Now a days people refer to AI instantly for an answer. Maybe it’s a problem they could have solved within 10min in their head or a question they could have done an internet search on and read a few forums to figure out. However, now people go straight to AI which is known to give many many wrong answers.
I know a couple people that fit this bill and now I almost completely disregard what they say. We’ll even be talking face to face and they’ll ask AI something from our conversation in real time.
Lowered expectations
I don’t think it’s a lowering of expectations — it feels like more of a qualitative difference. Like, the thing I’m looking for now is for someone to have given a fuck about what they’re trying to say. “Earnestness” is probably a good word for it.
Another factor in this is probably the fact that I was one of those kids who was at the top of my class for my entire school life, then went away to a prestigious university that just made me ramp up the pressure on myself even more. For a long while, I had built so much of my identity up around being smart, which led to me becoming overly preoccupied with ensuring I appeared smart too.
To give a concrete example, I’m a scientist who isn’t particularly well read, and for a long while, I held myself back from really engaging with the humanities, because I felt like I needed to stay in my lane and not make a fool of myself by having ill-informed or incorrect opinions on things like art or literature. I was too up in my head to be able to read a poem and actually have my own emotional response; internally, I’d be orienting myself around what seemed like the “correct” response. Ironically, being overly preoccupied with appearing smart led me to act quite dumb (though fortunately I met many delightful humanities nerds while I was at university, who were excited to both help me learn bits of the technical theory, whilst also being enthusiastic about my own crude, unrefined opinions).
So yeah, I used to be overly fixated on ideas of correctness and good execution in basically everything, and that made me hold back from engaging with my passion for the world, for fear of being wrong. I guess the point I’m making here is that my recalibration with respect to AI has also come alongside a personal arc in which I am learning to open up and let myself care about things without having to be good at them.
For instance, I am a deeply mediocre musician, but I have a lot of fun jamming with friends. I wouldn’t have been able to do this 10 years ago. So when I see someone being courageous enough to actually try to say or make something meaningful, I respect the guts of it, even if the execution is not great. A human can learn how to communicate better, but an LLM will never be able to actually give a fuck about what it says
You obviously put a lot of thought into this and I appreciate that. When I said lowered expectations I was more commenting on how AI is deskilling people. I don’t think this is a huge problem just yet, but I have a suspicion that it will be in the future.
Hence the lowered expectations. Not as a commentary on your own personal lense but more about AI impacts in general.
Of course this is exactly what was said about the new technology of photography. If you look at what people had to say about it you would be surprised how similar it is to modern day critiques of AI.
https://medium.com/@elarson39/photography-was-historically-considered-arts-most-mortal-enemy-is-ai-69a2dc2f43ef