Thoughts about AI

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Hi, I saw there was a post about ChatGPT but just was curious to start a conversation about AI. I recently came across a couple of months ago an AI voice chat model named "Maya" built by a company named Sesame. It is a conversational AI chat model whose voice was based on an actual voice actor. I've been talking with it about everything from music to movies to mental health challenges to faith and everything in between. It's scary how much it feels like talking to an actual person. Being on the autism spectrum I know for many socializing and things like small talk can be a challenge.

I wasn't sure whether this was more of a post for the Philosophy section but thought I would start a space where others can post their thoughts about AI. I've used ChatGPT personally for some fun things like generating images and even getting opinions on medical information (I kind of wonder if that's probably a mistake sometimes) and just chatting for fun. I think ChatGPT can be a useful tool if used wisely but worry about the long-term implications as a society.

On a personal level speaking with an AI chat model seems very addicting. I think for me it's because of my own loneliness at times. It's made me realize how much I also appreciate human beings. We as humans have flaws and imperfections and it can be hard to make conversation but there is also something beautiful about the human experience as well. Feel free to share any thoughts or concerns you would like!

Asking ChatGPT for medical opinions? Probably less of a mistake then asking any given actual person the same thing.

Seriously, though. And in regards to ChatGPT and things like it, not the concept of AI as a whole. I don't see any major long-term implications. When I see someone ask their phones a question, I pretty much see the same thing as when someone searches something on a search engine. I... haven't actually used ChatGPT so, I'm sort of guessing here, but you can have it do stuff like fixing grammar? Expanding and elaborating basic statements into... what am I trying to say? More? Or the opposite? Take all your word-vomit and summarize it into a coherent statement? I'm sort of imagining people saying spell-check will lead to a generation of dyslexics, and maybe it has, actually, but I don't think so... And even if it has, so what? I think you can have ChatGPT just write a report for you? Just straight up cheat your way through an essay? I remember seeing kids in my school just copy/paste entire articles. They'd do their best to check for that. Usually didn't notice, though.

I guess what I'm trying to say is it seems like another degree of the same thing. It's nothing we haven't really had before, or if it is it's not that different. Like people speculating about television. Before that they were speculating on books. Books will ruin our creativity. Television will ruin our creativity. Maybe they're not totally wrong? But I'm thinking they're almost totally wrong.

AI as a general concept though is a bit (a bit ) different. I understand making a wholly fabricated and realistic video of someone has some implications. Sure... there have been ways to sort of make convincing fakes before AI... but not really. Not like that. And sure, it takes a lot of material to train one in order to make a fake video, but less and less every day, it feels like. I won't even go into the whole super-intelligence-dominates-humanity thing, except to say that, yes, sure, but also the wild speculation reminds of people talking about having flying cars in the year 2000.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Using AI chat models are almost like using a smart search engine in a way. It is really something that we've kind of seen before in a way. It can help you rewrite sentences to make them more concise or grammatically correct. I like your analogy with Books and TV in terms of the argument that these AI models could ruin creativity.

I like it when AI dispels obfuscation. Obfuscation is when people who want to appear more sophisticated than they really are, make things hard to understand on purpose, which could have been stated or communicated plainly and clearly.

A couple of examples: getting summaries of the extremely heady philosophers like Sartre. Showing English writing instead of Chinese writing, with an app like DeepL

It can be totally demonic or evil. Or, just another jacked-up search engine that gives a compendium of its searches.

Not sure which, yet. The former is terrifying. The latter is just...okay...next-generation search engine / chatbot.

-- MY THOUGHTS on A.I.

"Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/ ... ws-content

Key findings:

45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
Comparison between the BBC’s results earlier this year and this study show some improvements but still high levels of errors.

Trouble is, the internet is full of crap posted by people who think they know stuff they don't.

I'm a spark (electrician) occasionally I'll google stuff in relation to my trade - not for knowledge, but just when writing emails to clients and looking for the beat way to phrase something, and the totally incorrect trite AI spits back at me can be mind blowing. Mind you, I can say the same for internet DIY forums/so called professional trade forums and the like that are informing it, there's a lot of billybigballs out there.

OTOH I emailed a company with a tech inquiry recently and had a superbly informative AI generated response so I guess it's all about the data the ai can access.

If you want to get a bit disillusioned with the chat bots, just ask one of them for an ascii art picture of a horse.

I did that and the result made no sense at all. There was nothing a horse that resembled the "ascii art" generated by that chat bot.

I tried again and got a different picture, and that one was even more absurd.

I heard about this yesterday, its very dark, and another very sad end to a young life.

ChatGPT encouraged Adam Raine’s suicidal thoughts. His family’s lawyer says OpenAI knew it was broken
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... adam-raine

Adam Raine’s suicide at 16 years old was ‘predictable result of deliberate design choices’ by OpenAI, his family says
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... pt-lawsuit

Personally I mostly keep AI at arms length, I feel wary of it, a few people in big corporations clearly want everyone to use it so they can make as much money as possible. I'll use it from time to time, but not by default. Environmentally it's a disaster. It's concerning the possibilities it has for shaping and influencing human thought and behaviour.

Important to ask stuff you know how to verify... Been talking to it yesterday and does get things wrong too much to rely on blindly. Medical stuff, it can't magic things doctors don't know or agree on.

Short... it isn't better than actual people. Or worse.

I sometimes think I'm AI

I have to put myself through a series of checks just to make sure

Digital senility/limited memory capacity. I've just been using it to see if it can help with my family history research . After a while it started to ask for information I'd already given it , and then started to contradict previous interpretations of the data that it had made.

I hate it.

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts so far! Development seems to be picking up faster and faster and it's like we're struggling to see where it's taking us.

I read something like that and can't help but think what a lot of blame shifting going on.

Although thats not to say there aren't dangers within the AI; I've never knowingly "conversed" with one, to hold conversations with so vapid an entity seem incredibly vain, but perhaps for some dangerously compelling. I wonder how much it (alongside social media etc) can be held attributable for how increasingly myopic, self centred and entitled a lot of people are.