-Video games: Provide fun, but probably overall bad for society bc people waste too much time on them.
-Alcohol: Most drinkers get a lot of value out of drinking, but alcoholism is so bad that on net alcohol's probably bad.
-Guns & nuclear weapons: Wish both didn't exist, but each provides a lot of use to the specific people who have them.
-TikTok: Overall causes too many people to believe misinformation, but for a lot of other people is fun or interesting.
It's possible to think AI chatbots are net bad because people use them to cheat, or they rely on them for information too much and believe false information, without believing that they are always useless in all circumstances. I can use ChatGPT to alphabetize a long list for me. That's useful, even if I think overall chatbots are net bad.
Trying to imagine using enough energy to boil two liters of water(1)(2) to sort a list instead of typing
sort list.txt
which is a command that works pretty much the same on Windows(3), Linux/Bash(4), macOS (5) and does not have any risk of hallucinating at all, and the only reason I could imagine myself doing that was if for some reason, using enough energy to boil two liters of water to sort a list made me feel good. Like I would only do that if I got some sort of rush out of it or if it made people on the internet think that I am smart.
1 https://ai-basics.com/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-really-us...
2 https://eatwithus.net/how-much-energy-does-it-take-to-boil-1...
3 https://www.windows-commandline.com/sort-command/
On the one hand the fact that people accept hallucinations is all the proof you need to indicate that chat bot usage is driven by feelings and not results, and on the other hand there’s a blog post that might’ve been written by a chat bot about how chat bot energy usage is pretty cool, actually, so who is to know anything about anything
If so, that's a pretty radical position, and if not I don't understand how they're relevant.
I like this reasoning. If something is popular it is objectively good. For example 21.7% of adults on earth use tobacco, so it must be good then.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.PRV.SMOK?name_desc=f...
Except for TikTok, which is bad because people share their experiences of chat bots not being very good on there.
As an aside, “dumb” is subjective, though if we had to put a label on it, “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” sounds like it could be something?
I would say that's true using a strict definition of the term, and is definitely true for common usage of the term.
In the future, you should just tell people up front when you're going to redefine terms to suit your needs (in your article and in your posts here, you apparently define "useful" as "providing immediate gratification with no consideration of any long term effects" and you seem to be define "stupid" only as "making decisions without full knowledge of the consequences" above) rather than confusing nearly everyone who reads your writing.
Seeing that your essay is about people’s presumptions about one another, and you say that you lose respect for people based on their chat bot opinions without a lick of self-awareness around the topic of the essay it can be concluded that your overall thesis is that people that don’t like chat bots like you do are inherently less worthy of respect.