I once met a girl who took a photo of the menu and just asked ChatGPT what to order. We were a big group and we were all left with our mouths open when she did that, and further defended her stance to just let AI make the decision for her.
Edit: typos (at least you know I wrote the comment myself)
As a kid I had a collection of short stories by Paul Jennings (could be someone else, this was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure)
One of these stories was of a boy who gets a toy robot, and you pull a lever and it gives out either a yes or a no. As long as he did what the robot said, good things always came of it. Even if he really didn't want to do it, he did and it always paid off. The part I remember is that it told him to pick up an insect on a leaf on the pavement and put it somewhere safer, and I think someone saw him do it and rewarded him for his kindness
Towards the end of the story it gets very... real. His parents are getting a divorce, and the family is falling apart. While he's sitting in the back of the car, he asks the robot which parent he should live with. It wasn't clear how the robot answered, but after the boy sees it he throws the robot out of the window
I think about that story more and more over time. It's incredibly depressing to realise that the boy is now smarter than the vast majority of adults, and we have evidence of that
Edit: just looked it up, it was called "eyes knows" if anyone's interested. At the time I thought it was a really interesting story
Well, it's not really about that. It's about having an external voice dictate your actions. The boy would rather make his own decisions than be told which one to make, even if it's a guaranteed way of getting the best outcome. It's about things like AI
But this isn't even that, it's more like a flattery machine that will arbitrarily pick one random thing and then endlessly justify it after the fact. Seriously try asking it if ingredient X goes in dish Y and 90% of the time it'll say something like yeah that's such an interesting combination you're so special... sometimes it'll try to get you to use only a very small amount of an ingredient like 1/4tsp and then if you ask should I use 1/32 instead it'll say yeah that's an even better idea because it secretly thinks you definitely fucking shouldn't use any but doesn't want to displease you.
not that this helps any with all the gullible idiots outsourcing their thinking to LLMs, but you can get proper answers to questions such as yours if you format your question/prompt better and more specifically
I've tried and certain things just require a lot of effort up front to get it to do what you want, and even then sometimes it's just faster to 'argue' with it back and forth. For cooking generally I find it's almost useless without lots of prompting about how you don't want flattery and need it to actually do proper research and not be lazy, and still you'll often just end up arguing with it. Like if you want to mix ingredients from different cuisines or do actually creative stuff it's still really bad outside of already common or super basic tasks, because it'll just try to convince you not to do things that aren't already popular, or swing the other way and overcorrect to say all your random brainstorming is perfect and genius (also it does this extremely annoying thing where if you're like "hmm I do have ingredient X" it interprets that as a directive strictly requiring that ingredient from now on, and basically overwrites its entire goal as trying to please you by working it in, and then once you say you weren't requiring it, it'll spend like 25% of literally every answer going forward explaining why ingredient X is not necessary, like it's padding out a book report, and giving itself Alzheimer's by wasting context). Plus it has random 'opinions' you can figure out because it clearly tries to justify them post-hoc, often with just a single unreliable source like one reddit comment then acting like it's proven.
But this shit also happens for random specific topics where it'll have these weird hangups or fixations, like it's hard to explain overall but for example if there's a superficially adjacent misconception around a topic related to your query, it'll just latch onto that and often disregard your actual query... One thing I noticed is that if you talk to it about starting seeds or gardening, it's obsessed with telling you to make sure your pots have drainage. This is good normal advice, but for the specific topic I was using it for this made no sense because I wasn't drowning it in water and already explained I was using a pipette so taking the time to drill holes for drainage in my little recycled seed starter cups made no sense, but I had to waste time actually convincing it that it wasn't necessary or it would spend 50% of each answer repetitively explaining why it's generally advised, devoid of all the context it already had -- like it was prioritizing generic advice without evaluating relevance. Or like I remember I asked the newest GPT model recently which deli meats avoid nitrites and nitrates and it spent basically the entire answer carefully explaining how the USDA 'uncured' label still technically allows celery salt which contains basically the same amount of nitrates and nitrites, so I had to be like "that's not what I asked" and then it took like 3 more turns to get it to stop vomiting lists of random Walmart UPCs and actually talk about categories... (it's turkey, roast beef, and prosciutto btw)
Saw a convo on threads where a guy was “proving” to everyone that his use of AI was fine by using a response he got from AI saying that it was fine. People kept trying to convince him that of course the product he paid for & curated was going to agree with him, but then all of his refutes to those arguments were him putting the replies into ChatGPT and replying with screenshots of its responses. Another I saw was a guy who asked ChatGPT the most comfortable position for his car seat to be in for his body. You know, instead of just sitting in the car and figuring it out.
It’s honestly terrifying how in just two years some people have completely lost the ability to think.
Would be a fair assumption, but I guarantee you, she wasn't. Some of us immediately reprehended her for outsourcing her decision-making to AI, and she just stood by her usage if it by saying that "ChatGPT knows me, and knows more about this cuisine than I do." If diet was a reason, she would've easily mentioned it.
Eh, that sounds worse than it is. How many folks ask a server what they'd recommend, or struggle to pick one thing when the entire menu looks good? Was mentioning in another comment, you could pretty much do the same thing by rolling a die or flipping a coin.
Tool vs a crutch is how I look at it. "I've considered my options, just spin the wheel." Tool. "I can't be bothered to read the menu, just make it happen." Crutch. Would be curious to know if your friend had the foggiest idea of what else was on the menu. That'd answer the question of how they used AI in their decision-making process.
To be a little fair to her, the menu was a bit long and in a language that she speaks little-to-none of. However, we were something like 10 people at the table, so she could've easily asked anybody for help, or use AI more reasonably and ask ChatGPT to translate the menu for her.
Instead, as soon as she got the menu, she took a photo of the specials and asked ChatGPT to pick her meal, arguing that "ChatGPT knows her."
Also, she's not my friend. This was at a meetup event with a bunch of random people.
I mean, sometimes I'll ask a server what they might recommend. Haven't thought of asking AI, but I could see a parallel there. "It all sounds good, ChatGPT, roll the dice for me."
Doesn't sound that crazy to me. I could easily flip a coin or roll a d20 and do the same thing manually. Not like they were trying to offload decision making for anything particularly meaningful.
Servers have the context of working in the restaurant and knowing which meals tend to get compliments. If they were treating it as a dice roll, it's fine, but I know a lot of people who are starting to trust AI for everything.
Yeah, fair. I don't disagree that folks are getting way too cozy with AI. I'm not really opposed to having it recommend food I guess. Similar idea to having it propose some recipes. Kind of a situation where you want to try something new but have a hard time deciding on it.
AI is definitely this weird thing still where I don't know how to articulate where the exact line ought to be. I can at least affirm that I wouldn't rely on it for safety critical applications!
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u/jphzazueta Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
I once met a girl who took a photo of the menu and just asked ChatGPT what to order. We were a big group and we were all left with our mouths open when she did that, and further defended her stance to just let AI make the decision for her.
Edit: typos (at least you know I wrote the comment myself)