11 ms·

Please Use AI

• JSR_FDED 4mo ago
  Beautifully expressed. Using AI to remove even more opportunities for human contact is a tragedy.
• moralestapia 4mo ago
  Wow, so powerful, I could barely type this comment with tears in my eyes. OP should consider a side career in poetry.
• Hovertruck 4mo ago
  Really beautiful piece.
• stellalo 4mo ago
  This is really beautiful and tragic at the same time. Very well written.
  • customguy 4mo ago
    I thought I'm jaded, and a bit of a poet myself, and already sufficiently "upset" by several things, but this still made me so profoundly sad, and at the same time incredibly proud of the author and hopeful of being human. And they don't cancel each other out. It's a very strong, odd mixture. This is with me now, and I hope it'll linger. I don't have anything intelligent to say really. This poem made me go "Fuck yeah, poetry! Humans!!", and I'm grateful to the author, the submitter, and the people who upvoted it, so that I ended up reading it.
• throwaw12 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • patosullivan 4mo ago
    I think you totally missed the point of this post.
    • throawayonthe 4mo ago
      i read it as adding onto the post
      • happytoexplain 4mo ago
        They wouldn't have quoted the first "because..." and used the opening, "Yes, " if they were participating in the joke with the author.
  • happytoexplain 4mo ago
    I know sarcasm can be missed in writing, but I find it hard to give you the benefit of the doubt on this one.
  • tripleee 4mo ago
    seems like unironically a lot of people here are all for that, yes
• yanis_t 4mo ago
  Or just use AI when it makes sense, and call your friends too. Why do we have to over-dramatize everything?
  • honeycrispy 4mo ago
    Or you could use AI to explain to you how you missed the point.
  • solenoid0937 4mo ago
    I'd have thought people that are technologists at heart would have understood the benefit of the next Industrial Revolution but all anyone wants to do is whine about it.
    • honeycrispy 4mo ago
      I see this false equivalency argument everywhere. Just because one revolution had one effect does not mean they'll all be the same.
      • happytoexplain 4mo ago
        Nor does it mean people negatively affected at the time were wrong to fight for the quality of their family's lives. Anybody would do that. Also, the unfolding of inevitable changes can be managed by governments to reduce harm (they just usually don't because that would mean a slower increase in profit, directly or indirectly).
        • solenoid0937 4mo ago
          Turbulence and change always hurt quality of life. If the people fighting the Industrial Revolution were successful in shutting it down, humanity would have been far worse off. So I understand, but can't excuse, people that fight the next Industrial Revolution simply to save their jobs. No one's job is more important than what is to come. I'd gladly give mine up for AGI. No individual takes priority over all future humans.
• causal 4mo ago
  This does not just apply to AI. Uber, AirBNB, Facebook, etc. all basically serve as paid surrogates for what once was done by community. Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
  • antonyt 4mo ago
    Facebook, sure, but Uber and AirBNB? I don't see how Uber has displaced some community function. AirBNB is arguably destructive to communities, but again how was community fulfilling the need it attempts to address?
    • causal 4mo ago
      Before Uber it was totally normal to ask someone, even an acquaintance, for a ride to the airport.
      • ilikecakeandpie 4mo ago
        You can still ask friends or acquaintances for rides to the airport. The taxi service where I live is absolutely miserable and there's not really any viable public transport options. Pre-Uber and early smartphones, they'd require you to have the exact address of where you were and they'd be there "between 30 minutes and two hours" which is unreasonable and had folks judging if they were actually "good enough" to drive. If they actually showed and picked you up, somehow the credit card machine wouldn't be working and then they'd aggressively insist they'd drive you to an ATM to get cash. It would magically start working if you told them that cash was not an option The taxi service got what was coming to them, at least here they did. They had decades to make their service at least non-hostile to the consumer and instead it just got worse. I'll gladly pay for a rideshare where I can just put in my destination address vs have to deal with that nonsense
      • antonyt 4mo ago
        I see what you mean. I still ask friends for rides to the airport, but you're probably right that it's a shallower net than I might have cast without rideshare apps.
• Chinjut 4mo ago
  Hypocrite didn't even use AI to write this lovely poem.
• frankest 4mo ago
  The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human. At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog. There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
  • causal 4mo ago
    > instead of a hand-crafted custom blog I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.
    • aidenn0 4mo ago
      So what's the kind of elitism that gets the point?
      • causal 4mo ago
        Elitism excludes humans from one another, which is exactly what the poem is encouraging you not to do
        • aidenn0 4mo ago
          The poem itself is elitist. If you leverage a broad social network, you are better than if you use AI.
          • causal 4mo ago
            You completely misunderstood it then. It was not about utilizing broad social networks nor was it about not-using AI.
            • 4mo ago
• steve_adams_86 4mo ago
  This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now. When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?” Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question. I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear. The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like. Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird. I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers. Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to. I’m still very conflicted about it. I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc. Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?
  • hootz 4mo ago
    To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!
    • godshatter 4mo ago
• willguest 4mo ago
  I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN. I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E. I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better. Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased
  • jamwil 4mo ago
    The author’s point was more nuanced than ‘tool bad’.
    • willguest 4mo ago
      tell me, where in this piece is there any acknowledgement that the technology, if used well, can bring people together? show me, and i will accept there is nuance
  • CivBase 4mo ago
    > thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN. It's a pretty big stretch to liken a ranking algorithm based entirely on direct, intentional human inputs to what most people understand to be "AI".
    • willguest 4mo ago
      > what most people understand to be "AI" most people understand it to be an LLM, but that doesn't make the term mean only that. the point was illustrative, perhaps Meta's attention maximization algos would be a better example my point was not that they are the same, but that the author seems to advocate for some technologies, like video calling and text messages, but cannot make the leap to see that it is how we use that matters. It is a selective diabtribe, framed in a positive voice, hence my counter-examples to match
• randusername 4mo ago
  Reminds me of that silly Adam Sandler movie Click (2006). In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction. But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?
  • cpt_sobel 4mo ago
    This movie hit harder than my highest expectations from an Adam Sandler movie.
    • throw101010 4mo ago
      Sandler has some pretty good non-comedy (Uncut Gems, Hustle) or half serious comedy (like Click). He's among the few actors who still could do this and not feel completely out of place... but that's if you give his serious roles a chance, many people just judge the serious movies by his presence in the cast and never actually watch them. He also had a lot of slop movies in career, so I don't blame people who do that... but it's a shame if you miss the good ones because his acting really makes these great.
      • jjulius 4mo ago
        Reign Over Me wasn't the greatest movie, but his performance in it is stellar.
      • cpt_sobel 4mo ago
        I've always felt that his slop movies were just excuses to go film on some exotic island with his buddies, I'd have done the same :)
  • layer8 4mo ago
    Vernor Vinge’s “bobble” series provides a variation of that scenario: https://www.goodreads.com/series/57273-across-realtime https://www.goodreads.com/series/57273-across-realtime
• artemonster 4mo ago
  I asked Claude what he thinks about this blog post and was surprised by the level of self awareness (you cant call it like that but I dont have better word)
• nathanfig 4mo ago
  I've been pondering the question: "What does it mean to live well with AI?" We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.
  • skydhash 4mo ago
    Even though I spent the majority of my work day with computers, my fascination with them starts and stops on understanding how they work. Aside from that, they’re only utilitarian. What I really like to do is grab a nice book, put on some nice album to listen too, and enjoy a quiet night with my SO. If not for the fact that it’s easier to get books and music in digital format where I live, I’d spend even less time with computers.
    • nathanfig 4mo ago
      Yeah it's entirely possible the answer is: "You don't." But I haven't even seen people attempting to imagine life well-lived. Like with so much technology it's basically an afterthought.
• eunoia 4mo ago
  Beautiful piece. I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
  • renegade-otter 4mo ago
    The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
    • simoncion 4mo ago
      > The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me. Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic? How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill? The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. If your best you is a baseline human, then, great! More power to you! I know that mine sure as fuck isn't. Will there be lots of trouble on the way towards teching up so that everyone can be the best version of themselves possible? Absolutely. Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
      • jubilanti 4mo ago
        > The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. Come on, by that vague of a definition, Aristotle and Confucius were apparently transhumanists.
      • jimbokun 4mo ago
        This is all bullshit. Transhumanism when put into practice will be about changing our environment to take away everything that allows humans to thrive and be happy and fulfilled. It's about the destruction of families, communities, and human cultures built up over millennia with no serious thought put into what comes next and why it might or might not be better for human beings. > How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill? This is not Transhumanism, the desire for these things far pre-date Transhumanism as a philosophy. > Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do. So maybe we work on that before diving head long into the post human future?
• coldpie 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• Brendinooo 4mo ago
  This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers. Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck? I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.
  • happytoexplain 4mo ago
    >If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck? I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
    • nightski 4mo ago
      I found it rather on point to be honest, it was exactly how I felt when reading the article.
      • fckgw 4mo ago
        Then you're missing the point. The point was "talk to another human about shared experiences, whatever that may be".
    • Brendinooo 4mo ago
      There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people. I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context. I thought this was amazing! But I'm sure someone could point out that I took a mental shortcut, that I made myself dumber by not grasping Serbian and Cyrillic to have a go at translating myself. Or they could say that I lost the human connection that would have come by finding a resident who spoke English and asking about what that meant. In a sense, this are plausible critiques. But the reality is that I was on a run, and I almost certainly never would have done those things if Claude (or smartphones with cameras, for that matter) didn't exist. I didn't become lazier or lose the imperfections of human connections, the whole thing was a net add for me. And so, in that light - it's okay to use a recipe book, or ask an LLM about fly fishing, or do some web searches to get some advice about how to write a wedding toast. If that's missing the point somehow, so be it. Perhaps you could enlighten me (and thus cultivate a human connection)!
• faangguyindia 4mo ago
  I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India. AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India. As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    > fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India. That's not necessarily because of AI. The trend has been going downward for some time, anyway. Outsourcing has drawbacks; usually ones that aren't apparent, until it has been in place for a while (I won't go into what they are, because this isn't really the proper venue, and I don't feel like arguing). I think that many companies have been learning about these drawbacks, in the last few years. But AI is likely to impact some (not all) jobs that would normally be offshored.
• tiborsaas 4mo ago
  Meh, here's a haiku from gemini > write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff Let humans create, Leave the soul to living minds, Let code do the chores.
• josefritzishere 4mo ago
  Every interaction I've had with AI has been negative. It's just not very good.
• yanis_t 4mo ago
  Be sure to use a mobile phone when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not come in person to your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals
  • bigfishrunning 4mo ago
    You've missed the point. You're describing replacing a method of communication, the poem describes replacing a relationship.
    • yanis_t 4mo ago
      Right, but why attacking AI specifically? I just don’t buy the example, she could use a book with recepies instead of calling her friend, right? Maybe she just doesn’t want to call her friend this time, you know, and maybe it doesn’t make her less human.
  • draftsman 4mo ago
    You’ve either willfully ignored the point, or completely missed it as it flew over your head. AI wants to replace “your friend” completely.
• postalcoder 4mo ago
  I agree with this sentiment. I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them. People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me. I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.
  • jimbokun 4mo ago
    Yep, we all thought giving young kids was "helping them learn to use computers to be ready for the future" too. Some people learned that lesson and are now pushing back on letting their kids access AI. But not everyone.
• kshri24 4mo ago
  Beautiful. Thank you!
• annnoo 4mo ago
  I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results. I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with
  • ryandrake 4mo ago
    Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anything." Without any sense of ownership or attachment whatsoever. If someone DMCA'ed one of my GitHub projects and made me take it down, I'd be pissed. But if someone DMCA'ed an AI-coded thinggy, I'd probably delete the repo and never think about it again in my life.
    • culopatin 4mo ago
      AI is like cheap void calories. Writing by hand is calories from a good home cooked meal with all the nutrients and love, AI code (unless maybe you worked on putting together an AI system and the harness is your build), feels like calories from a Sprite. Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
      • boringg 4mo ago
        Your analogy is apt. The challenge is that most of the world runs on cheap calories and cheap furniture and that seems to be growing more and more.
      • 4mo ago
• keybored 4mo ago
  Misses the mark IMO. You can already do all of these things. Just do them. As long as I get to fire half of my employees and you hit the token quota it’s all good.
• Waterluvian 4mo ago
  We're optimizing the soul out of being human. I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible. But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player. I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.
• delichon 4mo ago
  OK, but you could write the same thing as "Please read books". Many times I have learned things from reading I could have learned, e.g., from a crotchety old neighbor in return for interacting with him.
  • dietr1ch 4mo ago
    Yeah, but no one has a book on pretty much anything at their fingertips that you open and find a hopefully good chapter on what you wanted. With books you needed to consult people on which book to read first.
    • cortesoft 4mo ago
      No, you go to the library and find the book. That is what I did before the internet.
      • NoGravitas 4mo ago
        And there's someone working at the library who can help you find the right book to meet your need, if you talk to them.
        • cortesoft 4mo ago
          I never did that, though. I would look using the computer or card catalog
• patates 4mo ago
  If AI is not that special, just a tool, then treat it as such. If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much? I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone. It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.
  • timmytokyo 4mo ago
    And will you use AI to write the wedding speech you give at your child's wedding? People aren't reading what they're responding to.
    • patates 4mo ago
      > And will you use AI to write the wedding speech you give at your child's wedding? You aren't reading what you are responding to.
• d--b 4mo ago
  I really dislike the condescending tone of the person who thinks they discovered the secret of happiness, but instead of distilling their wisdom for joy chooses to shame others in a passive aggressive poem. Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?
  • yanis_t 4mo ago
    Exactly. I have children too you know. In fact we had a blast last time with my five year old shouting nonsense at Suno and having it make some cool songs out of it. Does it make me less human? It’s all about how you choose to use the technology
• sublinear 4mo ago
  I sometimes wonder if these same people pushing AI onto devs would ask the same of their lawyers and accountants. If someone hasn't gotten the memo yet, writing code got that serious at least a decade ago when web ate the world and chrome had won the web. Probably even earlier for certain industries like financial institutions. This isn't just about "human imperfections" or something else sentimental. It's the fact that quality really does matter in a huge number of situations and the consequences are not forgiving in the slightest.
• kenty 4mo ago
  This is beautiful.
• btilly 4mo ago
  I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70) from a year ago. "The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped." AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise. Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix. So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
  • cstever 4mo ago
    >Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix. > So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder. This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
    • btilly 4mo ago
      Odd. I never had any friends, families, or coworkers who were willing to be available for a dozen rough drafts. I've only had ones who were willing to talk during the idea stage, or after it was closer to a final speech. For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.
      • cstever 4mo ago
        Less about the draft/writing and more about human interaction on all levels. I don't see how AI becoming a mentor or a coach to push me harder is helpful in the long run. I would be missing out on opportunity to learn from real life experience. I'd rather listen to my brother or my coworker or whomever human, pick their brain, riff, dig deeper, understand their perspective from life experiences and actual meaningful thought and moral compass than have AI (take intelligence with a grain of salt) influence me.
• mda_damico 4mo ago
  Soulfully! AI just a tool. Person constantly uses the tool instead of itself is felt as a robot.
• jdw64 4mo ago
  I am truly envious of people who have the luxury of a supportive environment that allows them to write a post like this. For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete. I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming. It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.
  • g-b-r 4mo ago
    Buddy, I have no idea what happened you, but I never heard someone linking learning programming to insults. It seems unlikely to have happened to anyone else, ever. "Before" AI there was internet, and before that often just your room, your computer, and tinkering with it for years before meeting anyone else with the same interest. And trust me that there are many books better than AI. I'm sorry for your experience, anyhow
    • jdw64 4mo ago
      [dead]
• jppope 4mo ago
  Beautiful poem. Well said and hard cutting
• tasuki 4mo ago
  I found the weird line breaks extremely jarring. But it was an interesting article nevertheless.
• elliotbnvl 4mo ago
  Though I deeply agree with this sentiment, the author fails to address that there can be multiple goals to an action. And writing can be for art or communication or both but not always both, and removing the art from communication doesn’t destroy its ability to communicate.
  • jimbokun 4mo ago
    No, I think it does. The only purpose of communicating is to transmit your thoughts to one or more other people. If the thoughts are the thoughts of the AI, you are not communicating anything.
• LetsGetTechnicl 4mo ago
  Choosing AI over human authenticity is a death sentence.
• bob001 4mo ago
  Please use books. Please use the internet. Please use search engines. Please use AI. Everything old is good and everything new is evil. The irony of this being posted online in written form is lost on the author. Socrates would probably have an aneurysm.
• SuperV1234 4mo ago
  I found this quite cringy and an attempt at pulling at one's heartstrings due to the lack of a strong argumentation. I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine. If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material. The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.
  • jjulius 4mo ago
    As others have echoed elsewhere in these responses, this idea can very easily be applied to the broader internet (eg, your Google searches) as well. Not everything is answered with Google. To your point about figuring out a hiking path, I backpack very regularly - search engines consistently return the same sets of results, and I've found wonderful places by talking to friends or others in the community that I, to this day, don't come across when searching for things online. Just because it gets results doesn't mean there isn't more out there, and that there isn't a benefit to engaging with your community. I see the same sameness in the results when I use AI to explore such subjects. There's a certain level of homogeneity that comes with relying on Google, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, and AI for our answers.
• bluedino 4mo ago
  I love the trend of using AI to generate flyers/advertisements for everything: family reunion, restaurant, yard sale... The shit all looks the same. Every taco truck in town uses the same crappy style advertisements, all the food looks the same (AI tacos, not pictures of actual food...) I liked small business advertisements better when it was full of crappy fonts, clashing color choices, horrifying JPEG artifacts and all.
• alf42red 4mo ago
  After skimming through this, I want to write a post about how others are living their lives wrong. It must really feel great to be right about things on the internet. How do I start? I guess I'll just ask AI ...
  • g-b-r 4mo ago
    8 years after making that account you finally decided to use it to write that, congratulations
• tobadzistsini 4mo ago
  what is up with the formatting on this post? does substack not have wordwrap and the guy is using manual carriage returns?
  • monitron 4mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse
  • jimbokun 4mo ago
    It's a poem.
• yummybear 4mo ago
  As someone who uses AI constantly - mandated at work. I fucking hate it. I hate what it makes me become: a mall cop of creativity. Endlessly directing little agents with feigned authority.
• Gomotono 4mo ago
  For the sake of it: Just do everything manually. Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them. Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit. Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront. How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ... Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people... And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.
  • ilikecakeandpie 4mo ago
    You're being intentionally intellectually dishonest with your take here and this an absurd whataboutism. The author isn't telling people to stop using AI for work, coding tasks, etc he's saying to stop using it as a replacement for human interaction. Anecdotally, I've seen the effects that people delegating their executive functions to AI have had and the damage is quick and harrowing
    • cortesoft 4mo ago
      If that is the argument, it makes even less sense. Who is using AI to replace human interaction? People use AI to replace other computer solutions for things. This is arguing against a straw man.
      • miunau 4mo ago
        I suggest reading James Muldoon's "Love Machines" for a thorough answer to your question.
    • Gomotono 4mo ago
      No i'm not. You could just ask me and have an option discussion instead of downvoting and thinking i'm dishonest. People today don't ask other people what 'time saving tipps' they have, you google and checkout some influencer etc. I also have never asked some friends about their camping trip ideas. I use tripadvisor, or similiar things. My mom does it the same way and the rest of my family (all non it people). He uses some hyperbole for the marriage proposal text but lets be honest, if a person is using that instead of trying it themselves, they wouldn't have tried it themselves anyway. I also take pictures, you know how it felt already 10 years ago when people compared your pictures to evyerone else pictures? This train has departed. Everyone did red color key pictures, had their B/W phase etc. How much time do we all actually sit in front of screens? Why are we discussiong this on hn? I don't know you, you don't know me. You don't care who i'm as a person. My comment is genuin and its true.
• adamtaylor_13 4mo ago
  I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology. I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.
• doug_durham 4mo ago
  I find these kinds of posts to be elitist and self-important. They draw a false dichotomy between tool use and lifestyle. I'm glad the poster has a lifestyle that works for them personally. This post really has nothing to do with AI. It's really just saying, spend more time talking to the people in your life. It seems to be written for the purposes of gaining clicks and engagement by using the phrase AI.
• bko 4mo ago
  When your router is not working, please use AI. Don't call your friend who is "good with computers" have him drop everything he's doing and have him trouble shoot the problem for you over the phone. This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.
  • SuperV1234 4mo ago
    And if my router wasn't working 5 years ago, I would have first used a search engine and tried to figure it out on my own. Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.
    • bko 4mo ago
      Congrats. I'm pretty sure I've helped more than a few friends and family members debug a router. Most of them didn't even know what a router was. Much harder to Google for specific issues like that, hence the 1 billion people that use AI globally. Pretending that AI is not incredibly useful is... disingeuous
      • SuperV1234 4mo ago
        How'd you infer that I don't find AI useful from my statement? Of course I do. I am merely saying that the argumentation in the "poem" is not specific to AI.
        • bko 4mo ago
          It was based on: > Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous. yes, being able to debug your router through a simple conversation without bothering people is a novelty
          • SuperV1234 4mo ago
            It's not that simple. The grandma that would have phoned her nephew to fix the phone will still do the same thing now. She will not have magically switched to querying LLMs after a lifetime of technological illiteracy. The tech-savvy person that uses AI today would have been more than capable than figuring out how to fix their router by using Google even without prior networking skills/experience 5-10 years ago. Using AI to solve these problems is a novelty for a specific subset of the population. And the topic does matter. Even the somewhat tech-illiterate mom would have been able to Google a recipe 10 years ago, or watch an Instagram reel 5 years ago. They were surely not going to call their friends to ask instructions on how to make an apple pie. Pretending this is an AI novelty is indeed disingeneous.
• ElProlactin 4mo ago
  "Please use social media" would be equally apt.
• mchl-mumo 4mo ago
  Oh to be human!
• NiloCK 4mo ago
  A great many today find themselves surrounded by people staring at phones, who express irritation any time they are asked to look up. I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act. It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• derac 4mo ago
  Why can't you use technology and communicate with your friends? The same can be said for how people abuse TV, fast food, etc. It's up to you to live with care and attention or not. On the other hand, tech in general (not just AI) does make an easier and easier path for people to go inward and neglect their community/family/friends. This does suck.
• drpepperfan2080 4mo ago
  Human condition slop
• Meneth 4mo ago
  Or, more accurately, Please don't.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• YetAnotherNick 4mo ago
  Why do these kind of articles getting into front page in HN everyday. There is nothing substantive and these are the empty kind of articles that anti AI folks should be against. No one is forcing you or pressuring you to not call friend to ask for recipe. Even AI would say that you should talk to friends.
• xyzal 4mo ago
  AI is a wheelchair for the mind
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• aogaili 4mo ago
  Passive aggressive piece of garbage, he thinks everyone has those moments and people welcome them in open arms.
  • jimbokun 4mo ago
    If you don't have a relationships like this, developing some is probably the best priority right now.
    • aogaili 4mo ago
      Again, not everyone has this option, people who think that lives in a bubble. Many people leave alone, isolated, and some despite their best effort lives isolated.
• jr_isidore 4mo ago
  Bro expects me to have friend, much less friends plural?
  • jimbokun 4mo ago
    Well now you've identified the first problem to work on.
• zug_zug 4mo ago
  I mean I get it hits you in the feels... but at the same time... DO talk to your friends, but then use AI too? Like I don't want to say it's a strawman exactly, because some people probably do use AI too much. But it's a really emotional (and not exactly logical) play to emotions that sort of implies don't use AI at all, which I don't agree with. Like if you're writing a speech for my wedding, please do a sanity check against AI before saying a really crass or risky joke. Because some of us have those maybe-on-the-spectrum acquaintances and AI actually can be a great sanity check for those people.
• jader201 4mo ago
  How is this on the second page with 589 votes in 2 hours? The only thing that makes sense is that it’s being flagged, I guess.
• iainctduncan 4mo ago
  Lots of "but I don't have those friends" replies here.... ..which is only going to get worse the more you rely on a statisical model for things instead of talking to people.
• yomismoaqui 4mo ago
  Apparently, asking ChatGPT for a meal plan is now the first step toward abandoning friendship, craft, parenthood, and the sacred wobbliness of the human soul. When I start thinking we programmers are the most pedantic people around, I just look at some writers and feel a little better.
• bicepjai 4mo ago
  Thanks for beautiful words
• eggbrain 4mo ago
  The value of human interaction cannot be overstated -- and the writer did a beautiful job outlining how AI isolates us. But there are also hidden difficulties in human interaction that AI helps ameliorate. - My doctor friend does not wanting me pinging them asking for free medical advice every time I get health anxiety - My chef friend does not want me calling them every time I'm struggling with a recipe - My author friend does not want to read the 20th draft of my book, in which I've changed perhaps 10% of the content from the last draft In these, the cost is a tax on the relationship -- relying on someone else too much to the point where it could potentially be impacting _their_ life. Similarly, there are enough communities out there that are not accommodating -- even if I wanted to get a human answer and/or connect with someone, the interactions themselves can be painful. Do we remember what it was like posting on Stack Overflow? Do we believe Stack Overflow was a one-off outlier? I also believe human imagination and knowledge shouldn't be bound to the relationships you have around you. What if my social group is small, or diversity of knowledge that my social group has is small? Should I not be able to think and explore an idea because my best alternative would be to contact a professor at a university that 99% of the time will not answer me? I do believe that many people use AI now instead of learning and connecting -- I know my own programmatic knowledge has weakened now that AI has acted as a superhuman autocorrect. But on the other hand, with the help of AI I've also learned about a ton of things that would have otherwise been unavailable to me -- and I believe has improved me on the whole.
  • happytoexplain 4mo ago
    I think one of the important things at the core of these conversations is that the "things where AI is the best option" parts of the matrix don't feel like they need to be encouraged. People are going to use AI. A lot. I.e. for those of us who agree there is a balance to be struck, it's hard to argue that real-life usage doesn't naturally lean toward "too much AI" vs "not enough AI".
• richardvsu 4mo ago
  2 hours ago and 609 upvotes and counting. Why is is at the 51st place and on the second page? Something is going on.
• jakeinspace 4mo ago
  Marx wrote about the concept of alienation in the context of work, the process by which capitalism would destroy the emotional attachment between laborer and their output in the name of efficiency. Prior to factories and division of labor, while life was still very hard, artisans and craftspeople were more in charge of their work and output. Software, and knowledge work in general, is facing an even deeper form of alienation from AI. I don't see how I (just past 30) or future generations will be able to find deep satisfaction from "knowledge work" if this current trajectory holds. I don't think our brains are wired for a life of this without tremendous mental anguish.
• kylehotchkiss 4mo ago
  This, but for people who place a phone/iPad in their kids face to make them stop asking questions.
• jjulius 4mo ago
  "Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we'll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of man pursuing a goal that he fears and that he really does not need. Man needs man!" - Dr. Snaut, Solaris (1972)
• arjie 4mo ago
  The whole AI/anti-AI schtick doesn't have a sense of sanctimony to it that I think would be considered gauche in real life. That makes me wonder. I'm here on this site a lot but my life seems very different from most commenters. So I'm starting to believe that the difference clusters a little. For instance, I frequently see the "we never talk to our neighbours anymore" idea expressed, but in real life I live in a high-rise in San Francisco where the neighbours will help people wash laundry, or borrow yogurt or sugar, or help with a broken knob[0]. Then there's this business about "AI removing connections to people". My wife's an artist (and now a Creative Director in a corp) and she used an early image model years ago to iterate on the design that we then had embroidered onto my sherwani[1] in India through a close friend's connection and I made a suno.ai tune to walk out for my wedding to. My wife and I use this new tech to model things and print it out on our 3D printer[2] so we can reuse my daughter's infant-stage play pen as gates now that she's older. My wife once tried to make us persimmon bread from a recipe that 3.5 gave us. We have a claw-like bot that is hooked up to our calendar, contacts, history, planes, airbnbs, hotels and so on and helps us with stuff. By any measure, we are pretty social people and we are quite happy. And the thing to note is that, as far as I can see, we are not particularly remarkable. This seems to be the standard way most people I know use LLMs: to do things that they wouldn't cross the effort/reward threshold otherwise. And there's no grand disaster happening. 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community 1: https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665?s=20 https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665?s=20 2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_With_Claude https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...
• pmxi 4mo ago
  The first part, describes a decision to ask AI over calling a good friend and domain expert. Typically the domain expert is not an option. (looking at my last 10 Claude chats, I knew a domain expert for one of them). The second part assumes AI writing can substitute mastery of writing, and simultaneously, not be good enough. We have, for a several thousand years, continued to develop labor and cost saving technology. We have been OK thus far.
• nunez 4mo ago
  Perfect. AI is really cool technology, but the cost is tremendous.
• cirrus3 4mo ago
  Lost me when it was framed as a binary decision.
• ofcourseyoudo 4mo ago
  if "false dichotomy" was a whole ass essay as if you're choosing between "Claude, tell me how to make an omelette" and walking across the forest path to your sylvan neighbor, the former Michelin-star chef who set up an artisanal microgastropub by the pond as opposed to googling "omelet recipe"
• zzyzxd 4mo ago
  It would be nice if I could talk to my parents in person everyday, feeling their touches and temperature. But we live in different countries, so instead I talk to them over FaceTime everyday. TBH, even if they live next door, I may not always find time to visit them everyday. So having a way to use a device in my pocket to talk to them is nice. It's a compromise I accept. On the other hand, if I live in 150 years ago where telephone had not been invented, I may never make such decision to live so far away from my parents at all. "Technology giveth and technology taketh away"
• eudamoniac 4mo ago
  Great sentiment, but can we collectively come to the realization that random line breaks in prose are not poetry and never were?
• kajaktum 4mo ago
  I have been thinking of something like this. We are paid to solve problems but should we really solve them? This is easiest to see in games, when people complain about the balance of a game, they often want some "problems" to be solved. "This map is massive, can't we just create teleportation nodes everywhere? Can't we just have a very fast flying mount?". To me this is missing the point, is battle mechanic an obstacle over the story? Maybe it is, but have you considered that they expected to experience the story with the combat? In real life, it is not so easy to say "This problem is necessary for human life". If an LLM can infer what I want to say to someone in a much clearer form, should we do that? Should we use LLM to fix all of our grammars? Should making accounts be really cheap? Is market making a problem that we should solve? Should we really make it easier for people to invest i.e. democratizing finance? Should we really give everyone access to 1GBps bandwidth internet? Should we really want full internet access everywhere even in the middle of Amazon forest? Personally, I don't know if the answer is that straightforward. For each of the items I listed, I can see things that we lose. A lot of humanity is problem solving, and we have solve a lot of problems that have kept humanity busy for most of their lives. We are not living in an era where problems that we face are unique and we are simply not designed for.
• rcdwealth 4mo ago
  [dead]
• dostick 4mo ago
  Please use sarcasm