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I don’t think there’s a single serious critic who says AI’s not useful? The concerns I see are about content rights, worker impacts, environmental effects, epistemological threats, or media manipulation. But that’s all predicated on the idea that it *does* work, often too well for people to manage…

not only is it not useful, LLMs rot your brain

That is a function that Epicurious/Bon Appetite had 20 years ago.

I agree. And I helped build those features, more than once, on indie food sites. But they don’t have those features now. Because people tend to not seek out individual sites or apps, they’ve been trained to favor generalized interfaces that they’re familiar with.

Or, that specific use case is actually not that useful. If it was, the previous specialized feature would have been used more often. This hits exactly at the reason the supposed utility doesn't stand up to the massive costs / negative externalities for society.

Let's use that example. I want to make dinner, I could: a) Perform an indexed search of key ingredients (individually or together) and see what real recipes exist that people have made and found tasty. Read a few, compare, see what other ingredients I'd need. Adjust. Decide. b) Ask Chgpt and have it

This is what fundamentally doesn't square. All of the real use cases that get thrown around feel so penny-ante (or actively harmful) against the scale of the costs of LLMs. It's not that they are "useless" it's that the hype machine is so out of whack with the actual use cases.

I think that’s largely true! They’re wildly over-hyped. But people do find utility in the modest use cases for simpler things, and that’s why normal people are using them, often for very mundane reasons. It’s not productive to deny that.

autocomplete doesn’t tell you what to do, the decision making is still 100% in your court. you have to think and it saves you typing. and i bet you’ll find people do stop remembering eg the function names if deprived of autocomplete

one's a supposition, the other is a study people who used a lot of search also experienced a (vastly lesser) impact — bc it was still handing off cognitive tasks, just much less so