"Just Ask Claude" Is a Rare and Valuable Skill(justismills.substack.com) |
"Just Ask Claude" Is a Rare and Valuable Skill(justismills.substack.com) |
This is why I hate when people paste a response from Claude/ChatGPT to me when I ask them a question.
I think the only people I know that complain of this are the ones that don’t use the tools. And the only people I’m inclined to reply are also the people that don’t use the tools.
For people that do, the question is usually formatted differently - either it’s obvious Claude wouldn’t help, or they explain why it wasn’t helpful.
I have trouble saying "I" when an LLM has done the leg work.
"I found a report with this info..." turns into "There's a report with this info". heh.
Clearly, for some people, "type into a search bar" is some sort of cognitive obstacle, and "go bother another person" isn't.
Now that I'm thinking about it: maybe the likes of OpenAI have the right idea when they invest into conversational models? Does it meaningfully reduce the workload of flesh proxies?
Anyway, I guess that's so different now when kids have internet devices in their hands and now even moreso with an AI assistant that has the worlds knowledge
Youtube music is also serviceable enough if you're not picky about mobile UX. Comes included with a basic yt premium subscription.
I'll always tell people, no other subscription - software or otherwise - comes close to providing the real-world value that yt premium does for that little money.
The principled position behind "you should install something" is that in the scenario you outline, you cannot just install something, and this is a kind of power over you that you are relinquishing to both YouTube and the TV manufacturer. You will not get it back.
You don't have to start doing their research for them, or copying and pasting or transcribing Claude's answer.
There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.
This gradual accruing of more and more falsehood will hurt us in the coming years, big time.
EDIT: I just asked Claude a very basic question on an area I'm an expert in and it gave me a partially true and misleading answer. I drilled in on the false part and it wiggled and gave more confusing, incorrect, poor justifications for why it gave me the clearly wrong information. If someone was not an expert, there is absolutely no way they could fact-check this. Instead, the falsehood would be written, published somewhere, and would serve as a base for more falsehood in the future.
Go check out the collective social knowledge of some political groups, and it's clear that we don't need to wait for "coming years" to be hurt by misinformation and disinformation. AI had very little to do with this.
Also, a good Claude-asker should be capable of a decent level of fact-checking, and shouldn't in fact be a pure meat proxy.
Corrupt actors have always existed, of course, but AI automates, normalizes, and scales this to a fundamentally different level.
This is more or less why writing was invented thousands of years ago, the amount of knowledge exceeds human memory
If your writing is compressible, you are doing it wrong.
EDIT: I see your point. Same mechanism, different substrate.
And less mental effort as well, since the subscription forces to stay in guard for enshittification (are there now ads in my tier? Did the price go up?).
NewPipe/PipePipe are free
You are welcome
Firefox with uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the correct move.
If on mobile, Duckduckgo app has Duck Player.
OTOH, I do begrudge them all the scams they have accepted ads for in the past.