Hi everyone. I’m a senior Computer Engineering student and my girlfriend is a senior Mechanical Engineering student.
She is caring, cute, clever and really thoughtful. I love everything about her. But the one thing that always bugs me out is the amount of AI she uses.
When we met 2 years ago the first topic we talked about was about AI and ever since that day I always mentioned her the advancements and dangers of AI. I said how there can’t be ethical AI and any use of it is harmful.
She agrees with me every time and says she will decrease her usage but at the end she uses it still. Projects, reports, homeworks all go through the LLM. She shows me her work and I can’t congratulate her without forcing myself because I know it’s AI.
She has diagnosed ADHD and I think this might be one of the reasons but I still don’t understand. She sometimes spends hours working. If she had spent that time with pen and paper she could’ve reached the same conclusions she did with AI but with more understanding of her work.
I don’t want to upset her but also seeing someone this close to me do this is saddening to me. What should I do? Should I just ignore it?
Hey here’s something you should probably hear: You’re wrong.
You claim there’s no ethical use of AI, yet you don’t ever actually prove that claim. Your GF sits there, ethically using it in front of you and you can’t see it because your ideology blinds you. You literally ran to the fuck_ai forum for ideological relief. It’s kind of pathetic. Leave your GF alone.
Until everything made by LLMs trained on copyleft materials are legally forced to have all generated content be automatically licensed under copy-left licenses I don’t wanna hear that “ethical use” bullshit.
Also make sure all the training infrastructure uses renewable energy, landmass, and water.
If any profit is made, donate enough to cover environmental damage.
Make sure the AI products won’t take away any job on earth.
Or just, you know, don’t fucking bother.
I agree with all of the above, but also think UBI should also be implemented as a safety measure for those losing jobs to automation as a whole.
You’re making a legitimate argument, but an argument isn’t a fact. he can say to his gf til he’s blue in the face that she’s being unethical, but he hasn’t demonstrated (nor can he really beyond theoretical hand waving) who is actually harmed by her use of AI. That isn’t to say there aren’t real harms that can happen and do happen, but it’s a bit ridiculous to tell someone who’s using an LLM to summarize an email that they’re responsible for the downfall of society. Get a grip
It is a fact that LLMs took the teeth away from copy left licenses.
You can now legally make a proprietary version of a copyleft licensed work by having an llm gobble it up and regurgitate it.
As someone who has donated money to, daily drives, and has even written software under a copyleft license? Yes that tangibly hurt me. It undermined my work, and others work I helped pay for, and even just work I use for free, and gave businesses a legal pathway to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish said software.
Don’t believe me? Some asshole who thinks he’s doing the lords work already started doing it to GIMP. Even if its open source, its still stealing the spotlight and funding from the actual FLOSS solutions worth using.
Taking the teeth away from a license many rely on isn’t an intangible harm, its a very real problem. We used to be able to legally threaten companies into playing nice, that needs to be brought back.
…ok, so are you saying that this guy should start talking about copyleft licenses and that will resolve his relationship dispute? Because I’m saying he should accept that she has a different opinion and that he may even be wrong since she’s demonstrably not using it unethically (assuming she’s not trying to LLM-wash some open source software), I’m not really sure how what you mentioned is a relevant harm that would change his gf’s opinion?
ETA: To give you a better idea what I’m talking about, let’s say that the gf really just ethically thinks playing video games is a massive waste of time, and she raises that concern. And that he thinks that playing video games is a social outlet so that he can spend time with friends from high school, and have a fun time, and that the time he spends with it is in balance with the rest of his priorities and life.
The GF has a valid opinion about video games, but she’s not going to win any arguments with someone who is enjoying their usage in a balanced way with random ideological arguments, and moreover, she needs to either accept that this is something he enjoys to do in the balance of his life, and/or that she gasp may be wrong and/or leave the relationship if it’s really that big of a deal, but it would seem like she’s a bit of a nutter if she does that, to me at least.
You can say the same about any creative commons media they may have swallowed. There are copyleft forms of licenses for all creations in all domains. By using LLM generated content, you’re using that training data.
Keep backpeddling all you want, I demonstrated one of tbe many ways that LLMs create inherit and tangible harm as asked.
As for this guys girlfriend? I’ll refer to my first comment. (Admittedly edited a coupla mins after its original posting, so ya nights missed it):
That being said, yeah that’s rough and you’re probably gonna have to just accept it if a coupla conversations aren’t doing it, because trying to ‘fix’ your partners like they’re a project is both unhealthy and condescending.
I wasn’t asking for an abstract concept of how LLMs can cause ethical harms, I was asking how this person ever made the case that his GF’s particular use of AI was causing ethical harm. As I said in my last comment, responding with esoteric random arguments (arguments, not facts, I still remember when ‘theft’ required actually having to lose property) is not how you resolve a dispute in a relationship or a difference of opinion. I’m not backpedaling, you just demonstrated exactly what OP is doing and why it isn’t relevant to the situation.
There are copyleft forms of licenses for all creations in all domains. By using LLM generated content, you’re using that training data.
If you create with an LLM you’re relicensing work under an incompatible license.
Even if you do release under a copy left license, which one do you use? Many of them are incompatible. No matter what your breaking someones terms (or you would if AI companies wherent allowed to get away with murder.)
Again, as someone with publicly released works under copy-left licenses, that is doing anyone who’s contributed to such works, in effort or donation, a tangible disservice.
Unless your work is so fucking innately important as to be above that issue, like improving quality of life for someone who’s disabled, or curing some horrible disease, I don’t wanna fucking hear it.
If you actually read the comments you will see most people don’t act like a circle jerk. Some say I’m wrong, some say I should break up with her and some say we should talk instead. I wrote here because people here might understand me.
You should phrase your concerns to her in the form ‘Your use of AI harms me in <specific way(s)>’ to her, then. Don’t talk about the planet, don’t talk about licenses. Is she not spending time with you that she’s spending with the AI? Is she spending excessive money on tokens and hurting your family? What is she doing that’s actually hurting you? Having a different opinion than you doesn’t count as a harm.
ETA: I also read every comment in the thread before I responded. No one just proferred that maybe you’re just flat out wrong and need to stop pushing your weird opinion this deep into your relationship. And I think the fact that you ran to the fuck_ai community to ask for relationship advice is testament to that. Come on bro.
Why are you so violent? Do you also use AI and feel bad to be called out?
As I suspected you’re just looking for agreement and not advice. So yeah, you’re right dude just keep pressing her on this, it would be a great idea.
Don’t talk about the planet […] What is she doing that’s actually hurting you?
Hurting the planet is actually hurting us too. We’re all going to die in screaming fucking agony from mass starvation, mega disasters, wars for resources, collapsing infrastructure, and the eventual collapse of all civilization. Everyone dead forever because people needed to cheat on their homework and generate images of Sonic with big tiddies.
there’s a big giant line between buying up 2.5 times the world’s capacity for data and gpu compute and speculatively trying to build thousands of community-destroying data centers because you have some deluded idea that it will ‘solve work’ or generate infinite value or whatever the fuck is going on with those people and someone using an LLM to summarize their fucking emails. If you seem them as being literally exactly the same, then I guess OP came to the right place, good lord. If you can acknowledge that when this hysteria passes there will still be tools out there that parse data and return it as text and that people will still use that and can do so without being cartoon villains, then I think OP should centralize his concerns around whether it’s actually harming him vs this henny penny bullshit.
My point is that talking about the planet is talking about what is actually hurting us.
And she’s plainly not using it for “summarizing emails” as the OP clearly says “Projects, reports, homeworks all go through the LLM.”
That sounds like she’s a heavy user burning through a bunch of tokens, which means she is helping fuel the people buying up 2.5 times the world’s capacity for data and gpu compute and speculatively trying to build thousands of community-destroying data centers and all that other horseshit. You can’t give these people your money and then pretend you aren’t part of the problem.
Maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s a conscientious user using a lightweight open Chinese model that doesn’t require destroying the world to run (I really don’t care if people do this by the way), but that doesn’t sound like the situation.
Yeah but that usage isn’t going to kill the planet, it pales in comparison to a single lazy system admin who uses it to generate all of his work or analyze through a company’s entire codebase. I don’t think the buildout is sustainable (or going to happen), and I think over time more people will shift into the usage model that you mention - running capable models locally on their own devices. They’re trying to essentially capture the entire industry before that happens.
It still helps keep the bubble inflated. They do need all those individual retail level customers to keep their valuations pumped up; relying solely on institutional customers and b2b isn’t enough. Obviously a single user can’t change anything, but if individual customers didn’t matter they wouldn’t bother advertising or trying to get us to use AI in our lives outside of work.
We absolutely should pressure the people we know in our lives to not use AI - or at least, stop buying tokens from hyperscalers.
Shift it from a merely theoretical conversation about the negatives of AI to a personal, relationship-focused conversation. Make it clear to her that it would mean a lot to you, personally, if she could make that change or at least open a discussion about why she continues to use it.
It’s AI, not heroin. Hating AI is great but shouldn’t lead all the way to serious relationship trouble IMO, as long as she doesn’t use LLMs to talk to you directly or something. You can try to understand why she uses it and how it helps her. You can also tell her it feels wrong to you or bothers you that her work is done with AI, or that you don’t want to read it, but at the same time you can still accept that it’s working for her. Dogma doesn’t fair well in relationships
Nah, political views seem pretty important for relationships—like, where do you draw the line? Is racism okay? Is pro-capitalism fine? Is fascism tolerable?
Also, in my opinion, AI is akin to mind-altering drugs: there’s withdrawl, pyschosis, dependency, et cetera. At best, it’s comparable to caffine. At worst… well, people have ended their lives because of it.
I agree. I think it has the potential to cause impairment of thinking if left rampant. It’s like watching a religion take over.
The issue you have is now widening ideas on who the person you love is. It’s easy to say oh just seperate them from thier role, but it’s not that simple, once it’s in your head. If you said my partner has adopted a new religion and it is at odds of how we were, you would likely get more understanding.
Whilst it sounds crazy I think you have to look at hypothetical situations, what if she decided to disclose your data or identifiers to AI? Or what if you have a heated discussion and she chooses its decision over yours?
Is it simple a professional tool then or is it a crutch?
I think
She agrees with me every time and says she will decrease her usage but at the end she uses it still.
would be the issue more than the AI usage in and of itself.
Why?
If your partner tells you they’re going to do x and repeatedly does y instead, that’s somewhere between inconsiderate and deceptive. That’s not a good thing in a relationship and should be addressed.
What a shocking (for this platform)-ly helpful, mature, honest, and direct response! Absolutely.
You don’t need to ignore it. She should understand your stance on AI. You don’t need to come off strong with pure hatred, but she should understand your dislike of AI. On the topic of her homework, keep it light. You don’t need to fixate on it, just say it looks good (if it does). I don’t know if you can help her reduce her usage. Maybe someone else here can figure that out.
You make a fair few judgments there. A relationship doesn’t mean you get to control each other’s behaviour. I digress. What I’m curious about is
I said how there can’t be ethical AI and any use of it is harmful.
That’s pretty blanket. Did you mean just LLMs or all forms of AI?
She is caring, cute, clever and really thoughtful. I love everything about her.
Accept her for who she is. If you can’t, move on.
That is probably what I will do.
Personally that is a dealbreaker for me, but honestly- no one here can tell you what to do. And this is true about anything you can ask of complete strangers online.
Honestly I get you, I hate the world GenAI is making… but you can’t control what your partner does. You’ve told her your stance on AI, and that you don’t like how dependent she is on it - but it’s her decision and responsibility as to whether she acts on what you’ve said.
If her rampant AI use is a deal-breaker to you, then act on that. Otherwise, if she refuses to stop - then it’ll have to be something to disagree on. Draw the line on things you do together.
I’d say it’s about the same as other issues in relationships. People ain’t perfect. I have a few habits which don’t really resonate with my partner at all. And I see other people discuss other stuff as well. The amount of partying someone does, friends, kids, doomscrolling and TikTok addiction, chores, leisure time, relationship to someone’s parents… There’s a million things to fundamentally disagree on.
Somehow you need to work it out. Talk. Make up your own mind, think about where to compromise, what are hard limits for you. And what’s more important to you. That thing or her. And where do you all want to go. And then find a effective ways to talk. Seems to me what you’ve been doing is talk, but from the description, it doesn’t seem like it’s all that effective.
I personally don’t think policing someone’s work is the job of a spouse. I’ll ask my partner what’s up with their job, take interest, empathize… But I don’t tell them how to do their work. On the other hand I have expectations for personal life. I wouldn’t like it at all if someone brings AI slop into the shared living room. I might be able to compromise on some of it, especially if I disagree on the way to do it but there’s no bad consequences. But there’s hard no’s for me. And you do you.
I think most important is to come to some kind of agreement which makes everyone comfortable at least to some degree. If you wanna make the relationship work, that is. But I feel if she’s saying one thing but does another… There’s still some things to work out. Either you’re not really communicating and she just says yes to make you stop. Or she’s struggling to pull it off. (Might not be easy at all to quit AI?) Or you both have different opinions and avoid conflict.
Maybe another option is to remove your own opinion for now, and just listen for a while. Find out what she wants. Where she’s at and where she wants to go with this?
All I can tell you is that had I been you, I would have told her that her brain is every bit as beautiful as the rest of her, and that I’d hate to see that beauty eroded by her outsourcing her ability to think to a jumped-up Markov Chain.
Yours is the best answer here, bravo!
Commenting just to reiterate what a lot of the other comments are saying. It’s ok if AI use is a dealbreaker for you, it would be for me. I personally have a list of companies I boycott and if my partner didn’t care enough to also boycott them then in my opinion we just wouldn’t align enough to stay together. That being said, you can also just decide that not using AI is important to you but you will tolerate it in a partner. My main advice if that’s the route you go would be to be clear that you don’t personally use it and draw clear boundaries. It’s ok to say for example “if you use AI for a project I’m not interested in reviewing/discussing it”. Maybe that’s a dealbreaker for her, I don’t know, but I’d just sit down with yourself and determine 1) if it’s a dealbreaker or not and 2) if it’s not a dealbreaker what your boundaries about it are. You just have to be ready for whatever her decision is regarding that. If you tell her it’s not a dealbreaker then you should just let it go. No one likes being nagged. But you also don’t have to support it, just be clear about that and keep consistent with whatever you said you were/weren’t going to do when she brings it up.
Also, I think the comments calling you controlling are out of line. You can have preferences regarding your partners behavior. It only becomes controlling in very specific conditions. If you’re unclear about your desires and then retaliate against her without her knowing why that would be one way of being controlling. If you’re open and honest and communicate that you have a preference and are open to her response then you’re probably perfectly fine. The most important thing is clear communication and respecting each others boundaries.
Having a partner doing something that don’t align can definitely be hard to deal with. My fiance is the best person I know, I love everything about her, but sometimes she endorses the murder, rape, torture and breeding of animals for the sake of taste.
To me it makes no sense, but I accept that we have different priorities. If I were to look down on all people that make different choices than me I would be lonely and I don’t think hanging out with vegans gives me better life quality than being with my friends and family.
She is caring, cute, clever and really thoughtful
If you’re ending it, can I get her number? /s
Y’all need to chill it with crucifying anyone and everyone who uses ai. Like any other tool it depends on how it’s used. (If you can put aside the environmental factors cause a single person using it is not going to even scratch the surface of how much companies are)
As someone with ADHD, it’s an amazing way to organize thoughts and to destill ideas into actual writing. And before you go on about how you can do that without ai, yes you can, but it requires someone to sit down with you and help you through the executive functioning process that I don’t have. Would you be willing to spend that time and become her brain’s crutch?
Before you do anything drastic, talk to her, figure out what she uses it for, how it helps her process. Don’t blanket dismiss it cause it’s ai.
Of course I won’t break up with her. I want to support her with her work but I don’t feel like her work is genuine. And the issue is I am not good at lying or acting.
So when she talks about the things she did I can’t help myself and say “you could’ve done that by yourself”. She claims she doesn’t use it for everything but I saw the chats.
I know I sound like a jerk but this is important to me. I will probably try to ignore her use of AI and support her regardless.
She agrees with me every time and says she will decrease her usage but at the end she uses it still.
How often are you “explaining” to her the dangers of AI? Honestly, yes, just ignore it. Outside looking in, you sound tedious and mildly controlling.
I probably am but she always talks about how much she wants to succeed and be an engineer. I don’t see an engineer using AI and becoming successful so I am trying to guide her for her sake.
But I should probably stop you are right.
Dump that zero, and get a hero.
Play some games / do activities together that don’t involve internet / computer or any technology and best if it require focus and attention. ex yoga, board games, but also cooking from physical book or just experimenting in kitchen.
