First of all I don’t live in a neighbourhood with something equivalent of a HOA, but we do have an organisational unit that involves the group of 6 homes where I live in.
We had a meeting regarding the repair of a shared drain pipe following an inspection we had earlier this year, the camera inspection had a cost of €120 that was equally divided among 6 households, so €20 each, nice and easy.
After getting the quote for the repairs, one of our neighbours asked chatgpt to split the bill, €1500 divided by 6.
edit: paraphrasing, he proudly said "I asked chatgpt and 1500/6 is 250”
Do you really need to ask an LLM to divide two numbers? something the cheapest calculator can do instantly, or better yet, something you can easily do I your head?
It’s crazy how people go out of their way to ask chatbots for things it would be easier to do the normal way. A while back I saw someone post that they asked ChatGPT for a random seed for a new Minecraft world. ffs! It’s literally built into the game to automatically generate a random seed when creating a new world without you doing anything.
Honestly. It feels like some people have become so dependent on LLMs that they’ll ask them to solve the even most basic of questions.
Our bodies evolved on a “use it or lose it” basis, and like every other muscle in our bodies, the brain is not immune to this…
If you let your brain sit idle while passing on such simple tasks to AI, the neuronal pathways for these tasks will weaken to the point you’ll have to relearn them from scratch.
These AI companies want this to happen. They want more and more people to become dependent, so that once they decide to rug pull you with the true cost, you’ll have no choice but to pay up because you can’t cope without it. This is true not just for humans but even entire industries as a whole, who have very keenly taken to replacing humans with it.
I believe this is what you’re insinuating. The kids will grow up incapable of learning anything, and then we will die out.
Pruning is influenced by environmental factors. For instance, if the eyes are sewn shut in the critical period when synaptic pruning of the retina takes place, the lack of input of light will cause the synaptic connections required for vision to die off, resulting in blindness.[1][10]
That’s some Nazi level experimental torture shit
There’s a good chance that’s where the experimental data came from in the first place.
and then we will die out
So there is an upside?
I suppose so, though only the morons who use ChatGPT for everything will live to see it, under this theory.
Hey. At least he was upfront with using an unreliable source. It’s a low bar, but deserves some positive reinforcement. As other people do the same thing, they just don’t get scolded because they keep it hidden.
I did reply “yes, 1500 divided by 3 is 500 and divided by 2 is 250”. No acknowledgement of my commentary tho.
Hmmh. Zero recognition of critical thinking.
Sorry for giving unsolicited advice: I think from an education perspective, you could do even better next time. Don’t provide them with the answer. That’s generally not what we do in teaching. They’ll stay passive this way, as they still don’t need to activate their brain once they get the answer handed on a silver platter. I’d rather reply something like: “And how do you know this is the correct answer?” That forces them to activate a few brain cells. And maybe whilst switching to active mode, their brain is able to store some new information. At least it might connect going with the lazy option (asking ChatGPT) came with some extra effort they themselves had to put in (by checking the maths). You kinda took that experience away from them because you did the extra work for them. Just don’t expect any miracles. It just increases the odds a bit someone will learn something. But in the end they’ll still need to do the thinking and learning themselves.
I would have said “thanks for confirming with tons of long term ecological damage what you could have done in your head in 3 minutes, or checked on the built in calculator of whatever device you’re using and been done in less time than it took me to write this message that, while petty, I feel is necessary to mock the use of chatgpt.”
I uh… Don’t get along with dumb neighbors.
I’m a little surprised it gave the right answer. Although those are relatively common numbers, so it does make sense that it would.
I’ve seen people writing 1500/6 into google to make a calculation and was flabbergasted. Of course the stupidity can be worse…
That’s not AI tho. It actually does the calculation
Google at least has a actual calculator rather then the plagiarism machine maybe getting it right.
Also, AI models are so bad at math that some of them even tell you that right up front. You just don’t ask a bullshit machine for facts.
To be fair: why should you search for the calculator app on your phone when you have ChatGPT right on your first page? (Assuming the AI would be able to do maths without errors)
Edit: People here really think that everyone is totally aware what the flaws of AI are. Of course that’s a stupid thing to do. But you some people don’t really think about such “small” decisions.
Because you’re trashing the environment, wasting compute cycles, unnecessarily transferring data, wasting bandwidth (however small), etc?
Just use the calculator app bro.
Or do some mental math. It’s not a particularly hard one to do.
Some people will do anything to prevent having to do math. Part of my job includes counting tally marks from a sheet and entering it into a file. My coworkers use click-counters (which we all have because we use them for other tasks) and will sit there clicking the thing over and over again just to write down the final number. Meanwhile, I scan the page and use mental math to quickly come to an answer. I count twice to be sure, and I’m still done quicker than the click-counters.
It’s funny, when I started I was given a click-counter and told I could use it for this task. I responded that I’d get too hung up thinking I accidentally clicked it too many or too few times, and would probably end up in a loop clicking and resetting the thing over and again because of it. They’re tally marks, they’re not complicated, it’s much easier to just count them in my head than introduce a tool that will provide a new margin of error.
If a room of >6 people can’t work out 1500/6 in their heads, they don’t deserve to have their drain fixed.
why should you search for the calculator app on your phone when you have ChatGPT right on your first page?
I think this is only a valid question because the tech industry has worked so very, very hard to conceal all of the hidden costs of AI.
A question that’s analogous to your original but takes all of the ridiculous costs into account might be something more like “Why drive 20 minutes to the store when you can get there in a helicopter in 5 minutes?”
Like, yeah… one is faster. But speed isn’t the only variable, and there are plenty of obvious reasons why riding a helicopter to go get groceries or whatever is ridiculous. Soon, when AI firms can no longer afford to subsidize their costs, I think people will start to view AI this same way.
Sora at 15 million USD/day burn rate and 3 million USD in yearly revenues buttresses your point. I did see a guy on here (maybe it was a reddit repost or HN repost bot now that I think of it since lemmy hates ai) doing the math and for his plan that was $150 a month or so his compute costs were between $60 and $120 at the published prices for compute hours. His point was also that the big players would have to stop subsidising eventually.
Yeah, the numbers are kind of crazy if you take the time to dig into them. I’m forced to use Claude at work, but the company has bought all of us in at the $200 a month tier. That subscription gives basically unlimited usage… assuming you stay within Claude’s ecosystem (Claude code, basically).
However, if you want to use Claude with some other tools you have to generate an API key, and that gets billed by token usage (on top of the $200 per month). I know devs who are burning through $100 PER DAY on API usage, and I suspect their usage patterns are not at all unusual for heavy users. But even if it is, you’d still only have to be spending $7 a day in compute for the math on a $200 monthly sub to make sense for Anthropic, so it’s pretty obvious that their subscription customers are losing them money at an insane rate.
I’m pretty sure even doubling the subscription costs wouldn’t be enough for them to break even on compute, which is insane given how expensive a monthly sub is already. Once the VC money runs out and a sub price rises to $1000+ per month, the whole landscape is going to change extremely quickly.
That guy is assuming that the Government won’t bail them out with borrowed tax dollars, which they will. Unless the credit card is already maxxed out, that is happening it’s just a question of when, 37 trillion and counting.
An AI that can answer any math question flawlessly is undecidable.
If you restrict the flawless answers to simple add subtract multiply and divide, then you had might as well use your calculator app. Putting the prompt into the calculator is faster than prompting the AI.
To decide to use the calculator app, you have to know two things first:
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AIs are bad at maths. Some people just never heard of that because they don’t read any tech news and never questioned the results of AI.
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Where your calculator app is. If you rarely use it and take several seconds to find it, prompting “Calculate 1500/6” might actually be faster.
So assuming the person this thread is about never questioned those things, using AI could be considered a logical decision. Not good, but logical.
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Why would you waste the resources of a massive data center to solve a math problem that can be answered more reliably by a calculator that fits in your pocket and runs on a coin cell?
Why should you install AI and link it to first page as that’s the place for calc app.
Are you lost?








