[rayxi271828]

Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.

At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.

The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and biases, isn't the person... essentially dead to me and the world?

It's a very unsettling thing to think about. What makes a person a person isn't the fact that the person's breathing air, eating food, copulating, defecating, but it's the person's wetware's weights and biases. Because without those, what is even this meat construct I'm talking to via WhatsApp?

[easygenes]

While I endorse the message of TFA (though do find the framing a bit on the overly blunt side), I believe it's unfair to reduce to "losing the person". The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI. The latent space they exposed within the model is still uniquely the result of their words and effort.

We're just missing the establishment of a decorum of, "even if you do feel like you need to prompt the AI before responding, and even if you like the response, you still need to paraphrase and synthesize to avoid coming off rude and inhuman."

[FridgeSeal]

> The person is still willing to engage with you

But the highlighted examples demonstrate the complete opposite. Shuttling things between a model isn’t engaging with another human meaningfully.

[cbhl]

> still had to use their human words to prompt the AI

In that case, I would like to know what prompt they used so that I can learn to use the AI tools better.

Like, we've had "let me google that for you" since 2008...

[paulryanrogers]

Maybe "let me prompt that for you" will catch on?

[JohnFen]

> The person is still willing to engage with you and still had to use their human words to prompt the AI.

But they aren't willing enough to participate to actually engage in a discussion. They're just making people interact with a bot with a layer of indirection. Apparently, they don't know (or care) that if someone wants the machine's answer rather than the person's, they'd just ask the machine directly.

[antisthenes]

> At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.

You can say nearly the same of someone obsessed with social media and brain-rot. If you don't actively resist, soon your world view becomes the algorithm that you are being fed.

Very few people are able to resist this.

[soupspaces]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

[mil22]

Suppose they simply directly quoted Wikipedia or some other expert authority, with attribution, rather than AI. Would you say the same thing? The person isn't giving you the uniqueness of their brain's weights and biases when they do that, either. That doesn't make the response any less helpful or appropriate in the situation.

People quote other sources sometimes. That's entirely OK. In fact, sometimes it's completely appropriate. We have to get used to the idea that sometimes, that source will be AI, and pretty soon (if not already) it will be just as authoritative and correct as Wikipedia or any other expert the person might quote.

If you don't like it, instead of responding by sending them a link to an aggressive, insulting, disrespectful and frankly low emotional IQ site like this, you can just say, "OK, thanks, that's great, but what's your opinion? I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you think." Unfortunately, if you send a link to this site, you are more than likely to lose the person entirely from the conversation anyway.

[JohnFen]

> People quote other sources sometimes. That's entirely OK.

It's OK in the context of doing that to support a larger discussion they're participating in. It's not OK if the quote is the entirety of the response.

> you are more than likely to lose the person entirely from the conversation anyway.

Perhaps, but they weren't really participating in the discussion anyway.

[satisfice]

Please don’t say “okay, thanks, that’s great” unless you mean it.