this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Privacy

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I've been digging into the rabbit hole for a few months. Been switching to Linux, FOSS everything I can, trying to go to smaller sites, the least dubious social media, VPN, trusted mail, etc etc

But lately I've been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it's always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn't this basically cancelling every effort I've made? (using it in the first place anyway) I'm weak and it helps me, should I just throw my efforts out of the window and just say I don't care about privacy anymore and use whatever everyone uses? (on one hand, I've found alternatives for almost everything, so I could keep on using those, but also, again, if I keep on using GPT on a regular basis, this is probably the worst threat the future has to offer in termes of privacy, so...I'm lost)

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[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 3 points 1 week ago

Large Language Models only learn and repeat patterns, I don't think it's a good tool for introspection, because it's giving you more generic thoughts and only making it seem personal.

Worse, it's doing that lazily. People think that just because it has a gigantic database of information that it's able to parse all that information and put together summaries of that sum total of information, but what it does in reality is find the first solution it can cobble together from anonymous internet sources and present that as an "answer."

Asking a generic code question about data structures is less likely to produce bad answers, since there's little disagreement in how to implement them. They're close to brute facts, and a wrong answer is rarely catastrophic. Asking it about psychology or philosophy, however, is prone to terrible answers, not just because there's vast disagreement in those fields, but there's also a lot of personal consideration when it comes to applying the information to individuals.