Our devices have now increased the distance _between_ us -- it's not about _you_ being able to "do X" -- talking to others is not _you_ doing it, it's you _and the other person_ doing it _together_. You can't be doing anything together consentually when the other person is in the habit of talking with their AI, or doomscrolling for that matter.
I spent a few weeks at a hostel last year. It was always kind of depressing and tense in the shared kitchen, just this heavy silence.
I don't feel comfortable around strangers, so I solved that problem by just saying hi to everyone.
Most people didn't respond much, although most of them smiled and the tension was eased. But a few of them struck up conversation and we ended up making friends.
I ended up making like, ten new friends in two weeks. And then a bunch of them ended up becoming friends with each other as well.
Even if you do it, you are still swimming against the current.
I.e. it's only a problem if you're not willing to go and strike up conversations with people. Which is not AI or mobile phones' fault. Expecting society to come up with "systemic situations" to your personal problems is a fast path to a lifetime of disappointment.
It is not a problem if there are other people willing to also go and strike up conversations with people. That is why GP wrote that it is a systemic problem that can be solved on a personal level.
> Expecting society to come up with "systemic situations" to your personal problems is a fast path to a lifetime of disappointment.
It is not a personal problem. It is a systemic problem. Are you conflating on purpose or do you not understand the difference?
And it is a systemic problem, all you need to do is look at the data.
Uhm, those lonely people need to get out and start talking. How is this going to help society? This is going to make it worse.
Oh that kid is kinda quite and sad? Throw him an iPad. Oh that adult is kinda bored and wandering aimlessly? Throw him into a casino. Oh that adult is kinda lonely and feels like they don't have anyone they can talk to about their life? Give them LLM companionship.
Yep, it is over for humanity. People simply don't understand externalities.
Great, what is being done to help that happen?
Even if all I am saying is bullshit, "what is being done to help"? What about what is being done to make it way, way, way, way, way worse. If I had LLM companionship when I was alone, yea, I would have never gotten out of my shell. I would be stuck in there forever. Hell, why should I even talk to you? I should just argue with a robot instead.
For some of these people even talking to a robot would likely be a huge improvement in quality of life, and that's just talking. If said robots could also help them out in real life, sort of like a personal assistant, that would be even better.
I mentioned in another comment that I totally get it for these people. You are using the extreme cases to justify opioid for the masses. The moment you "solved" human loneliness and interacting by giving them drugged up with chatbots, its over. I am telling you, it is over.
AI psychosis is bad enough as it is with really poor imitation. The moment it can imitate and fool the average person, I just don't see why most people need real friends anymore. We will NEVER be able to get it out of kids hand, the cats out of the bag. You think kids growing up with social media and ipad is bad? Lets see what happens if they live in actual fantasy land with their robotic friends.
I don't even know if I want to live in that world anymore.
Also, your solution to lonely people with disabilities or old age is to create robotic "Friends" for them? This is just sickening. You might as well just drug them. The _actual_ solution is to create a compassionate society where this doesn't happen. The solution to overworked society isn't more opium to relieve the pain.
> Social people will be fine
Thing is, "social" is not only a scale, it's not even a line for scale. It's this multidimensional space of different social preferences and different preferences as to _how_ to socialise, not to mention with whom and for what reason. In short, it's much more complicated than as to permit a "binary" division into the "social" and "other" people, but even if you did, I would wager the division puts it at 50% for either group, meaning you're basically describing a cataclysmic event where 50% of the population suddenly has no access to a fundamental trait of humanity that in known and unknown ways has assured our feeling of happiness and warded off a plethora of conditions of misery and worse that psychology has no names for (and won't ever have names for because that's like classifying different gradations of drinkable water, I imagine).
But yeah, humanity has always had to evolve, it's just that these changes come too fast for our adaptability to adapt to, I believe.
I think the parent is saying now that that is attempting to be applied to "creativity" directly, as opposed to something like a shift of medium, that it threatens many peoples' ability to maintain creative capabilities.
Anecdotally I've already experienced this at work where post-AI we had a junior completely stagnate and a senior with over a decade of experience in the bay atrophy to the point that he had to be let go.
It's like trying to have meaningful conversations on Twitter. You don't go to Twitter to do things like that. Can you? Sure. It's just not what the format and the conventions (and the people) lend themselves to.
I don't think there's much merit in pretending that human activities are only shaped by hard limits.
Like saying I no longer walk because I can drive. I no longer cook because Doordash exists. I no longer play piano because midi exists.
I mean i guess, but it seems like you didn't LIKE crafting the text or coding from scratch, you just wanted the outcome. If we are talking purely about work, I understand that its about being productive and it sucks to have a job shift to something you enjoy less.
But for daily life? I dont see how it changes, maybe its a tech thing where people think about making their daily lives more productive, but most people dont.
You can CHOOSE to let AI think for you or achieve for you, but you dont have to. You only HAVE to in a work context (for some people), which I admit sucks (or is great depending on who you are).
This feels like a touch grass moment.
But when I am with friends, out for a mtn bike ride or playing golf, we are just hanging out like we did 20 years ago. I dont see any cars and I am sure there are tons of AI apps for both sports that would make me "better" but I really don't care. I don't do it for the outcome.
The bonding, happiness, sharing, laughing, are all there just like it always has been and always will be.
This is almost certainly going to bite us in the ass long term, because eventually without human creativity you're just training AI's on other AI slop, or limiting the possible catalogue of styles to "things that existed before AI ruined every creative job". I guess the question is, what kind of future do you want to live in? One where we have a massive abundance of easy-to-create but vaguely worthless artifacts in a society that's completely devalued being good at something? It just sounds really dystopian to me.
AI doesn't stop creative people from creating. it gives creative people an additional tool with which to create
Exactly, so why make it worse? Why try to automate an industry when the money you make off killing it wouldn't even cover the cost of your research?
> AI doesn't stop creative people from creating. it gives creative people an additional tool with which to create
I can't emphasize enough how much actual creative people hate this shit. Here's a relatively balanced take, although the headline spoils it (How AI Poisons Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeCSzEtZcUw ). Long story short, the struggle is where creative ideas come from. If you automate away the process you automate away the result.
Ai doesn’t technically stop me writing code. But it’s sucked so much joy and interest out of it, that I can’t scrape together the motivation to work on side projects anymore. It has a “chilling effect” the effects of which are notoriously indirect to observe.