Hi everyone. I’m a senior Computer Engineering student and my girlfriend is a senior Mechanical Engineering student.

She is caring, cute, clever and really thoughtful. I love everything about her. But the one thing that always bugs me out is the amount of AI she uses.

When we met 2 years ago the first topic we talked about was about AI and ever since that day I always mentioned her the advancements and dangers of AI. I said how there can’t be ethical AI and any use of it is harmful.

She agrees with me every time and says she will decrease her usage but at the end she uses it still. Projects, reports, homeworks all go through the LLM. She shows me her work and I can’t congratulate her without forcing myself because I know it’s AI.

She has diagnosed ADHD and I think this might be one of the reasons but I still don’t understand. She sometimes spends hours working. If she had spent that time with pen and paper she could’ve reached the same conclusions she did with AI but with more understanding of her work.

I don’t want to upset her but also seeing someone this close to me do this is saddening to me. What should I do? Should I just ignore it?

  • Goldholz @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    3 hours ago

    I also have ADHD and dont use AI.

    What i do with my partner who also uses AI to do stuff on their website or the server, and when ever I call them out for it, they get defensive. So i just ignore it now. It is not a thing i want to throw the relationship away for.

    We are both IT. Them Sys. Admin, me Software Dev…

  • LeftReddit2@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    3 hours ago

    Have you explained to her why you’re against LLMs? How they work? This is how I got some of my friends to stop using ChatGPT or Character.ai

    When you peek behind the curtain and see these are just algorithms, at their core, they become a lot less impressive.

    If nothing else, at least push her to use Local AI models using something like ollama or odysseus or LMstudio. This helped get one other friend off AI because, guess what, running this on your own machine makes you feel the consequences of it.

  • CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    4 hours ago

    Aside from the AI subject just agreeing with you everytime, then not changing, is a form of fawning. It’s avoidant, it usually comes from a disorganized attachment style. I only bring this up because this isn’t really about AI it’s about her behavior around it and taking inventory on the relationship and each partners attachment style can help communication, understanding and decision making.

  • m3t00🌎🇺🇦@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 hours ago

    wife developed a tictoc/youtube habit but actually does many of the subjects she watches; gardening, cooking, sewing, etc. I can’t stand the snail’s pace of information from most videos and have to skip around. she also asks her phone AI for details like ‘how to plant tomatoes?’, which gives an acceptable answer, I guess. I’m RTFM old school and look up such things starting from an index. skip around a lot. I’ve tried asking questions but AI always misunderstands my questions, so I don’t use it. If she can make money working with an LLM, it will be okay. I wouldn’t want to be the first to operate any machine designed that way.

  • majster@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    4 hours ago

    Eh you are overreacting. But one thing is crucial, is she using any proprietary software out of her own volition?

    • Ginny [they/she]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 hours ago

      I’m anti-AI but these two things are not remotely similar. You can’t slowly Claude yourself to death over a number of years as your friends and family are forced to watch.

      • ConsistentParadox@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        3 hours ago

        AI psychosis is a real thing, and multiple people have committed suicide because of it.

        There are lawsuits against AI companies for those deaths.

        So yes, you can in fact “Claude yourself to death”.

  • FoxAlive@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 hours ago

    Yeah ignore it. Really if it bugs you that much I would do something about it, but that feels dramatic to me. But I’m not in your shoes and I don’t know your moral compass or how annoying this girlfriend is with her ai use. This is really a you issue though and I would not ask peoples advice, and if you wanted real advice I wouldn’t ask the anti ai space for one.

    I can tell you though, there’s tons of things I can tell you about my partner and what they do and how it bugs me. Every time they use our stove I say never put it above 6 just give it time. And everytime we Cook the stove is blasted on full.

    I could get up set and argue about it which I did for a short period of time. But clearly they aren’t going to change and I’m being obnoxious about it.

    That doesn’t mean i don’t love them, its just a balance of learning eachothers quirks and embracing them rather than making things more adversarial than it needs to be. But again I can’t draw those lines for you, you can’t ignore something that really bugs you. Really just talk to them about it.

  • ace_garp@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    12 hours ago

    Below is one of the best sourced comments that I’ve seen about listing the negative aspects of LLMs/AI.

    One of my main ones is, thinking about spinning up a jet engine, next to someone’s backyard, each time a LLM is used for a web search.

    Stick to the facts when you explain your views, explore ways to run local models for her if you can stretch that far.


    Reasons not to use AI-LLM artificial intelligence. (There is probably a bunch more in the 7 months since this list was written.)

    https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045

  • DriftingLynx@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    19 hours ago

    Using it for school work is demonstrably not learning. In fact using an LLM is antithical to learning: it’s cognitive offloading.

    If she cares about actually learning she’d do her own school work.

    That’s the problem I see here… my 2¢

  • techsenslavingus@lemmus.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    17 hours ago

    Perhaps address the impact this will have in the future in her career. From decades of experience in the mechanical field, I will tell you that if she doesn’t have the knowledge in her head she will get laughed at and fired. AI has not really penetrated the mechanical field. Yes, there is AI in CAD and other software, but at best it is for tinkerers and not scalable. Without the knowledge she won’t last a month in a mech eng role, assuming she manages to even get one.

    • ducktumn@lemmy.zipOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      17 hours ago

      She recently used AI in Solidworks to generate a ladder and said everyone at the internship is doing the same and telling her its the future.

      Do you think that’s the case? Atleast for CAD in particular.

      • techsenslavingus@lemmus.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 hours ago

        She may be considered for an entry level mech eng role, but based on her workflow her knowledge of fundamentals of mechanical design would be questioned. Generating models is very minor. She needs to understand basics of construction, manufacturing, material selection, design limitations and most critically overlooked, tolerances. She won’t become a senior engineer without being a junior engineer and the learning curve is steep. The CAD portion is general grunt work, which to be clear is what she is offloading here. That grunt work is where a mech eng refines their knowledge of the previously mentioned topics and learns how to apply them to mechanical design for manufacturing, assembly and user experience, skills which a good mech eng is trying to develop. This isn’t even touching on designing for strict constraints like regulatory standards. Engineering is a delicate balance of a million different compromises, and she must understand the compromises she is making with her designs. If it was about just chugging out models she would be screwed along with every other junior mech eng, and would be replaced by AI. This won’t happen because AI is not trustworthy, lies and hallucinates. The design review method is done by a person with whom you can have meaningful dialogue with. AI erodes critical thinking, which is what she needs to learn, but isn’t while using AI.

  • jaschop@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    18 hours ago

    I’m sure enough people have told you to yeet her into the sun. I empathize if you decide you want to work this through with her. I have had issues like this with my own partner.

    I found this video essay by Dr. Fatima helpful to empathize in my case. You agree on some of the fundamentals it seems. She has a habit and somewhat agrees that it’s bad. But due to stress or whatever reason she can’t kick it. So try to help her to work on this. It’s good to keep in mind that even half-measures can do lots of good. Maybe she isn’t super principaled in her AI abstention like you, but there’s a wide range between occasional indulgance and full-on dependency.

    One seemingly small thing that reduced a lot of conflict for us was me replacing her search widget on her android. She kept quoting AI summaries from Google at me and I kept getting annoyed until I offered to help by changing it to DuckDuckGo. Maybe you’re better skilled in configuring your devices and can offer to protect her from addictive design patterns she is barely aware of.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    18 hours ago

    I’ve had experiences that relate to your post, and I understand how difficult it can be to be in your position. I can’t really make your decisions for you, but hopefully some of the following will help:

    First, since I made the post I linked here, my mother made an abrupt and unexpected reversal. One day out of the blue, she asked me to help her switch her default search engine on her computer to noai.duckduckgo.com and switch her phone’s browser to the Duck Duck Go browser and disable all AI features. (She’s not technical, so she appreciated, wanted, and requested the tech support assistance.) I don’t really know what prompted her to make the switch, but I’m elated by it. She’s still quite addicted to YouTube/Facebook shorts and some of the videos I see just by virtue of the fact that they’re playing in my viscinity are slop, but she usually makes the comment that “oh, that’s AI”. (Hell, we watched something on some streaming platform that had a slop scam ad targeting seniors with promises of some “Medicare grocery card” or something and my mother was the one who pointed out it was AI.) Her attitude has changed on the topic quite drastically. Between that post and my mother’s reversal, I did tell her “don’t read me that slop” or “yeah, but you can’t trust that because it’s LLM output” not terribly infrequently when she read me Google AI summaries or “oh, that’s not real though” when she’d show me a slop YouTube short. So it’s not like she didn’t get that I disapproved, and I think part of the reason for the reversal was probably for my benefit specifically. I’ve always been careful not to make any demands on her about things that aren’t my business. If she wants to consume slop content, that’s not really on me to correct. (To express concern, maybe, but not to demand she changes how she stewards her own brain.) But I don’t want that shit infecting my brain with LLM-hallucinated misconceptions, and I’ve been careful to make it clear that the boundaries I’m setting are where she ends and I begin. I’m not trying to control her, I’m trying to control me.

    Second, I usually try to avoid making predictions about the future, but more and more voices are saying now that there’s a strong possibility the AI bubble will pop within a couple of years. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are all giving away LLM access at a huge loss. They’ve already bumped prices and gamed the system to extract more revenue, but it isn’t enough. At some point they’ll have to either shutter their generative AI efforts or start charging what they actually cost (and then shutter their generative AI efforts when it becomes even more clear that virtually nobody is willing to pay anywhere near that). Assuming that all goes down the way I’m hoping, at that point your girlfriend may well basically lose access to LLMs. (Running LLMs locally is a little cheaper in the long run, but there’s a steep effort curve and a steep up-front-cost curve (not to mention ongoing power usage bills) to get anything that even the boosters would call acceptable results. I doubt any significant portion of people using LLMs today will undertake such and effort or cost.) All that to say, there’s a strong possibility she’ll quit using Generative AI just by virtue of an impending massive bubble pop.

    I dunno. I probably am not one to take advice from when it comes to relationships (or economics, for that matter). You’ll have to decide how to address and/or deal with this issue yourself. I told you what I did and what resulted. I think boundaries, done properly, are generally a good thing. I didn’t think it would work for me to pretend I was fine with being force-fed slop frequently and it worked out. But whatever you end up doing, I hope your situation resolves similarly positively. Good luck.

  • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    1 day ago

    Commenting just to reiterate what a lot of the other comments are saying. It’s ok if AI use is a dealbreaker for you, it would be for me. I personally have a list of companies I boycott and if my partner didn’t care enough to also boycott them then in my opinion we just wouldn’t align enough to stay together. That being said, you can also just decide that not using AI is important to you but you will tolerate it in a partner. My main advice if that’s the route you go would be to be clear that you don’t personally use it and draw clear boundaries. It’s ok to say for example “if you use AI for a project I’m not interested in reviewing/discussing it”. Maybe that’s a dealbreaker for her, I don’t know, but I’d just sit down with yourself and determine 1) if it’s a dealbreaker or not and 2) if it’s not a dealbreaker what your boundaries about it are. You just have to be ready for whatever her decision is regarding that. If you tell her it’s not a dealbreaker then you should just let it go. No one likes being nagged. But you also don’t have to support it, just be clear about that and keep consistent with whatever you said you were/weren’t going to do when she brings it up.

    Also, I think the comments calling you controlling are out of line. You can have preferences regarding your partners behavior. It only becomes controlling in very specific conditions. If you’re unclear about your desires and then retaliate against her without her knowing why that would be one way of being controlling. If you’re open and honest and communicate that you have a preference and are open to her response then you’re probably perfectly fine. The most important thing is clear communication and respecting each others boundaries.

    • Mirror Giraffe@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 hours ago

      Having a partner doing something that don’t align can definitely be hard to deal with. My fiance is the best person I know, I love everything about her, but sometimes she endorses the murder, rape, torture and breeding of animals for the sake of taste.

      To me it makes no sense, but I accept that we have different priorities. If I were to look down on all people that make different choices than me I would be lonely and I don’t think hanging out with vegans gives me better life quality than being with my friends and family.