No insult taken, haha. Yes in some ways i may be a bit of a luddite about AI compared to the younger generation, because i didn't grow up with smartphones (they only became a big thing around the time i went to university), and even the internet was still something we only got very little of "as a treat" every now and then when i was in middle school.

In fact i can remember a time in the 90s when internet was not yet even a thing in our household (I know by that time it was already taking off in the US but in Eastern Europe we lagged behind the West in this regard back then). Even owning a computer was considered something special. Most just went to internet cafes to use a computer, if they even knew how.

I do think we spent more time just hanging out with each other outside because of this, which made it easier to make friends.

Although i think the chronic device addiction is probably not the cause itself but more a reflection of the growing alienation in society, and used as a way to cope with that alienation, like how people use drugs to numb the pain of whatever is already not going ok in their lives, but at the same time the use of the drug does have a negative impact if abused and can exacerbate those already existing problems.

I am of course just as guilty as anyone else in modern society of this overuse of technology. Just because we grew up in a time when it didn't exist doesn't mean we can't get just as dependent. But "chatting" with "AI" was always just a bridge too far for me, it just seems so silly. I may as well talk to my dog if i want to vent. It may not talk back but at least it has real emotions and connection.

I was there when the world wide web was still very young. I'm a bit too young to know Usenet as anything other than a place to download pirated stuff (warez back in the day), but old enough that I played some MUDs over Telnet.

I'm honestly apathetic about AI and ignore it for the most part. I use it locally on my Immich server to allow me to search my photos by keyword but that's about it. As you say, it's mostly a minor annoyance telling me half truths with complete confidence in my search results. I really don't consider it all that different from the chatbots we had in the 00s for the most part. It used to be a game we played with our friends to see how long they would talk to the chatbot before realising it was a bot. Modern AI is just a bit better at passing the turing test and sometimes has some useful information. There just really isn't a lot that I want from an AI in general, aside from some questionable image recognition. If I'm feeling lonely I'll text a friend, pop down to the pub, or even just chat on a message board for a while. Talking to a bot honestly doesn't even occur to me.