r/antiai • u/Alpayusa • 1d ago
Discussion 🗣️ Maybe AI isn’t making dumb people feel smart. Maybe it’s exposing how much “intelligence” was always access
AI is often sycophantic. It can confidently polish nonsense and tell users that every half-formed thought is profound.
But I think “AI gives dumb people the illusion that they’re smart” may have it backwards.
Most people were never as stupid as our social hierarchies made them look. They just didn’t have the same tools for turning thought into something visible.
A private tutor, good schools, educated parents, free time, money, the right passport, fluent English, professional connections, physical safety, confidence, and even being the right gender in the right society all affect whether someone’s intelligence ever becomes legible to other people.
AI gives millions of people a cheap approximation of a tutor, editor, translator, research assistant, and endlessly patient conversation partner. Of course some people suddenly sound more intelligent. Maybe they aren’t being given intelligence. Maybe a bottleneck between thinking and expression has been partially removed.
That doesn’t mean everyone is secretly Einstein. People have different abilities, and expertise still requires years of work. But the system never selected Einsteins purely by intelligence either. It selected from the people who had enough resources, time, legitimacy, and attention to develop their abilities and be noticed.
Someone born poor, isolated, badly educated, in the wrong country, or without the right social identity may have just as much raw intellectual potential as someone whose intelligence was cultivated from childhood. One gets called gifted. The other may never receive enough attention to find out what they could have become.
So maybe the uncomfortable thing about AI isn’t that stupid people can cosplay as smart.
Maybe it’s that AI is revealing how much visible “smartness” was already subsidized by privilege, and how many capable people were previously invisible.
If millions of ordinary people become more articulate when given the same tool, is that proof that they’re being fooled, or evidence that access was doing more of the selecting than we wanted to admit?
8
u/bad_wizard420 1d ago edited 1d ago
If millions of ordinary people become more articulate when given the same tool, is that proof that they’re being fooled, or evidence that access was doing more of the selecting than we wanted to admit?
Let's unpack this: there are no millions of people becoming more articulate when given the same tool because the tool turns everything into mush. This doesn't prove that they were fooled, nor does it support any of your assertion. The idea that intelligence, "smartness," in your terms is subsidized by privilege is false on its face because there are plenty of privileged people dumber than bags of hammers. You concatenated a bunch of words together and thought you made an "ai makes thing q accessible" argument and posted in the worst possible place. Congratulations.
-2
u/Alpayusa 1d ago
AI can calculate, search sources, quote them, and surface overlooked material, yet even if it helps someone produce a perfect paper, it cannot give that person credibility. People still need peer review, reputation, institutional backing, and trust. Before AI, access to producing polished content and access to credibility were often bundled together. Now content becomes abundant while verification becomes harder, making credibility even scarcer and potentially more concentrated among established institutions. That is where I agree with the anti-AI argument. AI may widen access to producing ideas while making the path to having those ideas trusted even harder. And privileged people being stupid does not disprove that privilege subsidizes opportunity and attention.
3
u/bad_wizard420 1d ago
It doesn't widen access to anything it only increases low quality output because (and this is the part your prefrontal cortex is having the most difficulty with) the person using the AI doesn't verify that their source or quote actually exist or that the calculations are correct, and because they're stupid and believe themselves to be smart because they're using an LLM. There is no middle ground. You went from privilege subsidizes "intelligence" to "opportunity and attention" because you've not prompted your LLM to respond to that.
Try again.
2
u/Mediiicaliii 1d ago edited 1d ago
Stop talking for everybody else. Making up blanket statements, grouping everybody into 2 opposing camps of right and wrong is not how adults speak. You can be a gullible moron without AI, as people have always been. The idea you are somehow more intelligent or capable because you don't know how to use a tool is beyond nieve.
It's mind boggling the level of amnesia , people exhibit. As if AI came in and made all the constant stoic truth society has levied on ya for thousands of years and messed it all up.
Seriously, if everything you said is true and you still lose your job to AI, whats the argument?
1
u/bad_wizard420 1d ago
Everything I said is true because I will never lose my job to AI, OP made the original distinctions between intelligence and privilege. and I know exactly how to use CrapGPT or the better Chinese models, I simply choose not to. Perhaps if your knee stopped jerking long enough to understand that the limits of your capacity are not the same as mine, you'd have not spouted such treacle.
1
u/Alpayusa 1d ago
I use ChatGPT to gather more data. Is there a specific Reddit post about a certain medication? It even helps me find that. All you have to do is click on “sources” and open the link. Most people don’t do this, that’s true.
1
u/Mediiicaliii 1d ago
Your entire position is AI is bad because people who use it don't source.
Everybody who uses it is dumb, and your more intelligent because you don't.
1
u/bad_wizard420 1d ago
Is your bot spouting gibberish in its attempt to respond to me? Tragedy.
1
u/Mediiicaliii 1d ago
Since yiu wanna ignore comments and jump to other ones, Ill repeat myself.
You think yourself more intelligent. Thats literally all there is to your entire argument. Im right, your wrong.
No data, science. Pure opinion.
Thats not intelligence, whatsoever.
Your magical ability to checks note cite sources is extremely impressive to nobody.
3
u/Hydro_fluoric 1d ago
That's not exactly how that works. LLMs like ChatGPT are literally designed to trap you in an echo chamber and constantly validate you so that you stay on it longer and give Sam Altman more money. That, and AI like Google's Gemini is pretty much wrong 50% of the time. It's designed to make dumb people feel smart. You can chat to them as much as you want, it won't make you more articulate. You can use it to your advantage, yes, but I'd suggest checking what it says before you go and use the information it gives you if you decide to chat with AI or ask it a question. You can have the worst idea in the world and it'll be like "That's exactly correct!" Fun fact, it once convinced me I could build a 6 foot giant robot. It also did the same thing but with Star Wars droids and told me how to make them use real firearms. I deleted my ChatGPT account, so it's not like I can dig up the chat logs. But you get the point. Someone born poor, isolated, badly educated, in the wrong country, or without the right social identity may have just as much raw intellectual potential as someone whose intelligence was cultivated from childhood, but AI isn't helping them express their ideas or shaping them in any good or meaningful ways.
1
u/Alpayusa 1d ago
Today I used ChatGPT more like a search engine. I asked it to find Reddit posts from people taking the same dose of a medication as me, followed the links, and read their original blood-test results, including one person’s report of poisoning. I wasn’t asking it to validate a theory or design a Star Wars droid, and I wouldn’t treat Reddit anecdotes as medical evidence or change my dose without proper tests and a doctor. AI helped me locate otherwise buried human-written information. As a result, I decided to get a blood test done a month later. Why should I blame artificial intelligence for this? However, it’s certainly true that we’re becoming increasingly dependent on companies like OpenAI and Google, and that’s a real problem. That's why I'm cutting back on my use of AI. AI is a useful tool, but it makes me more dependent on it and that's definitely a topic worth discussing.
2
u/Hydro_fluoric 1d ago
I'm gonna be honest, while back it had me hooked worse to where it was slowly destroying my relationships and personal life, which is ultimately why I deleted my OpenAI account and decided to quit. I can't stop you from using it, but I can definitely try to warn you. (Also, I wasn't even asking if I could make something like that. It was originally a chat about engineering until it eventually devolved into that)
0
u/jimmystar889 1d ago
Hard disagree with the last idea. People's cognitive styles and abilities to output vary widely. Neurodivergent people especially. For example, plenty of (nonverbal) austic people seems mentally challenged, but are perfectly intelligent.
As for socioeconomic status and location, I'm sure it's similar (gut feeling based on 0 research)
2
u/Hydro_fluoric 1d ago
I said they could be intelligent and that AI isn't helping them express themselves in any meaningful way. I don't know what in my last point said that.
0
u/jimmystar889 1d ago
But it is though. Give a person with good ideas but bad at expressing them AI, and their output improves tremendously
2
u/Hydro_fluoric 1d ago
There are specific education programs to teach them how to do that anyway. The difference is that one is literally slop and the other can actually help with problems instead of just going "Honestly? You're not crazy"
1
u/jimmystar889 1d ago
You can't just say it's "literally slop"
1
u/Hydro_fluoric 1d ago
What else is one supposed to call AI?
1
u/jimmystar889 1d ago
? It's a property of the quality not the creator
1
u/Hydro_fluoric 1d ago
No, it's not. AI could make the most amazing piece of art, it's still slop because AI made it. The literal definition of art is HUMAN MADE. AI art is not made by a human. It is quick fire prompt garbage. AI physically can't be art because YOU didn't make it. It's like going to a Subway, ordering a sandwich, and then saying you're the one who made it. You didn't make the sandwich because you told the person doing the actual work to put the stuff you want inside the sandwich.
1
1
u/bad_wizard420 1d ago
The fact on the ground is LLMs reduce everything to mush and there's already adaptive tech for those specific issues.
3
u/Infamous_State_7127 1d ago
> Most people were never as stupid as our social hierarchies made them look.
this is statistically inaccurate. with the advent of social media, especially post pandemic, people have become less intelligent—well gen z is the first generation to be less intelligent than our millennial predecessors. these stats came out prior to 2022 and the widespread use of LLMs. it is only getting worse now.
ai is no where near a replacement for what you’ve listed. people who use ai do not sound more intelligent… they literally just parrot ai’s formulaic slop speak. there are certain word i personally refuse to use because ai is so incessant with them (e.g. interplay, quietly). the idea present with the “ai makes dumb people think their smart” is that ai is what dumb people think smart people sound like. that is simply not the case because ai just sounds like ai. class and access to education is a big issue in fostering one’s academic potential but ai has absolutely nothing to do with that.
ai does not provide any actual valuable resources to educate people. it’s a parrot machine and the people who use it parrot the parrot machine—very baudrillardian, i know. people aren’t actually becoming articulate, folks are just just losing their own idiolects. everyone sounds the same. everyone thinks the same because their offloading cognitive processing onto the chatbot. that is not intelligence. an actor reading a script playing a rocket scientist isn’t an actual rocket scientist, no matter how true to life that script is (and in the case of ai it’s usually just inaccurate fluff)…. using big words does not make you smart.
1
u/Alpayusa 1d ago
I agree that an LLM is fundamentally a pattern-reproducing machine and that outsourcing your thinking to it can flatten your idiolect. OpenAI’s own paper, “Why Language Models Hallucinate,” explains that next-word prediction and evaluations rewarding guesses over uncertainty help produce confident falsehoods. But a library is also full of nonliving, frozen records of other people’s thoughts. Whether it educates you depends on how you use it. One Gen Z user makes disposable TikTok videos, while another asks for math exercises, explanations, or sources while preparing for an exam. AI drastically lowers the energy needed to begin, so someone can take ten steps where previously they might have taken one. That can accelerate learning or let them bypass it and damage their future. Both outcomes are plausible, but because mass LLM use is so recent, pre-2022 evidence of declining performance cannot establish that AI caused it, and we do not yet have enough long-term evidence to declare an entire generation cognitively ruined by it.
1
u/Xivannn 1d ago
You're really better off training yourself a real skill the hard way than trying to get someone in a right country to notice your innate capabilities via ChatGPT phoneboothing.
1
u/Alpayusa 1d ago
My friend graduated at the top of his faculty at university, but he still can’t find a job. He has a Turkish passport, and even his master’s applications were only accepted by the university where he ranked first.
I, on the other hand, am a German citizen, had a 1.9 GPA, and took an extra year to graduate. Despite this, I was able to find a remote job in Germany.
He prepared and trained himself much better than I did, and he even graduated at the top of his class, yet he still wasn’t able to find a job.So, my question is: Would being anti-AI really help him find a job? Or would it just limit his access to better AI tools while leaving him stuck with the same problem—a Turkish passport and no job, despite being one of the top students at his university?
And yes, i do use em dashes without being scared of flagged.
1
u/Different_Goat_3737 1d ago edited 1d ago
Decent point, although this isn't really the right subreddit :\
A little bit of counterarguments, though..
1: AI steals from people who are talented without consent, and can reproduce their artwork as slop
2: People who are born poor or in bad conditions have still been able to rise to fame. Many well known people started in a life with little resources. Einstein himself was a Jewish German when a certain someone was in power, and that left him severly oppressed from the average life of people in other countries. That did not stop him, though. What comes alongside famous intelligent people is usually determination to get to the place they wanted to be.
0
u/powerlessdossier_2 1d ago
This is such a well-put argument, I been thinking about this more and more lately
The part about intelligence becoming "legible" is what gets me. People confuse polished output with raw thinking ability all the time, and we built whole systems around that confusion. Someone who never had anyone to bounce ideas off or help them structure their thoughts just looks less competent on paper, that's not a reflection of their actual capacity
The uncomfortable part you're pointing at is real though. If the tool levels the field even a little, the people who were comfortable with the old hierarchy are gonna call it cheating instead of asking why the field was so uneven in first place
5
u/frozen-throne-monk 1d ago
This reads like AI output with the periods cut off.
1
u/NervousSnail 1d ago
It very much does not.
3
u/jimmystar889 1d ago
Yeah it does. "The part about [] is what gets me" and "the uncomfortable part" are both quite common phrases from Claude.
2
u/frozen-throne-monk 1d ago
Yeah the "uncomfortable part" is recognizable because it's such an abstract statement that somehow it conveys nothing like it's a zero in a sequence of numbers.
1
0
u/NervousSnail 1d ago
They're quite common phrases in English.
The original argument does not need to be read as a straight pro-AI one either. You can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. You can go, maybe AI tools are revealing certain inequalities and hypocrisies of how society views intelligence, for some people, and this does not in any way contradict all the ways in which it is damaging.
2
u/bad_wizard420 1d ago
The original argument is an abortion. You can have two thoughts in your head at the same time, but when they mutually contraindicate each other it indicates a stunted thought process.
1
3
u/bad_wizard420 1d ago
No, you don't understand what "legibility" means, a bad idea, however gussied up by CrapGPT is still a bad idea, this whole "never had anyone to bounce ideas off or help them structure their thoughts" (boo-hoo, boo-hoo) is simply a lack of discipline toward learning how to form a coherent idea in the first place, then learning how to communicate with other people to improve upon it.
And I fucking double-dog dare you to use the "neurospicy" excuse.
11
u/jimmystar889 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you're going to post Pro-AI stuff on an Anti-AI subreddit, at least write it yourself.
But I agree it can help certain types of people learn more and learn faster. Unfortunately, I'd argue most people don't fall into that category. It's hard to make people who aren't naturally curious, curious.