All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI. “Another brick in the wall” hits stronger than ever now.
This is exactly the kind of black and white reasoning that annoys me about online discourse. The camps of “neverslop” and “techbro shill” are extremely vocal, and squeeze out anyone in between with a nuanced opinion (like myself). And I know I’m not the only one because I get upvotes!
Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now? If anyone might be an authority on the ethical use of ai, it would be him.
“But Glitch, that’s an appeal to authority fallacy!”
Okay, hypothetical strawman, you have a point.
Sure, there’s people who exist who operate like how op describes. I’m not disputing that. But saying everyone who uses ai at all is braindead is both incorrect and insulting. I use ai for some shit, it’s genuinely a somewhat useful tool and middling quality entertainment. But did ai write this comment? No, it did not, nor has ai told me what my opinions should be. So, proposal disproved by counterexample.
Someone is going to tell me I’m taking this too seriously, i can feel it.
this one time I had a huge 200 file folder full of ugly filenames i needed to be standardized to use in a script. Renaming them all manually was easily a 3 hour job at least. I described the end result name syntax i wanted and gave the full list of the current file names to an llm, and it gave me a powershell script that renamed every file for me perfectly in 2 minutes.
could i have coded that myself? sure. but then I’d be deciding between “three hours making a complicated file renaming script or 3 hours or manually renaming 200 files for 3 hours”. The llm solved my problem for me and allowed me to continue with my actual work rather than wasting time doing data entry.
is this stupid npc behavior? if it is then it sure seems like only npc idiots like saving time.
Yup, that is where I also use AI for. The boring stuff. Clicking on repeat for 3 hours and then it turns out you made a mistake and need to do it all over again. No thanks.
The creative things I do myself.
I think that’s perfectly reasonable, just review the script first for anything that might break your pc.
somewhat useful tool and middling quality entertainment.
is that worth all the damage it’s causing? for a bit of middling entertainment?
think about the company you keep bro. altman? musk? amodei? trump?
is that worth all the damage it’s causing? for a bit of middling entertainment?
No, it’s not. But the damage is already done, and will be done regardless of anything I do. For the sake of argument, let’s say I do stop using ai altogether. There will always be something that I’m not doing good enough to some people, one of my favorite examples is eating meat. It’s delicious, and the vegans can kiss my ass. I still shop from amazon, other options are not practical. I work for a company that supports republican politicians, I have to pay rent somehow. I could continue.
think about the company you keep bro. altman? musk? amodei? trump?
I’m not keeping that kind of company. I have repeatedly and loudly insisted that those people deserve prison at best. The ai platform I currently use is not associated with any of the big ai companies, and I intend to switch to self hosting in the near future.
Something you should understand is that shit sucks. And sometimes, you can benefit from shit sucking. Taking advantage of shit sucking does not invalidate demands to make it not suck. I haven’t said much about my disdain for the environmental impacts because on the subject of the environmental impact I agree with the neverslop side, but at the same time what the fuck am I supposed to do about it?
Here’s an example for you. Recently, a friend of mine was involved in a car crash. Based on how the cars ended up, it looked like my friend was at fault. However, a flock camera caught the other party speeding into the intersection where the collision happened. Flock is a product of evil and needs to not exist, but between now and then we can sometimes take advantage of it.
No, it’s not.
So you’re simply going to suck AI dick even knowing the damage it’s causing? That’s an impressive amount of ignorance you’ve crammed into that pinhead of yours.
you ride with those 4 every time you use any model that’s built on theft. justify it however you need to sleep at night.
You’re delusional. Take your kitto coupon to the funhole, they love hating ai in all its forms there. I’m not interested in a cult echochamber.
What the actual fuck is a kitto coupon?
AI is making you nuts dude.
You’re on lemmy and you seriously don’t know about funhole? you’re missing out.
https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/funhole
Anyway, kitto coupons were a viral meme over there for a while (was pretty annoying, but I get it). I wanted to provide an example in this comment, but lemmy’s search function sucks major ass (actually worse than reddit, and reddit’s search has always been shit).
Anyway, don’t blame memes being too niche for you on ai.
fuck ai, fuck them, fuck you, fuck funhole
kitto coupon
not sure what you’re smoking there. what the fuck are you rambling about promptboy?
Is he an unthinking npc now?
As the creator and leading expert on Linux, he’s ultimately responsible for the project.
The NPCs have no responsibility, they are just there.
The AI discourse is rather pointless when you see how much people are willing to bend their own opinions. So that it’s always in the right, and one step further is the sloppery slope to hell
As you mentioned. Look at the Linux communities. Before Linus came out in support it was “Microslop” this “vibe coded OS” that. And now suddenly, AI is actually a good thing.
Or G*mers. On the one hand they’re complaining about AI games being sold on Steam. But on the other hand they’ll also defend Steam selling AI games. But on the other hand complain when Epic sells AI games. And then on the other hand they’ll praise AI piracy and emulators.
The AI discourse is rather pointless when you see how much people are willing to bend their own opinions. So that it’s always in the right, and one step further is the sloppery slope to hell
yup, guilty of that myself.
As you mentioned. Look at the Linux communities. Before Linus came out in support it was “Microslop” this “vibe coded OS” that. And now suddenly, AI is actually a good thing.
Both things are true. Linus has a proven track record of being good at his job and knowing what he’s talking about. Microsoft has a proven track record of producing shit, and making their products worse. Giving them ai just makes them do what they were already doing faster. Linus speaking out didn’t change my opinion on the matter, it only confirmed the current iteration of my opinions on ai that I’ve been slowly developing over the past few years.
Or G*mers. On the one hand they’re complaining about AI games being sold on Steam. But on the other hand they’ll also defend Steam selling AI games. But on the other hand complain when Epic sells AI games. And then on the other hand they’ll praise AI piracy and emulators.
Gamers as a collective are fucking morons. That aside, I don’t hold all developers to the same standard. A solo dev with no funding is not the same as a 200 man team with the backing of a multi billion dollar publisher. Holding them both to the same standards is asinine. So if the next GTA/Elder Scrolls/Call of Duty/Final Fantasy/Whatever has vibe code or slop assets, gamers are absolutely right to rake those studios over the coals. They have the money to pay for programmers and artists. There is no excuse.
On the other hand, our nameless ideal solo dev who’s struggling to so much as pay rent, fuckit go nuts. Vibe code the whole thing, slop out the assets, whatever. Just review the damn code, and curate the assets. If the project has any creative passion whatsoever, that will come through in how the slop is put together. I see using ai assets the same as using packaged assets from, say, the unity store: you didn’t make it, but what’s more important is how you use it.
And on ai piracy and emulators, I’m just tickled by the giant ai shaped middle finger pointed at nintendo and the ai companies.
The main downside of Ai is expectation of speed. Everyone expects things to be done very fast. You have no time to do your own research, to learn how to do it and be confident that you have done it right
It sounds like, for the purposes of this post, you and many other people would not be in the “People who use AI” category:
All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI.
I have coworkers who are effectively meat proxies. I think the term NPC applies well to how interacting with these folks feels, since it does feel like I’m not talking to a real human, but a computer trying to appear human.
Is OPs net too wide? Probably, yeah. But the sentiment is real, the frustration is real, and contextualizing those interactions as with NPCs resonates.
Have your fun with using AI, but there’s no need to yum our yuck.
Oh I’m right there with you (and op) in your annoyance with meat proxies. I just don’t want to be lumped in with them. The amount of times I deal with someone telling me “chat gpt said I need xyz thing” and I have to explain that what they’re asking for is impractical/impossible/expensive/doesn’t exist. And then they get mad at me about it! Fuckers.
Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now?
yep.
imho you’re not taking it seriously enough sport. if you were, you’d have stopped using AI.
Citing “Another Brick In The Wall” is suspiciously generic and uncreative.
And not even relevant to OPs metaphor
People who use the internet are actual NPCs. I’m the only main character here.
Unless you’re saying that people using ai is causing you to isolate yourself and bottle up your own feelings that’s not the correct song to use.
For those who say “what about ethical uses of AI?” and “but what if it actually useful?”:
Two things can be true at the same time:
- Technology is legitimately useful.
- Technology is so harmful it shouldn’t exist.
We didn’t “cancel” asbestos for an all-around better material. We got rid of it wherever we could due to the harms of it. AI is harming our society, since it attempts to replace human communication with technology.
All the outrage about AI around here is the outrage that should have been targeted towards social media in the past 10 years. The corporations that want to control societies communication while injecting their nefarious plots are already doing so.
Very few critics hit the point, which is the tech Bros utopia is to make us all superfluous as workers. That is the story we should challenge, and not lazily repeat criticism that doesn’t reflect the real world.
when AI poses an actual threat to quality of life, whether it’s access to affordable power, water, ram, gpus etc., it should always take the back seat.
Not this stupid silly bullshit:
I recently tried using AI as a test for therapy. Omg. It has no idea what it’s talking about. It makes wild assumptions, defends the indefensible, and will always tell you it doesn’t really know once you push back on it a little bit.
It’s honestly useless for information. It’s an auto-coder. That’s all.
Calling people NPCs because they use AI is pretty ironic. Using a tool doesn’t make someone less human, any more than using a calculator makes someone incapable of thinking. The real question is whether people are using AI to expand their thinking or outsourcing it entirely. Blindly repeating AI-generated content is one thing; using AI as a tool for creativity, learning, or productivity is another. Judge the thought, not the tool.
using AI to expand their thinking
An oxymoron.
Comparing LLMs to simple tools is a bullshit argument. Calculators are deterministic and they don’t confidently give incorrect answers, for one.
The IPO bots are out to pump the numbers. This is an established routine lol. The idiots eat it up
Calling people NPCs because they delegate their thinking to a machine.
Unused, the brain atrophies. The human dies.
There’s still a living body, most of the time, but it’s merely the slop machine’s peripheral.
A husk, a mockery of humanity, a corporation’s wet dream, still given the same rights and respect as a real living human being, despite being merely a tool to carry on the corporation’s whims.
NPCs is appropriate. Clearer than reverse centaurs.
Lemmy users would’ve hated when the calculator was invented.
Comparing LLMs to calculators is so goddamn disingenuous.
I used to be able to do long division in my head. Square roots. That kind of thing.
Then they allowed us to use calculators in class, and I was too young to realise the danger. Now that part of my brain is gone. Dead. I can’t do those calculations without using the machine as a crutch. It mutilated me, maimed me, killed a part of me, and made me dependent on it.
I won’t let LLMs do the same to the rest of my brain, and will treat anyone who does with the pity, disgust, and existential nausea and horror they deserve.
This is the correct take. You’re 100% correct, all of us who used to “think” (how archaic! The TV screen tells us what to think) feel this way.
Fuck you, with a rake, sideways. You’re either the most disingenuous person who ever lived (unlikely, stiff competition, you’re not smart enough), or the dumbest person who ever lived (obviously true lmao, we can all tell)
Ok, when?
I see generative AI the same way I see anabolic steroids. If you’re already versed enough in whatever field, it might not be that bad a thing, but you’re 100% gonna deal with some consequences.
Take me for example, by the time I really got into generative AI in 2023-2024, I already worked IT for like 10-11 years, had several certs, and so I was able to get it to be mostly useful to me because I already knew my job well enough.
Others? I had some coworkers get straight up brainrotted and couldn’t configure a damn Cisco Router without asking ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Deepseek or Gemini or whatever.
And shit, even for people who say, “WHY DON’T WE USE AI TO SOLVE CANCER!?” Like doctors who use AI to do that wind up becoming worse at spotting cancer on their own. Even me, guy with over a decade of IT experience? I felt myself becoming dumber when I use AI too much and have to take like tolerence breaks to go back to the old ways of scrolling old tech forums to find the answer.
shoutouts to simpleflips
People who use AI to outsource their creativity and ideas are NPCs. People who have ideas and use AI to bring those ideas into fruition are at least neutral.
This
What about opensource self hosted AI?
There are still major ethical issues with how they get training data, but the problem with hijacking the economy and society seems resolved. I feel like I can more easily forgive the copyright theft for someone just fucking around in their homelab, replacing Google assistant.
Maybe I’m just bean-souping.
don’t forget that frequent LLM use erodes patience and skills. even with the training ethics and environmental ethics set aside, they make you measurably dumber.
LLM users consistently underperform at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels
This kinda gets philosophy-of-cognative-science-ey, but it kinda smells like “measuring a fish by its tree climbing ability”. Or maybe like goodharts law.
There are many different kinds of smart, is the kind of smart they’re measuring the one that will be relevant?
Again, I don’t want to carry too much water for AI, but I also don’t want to propagate arguments that also apply to other tools I like. Consider: externalizing memory. Without the tool you used to capture that memory, you’re completely unable to function. Dependency on it reduces your ability to remember things yourself. By many measures, it makes your dumber and less productive. But I wouldn’t personally consider taking notes to be detrimental.
So I want to be very careful when we make claims that externalizing some aspect of our cognition makes us worse somehow.
There are many, many effective ways to oppose AI. Dehumanizing everyone that uses it isn’t one of them.
Dehumanization is a line I won’t cross, maybe with the exception of Nazis. This is a little too casual.
wow, you’re so quick to humanize people who believe their VMware friends than actual humans.
Dehumanization
Feels a bit unproductive to just call this dehumanization. It could be that sure, but it could also be discussing a kind of real issue of people turning off their higher reasoning and just handing it all over to LLMs. People are treating anything the LLM says as an absolute source of truth and that’s incredibly dangerous as a society - they’re essentially willingly becoming literal NPCs whose thoughts are set by whoever decides whatever stances the LLMs should take.
E.g. I’ve recently seen LLMs take ultra conservative stances towards safety calling benign actions dangerous and when asked to find sources literally lie about what sources they find and cite say.
Antis saying the same thing over and over and then accusing others of being NPCs. Classic.
Assisted AI is fine, but putting it in the drivers seat and abandoning critical thinking skills is pretty concerning, yet sadly not surprising with the masses
The irony is that calling people “NPCs” for using AI is itself a pretty scripted take. AI can generate text, but people still choose what to ask, what to accept, and what to do with it. “Another Brick in the Wall” was about resisting systems that flatten individuality—not about treating everyone who uses a new tool as mindless.
- Perplexity AI.
Now dumb it down a bit so it’s more believable as a real internet comment
It’s kind of funny that people call others “NPCs” for using AI, because that sounds pretty robotic in itself. Just because someone uses AI doesn’t mean they can’t think for themselves. People still decide what to ask, what to believe, and what to do with the answers. And honestly, “Another Brick in the Wall” was about people losing their individuality, not about attacking everyone who uses a new tool.
- ChatGPT
Oh interesting, I wonder if they’re adding more model instructions or other tweaks to counteract how much of the contemporary internet finds anything to do with the big LLM providers distasteful.
Perhaps? I don’t know honestly, just wanted to mess around. Put it into the AI, got a response and commented it here and then… I moved on, lol.
The entire discussion about using AI or not using it, lets me cold. Even if I wanted to stay away from it, work pretty much forces me to use it, so eh lol.
I’m sorry to hear that, that seems to be the way of tech when lead by MBAs. I don’t need to for my work, but I do have to use Teams so I’m not sure which one of us has it worse.
Removed by mod
I don’t code, don’t care about coding myself. I’m in the financial sector. Anyway, since you are disrespectful, rude and most of all you are a stranger, so bye! Blocked my love.
Removed by mod
Fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on, and fuck you personally. Idiot
