Link to tweet

and the ability to add follow-up queries (in context of the original) without having to start each query from scratch is a blessing. The links and sources are much more relevant and valuable to me whether it has to do with a specific type of computer, or its operating system... or as ordinary as DIY home repair and maintenance.

It's made me smarter and more competent... it has allowed me to LEARN more rather than being stuck with trying repeatedly construct perfect queries that produce limited and poor quality results. In that regard, I think it's great!

intellectual property from, because the goal of AI search is to stop the traffic there. Sometimes they provide links, but not always, and the links provided might not be the ones most relevant to the information the AI provides. Perplexity AI, for instance - which is being sued now and should be sued out of existence, as all genAI companies should - would regularly offer near-exact copies of articles from major publications, then a list of links that buried the link to the true source under links to several blogs, etc., that made some reference to the article the content was stolen from, but didn't make the actual source and extent of the theft obvious.

The AI companies' goal is to keep people in AI search, off the source websites, and to place ads in the AI search summary. It's predatory and exploitative.

And the AI answers are often wrong.

I also find great links to a lot of how-to and step-by-step videos on youtube.

forced to do so, and it's a choice that encourages AI companies' theft of intellectual property and destruction of the internet.

YouTube does have a lot of info that's wrong, but there's much, much more of it now thanks to AI slop videos. I've seen what AI has done to the internet described as both pollution of our information ecosystem and - more succinctly - enshittification. Both descriptions fit.

for example, I truly despise LED christmas light strings. They look awful! I much prefer the warm glow of incandescent C7 and C9 bulbs. But I realize that it would be futile to start a one-man crusade against LED xmas lights. Another genie that's out of the bottle. So I enjoy my own vintage lights at home, and I don't try to lecture or judge or berate my neighbors who enjoy their mini LED's, net lights, and strings of icicle "chalet" lights. They're free to do their thing and I'm free to do mine... and the world keeps on spinning. The sky isn't falling. Life goes on.

is one of the main reasons people are unhappy with genAI.

better get used to it.

I have found AI to be a very useful tool for saving time and enhancing creativity. And contrary to the idea that it dumbs people down, AI doesn't diminish our intelligence, just as calculators don't lessen our understanding of mathematics.

One of the biggest red flags is our government capitulating to the billionaire AI companies giving them whatever they want while not having even a cursory understanding of what AI will mean for everyday people. They’re basically giving 6 people (corporations) the power to make decisions for the future of 8 billion people. Not to mention the degradation of the environment which is no small thing. AI will tear our social fabric apart and it will be replaced by nothing good.

alignment with Trump and RW authoritarian governments and movements elsewhere show how little concern they have for humanity and democracy.

Even when it looked likely that Harris would beat Trump, it was obvious that the AI companies would continue to be a problem if not an outright threat. With Trump in power, it's more obvious than ever just how dangerous those companies and the billionaires behind them are.

It's been ongoing and accelerating for quite some time now. The Internet has revolutionized the world in ways that people can't really grasp unless they remember the Before Times, back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you had to look at a physical phone book to find numbers.

For those of us who do predate the Internet, watching its growth and evolution has been both fascinating and repulsive. In a time when the sum total of human knowledge is available in a device 99% of us are carrying around in our pockets, how is it possible that people seem dumber and even less informed than ever before? The phones got smart and the people got dumb.

I think we can lay a fair bit of the blame on social media, personally. At first things like Facebook seemed so neat and innocent. You could keep up with your dear old great auntie Gertrude and chat with her any old time you wanted. Social media promised an era of connection and togetherness and delivered something much less benign.

Instead we learned that these free platforms were harvesting our data and selling it to the highest bidder, reducing us to a collection of data points for marketers to comb through. Turns out we were the product all along for these "free" platforms.

Then there's the increasingly obvious detrimental mental health effects of social media. When I was a kid we were safe from the bullies once we got home. Now the bullying continues apace no matter where the target is and kids can indulge their most vicious impulses anonymously, tormenting their targets with no fear of accountability.

Social media enables and promotes narcissistic behavior. Why on earth does anyone think their followers give a damn about the burger they just ordered? Why, for that matter, does some random yutz even have thousands of followers? We've watched idiotic man-children and vapid, airheaded "influencers" build media empires with no actual recognizable skills. But they sure get rewarded with millions of dollars, don't they? Then we wonder why kids want to grow up to be influencers when previous generations wanted to be lawyers and firefighters and astronauts.

Sadly the social media genie is out of the bottle just like the AI genie is. I think we can only hope that AI isn't as corrosive to society as social media turned out to be. Regardless, it's just one more manifestation of the Internet and we're stuck with it now, like it or not.

And now I'm gonna step outside and yell at a passing cloud.

As for the harm done by the internet, especially to kids - there are schools that separate children from smartphones, with good results. Adults can also limit screen time.

Harmful tech isn't inevitable.

It helps the purveyors and advocates of harmful tech if you say it is.

... not the fecundity of the not-so-bright.

Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes!

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

It makes them lazy.

Middle management mostly, as far as I can tell.