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?
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.
This is absolutely a thing. ADHD fucks the reward center of your brain, so you don’t really feel a lot of satisfaction from working (or any at all). If you spend that time with a pen and paper it just feels like a waste of time, even if you complete the job you set out to do. There’s still the reward at the end of the task, but the work itself does not feel rewarding. Medication helps, but it’s not magic.
What you’re basically telling her is “spend more time miserable” and are surprised she won’t.
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…
Unpopular opinion, but I think the degree to which AI doomerism plays out feels like Internet purity culture.
Eating meat or non-fair trade coffee and chocolate is unethical, driving a car, buying electronics with slave labor mined rare earth metals all do active harm to the world.
I feel like moderate AI use to save time isn’t a huge deal. Text generation is fairly cheap and not that harmful at small scale, if you’re running a swarm trying to solve millennium prizes that’s a much heavier lift.
There is danger in missing out on learning and developing core instincts and judgement when you outsource some of that to AI, but asking it to find something in a disorganized readme or something like that isn’t a huge deal.
The issue is we humans are awful at drawing that line. You eat meat too much no big deal. Drink coffee 3 times a day it’s fine. Spend too much money on ethical chocolate it’s fine. But AI is different.
Eventually there is a high probability of that moderate usage turning into frequent usage. If everyone used AI responsibly (like an advanced Google and sometimes grammar checks) it would be a great tool. But %99.9 people does not do that.
Idk, part of being in a relationship with an adult is acknowledging their autonomy. Where is the line between having an active college social life and a drug or alcohol problem? Sometimes that’s clear cut sometimes not. If it starts affecting their academic life you can voice your concerns but if you’re not ok with how they respond including ignoring you, you have to choose between not bringing it up again or leaving.
Maybe you also aren’t seeing the issue objectively either maybe the AI usage is being done responsibly and your GF is actually getting a real understanding of the material. I’m not saying I know everything, but might be worth considering if this is you externalizing your fears and concerns and this is maybe a legitimate difference in how both of you choose to engage with this technology.
You eat meat too much no big deal.
Do you not understand how harmful the factory farming of meat is to the environment? It’s orders of magnitude worse for the environment than data centres used for AI are.
I understand that there are other considerations in the overuse of AI beyond just the environment, but downplaying how bad our species mass consumption of meat actually is, is a pretty shitty thing to do.
A person “eating to much meat” isn’t “no big deal”
Meat eating is not the bad part here. It’s the manufacturing of that said meat. We are animals and eating other animals is natural. Again the issue how we treat them and feed them.
Also I meant “no big deal” for the person. As in health benefits or dangers. Of course meat industry is awful.
And the only realistic way to eat that meat is to get it from the manufacturers you numpty. They create the environment destroying supply to meet the astronomical demand. If everyone ate much less meat, the demand would go down and thus the manufacturers would create less supply.
I mean with those prices I don’t think anyone can eat that much meat lol
Are you purposefully being obtuse? Most people eat meat at least once a day. That’s a massive demand.
Replace “uses AI” with “is an alcoholic” and follow similar advice.
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.
See that’s where I’m going to disagree with you. I can name a handful of people who are logically dead already. Tons of people have destroyed their lives (and lost their lives) due to the psychosis they were allowed to build up while conversing only with AI.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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¢
Now try saying that about audio books. See the hypocrisy in action.
I could say that about audio books… but it wouldn’t be true.
🧐
I have to disagree here.
If you listen to an audiobook, you still take in all the same info as you would reading the book yourself.
If you use AI to help you with a research paper you will always be offloading part of the task. Use it to gather your sources? You just offloaded the skills of looking for credible evidence to back up your claim. Use it to write the paper after doing the research yourself? You still offload the skill of crafting your arguments, word choice, persuasion, etc.
You are also taking a big risk assuming that the output of the clanker is correct as it usually doesn’t provide you sources to double check yourself.
All I can tell you is that had I been you, I would have told her that her brain is every bit as beautiful as the rest of her, and that I’d hate to see that beauty eroded by her outsourcing her ability to think to a jumped-up Markov Chain.
Yours is the best answer here, bravo!
She’s a STUDENT? Why the hell would you cheat as a student? That seems incredibly counterproductive
A little understanding may help here - some people don’t think of the learning part here or long term. Something new is difficult and an LLM is easier.
It’s not counterproductive if your goal is to complete whatever assignment.
So a better approach might be helping the student focus on the longer term learning goal
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.
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.
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.)
It’s AI, not heroin. Hating AI is great but shouldn’t lead all the way to serious relationship trouble IMO, as long as she doesn’t use LLMs to talk to you directly or something. You can try to understand why she uses it and how it helps her. You can also tell her it feels wrong to you or bothers you that her work is done with AI, or that you don’t want to read it, but at the same time you can still accept that it’s working for her. Dogma doesn’t fair well in relationships
Nah, political views seem pretty important for relationships—like, where do you draw the line? Is racism okay? Is pro-capitalism fine? Is fascism tolerable?
Also, in my opinion, AI is akin to mind-altering drugs: there’s withdrawl, pyschosis, dependency, et cetera. At best, it’s comparable to caffine. At worst… well, people have ended their lives because of it.
I agree. I think it has the potential to cause impairment of thinking if left rampant. It’s like watching a religion take over.
The issue you have is now widening ideas on who the person you love is. It’s easy to say oh just seperate them from thier role, but it’s not that simple, once it’s in your head. If you said my partner has adopted a new religion and it is at odds of how we were, you would likely get more understanding.
Whilst it sounds crazy I think you have to look at hypothetical situations, what if she decided to disclose your data or identifiers to AI? Or what if you have a heated discussion and she chooses its decision over yours?
Is it simple a professional tool then or is it a crutch?
You’re highly unlikely to date someone for a extended period of time and then suddenly learn they actually heavily Catholic or part of the Klan. Generally if you share some basic general interest you share broader interests like politics just because they are related. If I met a girl/guy fishing I shouldn’t be surprised to see a rebel flag tramp stamp on the second date.
If you date someone for 3-6 months then suddenly you notice all the ww2 natzi medals, and marble busts of elon musk in his master bed room then you are also the hot mess.
Most of the things you’re going to have disagreements about politically are minor and trivial. If you do that’s just luck of the bag. No one can just start drawing moral standards and making lines in the sand for you and your relationship that’s just insanity.
I think
She agrees with me every time and says she will decrease her usage but at the end she uses it still.
would be the issue more than the AI usage in and of itself.
Why?
If your partner tells you they’re going to do x and repeatedly does y instead, that’s somewhere between inconsiderate and deceptive. That’s not a good thing in a relationship and should be addressed.
What a shocking (for this platform)-ly helpful, mature, honest, and direct response! Absolutely.
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.
Honestly I get you, I hate the world GenAI is making… but you can’t control what your partner does. You’ve told her your stance on AI, and that you don’t like how dependent she is on it - but it’s her decision and responsibility as to whether she acts on what you’ve said.
If her rampant AI use is a deal-breaker to you, then act on that. Otherwise, if she refuses to stop - then it’ll have to be something to disagree on. Draw the line on things you do together.
