.
Let's ask your friendly local Ukrainian refugee about that.
People are having romantic relationships with their chatbots and committing suicide because of them. That is harm.
So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the mentally disturbed. I see.
You understand “basically useless” does not mean “entirely useless”, right? That’s why the word “basically” is there.
I know Ukrainian people. I know Ukrainian people who are in attacked cities right now. They are friendly, and all of them would understand my point.
> So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the mentally disturbed. I see.
That is a bad faith argument. HN rules ask you to not do that and steel man. It is obvious that is not what I said, “permissible” isn’t part of the argument at all. And if you think one needs to be “mentally disturbed” to be affected, you are high on arrogance and low on empathy and information. There are numerous stories of sane people becoming affected.
https://archive.ph/2025.09.24-025805/https://www.nytimes.com...
You're right, I don't have much empathy for bullshit pop-psych as an instrument of motivated reasoning. If ChatGPT can convince you to kill yourself, you weren't mentally healthy to begin with, and something else would have eventually had the same effect on you. Either that, or you were an unsupervised child, victimized not by a chatbot but by your parents. A tragedy either way, but good faith requires us to place the blame where it's actually due.
All ask you again to not engage in bad faith.
> If ChatGPT can convince you to kill yourself, you weren't mentally healthy to begin with, and something else would have eventually had the same effect on you.
That is false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_barrier#Efficacy
> Research has shown suicidal thinking is often short-lived. Those who attempted suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge and were stopped in the process by a person did not go on to die by suicide by some other means. There are also a variety of examples that show restricting means of suicide have been associated with the overall reduction of it.
You started by comparing ChatGPT to thermonuclear weapons, inferring that it's a useless thing yet also an existential threat to humanity. State your position and desired outcome. You're all over the place here.