Comment by jrflowers
7 months ago
You literally say that you lose respect for people that don’t agree with you about chat bots.
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.
I say in the post I lose respect for people who specifically claim that a billion people are using an app that adds absolutely nothing to their lives each week, not people who dislike chatbots for other reasons (hallucinations etc.). So I think a lot of people are getting a lot of misinformation from TikTok, and I think it’d be better if TikTok didn’t exist, but I’d consider anyone who said that TikTok is completely useless to its users to be pretty goofy. I feel the same about chatbots.
> a billion people are using an app that adds absolutely nothing to their lives each week
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?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
I think basically everyone using tobacco knows it's bad for them. They're not stupid. This is another example of people being basically aware of their situations.
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How can you both think TikTok shouldn't exist and think that it's useful to its users, without using a pretty unique definition of useful?
There's a ton of stuff I think is useful in specific circumstances but can be bad overall.
-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.
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