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?
It’s not right of you to try to change her. She knows you’re not ethically aligned. If it’s a huge problem for you that sounds like a deal breaker. I am an AI user and would be grossed out if my partner was disgusted by my use if it and asked the internet what to do instead of just dealing with it up front.
“She knows you’re not ethically aligned. If it’s a huge problem for you…”
ai user proving the problem with ai users yet again… no ethics, doesn’t even understand what they are.
I also have ADHD and dont use AI.
What i do with my partner who also uses AI to do stuff on their website or the server, and when ever I call them out for it, they get defensive. So i just ignore it now. It is not a thing i want to throw the relationship away for.
We are both IT. Them Sys. Admin, me Software Dev…
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.
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!
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.
This is absolutely a thing. ADHD fucks the reward center of your brain, so you don’t really feel a lot of satisfaction from working (or any at all). If you spend that time with a pen and paper it just feels like a waste of time, even if you complete the job you set out to do. There’s still the reward at the end of the task, but the work itself does not feel rewarding. Medication helps, but it’s not magic.
What you’re basically telling her is “spend more time miserable” and are surprised she won’t.
Using it for school work is demonstrably not learning. In fact using an LLM is antithical to learning: it’s cognitive offloading.
If she cares about actually learning she’d do her own school work.
That’s the problem I see here… my 2¢
Now try saying that about audio books. See the hypocrisy in action.
I have to disagree here.
If you listen to an audiobook, you still take in all the same info as you would reading the book yourself.
If you use AI to help you with a research paper you will always be offloading part of the task. Use it to gather your sources? You just offloaded the skills of looking for credible evidence to back up your claim. Use it to write the paper after doing the research yourself? You still offload the skill of crafting your arguments, word choice, persuasion, etc.
You are also taking a big risk assuming that the output of the clanker is correct as it usually doesn’t provide you sources to double check yourself.
I could say that about audio books… but it wouldn’t be true.
🧐
Replace “uses AI” with “is an alcoholic” and follow similar advice.
I’m anti-AI but these two things are not remotely similar. You can’t slowly Claude yourself to death over a number of years as your friends and family are forced to watch.
You can claude your friends and family to death though, while they watch you turn into even more of a self absorbed muppet every single day
Wut? That’s what I see in a lot of my friends on instagram. Which had lead to a lot of suicides.
And it’s the same with AI chat bots. I’ve completely lost some friends. When I ask then a question, they just paste it into their chat and paste that slop response back to me
The first step is admitting they have a problem.
See that’s where I’m going to disagree with you. I can name a handful of people who are logically dead already. Tons of people have destroyed their lives (and lost their lives) due to the psychosis they were allowed to build up while conversing only with AI.
South Park had a pretty entertaining (fictional) demonstration of this
I really have to find a way to catch up on that show, I hear they now call it South America.
Probably not worth it. Just watch an episode here and there where someone recommends it
The episode I was talking about is Season 27 Episode 3: Sickofancy. In it, Randy gets addicted to chatgpt, and decides he’s going to get VP funding for a startup, takes a bunch of ketamine, and realizes that he’s gone bankrupt by the terrible advice from his AI chat bot.
I also recommend Season 26 Episode 4: Deep Learning. In it, the kids start writing all their school essays with AI (and also all their romantic responses to girlfriends) while their teacher grades all the essays with AI. Then the school AI police start to investigate, and both the students and the teachers are terrified they’ll be found out.
That’s much more upbeat from the real stories I’ve learned about!
Sure, but it’s much more entertaining. And meme’able.
Satire has real value in a society that’s marching off a cliff.
AI psychosis is a real thing, and multiple people have committed suicide because of it.
There are lawsuits against AI companies for those deaths.
So yes, you can in fact “Claude yourself to death”.
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?
You’re highly unlikely to date someone for a extended period of time and then suddenly learn they actually heavily Catholic or part of the Klan. Generally if you share some basic general interest you share broader interests like politics just because they are related. If I met a girl/guy fishing I shouldn’t be surprised to see a rebel flag tramp stamp on the second date.
If you date someone for 3-6 months then suddenly you notice all the ww2 natzi medals, and marble busts of elon musk in his master bed room then you are also the hot mess.
Most of the things you’re going to have disagreements about politically are minor and trivial. If you do that’s just luck of the bag. No one can just start drawing moral standards and making lines in the sand for you and your relationship that’s just insanity.
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.
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? Maybe she feels like she’s okay with AI? Maybe it’s some proxy for something else? Maybe she wants to quit, maybe she doesn’t? I feel that’s all important information for any further considerations. (I mean your post is mainly you writing down what you want. That’s perfectly alright. You also write what she does but there isn’t really anything about what she wants. So we’re missing a substantial chunk of the equation here.)
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.
Aside from the AI subject just agreeing with you everytime, then not changing, is a form of fawning. It’s avoidant, it usually comes from a disorganized attachment style. I only bring this up because this isn’t really about AI it’s about her behavior around it and taking inventory on the relationship and each partners attachment style can help communication, understanding and decision making.
Below is one of the best sourced comments that I’ve seen about listing the negative aspects of LLMs/AI.
One of my main ones is, thinking about spinning up a jet engine, next to someone’s backyard, each time a LLM is used for a web search.
Stick to the facts when you explain your views, explore ways to run local models for her if you can stretch that far.
Reasons not to use AI-LLM artificial intelligence. (There is probably a bunch more in the 7 months since this list was written.)
Perhaps address the impact this will have in the future in her career. From decades of experience in the mechanical field, I will tell you that if she doesn’t have the knowledge in her head she will get laughed at and fired. AI has not really penetrated the mechanical field. Yes, there is AI in CAD and other software, but at best it is for tinkerers and not scalable. Without the knowledge she won’t last a month in a mech eng role, assuming she manages to even get one.
She recently used AI in Solidworks to generate a ladder and said everyone at the internship is doing the same and telling her its the future.
Do you think that’s the case? Atleast for CAD in particular.
She may be considered for an entry level mech eng role, but based on her workflow her knowledge of fundamentals of mechanical design would be questioned. Generating models is very minor. She needs to understand basics of construction, manufacturing, material selection, design limitations and most critically overlooked, tolerances. She won’t become a senior engineer without being a junior engineer and the learning curve is steep. The CAD portion is general grunt work, which to be clear is what she is offloading here. That grunt work is where a mech eng refines their knowledge of the previously mentioned topics and learns how to apply them to mechanical design for manufacturing, assembly and user experience, skills which a good mech eng is trying to develop. This isn’t even touching on designing for strict constraints like regulatory standards. Engineering is a delicate balance of a million different compromises, and she must understand the compromises she is making with her designs. If it was about just chugging out models she would be screwed along with every other junior mech eng, and would be replaced by AI. This won’t happen because AI is not trustworthy, lies and hallucinates. The design review method is done by a person with whom you can have meaningful dialogue with. AI erodes critical thinking, which is what she needs to learn, but isn’t while using AI.
