this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Sure it does. It’s a calculator and can tell me if I did my statistics homework correctly. I can also ask it to summarize a concept I find difficult.
If you want a calculator, try an actual calculator or a website that actually does math like Wolfram alpha.
A chatbot can't actually do math. It can only give you an answer that looks right because it has no fundamental understanding of what "right" actually is.
Love Wolfram. I believe Stephen is a big proponent of this stuff? Found his blog on it (turns three years old next Monday) and curious for your thoughts on it.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its-wolfram-superpowers/
No, it actually doesn't. How LLMs work is that it takes in written words and makes a sentence based on the likelihood of what the next word will be based on human readable text. That's literally it.
Hence, there's absolutely no guarantee that ChatGPT's 'review' of your homework will always be 100% correct because it is probable that the answer was written incorrectly in the billions of lines of text it has been fed.
On the other hand, a calculator has been superficially wired for it's purpose to process an input. 1 + 1 will always equal 2.
I'd wager your supervisor will be horrified to learn that you're getting an LLM to learn from rather than your peers. This is why i absolutely hate that it's being used as a substitute what essentially makes us human: art, music, research, learning etc.
It's a tool that needs a licence because you need to know how to use it to complement your existing skills, not supplement it.
We’re allowed to use them. We just have to provide the prompt used and the answer given.
Ah very interesting. Still, it's a shame cutting out the peer to peer discussions to expand one's own learning and understanding.
To do an in person degree I’d have to quit my job. I have been waiting for years for a program like this. That said, doing it in person would be a better experience and I wish I’d had the opportunity to do something like that years ago.
TLDR; should have had my doctorate years ago. I went to Argentina and had to abandon my work when the economy collapsed.
For sure; nothing beats in person but you have to make do with what you can. I wish you the best of luck in your doctorate (from another mature age student and soon to be commencing Masters).
Ooh good luck! I hope you find it fulfilling.
With that naivety you are setting yourself up for failure.
We're not in a dick-swinging contest here. At least I am not :) What a dumb way to deflect from the point I am making. If you have any understanding of the matter, you know that LLMs are only statistically accurate, and mathematically, that is useless.
I have a long, successful career. I am doing this program for personal growth and to create a challenge for myself. Please stop projecting your impressions on my life, I am my own person and very confident in what I have accomplished.
Edit: I got downvoted for being confident in my successes. Really?
I am not objecting to you to learn something new. The naivety is what you display assuming you can use LLMs to "check your homework".
i dont know if you're trolling but you would be making a pretty poor engineer if you are using a something to check your answers that may or may not be right, and not use an actual engineering calculator. how would you know your answers are correct in the forest place if you took them from an LLM. its literally just equivalant to finding the answers on a website and copy and pasting it to your hw, you arnt learning anything, and people who done that have been shown to do very poorly on tests.
This is an echo chamber. Logical and rational thoughts will be downvoted if they go against the narrative. Don't take it personally.
Yeah I didn’t realize just how deeply people were into the projected angst before now. Thank you.
until it hallucinates
who the fuck wants a calculator that gives out the wring answer every 5th time