First off, sorry if this is the wrong to community to post to - I'll move it somewhere else should it not fit the community.
My best friend quite often is a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, I feel like. Discussing politics, veganism, the problems with using Amazon, what have you, with him is nigh impossible because he insists on his opinion and won't budge. I feel like he just feels superior to other people, or at least to me, in a way that he just won't change his mind, doesn't hear other sides, and argues for the sake of arguing.
Now, in a recent discussion, I asked him if he knew why images aren't displayed properly in my Firefox-fork browser (Mull). He gave an answer and asked why I would use a custom browser instead of Firefox itself to which I responded that it's more privacy-focused and that I didn't like Mozilla's implementation of AI in their browser.
Long story short, it devolved into a lengthy discussion about AI, how the fear of AI is based on ignorance and a lack of knowledge, that it's fine that AI is used for creative projects because in most cases it's an assisting tool that aids creativity, doesn't steal jobs etc. essentially that it's just a tool to be used like a hammer would be.
What pisses me off the most about all this is that he subtly implies that I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it and that I don't have any sources to prove my points so they're essentially void.
How do I deal with this? Whatever facts I name he just shrugs off with "counter"-arguments. I've sent him articles that he doesn't accept as sources. This has been going on for a couple hours now and I don't know what to tell him. Do you guys have sources I could shove in his face? Any other facts I should throw his way?
Thank you in advance
Edit: A thing to add: I wasn't trying to convince him that AI itself is bad - there are useful usages of AI that I won't ignore. What I was concerned about is the way AI is used in any and all products nowadays that don't need AI to function at all, like some AI-powered light bulbs or whatever; that creative jobs and arts are actively harmed by people scraping data and art from artists to create derivative "art"; that it's used to influence politics (Trump, Gaza). These things. The way AI is used in its unmonitored way is just dangerous, I feel like
You typically cannot change someone like this with evidence. They must be personally affected or isolated from their politics before they will even consider it
For me it's not even that I hate the concept of AI. It's that we're shoving half baked AI literally everywhere we can without any fuck given to reliability, accuracy and safety, or even sustainability.
- GitHub Copilot: code so bad I won't even bother reviewing the PR. It doesn't save time at all unless you suck at coding already.
- Google Gemini/Bing Copilot: completely off the mark more often than not, it's still faster to do a standard, well written web search.
- AI assistants: they've always sucked and still sucks but hey at least the voice is realistic right. It still doesn't understand what you say to it half the time.
- Recall: nobody ever asked for that
- AI summaries: I'd rather skim through articles, at least I know what I skipped.
- AI translations: better than Google Translate I guess, but more of the same: it gets you by when reading foreign sites but the quality is still too bad to use it to translate my apps with it in a professional setting.
They're all impressive products on a technical level, but they're basically really expensive alpha quality software that sucks a stupid amount of power for dubious gains.
My other gripe is most of the time those feed your personal data to Microsoft/OpenAI for processing, because most people don't have a quad RTX 4090 Ti setup to run any decent model locally at reasonable speeds. It's using a jackhammer to nail a nail.
You explained to us that this is a general problem with this schmuck, so I don’t see how counter-arguments specific to AI will be of use.
I don't know, I thought I might try it to shut him up. Probably no use
I'd say its time to disengage from the conversation.
Having the conversations and sticking to your points is good and all but they didn't come to their opinions based on "facts and logic" so you're not going to facts and logic them into a different opinion.
Possibly try to pay attention to when your friend has gotten to the point in the conversation that they've effectively shut down and wind down the conversation when it gets to that point. Talk about something else, everybody goes outside and touches grass, or just call it a day.
I mean idc about ai either, what other people choose to like has no effect on me whatsoever
The electricity requirements and carbon footprint of the currently projected usage of LLMs is staggering and if you like living in an inhabitable environment, you should care.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/05/1084417/ais-carbon-footprint-is-bigger-than-you-think/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x
Congratulations on your selfish apathy. You seem to care a lot about letting us know you don't care.
Yeah because it's funny to see people like you whine about it
You continue to demonstrate how much you don't care in a oh so cool way by continuing to reply.
people like you whine about it
Having an inhabitable planet is a good thing, even if you're too much of a selfish nihilistic passive-aggressive treat hog to acknowledge that.
I'm glad you know how to Google big sounding words to sound smart to insult me with.
How long are you going to keep replying to demonstrate how much you don't care?
Google big sounding words
No wonder you're an apathetic "AI" hog: you're telling on yourself. What word up there was so big for you that you think it required computer assistance?
the fact i keep getting you to reply to me is pretty telling in itself
Bloviate all you want, Captain Apathy. I'm going to keep underlining how your "not caring" is getting more and more clownish as a claim because you keep caring enough to give your Reddity replies, hours later.
You care so very little about announcing your very brave 9th grade style apathy that you're still going on about it.
Do you need last words? Seems like you care about those.
When he's not being a contrarian, he's a very good friend whom I've known since I was 10. It's just when it comes to these subjects, he's not talked to
Start by becoming an area matter expert, otherwise you two just have different opinions
