Programmers were taught in today's schools which are mostly using 'teachers' who were programmed by teachers who were brought up thinking they are over-worked and under-paid.
What is lacking today are critical thinking skills!

:-D

As an aside, I stopped a McDonald's! My secret weapon, a TWO DOLLAR BILL. "What us this, then where would we put it???"

"Fundamental corroboration criteria will become essential to determine authenticity, quickly aiding in objectively evaluating truth and reality. Our continued existence, freedom, and life will depend upon it." Quote from a brief essay,
Is it Live or Is it Memorex? - SAVVY STREET,

Admittedly, I am not big on a lot of social stuff. I may want a nutritional analysis of a recipe, figured in several different ways, or I may want to understand how something works. So I ask the question, and don't get into the "personality" thing AT ALL with AI. I think it's pretty stupid to think of AI as an entity that can be engaged with, even though it can pretend to be just that. It's still pretending.

But then, when I was a kid I didn't play with dolls. They weren't alive, so why bother? This did not go over well with some of my grandchildren, because try as I might, I simply couldn't play dolls with them. (I am not bragging about that - it's one of my bigger failures, IMO.)

But what I've found is that in order to get a good answer, I have to ask a good question. And in that aspect, AI hasn't completely failed me, thank goodness. I have lost count of the times that I tried to form a question for AI, only to realize that I knew the answer (or was able to discern it) before I finished the question. Also, AI has been good for inadvertently pointing out to me the parts of the question I left out, as it formulated the answer for me.

Now about that math-on-paper and in-the-head...that's where I have allowed myself to be dumbed down. Sometimes getting that active with formulating a reasonable math answer seems harder than it used to be. I don't know whether that's old age or AI. In either case, the answer is the same: Practice.

Not quite sure how I allowed myself to get so off-track, but the entire topic is pretty interesting. And just because it's something that in many ways we don't "like," I refuse to ignore it. I am quite sure that long after the first highway was built, people were ignoring cars in favor of horse-and-buggy tech. They probably thought if they ignored cars long enough, they'd go away.

The only thing I've EVER discovered that will "go away" when you ignore them......is your teeth. That's pretty much guaranteed.

I use ChatGPT quite a bit. The best use is for creating poetry. It does that passably well, but is not quite up to my ultimate test, which is to imitate William Topaz McGonagall. McGonagall's sole criterion of poetitude was rhyme. He was blissfully unaware of meter, alliteration, imagery, parallel construction, and host of other devices. ChatGPT gets caught up in itself and when asked for McGonagallesque works, produces verse not as bad as McGonagall himself.

It's also seems to be very bad with biographical details. It not only had my friend of long ago shoot himself months after his death, but it killed Tom Lehrer by having him die this past April rather than in July.

Use AI for fun and for speed. It does indeed catch some things we might have missed, but don't trust it except for production of solid nonsense, and even then inspect the results.

Frankly, I believe its because AI can post pictures of lies and falsehoods about just about anything and dummies believe what they see.

Hmm, Ai is programed by dummies, We listen to Ai, so Ai makes US into Dummies, just like the programmers?

Do I have that right???

In the late '60s my teachers refused to let us use calculators in class because they wanted us to be more adept at doing math in our heads or on paper - making us think about what we were doing and learning. Slide rules (SR) were OK in most cases because you had to have understanding at some level to set them up. When I see the following generations, brought up on calculators, lack of in-the-head math skills I know my teachers were correct in predicting loss of skill. I can still do basic math in my head, but turning to the calculator is so convenient I've virtually lost SR skills. Could the new AI be the calculator on steroids? Maybe.

On the other hand, innovation supplants the old with the new with often wonderful results. American farmers have mostly lost the skill to plow with oxen or horses because it is so convenient and profitable to climb aboard a tractor.

We'll see what happens with AI, I guess.