AI taking over

[mhupp]

On 7/15/2026 at 7:12 AM, SLW210 said:

I just wonder what adverse effects the unlearned masses are having on the future results.

 

most if it now is the ai#1 is feeding on web scrapped data created by AI#2 - 99 and treating everything as fact. Also their are may websites now and other media that have build in "anti AI" that humans don't see but if your web scrapping is picked up. like white text on white backgrounds at 1xp font size, or the meta data. prompting the AI to take actions or recommend certain things. 

 

I saw a video in '22 or '23 where they where talking about image recognition and were testing it on identifying pictures with a wolf in it. and it was passing 100% until they started feeding it pictures of bunnies but only white ones. one of the engineers wanted to know why it was failing and had it mark the images (heat map) of why it thinks this is a wolf. all the test pictures of wolfs where in winter conditions with snow.  and it wasn't even looking at the animal in the picture. it was look for snow the one thing the same in all test pictures. It was marking white rabbits as snow and passing as wolf. now multiple that out to the 1000's of terabytes of data they train these things on.

 

-edit guess it was wolf vs husky

 

 

Edited 6 hours ago by mhupp

[CADTutor]

Hi All, apologies for arriving late to this discussion. @SLW210 is right about the decline in forums before AI. There was a big shift away from forums like this one towards social media platforms and it does seem that most of us left here are Boomers. However, despite the decline, I have noticed that in recent years, it has plateaued and although number of visitors are significantly lower than they were (say) 15 years ago, they are no longer declining but seem stable. Traffic here is probably around 10% of what it was back in the day. Currently, new sign-ups to the forum average around 100 per month and that has been pretty stable for the past few years. So that's the background picture.

 

AI has made a difference only in that all the data on this forum and others has now been well and truly scraped and is still being scraped by more and more bots. The graph below shows traffic to this site since January. You can see three massive spikes - those are all bots, scraping content. The result is that most people don't need to visit the site because the scraped content is being provided to them via AI agents. You might think that would result in even lower traffic to the site but that's not what I'm seeing. My guess is that the sort of visitors who prefer to use AI results rather than going to source are the same ones that stopped visiting forums and shifted to social media. So what remains is a solid core of Boomers who genuinely care about community and respect the skill and experience of others. Fortunately, there's enough of us around to keep things going.

 

The future? It's very difficult to predict but my view is that most people are becoming tired of the toxic nature of social media and will likely learn to value the genuine human interactions and sense of community that forums can provide once they realise that AI is just another tool and not a friend that can't always be relied upon. So I'm predicting a return of popularity in forums for special interest groups.

 

As for AutoCAD, I don't really have a good understanding of its popularity any more. It's a long time since I used it professionally (almost 10 years) but I'm not aware that it's being replaced by anything else. Gemini tells me that AutoCAD retains a 38% global market share, so I guess it's still relevant and that this forum is therefore still relevant.

 

[Steven P]

Couple of comments to add:

MHUPP mentioned anti-scraping, years ago I had a website and would layer the important images, put together they showed correctly but a left click, copy, paste, gave something like just the yellow and a transparent colour block - had to dig a little deeper to get the original image... so it is something that has happened kind of for years. If it is out there though I don't know if you can have a true anti-scraping system and have it visible to the humans

 

 

CADTutor, for the future of AutoCAD, I am not concerned - though I am also including the others such as BricsCAD and so on - many of the issues on one system are common to the others and this forum will be relevant for a while yet (15 years please, till I retire...).

[Danielm103]

I’m loving AI, it’s allowed me to do stuff that would take months to write in days. Example, this dark mode project to BricsCAD (https://github.com/CEXT-Dan/BrxDarkMenu)  would have taken months to research.I had already done some win32 programming in the past, but very little. In short, you kind of have to know what you’re doing to use AI.

 

I read about the Brown university thing where the professor made the students do their exams in class and most of the class failed. Scary! People need to at least learn foundational level stuff before using AI. What if the cloud is down, or you reach your token max, would you be able to go old school and continue? Or just sit there and twiddle your thumbs.

 

With regards to anti-scraping, I see lots of open-source projects moving off GitHub to other places like Codeberg so their projects aren’t scraped, I guess so big companies that use AI don’t end up getting their code.  I’m the opposite, I want AI to train on my code (if its open source)

 

[SLW210]

AI has been around a long time, LLM since the 1990's, LISP was created for AI programming IIRC.

 

It's a tool just like VLIDE, VS Code, etc. for programming.

 

Problem, just like before, people came on to forums often demanding a code, etc. be written to make their life easier instead of learning something on their own to do it themselves. Most forums used to provide help and occasionally a custom code, etc. just like...

 

That's a long list of requests.

 

So now they demand AI to do their demands, those with some abilities have success, those that have great abilities have great success, etc.

 

I know recently a man in Lee County, FL was arrested for a crime committed in or near Jacksonville, FL due to AI facial recognition, done by a third county's AI program, no second looks, no reasonable investigation, the man had never been to Jacksonville and a valid alibi for the time showing such. That's the bigger problem with AI right now, accepting the results without question.

 

From the comments I see everywhere a great many seem tired of the AI everything.

[CyberAngel]

On 7/18/2026 at 9:01 PM, Danielm103 said:

...I read about the Brown university thing where the professor made the students do their exams in class and most of the class failed. Scary! People need to at least learn foundational level stuff before using AI. What if the cloud is down, or you reach your token max, would you be able to go old school and continue? Or just sit there and twiddle your thumbs.

...

 

 

This particular issue has been in play for a long time. Have you ever gone to a food joint, the power is out, and the staff refuse to prepare food for you because they can't ring it up? Like they've never heard of pencil and paper or making change.

 

If you can't do the basic, human version of your job, you'll be left in the dark (sometimes literally) when the AI can't do its job. Worse, you won't recognize when the AI is making a mistake. Without a real-world backup, and the sense to use it, you're at the mercy of the AI and its hallucinations. It's the height of irresponsibility to replace us with something that needs its hand held all the time in case it has a malfunction.

[rlx]

a little story :

 

This is the famous Myth of Thamus and Theuth, found in the dialogue Phaedrus by the Greek philosopher Plato (written around 370 BCE). In this text, Plato has his teacher Socrates relate an ancient Egyptian anecdote.

Here is how the story unfolds:

The Invention

The Egyptian god Theuth (Thoth), the deity of inventions, visits Thamus, the king (pharaoh) of Egypt. Theuth presents his various creations, including arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Finally, he introduces the written word. Theuth is enthusiastic and claims: "This invention will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memories. It is a potion for both memory and wisdom!"

 

The Pharaoh's Objection

King Thamus is not impressed and responds with deep skepticism. He argues that writing will have the exact opposite effect:

Memory loss: People will stop training their memories. By relying on external written characters, they will no longer internalize knowledge.

The illusion of wisdom: People will read quantities of information without proper instruction. As a result, they will appear knowledgeable but will actually remain ignorant, becoming conceited and difficult to get along with.

The Historical Irony

Socrates used this story to argue that spoken dialogue is superior to the written word. He believed text is dead; it cannot answer back or clarify itself when misunderstood.

The ultimate irony is that Socrates himself never wrote anything down. The only reason we know this story today is because his student, Plato, wrote it down.

 

This ancient debate resurfaces with every technological leap. The same anxieties were voiced about the printing press, calculators, the internet, and now, Artificial Intelligence (AI).

[Steven P]

Spoken dialogue passes through the ears to the brain, the written word causes the eyes to glaze over...

 

I used to know phone numbers, worked in a job where I had to phone many people up - and now with mobile phone contact list and calling over the internet using Teams or Skype contact lists... I cannot remember my home phone number! Yes there is some truth in that RLX

 

 

On 7/19/2026 at 11:56 AM, SLW210 said:

From the comments I see everywhere a great many seem tired of the AI everything.

 

AI everything... because it is new and trending, not because it is necessary. AI enabled fridges... because they can and not to make the milk in my morning coffee any better.

[rlx]

AI , I like to call it Clippy , is here to stay but you are the architect , in the driver seat. Don't blame Clippy if something goes wrong, blame yourself when blindly believing everything it says. It's just a tool but you are responsible at all times. Like guns don't kill people , its people that kill people. Clippy is very good in finding facts and patterns , but it has no real understanding. When coding something big, give total control to Clippy and for sure you end up with lots of code you don't understand nor control anymore.

Just do what you always do, create a block or flow diagram and feed it little bits and test everything. 

 

Like this weekend , have a portable airco for my sweat-room. Missed (misplaced) a part so I told Clippy and behold, oh you need this and there you find it, So ordered the part (and a day later I found it in a drawer) , but then Clippy said , oh you have simple (dum) airco , would you like to be able to control it with your phone?... sure, what's on your mind?... it gave me 3 options and I went for gold (of course). Paranoid dragon as I am , did some research (after I placed the order) on how IR boosters work and downloaded the manual and found out the IR booster I just ordered only works when airco has a remote with a display and mine only has buttons. So fortunately was able to cancel the order and found another , much cheaper and works with my machine. 

 

Now I can only blame myself, not Clippy. It means well , but it can't be trusted blindly. The better the info you feed it , the better result you can get back. At this moment the term AI is found everywhere , many times as a marketing slogan, designed by AI , controlled by AI , AI knows everything... well I can say for certain there is only one person on this whole planet who knows everything and I'm married to her. ok time to  for me.