I-boats and AI

[rolmops]

Lately I have seen less and less traffic on this board and other similar ones. Artificial intelligence has probably combed every thread ever written on the I-Boats forums, All anyone has to do now is google a question and the answers come out within milliseconds. Will AI toll the death knell of this board?

 

[bakerjw]

AI has made it easier to collate desired information which leads to fewer posts asking questions. It is not just this one but forums across the web have been diminishing for many years.

 

[tpenfield]

I think it is more of a consolidation activity, and the smaller forums are becoming less and less active, as folks are gravitating to the larger forums. All AI is doing is speeding up the search process. But, the continued "I" comes from on-going forum participation.

 

[bigblocksarefun]

Social media has been slowly killing forums for years. AI might eventually, but not just yet.

 

[froggy1150]

Ai is only peat, peat and repeat. It will never have that glimmer of knowledge of how to figure some obscure thing out by trial and error....
At least not yet

 

[Fun Times]

Coupled with it is wintertime (at least) here in the US states in turn slowing things down a bit here but generally the overall site still remains decently active all of which there's been about the same up and down activity levels since I started paying attention to website boating forums back in the 2009 era.

Could also be that the Facebook boating and engine manufacturer group pages are lowering the volume of new members joining the forums as the group pages seem to remain pretty active all year long now.

This mentioned, in my view of AI, all the regular boating forum members like yourselves that have logged in day in, day out and provide detailed answers to multiple questions over the years ought to just give yourselves a nice little pat on the back mostly because, if it wasn't for you, then AI wouldn't really have anything significant to work with because generally speaking it's often just copying things you've all said in the past and putting it together in shorter sentences 'Plus in most cases, providing links to the subject at hand and you're in it.

 

[Scott Danforth]

My take is as follows:

those that blindly follow AI answers do not have NI (Natural Intelligence). When I do an AI augmented search, I know enough to review the results as most cases, something is missed or is wrong. I have a screenshot saved on my home computer where Google AI stated it was acceptable to bolt aluminum and stainless together in a salt water environment. AI currently is just matching word searches and combing large data sets - primarily Social Media..... where most of the answers are incorrect

Social media has proven the million monkeys theory to be false.

a few of the reasons for reduced forum traffic on iBoats and any forum. Forums were largely popular and started when the internet started..... the early 90's that is well over 3 decades ago. In that period of time, many of us have gone a bit more vintage and chrome. many of our members have simply passed.

over the past 10 years, the boating hobby has become extremely cost prohibitive. gone are the low-cost boat options. Just in the past 5 years, most boat company BOM costs have gone up 50%. A new 19 foot boat is $60k+. the average persons' income has not increased 50%. so people are simply not taking up the hobby.

 

[DeepCMark58A]

I have messed with AI when trying to trouble shoot. The information is not specific enough to be useful. AI is not real experience.

 

[jlh3rd]

It’s a tool…period.

 

[bakerjw]

I come here before the other big boat forum. Way less macho A-Holes berating and deriding people who can't afford half million dollar boats and multiple houses.
Off Topic a bit. I recently retired from Siemens as a senior level large system test architect. AI will make that job obsolete within a few years. Even our developers see the writing on the wall. It is not perfect and things need to be checked but there were occasions when I was writing test code in C# where Co-Pilot would suggest code that save me days of banging keys. For our other test groups, it is saving them time on an order of a magnitude or so.
We can give an AI a feature specification and use it to derive a test plan, test scenarios and test cases in a day where it used to take a high level expert weeks.
Glad I retired.

 

[Texasmark]

My take is as follows:

those that blindly follow AI answers do not have NI (Natural Intelligence). When I do an AI augmented search, I know enough to review the results as most cases, something is missed or is wrong. I have a screenshot saved on my home computer where Google AI stated it was acceptable to bolt aluminum and stainless together in a salt water environment. AI currently is just matching word searches and combing large data sets - primarily Social Media..... where most of the answers are incorrect

Social media has proven the million monkeys theory to be false.

a few of the reasons for reduced forum traffic on iBoats and any forum. Forums were largely popular and started when the internet started..... the early 90's that is well over 3 decades ago. In that period of time, many of us have gone a bit more vintage and chrome. many of our members have simply passed.

over the past 10 years, the boating hobby has become extremely cost prohibitive. gone are the low-cost boat options. Just in the past 5 years, most boat company BOM costs have gone up 50%. A new 19 foot boat is $60k+. the average persons' income has not increased 50%. so people are simply not taking up the hobby.

I don't want to know what TPenfield's new boat costs.....one beautiful beast!!! On AI gaining information, I use Google for my mailer. AI keeps sticking its nose in my business and at the end of a conversation from someone, AI posts its own idea of a response before you post yours. If you neglect the AI response it now comes back at you and wants to know why you rejected its idea of the correct response....like you said, gaining information.
On telling lies, I was working on some things to help digestion. The main one was fiber in your gut to keep it working properly. In that correspondence were things that add fiber to your meals.
AI got involved and decided that fiber in your diet was bad and came out with this dissertation that it was bad and listed just the opposite things you needed to eat for good gut performance. I didn't ask if for a response and was the first time I caught it telling a lie.

 

[redneck joe]

I come here before the other big boat forum. Way less macho A-Holes berating and deriding people who can't afford half million dollar boats and multiple houses.

must be tht...

 

[bigblocksarefun]

Google AI will outright lie to you. One of my current projects is researching shipyards and it has just made **** up, then when I call it out with evidence to the contrary it will admit it. Don't trust it. They're only good for certain things.

must be tht...

First place I thought of lol.

 

[eggs712]

AI wastes my time more than anything, and Google won't let us turn it off anymore. As others said, it frequently scours social media for answers, and having to read through its sources reveal that it usually doesn't comprehend the question.

However, it's actually good at cross-referencing obsolete part numbers to new ones.

 

[redneck joe]

saw a good interview with Mark Cuban about AI.

It is not intelligence, it is brute force.

 

[rolmops]

AI wastes my time more than anything, and Google won't let us turn it off anymore. As others said, it frequently scours social media for answers, and having to read through its sources reveal that it usually doesn't comprehend the question.

However, it's actually good at cross-referencing obsolete part numbers to new ones.

Maybe , you should try duckduckgo