All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI. “Another brick in the wall” hits stronger than ever now.
Unless you’re saying that people using ai is causing you to isolate yourself and bottle up your own feelings that’s not the correct song to use.
I prefer “meat proxy”.
People who use the internet are actual NPCs. I’m the only main character here.
I don’t know what an NPC is but I like using AI because it’s a cheap form of therapy. Even though they’re keeping notes without HIPAA laws in place I figure I don’t matter enough to get put on some sort of government blah blah blah. I’m just another fucked up individual. One of billions I’d imagine.
Non-player character, a bot.
Like you are a robot, letting a statistical output dictate your stuff.
Please don’t use LLMs for therapy. I know it feels like it’s helping, but LLMs are specifically designed to tell you what you want to hear. People have been convinced to do some very terrible things because the LLMs keep reinforcing beliefs instead of challenging them or pushing back.
I know everything kind of sucks right now, but don’t make it worse by letting the LLM/AI economy start messing with your actual brain.
Non-player character. Normally a completely reasonable term from video games where, depending on the game, most characters you encounter might not be players.
Then it started being used by the alt-right to refer to people who disagree with them and therefore aren’t people who actually think for themselves but rather following a script, so using it to describe real people is kinda gross. The reasoning being “they believe what everyone else does so they’re sheeple/NPCs”. Because only controversial beliefs are an indication of being capable of thought.
Citing “Another Brick In The Wall” is suspiciously generic and uncreative.
And not even relevant to OPs metaphor
Are you offended?
This is exactly the kind of black and white reasoning that annoys me about online discourse. The camps of “neverslop” and “techbro shill” are extremely vocal, and squeeze out anyone in between with a nuanced opinion (like myself). And I know I’m not the only one because I get upvotes!
Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now? If anyone might be an authority on the ethical use of ai, it would be him.
“But Glitch, that’s an appeal to authority fallacy!”
Okay, hypothetical strawman, you have a point.
Sure, there’s people who exist who operate like how op describes. I’m not disputing that. But saying everyone who uses ai at all is braindead is both incorrect and insulting. I use ai for some shit, it’s genuinely a somewhat useful tool and middling quality entertainment. But did ai write this comment? No, it did not, nor has ai told me what my opinions should be. So, proposal disproved by counterexample.
Someone is going to tell me I’m taking this too seriously, i can feel it.
Is he an unthinking npc now?
As the creator and leading expert on Linux, he’s ultimately responsible for the project.
The NPCs have no responsibility, they are just there.
this one time I had a huge 200 file folder full of ugly filenames i needed to be standardized to use in a script. Renaming them all manually was easily a 3 hour job at least. I described the end result name syntax i wanted and gave the full list of the current file names to an llm, and it gave me a powershell script that renamed every file for me perfectly in 2 minutes.
could i have coded that myself? sure. but then I’d be deciding between “three hours making a complicated file renaming script or 3 hours or manually renaming 200 files for 3 hours”. The llm solved my problem for me and allowed me to continue with my actual work rather than wasting time doing data entry.
is this stupid npc behavior? if it is then it sure seems like only npc idiots like saving time.
Yup, that is where I also use AI for. The boring stuff. Clicking on repeat for 3 hours and then it turns out you made a mistake and need to do it all over again. No thanks.
The creative things I do myself.
I think that’s perfectly reasonable, just review the script first for anything that might break your pc.
The AI discourse is rather pointless when you see how much people are willing to bend their own opinions. So that it’s always in the right, and one step further is the sloppery slope to hell
As you mentioned. Look at the Linux communities. Before Linus came out in support it was “Microslop” this “vibe coded OS” that. And now suddenly, AI is actually a good thing.
Or G*mers. On the one hand they’re complaining about AI games being sold on Steam. But on the other hand they’ll also defend Steam selling AI games. But on the other hand complain when Epic sells AI games. And then on the other hand they’ll praise AI piracy and emulators.
The AI discourse is rather pointless when you see how much people are willing to bend their own opinions. So that it’s always in the right, and one step further is the sloppery slope to hell
yup, guilty of that myself.
As you mentioned. Look at the Linux communities. Before Linus came out in support it was “Microslop” this “vibe coded OS” that. And now suddenly, AI is actually a good thing.
Both things are true. Linus has a proven track record of being good at his job and knowing what he’s talking about. Microsoft has a proven track record of producing shit, and making their products worse. Giving them ai just makes them do what they were already doing faster. Linus speaking out didn’t change my opinion on the matter, it only confirmed the current iteration of my opinions on ai that I’ve been slowly developing over the past few years.
Or G*mers. On the one hand they’re complaining about AI games being sold on Steam. But on the other hand they’ll also defend Steam selling AI games. But on the other hand complain when Epic sells AI games. And then on the other hand they’ll praise AI piracy and emulators.
Gamers as a collective are fucking morons. That aside, I don’t hold all developers to the same standard. A solo dev with no funding is not the same as a 200 man team with the backing of a multi billion dollar publisher. Holding them both to the same standards is asinine. So if the next GTA/Elder Scrolls/Call of Duty/Final Fantasy/Whatever has vibe code or slop assets, gamers are absolutely right to rake those studios over the coals. They have the money to pay for programmers and artists. There is no excuse.
On the other hand, our nameless ideal solo dev who’s struggling to so much as pay rent, fuckit go nuts. Vibe code the whole thing, slop out the assets, whatever. Just review the damn code, and curate the assets. If the project has any creative passion whatsoever, that will come through in how the slop is put together. I see using ai assets the same as using packaged assets from, say, the unity store: you didn’t make it, but what’s more important is how you use it.
And on ai piracy and emulators, I’m just tickled by the giant ai shaped middle finger pointed at nintendo and the ai companies.
Holy shit, you dropped this 👑
I love external validation!
It sounds like, for the purposes of this post, you and many other people would not be in the “People who use AI” category:
All their responses are generated, no conscience there, just AI.
I have coworkers who are effectively meat proxies. I think the term NPC applies well to how interacting with these folks feels, since it does feel like I’m not talking to a real human, but a computer trying to appear human.
Is OPs net too wide? Probably, yeah. But the sentiment is real, the frustration is real, and contextualizing those interactions as with NPCs resonates.
Have your fun with using AI, but there’s no need to yum our yuck.
How practical :
- “everyone in this group is stupid”
- “That’s wrong”
- “no but i only mean the stupid ones”
Ah yes, the “Everyone is a true Scotsman” fallacy
Something something the fallacy fallacy
Oh I’m right there with you (and op) in your annoyance with meat proxies. I just don’t want to be lumped in with them. The amount of times I deal with someone telling me “chat gpt said I need xyz thing” and I have to explain that what they’re asking for is impractical/impossible/expensive/doesn’t exist. And then they get mad at me about it! Fuckers.
Fuck, Linus Torvalds uses ai. Is he an unthinking npc now?
yep.
imho you’re not taking it seriously enough sport. if you were, you’d have stopped using AI.
I recently tried using AI as a test for therapy. Omg. It has no idea what it’s talking about. It makes wild assumptions, defends the indefensible, and will always tell you it doesn’t really know once you push back on it a little bit.
It’s honestly useless for information. It’s an auto-coder. That’s all.
garbage in, garbage out
For those who say “what about ethical uses of AI?” and “but what if it actually useful?”:
Two things can be true at the same time:
- Technology is legitimately useful.
- Technology is so harmful it shouldn’t exist.
We didn’t “cancel” asbestos for an all-around better material. We got rid of it wherever we could due to the harms of it. AI is harming our society, since it attempts to replace human communication with technology.
All the outrage about AI around here is the outrage that should have been targeted towards social media in the past 10 years. The corporations that want to control societies communication while injecting their nefarious plots are already doing so.
Very few critics hit the point, which is the tech Bros utopia is to make us all superfluous as workers. That is the story we should challenge, and not lazily repeat criticism that doesn’t reflect the real world.
All the outrage about AI around here is the outrage that should have been targeted towards social media in the past 10 years
Agreed, but AI has grown the movement against them. So we are where we are.
I don’t see that
Oh, you see the rage against AI and social media as separate different targets?
I see it as rage against big tech in general.
Indeed I see there’s a difference. AI is much more than just the tech Bros version of it. If transferred to social media, the outrage would want to abolish not only Instagram and TicToc, but also the fediverse.
when AI poses an actual threat to quality of life, whether it’s access to affordable power, water, ram, gpus etc., it should always take the back seat.
Not this stupid silly bullshit:
There are many, many effective ways to oppose AI. Dehumanizing everyone that uses it isn’t one of them.
Dehumanization is a line I won’t cross, maybe with the exception of Nazis. This is a little too casual.
wow, you’re so quick to humanize people who believe their VMware friends than actual humans.
Dehumanization
Feels a bit unproductive to just call this dehumanization. It could be that sure, but it could also be discussing a kind of real issue of people turning off their higher reasoning and just handing it all over to LLMs. People are treating anything the LLM says as an absolute source of truth and that’s incredibly dangerous as a society - they’re essentially willingly becoming literal NPCs whose thoughts are set by whoever decides whatever stances the LLMs should take.
E.g. I’ve recently seen LLMs take ultra conservative stances towards safety calling benign actions dangerous and when asked to find sources literally lie about what sources they find and cite say.
It totally is dehumanizing, no matter how you turn things. Once someone you disagree with is called an NPC there is no meaning in listening to them or respecting them. You can see in this very comment section people saying that those NPC already “gave up living their life”…
My favorite is calling them meat proxies.
I see generative AI the same way I see anabolic steroids. If you’re already versed enough in whatever field, it might not be that bad a thing, but you’re 100% gonna deal with some consequences.
Take me for example, by the time I really got into generative AI in 2023-2024, I already worked IT for like 10-11 years, had several certs, and so I was able to get it to be mostly useful to me because I already knew my job well enough.
Others? I had some coworkers get straight up brainrotted and couldn’t configure a damn Cisco Router without asking ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Deepseek or Gemini or whatever.
And shit, even for people who say, “WHY DON’T WE USE AI TO SOLVE CANCER!?” Like doctors who use AI to do that wind up becoming worse at spotting cancer on their own. Even me, guy with over a decade of IT experience? I felt myself becoming dumber when I use AI too much and have to take like tolerence breaks to go back to the old ways of scrolling old tech forums to find the answer.
shoutouts to simpleflips
medical doctors wouldnt be “solving” cancer. you make it seem like Dr. Thickfingers is going to use chatgpt to detect cancer in someones anus. no, medical researchers would use an ai assisted tools is what that would mean
you make it seem like Dr. Thickfingers is going to use chatgpt to detect cancer in someones anus.
This made me laugh, that’s funny
Indubitably, to me it points out the absurdity of the original notion that medical doctors are using chat gpt to do things like “solve cancer”
People who use AI to outsource their creativity and ideas are NPCs. People who have ideas and use AI to bring those ideas into fruition are at least neutral.
This
Antis saying the same thing over and over and then accusing others of being NPCs. Classic.
ever spoken to a person that heavily uses llms, thier response is to use CHATGPT every single time.
I have a coworker who I used to bounce ideas off of all the time. Even just “hey am I over engineering this?”, which was great. I don’t have that anymore because the response is always “chat says …”. If I wanted to ask an llm why wouldn’t I just do it myself?
Maybe it’s not about whether they are or are not NPCs, but the time they spend being as one. I also think spending time scrolling, having all your content delivered to you via an algorithm, also is kind of like spending time being an NPC.
And driving in traffic is usually time spent being an NPC
Using AI is way more pro-active than all those examples.
