I’ve been digging into the rabbit hole for a few months. Been switching to Linux, FOSS everything I can, trying to go to smaller sites, the least dubious social media, VPN, trusted mail, etc etc
But lately I’ve been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it’s always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn’t this basically cancelling every effort I’ve made? (using it in the first place anyway)
I’m weak and it helps me, should I just throw my efforts out of the window and just say I don’t care about privacy anymore and use whatever everyone uses? (on one hand, I’ve found alternatives for almost everything, so I could keep on using those, but also, again, if I keep on using GPT on a regular basis, this is probably the worst threat the future has to offer in termes of privacy, so…I’m lost)
First off, I can’t personally cast any stones: I sometimes use chatGPT so summarize a text or help me debug a code. I resisted the idea at first, but many of the other students of my promotion recommended it. Almost any time I asked someone for help, they either told me to use chatGPT or themselves prompted it my question. I try to do without it as much as I can, and I never prompt a queston without having spent several minutes looking for an answer online written by a human, but I have difficulties in several subjects and I’ve already failed my first semester, so it’s not easy to scorn a possible source of help when all else fails… I’ve installed locally a light weight version of Deepseek on my computer to get some of the benefits with a smaller climate footprint and staying in the Open Source side of the force, but so far I haven’t found it satisfactory, perhaps I’ll try a heavier version of the model.
But now, it seems you’re using it for something way different. You say it dictates what you think, do you have difficulty parsing your own thoughts? I don’t think you should feel guilty for it, if you need the help, but I do feel somewhat concerned. Large Language Models only learn and repeat patterns, I don’t think it’s a good tool for introspection, because it’s giving you more generic thoughts and only making it seem personal. It is common for people who enjoy reading to find in the text things they’ve thought themself without being able to word it and to feel a connection with the author. But in this case, you still know these words are from someone else’s mind. You see where the connection starts and where it ends. I think reading helps being good at putting one’s thoughts in words, and is healthier than using an llm for it. You should probably also write, even if you keep it for yourself. That way, you’ll be certain that these thoughts are your own.
Worse, it’s doing that lazily. People think that just because it has a gigantic database of information that it’s able to parse all that information and put together summaries of that sum total of information, but what it does in reality is find the first solution it can cobble together from anonymous internet sources and present that as an “answer.”
Asking a generic code question about data structures is less likely to produce bad answers, since there’s little disagreement in how to implement them. They’re close to brute facts, and a wrong answer is rarely catastrophic. Asking it about psychology or philosophy, however, is prone to terrible answers, not just because there’s vast disagreement in those fields, but there’s also a lot of personal consideration when it comes to applying the information to individuals.
Kind of Supposedly ADHD, anxiety, and other things Dictate via microphone helps in many ways for me
I don’t really use it for introspection, always for information
Good thinking, thanks, I do still read tho, no worries (might not seem like it in my writing, english is not my first language). I’ve never been a writer, I’m usually into forms of expression that are more direct to me, like drawing and music