I asked ChatGippity to respond to the post above using ChoatieMom’s voice:
Silently judging people while announcing it publicly is certainly an interesting efficiency hack.
If your objection is environmental cost, then consistency would seem to require similar concern about streaming video, doomscrolling social media, online gaming, cloud photo storage, and the seventeen browser tabs many people keep open while researching whether their child’s 1570 SAT is “competitive.”
Every technology arrives with both meaningful applications and frivolous ones. That was true of the internet, smartphones, and apparently now AI-generated messiah portraits.
As for using AI to answer questions about college enrollment or describe a posting style on a discussion forum: this may not rank alongside curing cancer, but neither does most of what happens on College Confidential. We are, after all, on a message board populated largely by adults debating dorm configurations and parsing admissions office wording like Kremlinologists.
You are, of course, welcome to judge. Silently was probably the stronger opening strategy.
Using AI is an ongoing conversation/relationship. Rarely will its first attempt at a response satisfy you. The next step is evaluating that initial output and asking for a re-edit to remove the objections that you clearly spell out or adhere to your further clarifications. You will go back and forth with your machine partner in this fashion until you’re finally satisfied with the response.
Remember, AI doesn’t exactly understand style or accuracy. It’s like a puppy asking you if it did good. You need to train it to stay on the paper. Rather than smacking it on the nose or putting it down, take the upper hand and engage patiently with it, perhaps explaining that it oversimplified or formatted in an objectionable way. Feed it an example of what you’re looking for and ask it to try again. When the tool gets it right, you can say, “Good Boy!” (Really, not being facetious here. You can have fun with AI in this way.)
Cutting and pasting the first response is not the fault of AI but of the inexperienced AI user. We’ll all get better at this with trial and time.
I didn’t mean to disparage you @tamagotchi. I agree that the standard voice/output of several of these tools is unimaginative and even objectionable, but I try to respond in a way that might educate other readers who are still trying to make heads or tails of this thing. For various reasons given our different phases of work and life, many of us here don’t have a compelling reason to use AI in a meaningful way, and casual use is often frustrating and unsatisfying. I think many posts indicate fear and/or a general lack of understanding of how AI works. I’m learning, too, and try to share my experience as an experimenter and serious reader of this technology. I can’t help it — DH and our son live and breathe in this world, one from a business perspective, one from a development and national security perspective. I just try to keep up. I apologize if some of my posts seem offensive. They are not meant to be but, instead, to provoke experimentation and further educate.
And, AI has informed me that my sense of humor can be offputting, too.
I seem to remember similar attempts to “tech shame” people who used Google. IMO, what we’re doing comes under the rubric of honest, if somewhat ironic, feedback. Who knows? It might even take the place of moderators.
I frequent another forum (which many others are familiar with, I’m sure) where the owner/moderator deletes posts if they are generated by AI. Users report them when they see or suspect AI posts. The moderator has asserted that the value of his forum is for humans to talk to each other. There are a lot of things I prefer about this forum to that one, but I do appreciate the moderator of the other forum’s commitment to human interaction (even if it’s often unpleasant/messy).
I would also underscore an earlier poster’s note about the ethical issues around the way gen AI scrapes content and repurposes it without permission. I find that deeply offensive. And I would add that the environmental impact of using gen AI when a search would do is significant.
Finally, I’ll note an irony that I was discussing with my (anti-gen AI) children the other night: when Wikipedia was in its early days, people were suspicious of its validity because “anyone” could write a post. Many years later, Wikipedia has developed into a thoughtful, entirely human-run endeavor with clear sourcing and checks and balances around validation. I find myself incredibly grateful for its existence amid the rise of gen AI.
Unfortunately, since this report was issued in 2024 Google search energy use has increased because they now bake AI into every query. DuckDuckGo is a great option–absolutely no difference in search result quality, and you can turn off AI results. I’ve used it as my default search engine for years.
Not sure if this has been shared in the thread or not, but I found it humorous.
Exerpt: “Basically, Silicon Valley’s valley new star is just an automated mansplaining machine. Often wrong, and yet always certain — and with a tendency to be condescending in the process. And if it gets confused, it’s never the problem. You are.”
But it’s worth noting the article is over 3 years old and (even if they haven’t lost the annoying attitude), these chatbots have come a long way since then. In particular, their reasoning ability has improved a lot, so for example, most of today’s chatbots won’t be tripped up by the “Jane’s mother” puzzle cited in the story. The same goes for many math problems and handling nuance. They’re still occasionally wrong, but far less so than in early 2023.
Training a single large language model consumes as much electricity as hundreds of homes use in a year, and data centers that power AI are expanding rapidly with much of the electricity still coming from fossil fuels. Water usage is another problem especially here in the desert where many large data centers are located due to the dearth of natural weather disasters. Training AI models consumes millions of gallons of water in equipment cooling systems. Hardware and electronic waste costs include mining rare earth metals, increasing manufacturing emissions, and short hardware life cycles. As AI demand rises, the turnover of high-performance computing hardware is rising sharply, too. Carbon emissions are problematic as well when data centers are powered by coal-heavy grids, but we’re making headway in using water, wind, solar, and geothermal resources.
There is a balance. AI has the potential to accelerate climate solutions and bring efficiency gains across industries, but the net impact will depend on how responsibly AI is developed. We’ll have to see. This article from MIT acknowledges the problem but also outlines some solutions which include limiting the amount of power available, rethinking how models are trained, and making software AI- and carbon-aware.
While the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center continues to use these energy-efficient AI initiatives, there’s more work to be done, Gadepally said, including working with the broader community to collect data, build benchmarks, and rethink the current mindset that casts bigger AI models and data as better. “We need to think more about how we can get to the same answer but add a bit of intelligence to make AI processing more energy efficient,” he said.
I guess I’m struck by the fact that so much of this is having a direct impact on the so-called, Sunbelt States (not that there won’t be knock-on effects on everyone else down the road.) Is this going to be another one of those things where it gets left up to the Sierra Club to lead the charge?
Meanwhile, in the older industrial Rust Belt, the grass roots opposition seems to have developed rather quickly, though the issues differ slightly in that they seem to align closely with traditional, blue state concerns, including corporate power, noise and proximity to aging population centers. As luck would have it, the Gray Lady (The New York Times) has a timely article about the anti-data center movement in Michigan this morning:
“It’s a great antidote to doomscrolling and feeling helpless and overwhelmed,” Mr. Bernard, 46, said of his work with Mr. Wagner.
And when a conservative friend of Mr. Wagner’s expressed contempt for the liberals opposing the data centers, Mr. Wagner defended them.
Yes—the anti-data center alliances developing among otherwise hostile political factions are really interesting…and maybe a little bit hopeful?
The AI-is-inevitable push does seem like it’s backfiring in public sentiment. I saw a video recently comparing the public perception of the internet in the 90s and social media in the 00s with the public perception of AI today, and the numbers for AI are brutal. Pew did a survey in 2025 that found 50% of Americans were more concerned than excited about AI, and only 10% were more excited than concerned. Contemporary numbers about the internet and social media in their early days were much more positive/hopeful (will try to find those links).
ETA: To be clear, I understand the enormous potential of AI in many areas. The problem is that the people who stand to gain the most money and power from AI decided to make the conversation about all of the ways AI was going to make humans unnecessary rather than focusing on the applications where it would enhance discovery and complement human ingenuity.
What do you get when one multi-billionaire owns, leads, and/or heavily influences these six strategic technology domains:
Artificial intelligence
Autonomous driving
Space launch + satellite
Social media
Energy systems
Human–machine interface (implantable brain chips)
A) Someone I’d like to have cocktails with
B) A great “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” segment
C) A serious national security risk
The concentration of AI development/direction in too few extremely rich personal or corporate hands is a serious problem. It’s always about following the money and that rarely leads to philanthropy.
Yup. The small (teeny tiny) consolation is that the people with this consolidated power are so unlikeable, such inept communicators, and so insulated from critique in their daily lives that they are laying out their plans like comic book villains. This + organization among disparate groups of people toward a common goal gives us a chance at a more hopeful path.
