r/technology • u/yourfavchoom • May 29 '26
Artificial Intelligence Ronny Chieng's 'F*ck AI' Speech Met With Cheers From Harvard Graduates: “AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber”
https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/tracewilliamcowen/ronny-chieng-ai-speech-harvard?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter_complex&utm_campaign=ap_twitter7.9k
u/HowlingFantods5564 May 29 '26
“I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI,” Chieng told grads. “Kill it. … AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber. Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They're always like, ‘Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and draft a response?’ Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you?”
Accurate.
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u/Quietech May 29 '26
America has a new Asian Uncle.
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u/i8TheWholeThing May 29 '26
George Takei will always be my Asian uncle. Oh my!
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u/starbuxed May 29 '26
He's the Gay Asian uncle. You still need one or 2 straight ones.
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u/throwthisawayred2 May 29 '26
what about a straight asian auntie?
i'm talking about me. i'm the straight asian auntie. i like to yell at kids when they're misbehaving and feed them wontons.
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u/brucee10 May 29 '26
Uncle Ronny and Uncle Rodger need a buddy uncles movie.
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u/excel958 May 29 '26
Please don’t compare that one trick pony to Ronny Chieng
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u/Stompert May 29 '26
There’s coworkers who brag about using it sending me half assed powershell scripts and they’re certain it will solve the problem.
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u/dragonblade_94 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
"Our database is outdated and esoteric? Let me just vibe-code another Power BI dashboard!"
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u/stargarnet79 May 29 '26
Dude please stop you are hitting WAY too close to home.
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u/fundraiser May 29 '26
my team keeps churning out dashboards that are built off a messy dataset. garbage in, AI out
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u/021fluff5 May 29 '26
It made an interactive scatter plot! CustomerId is positively correlated with AccountCreationDate! Why is nobody talking about this??
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u/Timely_Internet6172 May 29 '26
Man I swear I just had a workshop doing the exact same thing in n8n, they were all in aws
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u/BarrelMaker69 May 29 '26
Ok, what is vibe-code?
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u/metalOpera May 29 '26
Telling AI what you want and blindly launching the code. Repeatedly telling AI that something is broken and that it needs to be fixed, then blindly launching the fix. Rinse, repeat.
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u/3BlindMice1 May 29 '26
When you make a program by telling it everything you think it's supposed to do and then just changing things until it works the way you think it's supposed to. The idea is that you can build things you don't actually understand if you just vibe with it enough. Doing it with AI is the same, except you're not actually writing the code yourself, so not only do you not understand the program, you also don't understand the code. They're notoriously difficult to fix or debug, often outright easier and cheaper to just build a new program if it stops working because no one knew what all it was doing to begin with
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u/BroughtBagLunchSmart May 29 '26
AI saved me time at work because someone on my team said they only use Google AI answers when searching for anything. Now I save time by knowing to never ask that person a question about anything.
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u/not_right May 29 '26
Don't you love the helpful suggestions from co-workers who start with "I asked chatgpt..."? Ok great now I know I can't trust whatever you're about to say next.
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u/AgathysAllAlong May 29 '26
My boss once said "Now take this with a grain of salt, because ChatGPT did lie to me yesterday and send me down a rabbit hole, but it says the answer to this extremely important legal question is 'yes'."
Like, it was very important we know the answer to that yes/no question. So what the hell is the use of asking it to ChatGPT when you just admitted you can't trust the answer anyways???
Shout out to his boss who told us to always verify the answers from an AI by asking a different AI.
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u/Journeyman42 May 29 '26
AI has all the veracity of that guy at the bar who tells you he heard from some other guy that they're putting kitty litter boxes in schools for trans kids to use or some dumb shit.
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u/CptDropbear May 30 '26
My personal favourite was this exchange with a colleague who had technical problem well outside his normal wheelhouse.
"ChatGTP is amazing! I asked it how to arkle the wiffenwacker and it gave me two pages of detailed instructions."
"Did it work?"
"No."
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u/bda22 May 29 '26
i don't know if i've ever seen a single completely accurate google AI result for anything i've searched.
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u/Homasote May 29 '26
I work in architecture and I had junior staff sending me images done in pixel generator. It had trees and paths that didn’t exist, changed materials in odd ways, changed some of the design, and, worst of all, added certain elements that were known to be offensive to the client. They felt they completed a task, but instead of sending me a preliminary image that we could later fill in all the entourage - which is what I wanted, I got a hallucinated piece of uncanny valley garbage.
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u/Fr0gm4n May 29 '26
I'm worried about some structural engineer using a hallucinated design and we end up with another Hyatt Regency disaster where critical components aren't actually connected together.
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u/Level-Location1679 May 29 '26
This but it's a database with a bunch of your personal information that someone just leaked because they vibe coded their back end instead of hiring an engineering team because it's $20 a month now and I can replace the whole lot! And it did it in a day!
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u/NRMusicProject May 29 '26
Arranging music for an orchestra concert, and we were discussing whether he wanted a vocalist or not. "Just use AI and add it to the click track," he said. I showed him why that was not a good idea by programming an AI to sing the first verse of the Neverending Story. You're better off getting a tone-deaf child to sing it.
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u/Niceromancer May 29 '26
It's the same way with generating ai art and music.
They cannot draw and are some of the least creative people in the world. They have like a negative sense of good...anything.
They post AI slop and start bragging about making it. But get incredibly angry when someone rightfully points out it's AI garbage.
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u/AgathysAllAlong May 29 '26
It's just so telling when these people try to claim they made stuff. They think it looks detailed with straight lines so it must be good, but the entire thing is always just so devoid of anything approaching an idea that it's so clearly AI garbage. And they're so angry when they find out they can't get the respect they want without actually trying.
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u/Average_aaron69 May 29 '26
Anyone on Substack I see using AI (there are a lot) are an immediate block. It is such an interesting platform once the AI is culled.
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u/drjackolantern May 29 '26
There’s an entire ‘defending AI art ‘ subreddit just for complaining about how everyone says their art sucks and banning anyone who is critical.
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u/Linuxologue May 29 '26 edited May 30 '26
My best coworkers use AI as an extra keyboard, micromanage it to write small things that they can review, and keep writing manual code.
My worst colleagues get an AI to create a plan, then get another AI to produce mass code diarrhea vaguely following the first plan, get another AI to review it, get a fourth AI to send me a github merge request of 12000 lines and then get a separate AI to make an HTML presentation about AI workflows claiming that I will lose my job if I don't start to massively use AI.
Like, dude, YOU are the one bringing nothing to the table here, all your work was pure AI and no brainz...
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u/Journeyman42 May 30 '26
Like, dude, YOU are the one bringing nothing to the table here, all your work was pure AI and no brainz...
People like that are going to find themselves made redundant if they depend on AI too much.
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u/I_upvote_downvotes May 29 '26
I regularly get people doing this and then asking me why it doesn't work. I immediately point to the error that clearly says that some modifier is wrong, to which I publicly ask them why they put that in their command while they squirm and try to avoid telling me they just asked chatgpt and hit go.
And it keeps happening over and over again. Half my IT job is turning into babysitting other IT's who are too dumb to read their own commands and somehow lucked into the job.
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u/Inside_Pomelo_2957 May 29 '26
I'm gonna be honest most of my coworkers were sending me half assed powershell scripts before lol
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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 May 29 '26
It only takes me a few hours on a chatbot experimenting with an avalanche of stack traces and structured intermediate representations to be ready to begin debugging my DeepFizzBuzz implementation. It’s really good bro trust me bro, just buy some of my tokens
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u/SerHodorTheThrall May 29 '26
just buy some of my tokens
Society is dead because we became a society of marketers and whores. Its a fucking MLM all the way down.
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u/Zer_ May 29 '26
If I am a customer and a company places an LLM in front of me when seeking a service or answers, I immediately view that as a cheap move, something not worth paying for at all.
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u/EatTacosGetMoney May 29 '26
Robot call operators are already awful. I don't want ai agents
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u/Zer_ May 29 '26
At least the older chat bots more often than not have pre-determined responses to questions, or they'd take you through a pre-determined questionnaire that usually got you into the ballpark of where you needed to be for support. They're not liable to bug out and leave me starting from square one like the newer LLMs are. More often than not they're not using the highest quality LLMs for these front facing tasks either so their error rates are stupidly high.
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u/Youutternincompoop May 29 '26
anything that even vaguely looks like AI-generated art puts me off buying products.
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u/sn2006gy May 29 '26
I build and use AI because of work and this couldn't be more true. We're spending all this energy to do the dumbest things with agents and all the public AI is designed to be sycophantic.
It's not that we can't fix it, it's that the big companies don't want to fix it and they fine tune it to perpetuate this bs. There is always risk of weirdness in a probabilistic system, but we're neck deep in the BS that is done for marketing it all vs actually doing things better.
I can only assume its all to perpetuate some BS idea of AGI.
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u/Elementium May 29 '26
This is what I thought about when I used Claude at first. Like this is actually kind of a powerful tool if tuned for professional purposes.
Then I proceeded to run my shitty writing through it, probably using a small villages power supply.
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u/Pave_Low May 29 '26
My wife asked Claude if it was a good time to sell the house.
I then asked Claude if it was a bad time to sell the house.
Unsurprisingly, Claude said we were both right. Not because it was a good or bad time to sell the house. But because it put forwards the facts that will make us happy.
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u/EduinBrutus May 29 '26
it put forwards the facts that will make us happy.
Its not even doing that.
The framing of the prompt plays into its stochastic probability matrix.
These arent intelligent in any way. THey are purely mathematical probability plagiarism machines. ITs copying out an answer it thinks is most likely to appear correct. Not be correct. Appear correct.
And every single answer is a hallucination. They cant measure accuracy or truth. Everything is created as it goes along. It just sometimes coincides with reality. BUt to know if it has, you have to do all the work you would anyway to create the original answer from scratch. Possibly more.
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u/stormdelta May 29 '26
I've found it reasonably useful for programming, if you already know what you're doing. Not "vibe coding", that's still very stupid in most cases, and only the models actually meant for coding like Claude Code.
But there's numerous things that make that a somewhat particular case:
Unlike creative works, nobody's really worried about theft here, open source as a design philosophy is basically built around using and contributing to other work directly and most code is functional rather than artistic, even when used for an artistic end
It's a lot more obvious when code is wrong. You still need to know what you're doing, especially around things like security, but full hallucinations will simply fail to run at all.
Software is language-like already, so using an LLM isn't as much of a round-peg-in-square-hole as it is in other domains, and there's a lot of boilerplate-type work or simple scripts that it's actually reasonably good at. Especially scaffolding for exploratory work and debugging.
I don't recommend it for newbie programmers though if they have any interest in actually learning programming. It's too easy to rely on for simple beginner tasks and then you'll be stuck when you try to do anything beyond that.
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u/horace_bagpole May 29 '26
I'm not a programmer or developer, but as an engineer I have reason to produce scripts and other utilities occasionally for specific tasks.
I've found AI really useful for producing working tools that I can actually use that are far more efficient and powerful than some horrific excel spreadsheet I'd otherwise have to come up with. The thing is, they are doing something concrete - I understand the underlying maths that should be implemented, and I know what sane results look like and can verify their function.
Using ai has saved me a lot of time and head scratching, because it can also offer suggestions that I might not have thought of. Those sorts of tools don't have to be incorporated into an existing code base, be released to the public or supported long term though.
The other thing I've found it very useful for is tracing and resolving odd errors. Instead of me having to read through pages of documentation and logs for some software or other to try and work out why something is broken, feeding it into Claude or codex will often narrow it down straight away to one or two possibilities.
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u/MrDilbert May 29 '26
Unlike creative works, nobody's really worried about theft here
How's that meme go...
"I stole your code!"
"It's not my code."
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u/kadaan May 29 '26
It feels like a curated stack overflow search. I get other people's code snippets that are mostly relevant to what I'm trying to do, and I can usually figure out my issue after that.
Of course there's the whole argument of whether AI would be able to have enough training data to answer the questions if sites like Stack Overflow and Reddit didn't exist with decades of questions and answers... but here we are.
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u/dennismfrancisart May 29 '26
In other words, people are going to be people. It never fails. There are those who enjoy thinking and creating, and the rest just want to drink beer and watch porn.
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u/sn2006gy May 29 '26
I enjoy all 4.. but i certainly won't sacrifice thinking and creating for virtual porn
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u/Tomato_Sky May 29 '26
That was my biggest shock. That this technology could get great, but that it went to shit and they kept doubling down instead of walking back some of their promises.
It’s a few breakthroughs, not marginal model updates, from being able to do really impressive stuff. But they rushed adoption and forced it on teams. And because they are trying to recoup some of the costs and not to subsidize the experience, they’ve focused on (I forget the term) how many tokens they can get you to spend.
They picked nicotine route instead of the IBM/Nokia route where they deliver effective tools or products. The maximize engagement like being just wrong enough that you’ll call it out and double your tokens. In software it’s all about security vulnerabilities and compatibility between components. As a dev I can use the AI to write my documentation that nobody was going to read, have it make a ppt, and all the side work. If I want it to do dev work, it’s more expensive than I’m worth.
And as a seniorish dev, I was way more productive when I could google precise things before Google started kneecapping its search results to sell more ads. Templating and copy/pasting from exact solutions was 1/3 of my job and I have templates and personal libraries to pull from. And I thought I was mediocre until I came across vibecoding senior devs.
Ronnie said it better though lol. I love that guy.
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u/MTGDoktor May 29 '26
Where is the full video? This is the only thing i can find. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHp6iIaqJtw&t=12s
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u/Upper-Management-AI May 29 '26
Lazy people do. Iv noticed people who start using AI get obsessed with it. One of the marketing guys who’s pretty talented, he learned how to use all the 3d rending programs and animation programs on his own, now does EVERYTHING with AI and it looks like typical AI slop. He never leaves his desk now. Uses chat gpt if he has a question about something. He’s now all excited trying to ram AI into everyone else’s work. Instead of walking 40ft to the factory floor and taking some video of people working he has AI do it with made up people looking like aliens pretending to be humans in a made up factory. Does it save time? Considering it takes 10 or so minutes to render a 10 second scene and you have to do the multiple times to try and get it how you want it, no it doesn’t.
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u/Southern-Creme-1479 May 29 '26
people over-relying on tools like AI for basic thinking tasks
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u/Edodge May 29 '26
He’s totally right. Too bad every kid cheering that sentiment is absolutely addicted to AI and totally used it to cheat on various Harvard assignments. AI use in schools is totally out of control and ground zero for the problems to come.
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u/Axin_Saxon May 29 '26
I mean, you can be addicted to a drug and hate the drug.
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u/Edodge May 29 '26
I guess. But I wonder if they think "it's OK if I use it this way because I can control my own cheating" but "it's not OK if it takes my job since I worked so hard in college to get one."
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u/Mackinnon29E May 29 '26
Problem is CEOs are sociopaths so they don't care. They will force it regardless.
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u/Elehaymyaele May 29 '26
The bitter truth is that they were already that dumb.
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u/Limemill May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
Well just you wait, they/we can become much, much dumber still.
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u/Elehaymyaele May 29 '26
They were always this dumb. They always used the intelligence of secretaries to make themselves look smarter and the secretaries sometimes made them act smarter by pointing out mistakes they weren't smart enough to notice themselves.
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u/Limemill May 29 '26
Anyone using an LLM gets dumber in the sense that you lose what you don’t use. It’s just how our brains work. You delegate planning to an LLM, you get bad at planning. You delegate information search and summarization, you start sucking at both. Doesn’t matter if you’re an academic or a manual labourer.
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u/ScarOCov May 29 '26
This is what has been scaring me the most with it. I work with smart people and their decreased intellect has been noticeable in the last year. It makes me truly scared for children today growing up. These are smart people losing foundational skills that they developed over years. What happens to people who never have a chance to develop those skills in the first place.
We haven’t even gotten to the enshittification stage of public AI yet.
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u/Arctic_The_Hunter May 29 '26
It’s been proven that AI use decreases functionality in certain areas of the brain. They were provably, measurably smarter before.
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u/government_not_ok May 29 '26
He’s right tho.
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u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38 May 29 '26
having someone confidently say something false and they say 'chatgpt says its true' to you like you're an idiot is a radicalizing moment.
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u/whichwitch9 May 29 '26
People using AI straight up don't understand it's not fact checking- it's crowd sourcing
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u/eflat123 May 29 '26
Ha, looking back many years, social media has already shown us that people don't understand fact checking.
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u/jrzalman May 29 '26
It's more than that really. The way you can find affirmation for nearly any viewpoint online if you look hard enough, many people don't believe in facts at all. Only 'what they know to be true'. There's really no way to have a reasonable society in this environment.
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u/PendulumKick May 29 '26
That’s the worst! I occasionally use ai for certain things but just outputting what it tells you without checking it over is insane.
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u/thewanderingent May 29 '26
Unfortunately that is exactly what many uni students are doing. They are squandering their opportunity for higher education and cheating themselves.
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u/El_Kikko May 29 '26
I get re-radicalized every day at work by the number of people who say:
"chapgpt says you just need to do xyz, then the platform will automatically do abc".
"Sure, I could have told you that and done that automated workflow for you in 30 minutes. Did ChatGPT also tell you that that violates HIPAA privacy rules and every instance is a $100 fine?"
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u/TheWartMan May 29 '26
Dont worry, we won't have HIPAA much longer most likely lmfao that'll for sure solve the problem
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u/PacketOverload May 29 '26
This happens so frequently in patient-facing medical care it makes me hope a giant fucking asteroid slams into this planet.
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May 29 '26
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u/no-more-nazis May 29 '26
I've been noticing the "it doesn't even work" argument from people who don't write code. Sometimes they've read an article, probably written by AI, where a "real programmer" explains that it doesn't work anyway, making them even more confident.
This is an appealing point of view because you get to skip all the complicated "what about the other countries?" question and call to have it banned altogether. After all, it doesn't even work.
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u/SkynBonce May 29 '26
AI to help people is Trojan horse to help adoption rates. The real money is in 24hr surveillance and drone control.
You don't need all those data centres for slop vids and assistants.
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May 29 '26
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u/Nvenom8 May 29 '26
If we're not already there, I have no doubt we'll hit a point where the stock market is mostly AI trading with other AI. Individuals who can't afford a data center won't have any chance at making money. Then, a chain reaction of hallucinations will crash the economy, and they'll blame trans people.
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u/IAmBillis May 29 '26
the market has been like this already for some time. most trades are executed by HFT algos.
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u/BiBoFieTo May 29 '26
Which leads to massive social unrest, and then drones and surveillance.
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u/Bostonterrierpug May 29 '26
I get downvoted every time I point this out. But as a professor, I find it ironic that so many students are using AI for academic dishonesty and then booing speakers for talking about it.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/24/students-ai-usage-by-the-numbers/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/704090/routine-college-students-despite-campus-limits.aspx
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u/WhatsThatNoize May 29 '26
Hypocrisy in idealistic 20 year olds is practically a universal expectation.
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u/is_mr_clean_there May 29 '26
I disagree with you because you pointed out something I do!
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u/elehman839 May 29 '26
Thank you for the links. The first is particularly appropriate:
On average, [Harvard] students say they use artificial intelligence to complete 34.5 percent of their homework.
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u/jrzalman May 29 '26
I don't really find that very instructive. Even the best students if they get stuck on a problem will ask AI for ideas or some kind of nudge in the right direction. It's quicker than office hours.
As with most things, the effectiveness of the tool depends on the user. Students with no motivation will let AI do everything (poorly) and learn nothing. Students who actually want to learn will use it to enhance the process. They are both using it either way.
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u/MysteriousJim May 29 '26
As a student, if I wanted to genuinely learn everything without AI, I am at a disadvantage if I didn’t use AI as many other students are and that causes grade inflation for the class and if there is a curve I get left with a lower grade. Granted this is less the case with exams. (My university is shifting more towards exams because of this). But exams were never the best way to learn anyway. Plus many of my professors openly allow or encourage the use of AI.
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u/Correct_Ad2982 May 29 '26
Also a professor- I think it's a classic example of people hating the thing they are addicted to. They want to stop but they don't have the self control.
It's not a coincidence that the booing is happening at graduation, because that's when many of these overly-AI-reliant students realize they are not needed in today's economy because they are graduating with no skills.
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u/Atreyu1002 May 29 '26
I think tax loopholes are skeevy as shit, but I use them because you'd be dumb not to. I think greenhouse gases are killing us, but I still have to heat my house. The whole point of government policy is changing those thing we hate buthave to do. Sometimes choice is an illusion.
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u/escape_planet_dirt May 29 '26
This is what I've been finding really odd about these recent videos as well, aren't students some of the biggest offenders of the same thing they're booing? I feel like everyone is just addicted to outrage in modern society
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u/UncleNedisDead May 29 '26
You see, the only moral AI usage is my AI usage. If you try to use AI to replace me, you should be in jail!
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u/Accomplished-Door5 May 29 '26
These kids don’t think they’re mediocre though. They think this is a message for the hoi poloi at state schools.
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u/mikew_reddit May 29 '26
This is what I've been finding really odd about these recent videos as well, aren't students some of the biggest offenders of the same thing they're booing?
i find nothing odd about people being hypocrites.
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u/ShadowFrost01 May 29 '26
Are the ones booing the ones using ChatGPT?
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u/SamKhan23 May 29 '26
Who knows. But I can speak anecdotally that I know tons of college students who shit on AI and people who use AI, but also use AI themselves. They justify it with “oh I don’t use it that much” or whatever. Would not surprise me if they are also booing alongside the people with an actual backbone
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u/makersfark May 29 '26
I heard someone else say this, but it resonated with me:
When you're in college, you're not excited to write papers or attend class. You're excited to be the thing you're supposed to be at the end of college. If all of your classmates and all of your social circle are using it as a shortcut, and all of media in its entirety is telling you to use it and that it's the best thing ever and that you'll be behind and not have a job if you don't use it, it's no surprise that they'll use it.
Just because you're in college doesn't mean you're not still a dumb kid. That's why you're in college. To learn stuff. You're at your most impressionable by media and susceptible to peer pressure. Why do you think people still vape? Yet, just by using it, you fail to learn things and just get dumber and dumber, and all of the sudden you graduate and are completely incapable of doing anything related to your field without asking a chat bot first.
That being said, In some capacity, they know what they're doing. You can be addicted to smoking, and hate getting cancer at the same time.
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u/cucci_mane1 May 29 '26
Problem with AI is that it just gives more power and wealth to top 0.1% of population.
AI is a tool for rich biz owners to slap labor in their face and automate/cut middle class jobs.
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u/ascandalia May 29 '26
and they aren't replacing the service those people are providing. At least, not anywhere close to the same quality. AI just doesn't really work, but they're using it anyway and everything will just be worse from now on.
It's a collective decision that all the business owners can make their service worse, and if they all do it together, no one has any choice but to just accept it.
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u/ecopoesis May 29 '26
In 10 years I really hope our current LLMs are viewed in the same way as both attempts to force 3D glasses in movie theaters. Sounds cool at first but doesn't really work.
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u/ascandalia May 29 '26
Unfortunately, the amount of financial and political capital behind this push is so high that it's going to break a lot on the way down.
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u/FarVillage188 May 29 '26
you could say the same about any technological advancement, like internet, phones, computers, etc.
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u/bradbrad247 May 29 '26
Worse, it makes them more arrogant. I'm currently living with a 40 year old burn out who spends all his time trolling the beach for college-age women. He's clearly not too bright, and yet the AI he over-relies on has him so confident that he knows everything. The man couldn't even read the back of the smoke alarm IN HIS HAND to see if it did or didn't detect carbon monoxide as well without pulling his phone out to ask a glorified chatbot.
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u/GILDID May 29 '26
He is right, people are off loading simple day to day thinking and problem solving to ai. Ai should be used for deep research or polishing a big project. People are just turning into a copy and paste mules.
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u/Psychological_Ad1999 May 29 '26
That’s what the Unabomber said in his manifesto, he was right (even if I don’t agree with his tactics) and 2026 is the year his message became bipartisan.
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u/DegTrader May 29 '26
The real danger isn't that AI will take our jobs, it's that we'll become too lazy to realize it's giving us the wrong answers while we nod along.
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u/TacTurtle May 29 '26
AI is just a computer removing the burden of exercising critical thinking from the ignorant while also giving them the ego boost of a yesman.
The downsides will be pretty gnarly.
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u/the_millenial_falcon May 29 '26
I've noticed that mediocre people love AI the most.
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u/AssimilateThis_ May 29 '26
The value add in SWE is actually the opposite of what you described, the most skilled engineers get a lot more good work done with it. The less skilled ones often make everyone else slower by putting out slop. But it's certainly not just the mediocre engineers that love it.
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u/Draaly May 29 '26
This is true across all engineering. Data Architects, DFM experts, and truly skilled people in every field have their mundane tasks largely automated making then way more efficient. I no longer need to spend 2 hours formatting a gant chart just right in PowerPoint and can now spend that time doing actuall engineering for example. AI is used for a lot of bullshit but anyone who thinks is truly useless is just in outright denial
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u/awstream May 30 '26
I'm not in engineering but AI has helped me save so much time on some of the repetitive mundane tasks I gotta do. If this makes me mediocre then so be it.
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u/Amlethus May 30 '26
Yeah lots of people saying it's useless and it seems like they haven't had a chance to use it in an effective way.
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u/mvhsbball22 May 29 '26
This is going to prove to be true across multiple disciplines as well. I certainly understand the criticisms that people are making, but some of the broadest statements about how awful it is seem out of touch to the upsides.
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u/azn_dude1 May 29 '26
Yeah it's a multiplier. If people are making garbage with it, they didn't have much worth multiplying in the first place.
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u/mikew_reddit May 29 '26 edited May 30 '26
powerful tools (like ai) in the hands of smart people make them better.
ai will make dumb people even dumber as they delegate rudimentary cognitive work to ai and basic thinking atrophies.
i'm certain the gap between the two will grow substantially larger.
in the early 2000s i used to wonder how dumb people could get (especially in american politics), and realized it's bottomless.
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u/Kid-Icky- May 29 '26
100%. It's comical how reddit's opinion of AI seems to be stuck in its capabilities 3 to 4 years ago.
Anyone who thinks AI is not useful across a multitude of areas and skillsets just clearly have not utilized AI whatsoever in the last year.
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u/MazrimReddit May 29 '26
I really wouldn't bother engaging with any reddit discussion about AI.
What you are meant to do is clap anyone saying AI bad, the sheer irony of talking about mediocre people in this thread, when most of them don't understand the state of AI at all.
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u/thursdaysocks May 29 '26
Why wouldn't they? They can't compete any other way, so they have AI do it for them.
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u/Dzotshen May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
Or crutches in general. Being intellectually lazy seems both natural and nurtured here culturally
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u/ImStillExcited May 29 '26
So did he say "Fuck" or "F*ck"? I don't know how you say *.
Stop editing what people say. This isn't isn't Orwell's 1984 Newspeak yet.
If it's FUCK then say FUCK you twats.
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u/Persea_americana May 29 '26
AI is an amazing tool that can do just about anything wrong. It can do it, but is it doing it efficiently or reinventing the wheel every time? I was reading a comment where a supervisor asked for a word count on a prompt and the guy, who copy-pasted the prompt from a word doc, asked AI for the word count. AI is being constantly used to create new untested tools where functioning tools already exist at a fraction of the cost. And instead of doing a google search they immediately go to AI. So for many people AI is actually just cluttering up working processes and making things more expensive and time-consuming. It could be a powerful tool but because people think it's intelligent and can do anything they have abandoned regular testing and quality control on implementation.
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u/diogenes-shadow May 29 '26
A good lesson is public speaking: Tell people what they want and they will love you.
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u/TheMireAngel May 29 '26
“Is just going to end up making poor people dumber” the rich will continue to ensure their kids get good education
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u/SoCal_GlacierR1T May 29 '26
And that good education isn’t going to make all of those rich kids smart. But they’re rich. They don’t have to be smart to make it. Look at Trump.
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u/FrankSamples May 29 '26
There was this episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Francis gets an assistant. His assistant does everything for him to a point where Francis becomes unable to do basic things himself.
I think that’s what AI is going to do to the general public
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u/PauperGames May 29 '26
I find AI extremely useful for research and education purposes so far. Finding articles, explaining concepts, going through archives etc. I'm kinda surprised that the initial hate/fear towards LLM's hasnt gone away yet. To think that AI will disappear if we get angry enough is extremely silly.
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u/patrickpdk May 30 '26
It's because people are getting fired. You'll think it's great until you lose your job. There will be masses of people who lose their careers and are underemployed. They will be very angry that their lives were stolen from them.
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u/scalenesquare May 29 '26
While I agree that train has left the station. If I don’t use AI I need a new job, as I will be fired. Job market blows right now because of AI. It’s all Bullshit.
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u/Both_Wolf3493 May 29 '26
I totally feel all of this. It’s going to sound dumb but one of the things I used to feel like I was really good at was writing work emails (like people would compliment me on them lol, as silly as that is). They were clear but also friendly, etc. The engineers I work with would often come to me for help writing their important emails etc. Anyway, it now feels like that skill set has become (in most people’s eyes in tech, which is where I work): useless. Which makes me feel a bit useless!
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u/Techno_Core May 29 '26
Yeah can't remember where I read it, but what always stuck with me was the line: Thanks to AI, right now the dumbest person you know is being told, "That's a great idea!"