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The example are contrived, but still very real.
`ctrl-a`, select desired font in style dropdown, done.
Do you perhaps have a better example?
The criticism people are throwing out here is that while users often claim that they're only using claude to speed up the exact thing they would have done anyway, they are in fact ceding control and critical thinking to claude and just accepting what it does as if it were what they would have done.
Responsible use of Claude behaves much the same, just within my budget
> Particularly if you know claude is really good at repetitive tasks, such as making sure all the font are the same size so you leave that until the end so you can focus on content.
Surely you can come up with a better example than something that's solved by even the most basic tools we've had for decades at this point?
If the OP had hours they’d probably be fine.
My different smug answer is: I bought a laptop with 64G of RAM before the RAM bubble and would try throwing qwen3 or gemma at it.
It's very different when you own your tools rather than renting them.
Many of us refused to go along with the subscription model, and so are not affected. I've used primarily LibreOffice for ~two decades, and even more emphatically when Excel became primarily Subscription. Stuck with Gimp even after buying Photoshop for the Pantone support, but killed PS when it went online model. Was very interested in Fusion 360, but stuck with RhinoCAD when Fusion was online-only. I refuse to use online accounting/payroll "solutions".
I use Claude $20/mth a good amount, and am hesitant to use Chinese technology, but the last day makes it look a lot more sensible to setup local AIs, even at the cost of higher initial cost, lower capability, more system management effort, and potential compromise.
It's just one small shop, but many others could make similar decisions, instead of going with what's "just easier today".
Some of us have made different choices and therefore have different exposure to these kinds of failures. Yes, sometimes those choices mean higher costs or fewer features, but a lower probability of getting kneecapped by others' problems is a pretty good feature.
Life is tradeoffs.
No. Not really. Depending on the presentation, it wouldn't stop professionals. More importantly, this is why you have backups. It's why you don't wait until the last minute to prepare your presentation, or, if you have to, you are knowledgeable enough to forego the presentation.
Simply put, in this case, absolutely not.
Edit: And to be clear, before you put too much weight on the "depending on the presentation" part, data heavy slides are not what I'm talking about.
But for many, they use it as a productivity multiplier. They can still get the job done, just slower. The problem is that the rest of the supply chain likely doesn't care, management deadlines likely don't have 'do without AI' timelines any longer, so if we define the "job" as needing to meet the deadlines and not just complete the task eventually, people will find themselves unable to do their "job" without AI.
These both can be simplified as "not being able to do your job without AI", but I propose we have little to gain and a decent bit to lose by doing anything that treats these two situations as the same.
Even better, if cave painting was good enough thousands of years ago it is good enough today.
When I was still teaching, I’d do this sometimes. Just do a lecture with a whiteboard and draw data structures and algorithms. It’s often much more engaging than prepared slides.
Yes, I know it doesn’t work for every possible presentation, but for many it does.
And for larger work presentations the expectation even 30 years ago was not whiteboards; that is very inefficient. It was transparencies. But try printing those in a pinch. And finding a projector.
That's not to say that a key tool outage should kill a presentation (and if it was important, do it early); but it is not a do-not-care either.
(Yes, I know that the slippery slope is in jest.)
The professor came in and looked around for two minutes before shrugging and pulling a fresh stick of chalk out of his back pocket and began writing on the board.
This is the same professor who we'd never seen use a fresh piece of chalk ever, he always just soldiered through the nubs and remains littering the board's chalk tray.
We had no idea he actually kept a pack of sticks in his back pocket at all times.
People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Please
> My car broke down and now I'm late for work
> Well you shouldn't have outsourced your mobility to a machine
Yes. Not completely unable all at once, but they certainly get worse at it fast.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...
Losing skills due to over-reliance on technology is not a new phenomenon and not exclusive to LLM use, but they of course exacerbate it by so pervasively touching so many areas.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m...
That seems to be precisely what your study shows as well, though I only read the summary. Say the AI lowered the endoscopists' workload by (for illustration) 20%, so they got 20% less practice per unit of time, which made them have a performance that was 20% worse in the trial. I would expect the same to happen if they got assigned to do paperwork for 20% of their time as well.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, perhaps we're in agreement here, I'm just clarifying my point.
There's a famous talk about the importance of knowing when to use which level of automation, and maintaining currency at all levels you expect to need to use: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
The talk looks interesting, thank you. I’ve added it to my list to watch later.
Likewise, the machinist still knows the principles of construction even if he's only used CNC machines. The endoscopist still knows the principles of colonoscopy even if he's only done it with AI assistance.
Just anecdotally, back when I took courses in assembler and logic circuits, there seemed to be no great difference in success between people like myself that had previous experience with that, and people who'd at most done some high-level scripting.
If you have enough curiosity I doubt using AI will be a roadblock to true understanding, just like high-level programming languages weren't.
That’s a gigantic “if”. Anything can become a positive in the right hands, but we have to consider the societal impact of broadly available tools.
And even in the case of outage, I can keep my computer running on a battery or a backup generator.
That's not what I'm talking about though, the question is whether the compiler does the thinking for you or not.
Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server?
> Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server?
In any case, your "argument" is more of an observation that
> Claude requires billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work
Okay, so does a bunch of other things as well. So what?
Me and other commenters have tried quite hard to divine what you feel is relevant about this fact, without success. Perhaps it's time for you to try to articulate what significance you see in it.
The whole "AI is a tool" argument only works if the "tool" is a commodity that is universally available and still exists even if the tool manufacturer disappears. Open-weights, locally hosted LLMs fit this criteria. Anything that depends on a cloud provider does not.
You have quite strange criteria for what constitutes a "tool", but sure, at least I see where you're coming from then.
Its great that you can keep your computer running, 1/3 of my information is ithe cloud (which is not a problem at all, even today) and 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.
Its not a problem at all, that a service has an outage. My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. Took 2 days to fix so what
Of course it does. It's the marginal cost that is low.
> 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
> My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke.
And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately.
> And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately.
Immediately after buying a new laptop. Or perhaps you mean you keep a spare laptop around? In any case, it's also an object that requires a huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create. Quite like a LLM...
No. I could go by with an older one, or in a pinch I could repurpose my current media server. Or I could put my data in an SSD with a bootable partition and borrow my wife's laptop...
> huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create.
Sunk cost fallacy? If the major electronics factories explode today, the existing computers won't stop working. If any of the Anthropic's datacenters go under, the compute capacity would have to be rebuilt.
are your audiences going to be exactly as pleased with just the prompt in the center of the sole slide just as they would with the complete generated slides? probably not
will they find AI-generated slides sloppy and worthless anyway? I might, but that is not exactly my business. also I know gcc or clang won't accept a prompt as source file(s) yet