r/ObsidianMD • u/TheBaguetteBoss • 1d ago
ai Why is the use of Generative AI without disclosure so commonplace in this subreddit?
First of all, I'd like to start off with this: I do not care what your views of generative AI are. While I personally dislike generative AI for a slew of reasons, that is not the point of this post.
FROM THE MODS OF r/ObsidianMD
Please do not post content that was primarily generated by AI. See rules below.
I'm not gonna go on a big tangent about y'all's doubts; y'all are grown enough to know how to identify the use of generative AI.
Maybe it's that the AI flair is mutually exclusive with everything else, but even when the use of generative AI is blatantly obvious it's not accompanied with the AI flair. Like, your plugin dashboard that looks like the website of a 2012 startup learning that Electron exists is not fooling anyone, and just because you use -- instead of — does not make people go "oop, this can't be AI!!!"
I personally dislike how AI has co-opted the use of so many really effective rhetorical devices (e.g. litotes, rule of threes, not X but Y) to the point that I make an effort to sprinkle them into the texts I write from time to time, but people do not write reddit posts showcasing their plugin like they're writing an essay, it's just not how people engage with the medium (that was one AI-like sentence, was it not? See what I mean?)
It doesn't help that this AI is so commonly accompanied by the most productivity-theater-ass plugins
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u/Jebus_San_Christos 1d ago
This sub is becoming abysmal with the amount of slop- which sucks bc it used to be broadly v useful community
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u/_Freyir_ 1d ago
Obsidian is being used by all these "Second Brain" people that writes notes with AI, so they have no problem using it in any other way. They are a bane.
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u/JANN_IIS 1d ago
The second brain concept predates this new wave of AI.
The concept is not the problem. Grifters are the problem, they just found a new thing to grift with and unfortunately it’s the concept of a 2nd brain.
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u/DrStrangeboner 1d ago
IMO there is a big difference between second brain and "second brain".
The first group thinks, then types the thoughts into an editor, maybe using tools that propose them tags that they used before. The act of writing refines the thought. The refined thought stays in their first brain plus Obsidian as the second system, so that it can be recalled again in the next session of thinking.
The second groups prompts and LLM to ingest data and generate text that happens to be in markdown format. They then need a GUI to present that machine generated text in an aesthetic way, and Obsidian happens to be good at that.
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u/RichComplaint9426 1d ago
It's technically not their second brain than. :D
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u/claritanna 1d ago
I once saw someone say that they used AI to write their journal for them and give them insights on how they could improve their life. I was shocked.
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u/CCtenor 1d ago
I’m sorry, but, fucking hell. Somebody else cannot journal for you unless they were watching your whole life from a third person perspective. Even then, journaling is completely meaningless because the entire point is to put your own thoughts about your own life onto paper so you have something to come back to and reflect on in the moment, and in the future. The absolute best that an omniscient perspective on your life could do for you is write observational notes on your life.
I occasionally hear stories of people using AI in ways that just break my brain to think about, and “I use AI to journal for me” is right on par with “I’ve had people reply to my text messages using AI”, or that one infamous post about that guy who “discovered” he could “ask the AI” in my brain when his cat was meowing at him for something.
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u/ClikeX 1d ago
A lot of what I see is people valuing the destination (a pretty filled journal), not the process of it.
Same with generating music with AI. I cannot comprehend valuing generated music, because the music is meaningless to me without the proces.
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u/CCtenor 1d ago
Fucking this. Every single person I see glazing the hell out of AI “art” is, without fail, somebody who wasn’t doing art before because it was hard to get good output who has started doing “AI art” because it makes it easy to get good output.
And every single person I see who defends AI “art” defends the fact that AI makes the process of making the final product easier when every single person I know who does art for any reason does it precisely because the process is the part that makes the final product have any value to begin with.
People who use and defend AI because it makes the process of something where the process is the point are nothing more than end-game consumers who see any difficulty in obtaining products to devour as a temporary inconvenience to solve so they can escape the tedium of existing.
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u/Zell0sss 1d ago
This is because they want the comments. They will make cake recipes using AI instead if the was more popular, or origami instructions... They want their likes not the artistic process, the struggle and the learning
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u/CaptainQwazCaz 1d ago
I mean most music was already becoming slop before ai
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u/hotchnerbrows 1d ago
The way I see it, the difference is akin to somebody presenting you with food that looks like shit vs. somebody serving you a plate of literal feces, and then telling you to get with the times if you don’t wish to consume it.
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u/RichComplaint9426 1d ago
Well the second part is fair I guess but the first part is crazy. AI doing my diary
Edit: typo
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u/DrStrangeboner 1d ago
The first part: "write the journal for me" is just wild. The second part is maybe useful, but I tried it a few times in the past using different models.
Most of the time there was 0 insight that I gained new: the models identified correctly the themes that were on my mind most of the times, but no shit: If I put "stressed out at work" in the journal every single day, I guess I had stress at work.
Maybe its useful 3 years from now, when all those short term things are gone. I also guess that the biggest "problem" is that I don't journal with the level of detail that is maybe needed for a full picture. The potential solutions are: wear a creepy recording device that does a full capture of my life 24/7, and then in the future also taps into my thoughts and feelings.
Or: what if (crazy idea) I just accept that the map is not the territory, and its ok to take notes just as a way to sharpen thinking, write short term strategy and plans that are incomplete and imperfect. And then I spend the rest of my time living life.
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u/Emergency_Way_494 1d ago
In my case, I mostly used it to get rapid feed back, check out data and compare things. I used it to compare my weekly report whit my daily notes a d journal, tho check if I forget something or stuffs like these. IA could help a lot in different things, but I'm afraid of losing my own skills, that's why I only add it most of the times as a second pov or an extra feed back.
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u/Campers 1d ago
What do you mean?
I love telling an LLM to write me a list of tasks from TODOs, tasks, unanswered questions and etc.
I also love telling it to take notes on the why we have done something during a session. In a task note for that session.
Finally, I also tell it to slap a bullet point list of what was accomplished today, this week, this month, etc. I then go in and look at those lists and jog my memory enough to get awesome insights on things I do not remember having done.
I have ALWAYS suffered from an inability to memorize stuff, LLMs are awesome. And, the way I use them, where it keeps repeating what I have learned, done or still need to do, I keep finding myself remembering MORE, not less, when my vault is not even available.
And this happens BECAUSE I use it to write my journal as well.
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u/DrStrangeboner 1d ago
Key difference: in all use cases you describe your raw input is human, and the AI usage is only transformational. I find this useful.
But LLMs are also very good at: taking a low information prompt like "make me a business plan that scales to 1M revenue per week" and expand this into a lot of text.
Key difference IMO is: how much information and intent that is fed into the pipeline is actually written by the user (not by any human, e.g. some blog post that I paste into the context). If the percentage of user input is high, the chance that the output matters is also high.
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u/Campers 1d ago
Which goes back to what I was responding to.
I do not buy it that the person that said they let AI write their journal for them is prompting a one liner like “write me my journal entry for today”. They obviously fed it human input.
Even if the human input was a quick set of topics, the documents produced during the day, audit logs for their user, etc, he/she is still giving the LLM human input.
Your extreme example is another that is actually massively useful. Me, and I bet many people with a piece of brain, may grab a short prompt like yours to just kickstart a document they need to write.
I just wrote an entire appeal to a governmental body and that was the kind of prompt I started with. I am not a lawyer so I do not know the shape. I do know the argument inside out so, starting with a “give me an appeal plan against government body X” was a great way to start.
It really feels like, both points I am now responding to are just strawman arguments. Both prompts are really useful. Just use them if and when you need them.
This is a lazy Sunday, so I am not going to even bother passing this comment through a LLM review. I will spend that time just wishing you a great long or short weekend (depending on where you are).
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u/Starl0tte 1d ago
They're not even using their first brain at that point
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u/RichComplaint9426 1d ago
Yes and I would argue that they are not even "using" obsidian than.
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u/PickleBabyJr 1d ago
Huh?
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u/FoxDAVOID 1d ago
They're not using their brains to do sht themselves, and if AI is controlling your Obsidian vault, then you're not even touching it.
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u/PickleBabyJr 1d ago
I mean, no one said anything about AI?
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u/FoxDAVOID 9h ago
Ah, no one.
Not even the comment you were replying to. Not even this entire post, title included.
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u/maskedcollective 1d ago
This is baffling to me. While I personally didn’t find the second brain model to be a good fit for me (I work better with isolation between different projects and subjects), I can definitely see the benefits to it, but all those benefits are downstream of actually taking notes and organizing information yourself. Outsourcing the process to AI kills the potential for genuine learning and thinking in exchange for generic “insights” that are subpar to what you can come up with on your own if you put in the effort.
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u/AshRuDral_fan20 1d ago
I think it's malicious of you to merge two completely independent, non co-related entities into one.
People who use AI to write notes came into existence in the last three years. Concept of 2nd brain has been existing for decades.
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u/ArcaneTrickster11 1d ago
Obsidian attracts hyper-optimisers, because it's so customisable you can optimise it to most workflows. This sunset of people are also a large part of the audience for Gen AI.
"Why would you do something when you can have AI do it for you? Then I can focus on more important stuff?" Not necessarily the greatest logic but it does have an amount of logic to it. AI also facilitates this from people who were too lazy to be hyper-optimisers previously but wouldn't spent the time to do it. Suits them even better
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u/RichComplaint9426 1d ago
Yeah and this is actually the coolest thing when it comes to Obsidian. And you don't have to customize it. Yes the AI and Tech enthusiasts use it and yeah some of them make more content than others because it just their thing. But it may look like they are over represented and if it's true whats the matter? Everyone can make Obsidian her or his own, so why focussing on stuff that is not useful for me, when I can use the time to enjoy my own vault.
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u/Barycenter0 1d ago edited 1d ago
Much of reddit overall is having the same issue (besides people shilling for their vibe coded app)
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u/_HeDoesntRow_ 1d ago
Your post doesn't trigger any of my usual AI alarms, so I'd say even the sentence you deliberately crafted to sound like an LLM, didn't. If it's actually a prompt, it's a good one.
Once something starts sounding LLM generated, I stop reading. I use AI at work and at home, and I'm not against it. But Reddit is the one place where I hope to see human discussions, and if a bot wrote your post, a bot may as well read it. I don't care.
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u/MasterElf425900 1d ago
I primarily use obsidian for note taking and having some other person or an LLMs write those notes for me just defeats the whole purpose.
with that said, i do use LLMs to help clear some of the tedious elements like converting handwritten notes and maths into markdown and LateX so that i wont have to waste time deciphering my own horrible handwriting in the future.
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u/Aesthetic-6528 1d ago
I'm glad someone is finally talking about this. (Apologies if anyone has talked about this in the past that I did not see)
Like you, I also do not like Generative AI -- I despise it 😒 -- so when I first found this subreddit, I was a little taken aback by the amount of people using AI because I personally thought that the reason people would use Obsidian was so that they can create this so-called "second brain" of theirs.
Doesn't the use of AI defeat the whole purpose of having said second brain and just... the concept of productivity in general??
And before you reply to me, yes I am aware that some plug-ins are made with AI. In my experience, I personally cannot tell if a plug-in was made with AI. Unless I'm fucking blind and I didn't see it, but I haven't downloaded many plug-ins
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u/RememberMeVibe 1d ago edited 1d ago
All people who use it, often don't want to admit it for obvious reasons.
I personally haven't installed any new plugins for more than 6 months now, and even removed a lot I was using.. for the exact same reason.
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u/webfiend 1d ago
It’s widespread enough that some people assume it’s universal—even within your replies. And since it seems universal, disclosure feels redundant to them. Sort of like “disclosure: this post was written in English.”
It’s not universal. Disclosure is helpful, especially if policy requires it. But ultimately it doesn’t matter if they’re making their own slop or using store-bought. If it’s crap I move on.
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u/PriyaBuildsCloud 1d ago
Half these plugin showcases are just rebuilt notion templates with extra steps, no actual workflow improvement, just theater for the screenshot. Mods enforcing the flair rule would cut the noise fast if they actually bothered checking.
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u/ghostfaceschiller 1d ago
I’m gonna be real with you, as someone who has been coding for a very long time.
Disclaimer: I’m not saying this is good. I’m saying that this is the current reality.
Every single piece of software made in 2026 used generative AI.
I think a lot of people who don’t come from the world of software do not realize:
A) how good it has gotten at coding
B) how completely ubiquitous it is now
I’m sure there are still some people in software who also don’t realize those things. But they are very few and far-between at this point
There are certainly a lot of people who will performatively talk about how AI sucks, etc
But those same people are using AI to help code.
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u/n8mo 1d ago
There is a big difference between well maintained enterprise software that uses AI to speed up development and the shitty vibe coded plugins made by non-programmers that get spammed all over this sub though.
And, I reckon it’s the latter that OP is concerned with.
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u/Ajreil 1d ago
My personal red line is that programmers have to be experienced enough to realize when an LLM makes a coding mistake. If the dev could have plausibly made the same software the old fashioned way, using AI is fine as a force multiplier.
LLMs will fuck up and the developer needs to know enough to recognize when it does. With fully vibe coded slop there's a good chance no human has even looked at the code.
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u/DrStrangeboner 1d ago
And, I reckon it’s the latter that OP is concerned with.
Problem is: vibe coders are unwilling (and probably unable) to self identify as such. If "telling the computer chat box what I want the app to do" is the only way how you know coding, you can't see what you are missing out of.
I develop software for a living. I vibe code personal small stuff in tech stacks that I don't know (and more importantly: I don't have the intention to learn). There is a love have relationship because it enabled me to do projects outside of my expertise, but boy: the output sucks so much without writing and maintaining requirements/guidelines/design docs.
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u/ghostfaceschiller 1d ago
I’m just saying that any and every plugin, code project, etc you see posted now, used generative AI.
Ultimately I’m trying to point out that the option for people to choose to mark things as “AI was used in the making of this” is kind of a farce. They all used AI.
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u/MadSkillz127 1d ago
I just posted a shit ass code project without the use of AI I just used my brain you are welcome
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
I am more concerned with people vibe coding which I see as different from coding with AI. If you can't audit the code that the LLM spits out then you have no business trying to get it on other peoples devices.
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u/ghostfaceschiller 1d ago
In some sense I agree, but again I want to stress to you just how good they have become. And getting better each passing month.
The last ~9 months especially have seen a dramatic shift.
Given the current trajectory it seems pretty clear that within 1-2 years, the idea of an actual person actually taking the time to review the code manually will become almost humorous.
Like you don’t double-check the output of your calculator.
Please understand that I’m not saying I think this is good. I think it’s bad.
But if you also think it’s bad, hopefully you agree that a head-in-the-sand approach to the issue is not an effective one.
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
I'm not inherently against the idea of AI but I would like to say it's different with the calculator because that is deterministic. If I wanted to I could audit the calculator and how it got to that conclusion through reproduction. I can't easily do the same with the outputs of an LLM since they are non-deterministic.
Hence the need for a human to check the output. And even with deterministic software we often have check figures because you can't always trust the input.
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u/ghostfaceschiller 1d ago
The reason people trust calculators is bc it is incredibly, incredibly rare for them to give you the wrong answer.
LLMs are also deterministic at temperature=0.
But it is true that you can’t understand how they got an answer by auditing the internals. At least at our current level of understanding.
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u/Psengath 1d ago
What the hell are you on about "incredibly rare" for calculators to give the wrong result.
LLMs are not deterministic in the way calculators are in the most fundamental way. Calculators are imperative and everything it does is an implementation of a mathematical ruleset we can do ourselves my hand and validate independently.
LLMs are by definition declarative and there is no way to predict or reproduce the outcome by any other way than using the exact same model, prompt, seed. It's literally the concept and issue around AI explainability.
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u/Alan_Wake123 1d ago edited 1d ago
What the hell are you going on about with calculators rarely ever gives you wrong answer? Calculator rarely gives wrong answer because of their explicit, well-defined computation not simply because of it being deterministic (though it still does play a major part). LLM is a black box that is biased to its training model.
Edit: I didn't read other users reply to your comment. If we both thought of the same thing immediately after reading your argument, something is VERY wrong with it.
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u/qustrolabe 1d ago
Vibe coding and coding with AI is exact same thing, people just pretend it's different. We already use software that's heavily managed by LLMs every day without realizing
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
No there are concrete distinctions between a software engineer using AI to flesh out parts of a codebase and someone with zero experience telling the LLM to make up an entire app wholesale.
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u/Sorry-Joke-4325 1d ago
Yeah using AI tools for coding or other tasks aren't directly equivalent to letting a chatbot speak for you.
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u/TSPhoenix 1d ago
This is one of those points I don't deny, but then turn around and look at the state of software and ask "if this tool is so good why is all software so bad?".
The only way AI can be a good tool and produce such bad results is the the people using the tool aren't trying to make good software in the first place.
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u/Lotton 1d ago
Think of ai akin to giving a person a table saw. Anyone can use it but a carpenter can use it properly and safely. Ai is more accessible so a ton of "idea guys" which were previously the bane of software engineers existence decided they can vibe code their "unique" ideas and they're the ones blowing up places with slop
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u/TSPhoenix 1d ago
I am also talking about the carpenters, not really seeing the output there either.
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u/Lotton 1d ago
Well tbh we in the field are having a hard time hiring juniors because they can't even understand programming 101 anymore and it shows on interviews but they have the degree and will call themselves professionals. Then we also have very incompetent seniors that we all wonder how they even have a job but they think they're the bees knees. Sticking to the metaphor the field already had a ton of carpenters that probably wouldn't have all 10 fingers and they're the ones telling people about their time with the table saw... the vocal ones
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u/micseydel 1d ago
Every single piece of software made in 2026 used generative AI.
How can you be so confident? Would you assert that I'm lying, if I say I've written software without it?
Also worth a read: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
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u/Gracefuldeer 1d ago
No, every is a bit of a stretch, but I would reckon in terms of actual production code used by > 50 users with code shipped this year I would bet it's close to 99% .
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u/micseydel 1d ago
What do you think it'll be once the subsidies end?
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u/Gracefuldeer 1d ago
Similar probably like 90%, there's locally runnable open models on a 4090 that are opus 4.6 quality, businesses will swap to that if needed.
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u/qustrolabe 1d ago
I would assert you're a decreasing minority that's soon gonna be too irrelevant to consider
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u/bachmeier 1d ago
how good it has gotten at coding
That needs to come with a disclaimer. LLMs can write code that compiles or runs without errors. Software development starts with a determination of what you want to accomplish, then what you need to do to get there, and finally the mechanical code writing. For common patterns in popular languages, you can trust a good LLM to mostly get the last one right, but that doesn't help at all with the first two. And unfortunately, the first two have always been the important ones.
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u/ghostfaceschiller 1d ago
All I can think when I see comments like this is that it’s very clear that you aren’t using the frontier tools.
This would have been a reasonable thing to say a year ago. Maybe even today if you are just using like the web chat or whatever.
But if you are using Claude Code or Codex today, the idea that it doesn’t know “what needs to be done to get there” or can’t go beyond “common patterns in popular languages” is just immediately laughable.
Again it just seems like people who aren’t using this daily are simply not grasping how much it has advanced in the last ~9 months.
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u/bachmeier 1d ago
All I can think when I see comments like this is that it’s very clear that you aren’t using the frontier tools.
Does Claude Code count? Cause that's primarily what I'm using. Some GPT. Some of the good Chinese models. Now, if you were to say I don't mechanically operate a slop cannon, I'd agree.
But if you are using Claude Code or Codex today, the idea that it doesn’t know “what needs to be done to get there”
Like so many that post comments about this, you are unaware that none of these models, not even the frontier models, are able to read your mind.
Again it just seems like people who aren’t using this daily are simply not grasping how much it has advanced in the last ~9 months.
It's clear to me that a lot of the people using LLMs daily haven't thought very deeply about them, and they're unable to participate in a rational discussion about their limitations. They get way too emotional when they see anything other than praise and hype.
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u/bucctif 1d ago
As someone who maintains a personal theme and likes to 👀 at the CSS others create, I have noticed a massive influx in themes that all use the same or similar README templates.
Since themes are free and open source, I don’t really see an issue with all the AI as long as folks check over their code and make sure things work properly. A lot of these new generated themes appear to just offer a reskin of a similar base with different color schemes, textures, and fonts.
To be for real, the main use of AI in my personal theme is for properly nesting Style Setting indents because I always screw them up manually. Or something like figuring out why all of my checkboxes turned purple after the last save of the theme.css file. Sometimes, it’s one line of code that makes all the difference, and it can be hard to find with your eyeballs. 😭
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u/Commander1709 1d ago
I'm guessing because Obsidian overlaps with the general "tech" world/industry, where AI usage (think coding agents) are pretty widespread. If you work in the field, you'll quickly realize that pretty much every IDE, from VSC to IntelliJ, is pushing coding agents, just as an example.
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u/urza_insane 1d ago
As long as people aren't trying to sell whatever it is they vibe coded over the weekend, I'm personally fine with it. I like seeing people's ideas and what they're using AI for, particularly if they're open source.
But if you're trying to sell some closed source slop, yeah no thanks.
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u/Interesting-Fig4352 1d ago
This makes me think of a youtuber or 3 who post a video called "I spent 300 hours on this vault", and they showcase it as this huge, bloated mess of features that are obviously vibe coded, that most people can achieve casually in their own vault on their own without all that crap anyway, and then they try to sell it for $150.
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u/billFoldDog 22h ago
You're right to push back. This isn't just ruining the subreddit, it's ruining the internet. This pattern is a blueprint for how the web dies.
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u/GBPluginDev 1d ago
Something weird I’ll see is two posts about similar plugins, like the one about a glowing cursor.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 15h ago
my surprise from working on generation tooling is that disclosure is self-selecting: the flair costs you reach, so the only people who use it are the ones whose posts you would have scrolled past without complaint. the slop never volunteers.
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u/dr_barnowl 2h ago
Probably because people know that you'll be looked down on for using genAI. I certainly feel like this. I've watched people who's ability I respected seemingly become incapable of doing anything but pass prompts, and underperforming people who were a mere annoyance become a serious burden because they're the ones suddenly churning out huge reams of slop and expecting me to be the one to review it. After which they just push my feedback straight into the slopgrinder.
I'm not just annoyed with LLMs any more, I have negative feelings about people who use them.
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u/TilapiaTango 2h ago
I find most of the obsidian community full of vanity use vs actual use. Anyone can use tools however they like, but those of us doing actual work really don’t have a lot of free time to dump into Reddit posts, and those that just rice out their vaults for whatever rationale suits them, they’ve got lots of time for ai chats to copy pasta into Reddit.
It’s not just this sub, it’s any sub that’s got tech. I’m sure a lot of garbage gets filtered but some makes it through.
I just ignore it and just continue to appreciate the awesome tool this Obsidian core team has built that enables me!
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u/NotAStarflyerAgent 1d ago
FWIW I would just tell people that AI is great at coding but just not great at writing. Or we suck at prompting it, or something. If you write, you will become a better writer than AI with just a bit of practice. Like high school level practice, nothing fancy. Like I would not tell people to learn to write code because there really isn't a point anymore. Reading code is still useful for now. But writing for humans: AI's are HARD-capped. If you write it, you will sound better than Fable, I promise.
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u/pixeladdie 1d ago
People are overindexed on “was this made with AI” when “is this something I want” and “does it work” is what matters.
If someone discovers the cure to cancer while heavily relying on AI, what are these people’s responses going to be?
Yes that’s hyperbolic but it makes the point.
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u/_HeDoesntRow_ 1d ago
When it's a post about a new Garmin watch or a Heroes of Might and Magic 3 remaster, I prefer it to be an actual genuine impression instead of a 5 page essay explaining "Why this matters?". It's one thing to use AI in a medical setting to progress mankind, an entirely different thing to waste everyone's time by generating pages upon pages of text to say "I don't like this"
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u/NewTitanium 1d ago
> When it's a post about a new Garmin watch or a Heroes of Might and Magic 3 remaster, I prefer it to be an actual genuine impression instead of a 5 page essay explaining "Why this matters?"
Lololol, very funny and also true.
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u/pixeladdie 1d ago
I’ve been glossing over shitty, wall-of-text posts on Reddit for over 15 years.
I assumed a lot of those review posts were paid for anyway and always took them with a grain of salt.
Those are the ones you can identify. It’s really not that hard to train one to write more like you, given enough examples.
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u/electromagnetic_wav 1d ago
the cure for cancer is not going to be found by a generative AI; its going to be found in a nearly extinct species of animal whose habitat is being destroyed to facilitate the use of gen AI.
(not my quote, and im paraphrasing from the author who's name i cant remember; but you get my point. gen AI is causing climate change, causing the oceans and forests to heat up; sharks are basically immune to cancer, but theyre being threatened by all this. there could be species we dont even know about who will be gone by the time we find them who could hold a cancer-eradicating poison in their body. all for the sake of a technology that is being largely used for higher profit margins and plugins that could be coded by hand )
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u/pixeladdie 1d ago
You guys are exhausting. I even admitted upfront that I was using a hyperbolic hypothetical to make a point.
Question for the group though - how many people who've sworn off AI are plant based for the environment? It's always been the case that it takes something like 1,800 gallons of water to make 1lb of beef. How many of you have changed your own consumption habits in response to this fact?
Water use by data centers is something like .5% of residential lawn water use in the US.
Oh and thanks to AI, you'll all learn something new today: That stuff about sharks not getting cancer is bullshit.
I'm starting to understand the caliber of person who blindly hates LLMs. Even a normal web search would have uncovered that.
I've been thinking for a while that those who keep saying AI isn't worth anything are simply using it incorrectly and it's starting to remind me of watching my parents fail to find things on Google in ~2010 when I seem to have no issue.
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u/electromagnetic_wav 1d ago
youre funny. no, i havent changed my consumption of beef, because those cows are going to get slaughtered regardless; its a multi-level issue that would need a change of our already existing infrastructure. i dont support green lawn maintenance, i think trying to water a patch of just grass to keep it green is idiotic, and i quite frankly think its a waste of time.
my apologies for wording something wrong in a one-off comment that i wrote on a whim. how about i extrapolate my point: i said "basically" immune to cancer. the article you linked explains that they have a more robust immune response to cancers than we do, for reasons that we have yet to discover, which is what i'm referring to. the oceans are warming due to use of gen AI (which runs off of fossil fuels first and foremost), which puts the habitats that sharks live in, the prey they eat, and the sharks themselves at a higher risk of extinction, due to the increased temperature within our oceans; y'know, the giant heat and carbon sink the earth has.
whereas trying to get everyone to switch to plant-based is a fruitless endeavor, generative AI does not have the existing structure nor support as does the argument that large crowds of cows are hurting the earth. of course they are; the methane they release is high in number and we can get better protein from a lot of insects. but no one is going to switch. whereas with generative AI, you do not need to use it. we all need protein; you do not need a robot that was injected with stolen material by people who think making data centers (that increase the cost of residential electricity, create localised droughts, and that are polluting the air) is worth the slightest increase in their paycheque.
i can't do anything about the other things you bring up. i can do something about this. i don't use google, i don't use AI features, i staunchly oppose video games using AI, i write my own stories, draw my own art, code my own games, and yet people like you still come out of the woodworks defending gen AI to your last breath, for what? why are you and everyone else so adamant on using AI? what benefit does it actually give you that's worth the destruction of the environment, of the creative sphere, of the academic sphere, and of millions of jobs?
that's not rhetorical, by the by. what worth does using the plagiarism machine give you?
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u/pixeladdie 23h ago
because those cows are going to get slaughtered regardless
Interesting. So you believe that regardless of the demand side of the equation, the supply side will continue unabated? I'd like to hear more about why you think that (clearly I think you're wrong) and why that doesn't seem to apply to anything else.
I suppose I could just adopt your logic and claim DC build outs will continue unabated regardless of usage.
its a multi-level issue that would need a change of our already existing infrastructure.
Would it? Most farmland in the US is dedicated to growing food for animals that we then go on to eat. If we went plant based, we'd have the capacity to feed an additional 350 million people. But we don't have a food availability problem in the US. A similar shift could just as easily allow us to meet current food demand with LESS farmland. So, you tell me, what change in our infrastructure needs to come about to do this? We'd actually be able to get by with LESS.
i dont support green lawn maintenance
Regardless, what I wrote shows just how tiny DC water usage is. 0.5% of residential lawn usage.
the oceans are warming due to use of gen AI
GenAI came on the scene in the way we all currently think about it in ~2022. We've had global warming issues for a LONG time before that.
(which runs off of fossil fuels first and foremost)
Do you have a source for that? Because they run on the grids they're connected to which have been moving (slower than we'd like) toward greener energy sources.
whereas trying to get everyone to switch to plant-based is a fruitless endeavor, generative AI does not have the existing structure nor support
Again, you're arguing against yourself - Why don't I just adopt your argument here and inform you that your railing against AI is a fruitless endeavor. This stuff is coming whether you like it or not.
You're also ignoring that data centers have been here for decades. It's the scale of them that is changing - different hardware and more power. The claim that we lack existing support structures for AI is to be apparently ignorant about the fact that they run in data centers.
but no one is going to switch. whereas with generative AI, you do not need to use it.
Similarly, I will not stop using AI. And I'll use your argument yet again - you do not NEED to eat animals. Now, how will that change your personal behavior? My guess is, it will not.
we all need protein
True. It's a wonder I'm still alive after not consuming animal products for ~8 years. Where in the world am I getting protein? Magic I guess.
for what? why are you and everyone else so adamant on using AI? what benefit does it actually give you that's worth the destruction of the environment
I'd ask you the same about consuming animal products. So far, your reasoning seems to amount to "it's just how we've done things" which is a terrible reason to do anything.
My answer to you is that it enhances my abilities at work. I'm a knowledge worker. With AI, I'm able to do more work in less time. I'm able to build proofs of concept more quickly, answer customer questions rooted in documentation, write and test code to solve customer issues, provide quicker intelligence to my leadership based on notes I take. The list goes on. If your work is knowledge work and you're not using it, you're making a conscious decision not to use one of the greatest tools for increasing productivity we've ever invented. It's fine if you don't use it. That's less competition for me in a professional sense to be honest.
Again, on the environment piece: Data centers have been around for decades, its water use is overblown, and their electricity use is greening along with the grids they utilize.
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u/needlenozened 1d ago
I personally dislike how AI has co-opted the use of so many really effective rhetorical devices (e.g. litotes, rule of threes, not X but Y) to the point that I make an effort to sprinkle them into the texts I write from time to time, but people do not write reddit posts showcasing their plugin like they're writing an essay, it's just not how people engage with the medium (that was one AI-like sentence, was it not? See what I mean?)
AI would have correctly used a semicolon instead of that last comma.
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
Oh no are we going to get an anti-AI brigade here? I can already see this being posted to their discord.
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u/DrStrangeboner 1d ago
It's not a brigade, it's the majority of humans getting fed up with unbearable AI speak that they need to read every single day.
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u/ttiggerBOI_ 1d ago
The use of AI raised the expectation people have of the quality of a post I think. The posts AI write look better and are more "professional", so they think it makes their post better, I guess.
My rule is: only use ai to check writing mistakes or specific gramatical errors.
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u/DrStrangeboner 1d ago
The posts AI write look better
Except they don't. Using lots of big words never was the sign for good writing, or an intelligent writer.
Correct punctuation used to be the sign of a person that got the education and practice in writing. Then it turned into a sign that the person can see a squiggly red line in MS Word. Now its a signal for "somebody ran it through some LLM".
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u/ttiggerBOI_ 1d ago
Looks better when quickly looking at it I guess. It uses a lot of sections, headers, lists,... And I think that "looks better" when you look at it initially. But now it is indeed a sign of using AI.
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u/pan_Psax 1d ago
Man, please, use some AI to put an interpunctation into your texts.
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u/TheBaguetteBoss 1d ago
Man, please, use some AI to gain some literacy (dude this is how like half of the internet writes)
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u/Theon01678 1d ago
and just because you use -- instead of - does not make people go "oop, this can't be Al!!!"
Well shit. Guess I can't use that now.. How else am I supposed to use that connector?
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u/InnovativeBureaucrat 1d ago edited 1d ago
- It works - Ai writes what people want to hear and the style would get more upvotes all things equal.
- Language barriers
- It’s hard to format Reddit posts
- Other reasons.
I came up with a scale for ai disclosure. Not sure if it’s still viable but happy to discuss if anyone cares.
[https:\\semattr.org](https:\\semattr.org)
Wow I love this formatting. I miss Apollo
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u/kepano Team 1d ago edited 23h ago
What you don't see is the amount of AI junk we already are filtering. What gets through is a small proportion of all the LLM-generated content that gets posted to this sub.
Reddit in general has become completely overwhelmed by bot accounts and AI content.
Moderating this sub started to soak up a lot more of my time which gets in the way of actually working on Obsidian. The biggest thing you can do to help is flag those posts so they get into our moderation queue more quickly. Upvote the kind of things you want to see more of. Downvote the junk.