[Brendinooo]

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.

[amdsn]

I really don't understand taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."

[enraged_camel]

A lot of people don't have that many friends. I forget the average but it is in fact absurdly low, at least for Americans. There are a lot of reasons for this (e.g. erosion and disappearance of "third place" spaces, rise of social media, etc.) but the circumstances have essentially been ripe for something like AI to come in and fill the gap, and it is.

[gbanfalvi]

And you don't think AI is going to make these things worse? Even if you only have 3 friends, talk to them, hang out, do stuff with them.

[swatcoder]

The article is specifically about a strategy to improve on that (or rather a satirical exposé on how AI answers are the next spiral down into isolation).

[jimbokun]

> A lot of people don't have that many friends.

Start there.

[jjulius]

Exactly. It's not an overnight process, it takes work, but there's tremendous value in true community.

[happytoexplain]

>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.

[Brendinooo]

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)!

[gbanfalvi]

I don't think that's what the page talks about. There are lots of _valid_ opportunities in our day-to-day lives where we'd benefit _so much_ from doing the research, struggle with a problem or reach out to someone ourselves instead of just asking an LLM -- but we just take a shortcut.

I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:

- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.

- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.

- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.

And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.

[layer8]

I think the point is that when you get into the habit of asking the AI because it’s always immediately available, you inevitably miss the opportunities that asking other people provides, or even the serendipities that happen when looking up books and websites and videos about a thing. The AI’s takes provide less variety, and it removes incidental adjacent discoveries and experiences.

[ElevenLathe]

I was young, but I remember a world before the internet was widespread. I was also an adult for years before I had it in my pocket. In these Before Times, there were often conversations that would meander for minutes about some fact that would be trivially verifiable if we had an internet-connected computer nearby: who was the other lead in that movie? who was the first non-Italian Pope? Is Moldova landlocked? Once we exhausted our local supply of half-remembered knowledge about the subject, we would have to just say "well, who knows eh?" and go about whatever it was we were doing. It may be nostalgia talking, but I miss this. Even if I'm game to keep it up for a while before pulling out my phone, somebody else won't be, and the conversation will usually peter out (at least for a while) once we for-sure know the answer. These tools reduce friction, but sometimes the friction is the fun.

I remember calling the library reference desk from the phone behind a bar to settle bar bets. Once free long distance became a thing, you could justify calling west coast libraries during east coast happy hour, and I had a hand-written list of phone numbers on a piece of folded up yellow legal pad. The LA Central Library seemed to be the most patient with drunk midwestern college students shouting questions about medieval art at them. Now bets are settled before they even really get going, so it doesn't even feel fun to bet on, so people don't.

I've also taken several trips to Europe and only on the most recent one did it make financial sense for me to get a local data plan. I admit that the language of the country we visit is kind of a hobby of mine, and so talking to the locals is a lot of the fun of going, but even if that's not the case, what's wrong with a little mystery? You can snap the photo, and then for years down the rode if you show it to somebody, you can say "Here's a cool statue I saw in Serbia, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the inscription on the plinth says." Or even 3 years ago, you probably would have posted it to $SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM with a caption like "Who can tell me what this says?" and perhaps even gotten a reply from somebody in the same city you were in and made a little connection.

[codethief]

> to settle bar bets

As I learned just yesterday, this is exactly how the Guinness World Records books came about. :)

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

[happytoexplain]

>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.

There isn't. This blog post is a great example. There isn't a hint of what you are asserting. You are assuming it out of thin air.

LLMs enable a lot and harm a lot. We should be able to talk about the harm without people assuming we are unaware of the enablement, and vice versa. LLMs are a gigantic topic.

[Brendinooo]

There’s absolutely a hint.

The poem didn’t talk about asking around for info about fly fishing, not finding anyone, but then deciding that was okay and/or finding new interests based on the interests of the people he talked to.

This would have been very in-bounds thematically.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context."

Google Translate provided OCR + translation from smartphones before LLMs became a thing so that doesn't manage to bolster your argument.

[famouswaffles]

He literally said it 'gave him some context'. Google Translate could do that too? And Google Translate is a worse translator than frontier LLMs by a large margin.

[jimbokun]

There are real benefits of AI.

There were many benefits of the original web as well. But it rapidly turned into social media and caused us more harm than good.

So many people are very skeptical and guarded about the promises of AI now.

[moron4hire]

It comes from an inclination to be argumentative for argument's sake. Some people approach everything with an eye that nobody else is as smart as them so everything everyone else makes must be flawed and it's their job to tell them how wrong they are.

[Brendinooo]

>that nobody else is as smart as them

>it's their job to tell them how wrong they are

lol.

To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so.

If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: people on the Internet have a way of replying to arguments that people aren't actually making, and I'm certainly not immune from that. But the structure of the piece is clearly making emotional arguments so I don't think I'm wrong in that regard.

[moron4hire]

The problem is that your core premise is flawed. Nobody who has access to an LLM today has lacked for access to knowledge in 15 years. The LLM providers even tell us themselves that they provide worse access to knowledge because they train on what is available on the public internet up to a certain cutoff date.

[Brendinooo]

The point isn't necessarily access (though I'm not willing to concede that), the point is ease of access.

In another comment[0], I gave a personal example. In a sense you are correct, because I could have taken a year or two to go to the library and find books on reading Cyrillic and speaking Serbian, or maybe found something Duolingo-like (I have to hedge here because neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone offer Serbian, which perhaps challenges your point), or even hired a private tutor.

All of these options sit on some kind of spectrum of ease and cost. If you have enough money, you can get the best help in the least amount of time. If you don't, you have to maximize the time you can put in instead, and both will be constrained by your intellectual capabilities.

One of the primary purposes of technology is to unbundle what consumers actually want from the craft that was previously necessary to deliver it, and in so doing allows us to do more, experience more, be more. That doesn't mean that there are no possible drawbacks, but let's not lose the forest for the trees.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323929

[nightski]

I found it rather on point to be honest, it was exactly how I felt when reading the article.

[fckgw]

Then you're missing the point.

The point was "talk to another human about shared experiences, whatever that may be".

[swatcoder]

> 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?

So much to unpack here!

First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.

The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.

Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.

Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)

And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.

[nozzlegear]

> 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.

Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.

[Brendinooo]

Right, that's my point exactly! Sorry I didn't mention it.

It's a channel that increases access to knowledge for those who wouldn't otherwise have it, but disrupts a status quo in a way that some might find harmful. But in that case people seemed to pretty universally recognize that the pros outweighed the cons.

[happytoexplain]

Analogies are almost always a distraction.

A YouTube channel about stuff your dad might know does not have the same potential for negative impact on human interaction as genAI. And the author never even claims "the cons outweigh the pros". Maybe they feel that way, but the dangers they advise against are absolutely real and do not require a broad stance like "everybody who ever uses AI should feel bad" in order to recognize those dangers. I use AI every single day, yet I do not feel the least bit browbeaten and my heart bleeds in agreement with this blog post.

[elric]

> disrupts a status quo in a way that some might find harmful

I love a good strawman argument myself, but this is just madness. Who the heck finds substitute "dad advice" harmful?

[Brendinooo]

Right! Neither do I find it inherently harmful to ask Claude for a recipe instead of calling your friend.

The author of the poem, however, is clearly portraying that as a negative.

[happytoexplain]

That is correct - this is the whole story. Everything else you've portrayed the author as saying is misleading.

The author believes if you have a friend who cooks, see if they have a recipe. You believe there's no harm in going straight to Claude in the same scenario.

That's the whole disagreement.

[michaelchisari]

You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.

Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.

[nicbou]

It's harder to get them to stop.

I love when I get someone to talk about something they clearly love, and they're giddy with joy and struggling to contain themselves. It's one of the finer pleasures of talking to strangers and not machines.

[causal]

Good point. Fixating of the fly-fishing example is silly to begin with but yeah- if you don't know a guy, it's certainly an opportunity to meet one.

[cocoto]

Not everyone live in a big city.

[thunderfork]

You probably live in a community of some nature, though.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> 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?

Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.

You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:

* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media

The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.

[jimbokun]

This was the optimistic view of the Internet. That we would be able to stay in touch with friends and families over vast distances. That we would be able to develop new relationships with people over shared interests not limited to geographical proximity. That we would be able to collaborate to create new things.

The reality was replacing human interaction with addiction to an algorithmic feed and endless hours of mindless consumption and very little creation and rapidly deteriorating mental health.

It is good to be skeptical of similar grandiose claims about AI, and consider what the reality might turn out to be.

[brunoborges]

Go to a store that sells fly fishing equipment and talk to a customer or a staff. You may as well end up with a new friend.

[jrumbut]

Part of this is the changes wrought by the Internet already. At one point, almost nobody got into fly fishing out of an idiopathic urge to capture little trouts.

I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.

The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.

[graemep]

> 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.

Not everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.

Not every dad is good at everything.

[Brendinooo]

Yup, this meshes very well with the point I was trying to make.

[happytoexplain]

It demonstrates a gap in your analogy. The author is writing about scenarios in which the theoretical subject has people in their life who should be valued. You can say, "and what if I don't know anybody who cooks food or fly-fishes?", and that would be a valid question in a void, but a dishonest interpretation of the author's writing.

[diob]

I don't think it's meant to browbeat you, that feels a rather uncharitable read of what is essentially just the author saying connect with the people in your life because they'd love to hear from you and likely need someone to talk to as well.

[taco_emoji]

> 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 know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish

[causal]

Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug.

You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.

I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.

[1shooner]

>but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about

But this is the thing. Many people don't, or have some other real or imagined barrier preventing them from it. Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.

While I relate to the heart of the poem, there is an aspect of it that's essentially criticizing people for their suffering. There's a "just stop drinking" vibe.

[customguy]

> Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.

Then let's talk about that, and encourage them to speak up and reach out, rather than entombing them and throwing away the key.

I can stand someone who is lonely, and awkward, or sad. I have been all those things. I cannot stand someone who is so hospitalized by talking to LLM constantly that they treat me like a jukebox, too. That they're not even stupid or bad with words, but cannot think at all, and do it in a high volume, high confidence manner, with lots of big words and things that seem to make sense until you put weight on them. So unless someone more patient than me comes along, as far as I'm concerned, they are now lonely for good, unless I can avoid it. And that's not a state of things I want for myself or others.

[jimbokun]

You're right.

It's much better to forever wallow in your loneliness and lack of friends, instead of working on how to develop better friendships and relationships.

[1shooner]

I just don't think moralistic condescending poetry really helps any of that.

[customguy]

> But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other

"It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love."

-- Stephen Hawking

I think we may be approaching some sort of watershed moment, if not conflict between those who hold such sentiments and those whose response is "oh yeah? hold my beer".

[causal]

Yeah I hit reply knowing the "hold my beer" crowd would disagree but I stand by the claim :)

[Brendinooo]

I generally agree with this, for what it's worth, and I'm certainly open to the accusation of missing the point entirely, but it certainly does seem to me like the author has a point of view on LLMs and wrote with an emotionally charged point of view.

[llm_nerd]

>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.

Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.

So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.

Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.

Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.

Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.

Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.

And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.

Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.

AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.

[happytoexplain]

>Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form.

This is backwards. This false dichotomy is what irrational reactions against anti-AI sentiment use, not the anti-AI sentiment itself. It is exactly the false dichotomy the parent you are replying to is using.

[llm_nerd]

>This false dichotomy is what irrational reactions against anti-AI sentiment use, not the anti-AI sentiment itself.

This is very LLM. Did you use ChatGPT to write that bounces-off-me-and-sticks-to-you retort?

It's, of course, absolute nonsense.

The very foundation of the essay was AI or dichotomies, and that forms the entire basis of an anti-AI screed. A sort of laughably righteous screed as if everyone else is making bad choices, and this guy has it right.

It's hyperbolic silliness.

[nicbou]

You have a point, even if I hate to admit it.

On the other hand, maybe we should stop doing bullshit things instead of doing them more and faster. Maybe we ought to have fewer, shorter speeches, simpler websites and so on. Instead, we're drowning the world in noise. Speeches written by nobody, about nothing, for nobody in particular.

Sure, humans repeat patterns, but they add their own delightful uniqueness and imperfection to the mix. Tiny random mutations that eventually evolve the genre. Humans get really good at following rules, but then they develop the taste to break them. Wisdom shapes their craft in unpredictable ways.

And I guess that's what being an internet dad is. You live a long, imperfect life and you learn all sorts of lessons, many of which are subtle and never written down, then you apply those lessons to your craft. What can a machine teach us about fatherhood?

[bigstrat2003]

Sure, there's always been a subset of human endeavor which is just phoned-in slop. But AI makes the problem much worse, because it's basically all slop now. Moreover, I am an unabashed human supremacist. I find anything a human does to have some intrinsic value, even if it's not a high quality effort. So if it's the choice between human slop or AI slop, even if it were the same percentage of slop, I would rather have the human slop. At least that has some value due to being made by a human.

[dissahc]

It's an incredibly smug poem that has the vibe of someone fantasizing about winning an argument against someone who doesn't even exist.

The narratives about people not calling their friends for advice, but instead using AI... these are basically unfalsifiable. How could he possibly know that this is a thing that commonly occurs? That's right, he doesn't.

>Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals

I don't know about you, but if a friend were to call me for meal prep advice, I'd honestly be worried that they're having some sort of crisis and just need to talk to someone.

>Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail

Personally, I consider it kind of rude to pester someone who is an expert in a subject with extremely basic questions. Yes, sometimes they wont mind and will even be glad to answer your questions, but they would probably appreciate that you took the time to do research and aren't just using them as human Google search. The more genuine way to reach out to this person would be to learn as much about the subject as you can, and ask them to sanity check what you've learned. This is a much more considerate way to go about things.

>Be sure to use AI

>and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th

>year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,

>my arm falling asleep because I dare not move

>lest I scare away this moment,

What? Does using AI disqualify you from having this experience? This post is so ridiculous man.

[happytoexplain]

You're reacting to a very level, honest examination of what we lose with AI by insulting and berating and inventing other scenarios. You're exemplifying both the thing you are accusing the author of, and also the thing that the author is lamenting.

[Brendinooo]

But it's not really an examination of what we lost with AI as all. Nor is it "level" - we can disagree on interpretations but it's very obviously written to be emotionally charged. You even called it a lamentation!

Like the person you replied to said, AI doesn't prevent you from holding your napping daughter. And most people who need a recipe would have used the Internet, and then recipe books in the pre-AI era. Plenty of people who ask Claude about fly fishing probably would have gone to Google or Reddit, or maybe even the library.

[theideaofcoffee]

Way to miss the point, there.