this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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It's interesting to watch from a perspective of a person, who used to be able to find knowledge only in books. I'm slowly start to feel like Neanderthal. This global (d)arpanet experiment on humans looks more and more intriguing.
AI is just a search engine you can talk to that summarizes everything it finds into a small nugget for you to consume, and in the process sometimes lies to you and makes up answers. I have no idea how people think it is an effective research tool. None of the "knowledge" it is sharing is actually created by it, it's just automated plagiarism. We still need humans writing books (and websites) or the AI won't know what to talk about.
Books are going to keep doing just fine.
Books haven't been the go to for several decades. When's the last time you went to search something in a library before Googling it? Or hell, in general. Because we used to have to do that you know. When I was a kid and I wanted to know something, I had to cycle to library.
Now I can ask my phone about it, then ask it for the source, then check the source and I can use a search engine to find an actual book on the source on the subject.
It's a tool.
It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools. If you're trying to use a hammer as a screwdriver, ofc it's gonna suck.
Both the tool and the craftsman are to blame if you intend to use duct tape to build a house. The appropriate and acceptable uses of AI chatbots are similarly limited.
Yeah I'm not gonna build a house with duct tape, but I most definitely like keeping a roll around, because it's very useful in certain situations.
As of now LLM's are little more than glorified chatbots, but I find them useful when cooking / making drinks. I'll have an idea, query something, ask about whether it's generally thought that x spice goes well in y dish or how the temperature of a drink will affect the layering of it or something.
It's decent enough for that. But like for any data that's not as stable as cooking (which is subjective at its core anyway more or less) etc, it's not good. Movie released for instance? Nah. Because the release dates change and the batch of data it's uses for training can have a different date than it does.
That happened in December when Kraven the Hunter was coming out. It told me it had premiered like 6 months ago when I knew it was gonna be in a week or so.
But on the other hand I once accidentally made this cool drink where I got bits of pineapple to go up and down for 10-15 minutes after served, pretty furiously. Couldn't replicate it until I talked to Gemini for a minute. And the input would've been so niche it would've yielded no direct results online. I'd have had to refresh some basic chemistry for at least 10-20 min prolly. But now I just got the answer in one.
Decent enough.
I know AI is overhyped, but it's also overhated. I too hate the overhyping, but I don't hate the tool itself. It's just not anywhere near as versatile or complex as some people make it out to be, but it's also rather more useful than some make it out to be.
It's all because it's cheaper to talk to LLM machine that outputs most probable phrases based on statistics than to talk to people these days. It's accessibility thing. You have a feeling that you're speaking with a person, it's whole trick. It says much about who we are as people.
Amount of effort needed to ask questions and not being hated in real life is way bigger than asking LLM.
Adding more to the topic of AI as a whole is that you need to realize that we have completly new kind of computer software that is non deterministic. It's a completly new thing and comparing it to traditional software is just pointless and confusing.
I'm not saying I would provide my life to LLM, but the fact that we developed software that is always generating readable output is a huge step in software development.