I want to let people know why I’m strictly against using AI in everything I do without sounding like an ‘AI vegan’, especially in front of those who are genuinely ready to listen and follow the same.
Any sources I try to find to cite regarding my viewpoint are either mild enough to be considered AI generated themselves or filled with extremist views of the author. I want to explain the situation in an objective manner that is simple to understand and also alarming enough for them to take action.
This is literally begging the question.
I don’t think it is, nor do I think name dropping random fallacies without engaging with the topic makes for particularly good conversation. If you have issues with OP’s phrasing it would benefit all of us moving forward if we found a better way to talk about it, yes?
It’s not a random fallacy, it’s the one you’re engaging in. Look it up. Your analogy presupposes an answer to the question that is actually at hand. It’s the classic “have you stopped beating your wife” situation.
I am intimately familiar with the fallacy. You don’t know how to apply it. I have presupposed nothing.
You can see very clearly from the structure of my post that the brain rot I am referring to is established via anecdote. It is my direct experience. This is obviously low quality evidence by itself for the establishment of my conclusion as a broader fact, and we could absolutely go down that road and start linking to the actual cognitive decline studies if you wanted
But my ‘argument’ is simply not structured as a begging the question fallacy. I am literally saying that I have personally observed that all AI users I encounter are “wife beaters”, and am proceeding with my analogy from there
“Given that we have identified a group of wife beaters, and you dislike the term ‘wife beater’, how can we better phrase it to improve domestic abuse interventions?” Does not become a begging the question fallacy just because you disagree with the initial classification of who is a wife beater
You wrote:
By using this analogy for the “brain rot” you claim comes from AI use, you are presupposing that it actually happens. You’re putting as much confidence in that as there is in the well-established but completely unrelated effect of smoking on lung capacity.
Ultimately, what this whole exchange boils down to:
How useful.
You are factually incorrect, willfully ignoring my point, and you don’t even appear to know who you’re talking to, confusing me with an above poster in this conversation.
Your misattribution of a specific fallacy as well as your refusal to engage in the actual topic will endure as a mark of shame against you, and I will add you as yet another example in the list of pro-AI outcomes I have observed. Cheers
What about that exchange makes you think they are pro AI? They seemed to be open minded to learning more about the topic but for some reason nothing was resolved.
To be honest with you, at the time I literally just got the vibe they were pro AI based on their defensiveness as well as their evident inability to participate in basic conversation, which is a hallmark of AI induced enfeeblement. I went with my gut, in other words
Ah, and my gut was correct. A quick look through their posting history just from this week reveals they use AI and are looking forward to its further inclusion in Firefox. Half their comments generally are defending AI tech giants, including minimizing the environmental and privacy concerns.
My 2c on a different topic - open minded people don’t try to discredit you on a technicality while actively shoehorning you into it and ignoring your actual words. I don’t detect the faintest hint of willingness to learn, either. We’re talking about the same person?
Looking through the interaction again, perhaps you are right and I was reading into it too much. They were stuck trying to get you to admit brain rot isn’t a forgone conclusion and wouldn’t accept that you already answered it noting this was your experience. I do want to add to one of their points. If you start with a premise that AI causes brain rot and you are generally hostile/aggressive in pushing that view, I would imagine it becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy that you will only have negative interactions with brain rotted individuals.
I think “brain rot” is because most people are lazy. YouTube/TikTok/TV “causes” brain rot in the same way. If people want to turn off their brain and fill it with mush, it will happen regardless. Counterpoint - I reference videos on YouTube fairly often for helping me fix something or learning to play an instrument.
AI use is probably the biggest threat to what I am calling “lazy” people because it is interactive, “addictive”, and the sycophantic direction it’s taking just can’t be healthy, but I’m not so sure people will come to depend on it any more than other technologies. I’m sure you saw the news of AI contributing toward suicides, but as a counterpoint, organizing knowledge for me to make decisions is one of the things I use it for. It gets in the way and tries to steer me in the wrong direction sometimes, but overall it is useful in non-sycophantic interactions (e.g., agentic tool use). The honeymoon phase of conversational AI has been over for me for a while. Hopefully I keep an immunity to bullshit like YouTube, social media and AI (yet to be seen and I’m sure you’ll set me straight :) ) and whatever comes next, and I’ll try not to demonize the new thing either.
Signed, A brain rotted individual