Seeing that your essay is about people’s presumptions about one another, and you say that you lose respect for people based on their chat bot opinions without a lick of self-awareness around the topic of the essay it can be concluded that your overall thesis is that people that don’t like chat bots like you do are inherently less worthy of respect.
-Video games: Provide fun, but probably overall bad for society bc people waste too much time on them.
-Alcohol: Most drinkers get a lot of value out of drinking, but alcoholism is so bad that on net alcohol's probably bad.
-Guns & nuclear weapons: Wish both didn't exist, but each provides a lot of use to the specific people who have them.
-TikTok: Overall causes too many people to believe misinformation, but for a lot of other people is fun or interesting.
It's possible to think AI chatbots are net bad because people use them to cheat, or they rely on them for information too much and believe false information, without believing that they are always useless in all circumstances. I can use ChatGPT to alphabetize a long list for me. That's useful, even if I think overall chatbots are net bad.
If so, that's a pretty radical position, and if not I don't understand how they're relevant.
Frankly, the inherent contradiction of your vehement support for something you think shouldn't exist has confounded me, and your position that video games, guns, and alcohol also should not exist is so far on the fringe of society that it's hard to take at face value.
I am not conflating "useful" and "good overall". You are the one claiming that something (let's pick TikTok) is useful to its users, but shouldn't exist. Why should something that is useful to its users not exist?
When you say useful in this case, I think you mean that users are deriving short term pleasure from interacting with the app by choice. You also seem to believe that the long term effects of near-constant social media consumption are so harmful that it should be banned. In my mind, if the latter is true, the short term pleasure is not in reality useful. If the latter is false, then the short term pleasure could be considered "useful" but there's no need for a ban.
This pattern also seems to hold with your example of students using chatGPT to avoid writing papers themselves. If I needed to succinctly describe the actions of someone who is spending tens of thousands of dollars a year and at least several hundred hours a year at a place for the express purpose of learning yet also actively avoids making effort to learn, "stupid" is a word that jumps to mind. Yet you seem to be arguing that is not the case because they know they're making a bad decision, which is hard to accept as an attempt at honest dialogue.
In both cases, people are trading long term gains for short term enjoyment. Calling that choice "stupid" may be rude or blunt, but it's not incorrect in most instances.
I'm not trying to put words into your mouth so I would welcome an actual answer to my question above (Why should something that is useful to its users not exist?), but I did want to explain what seems to me like an inherent contradiction in your position.
Yes, it is possible for something to be useful in specific circumstances but still be bad overall.
We have disagreements about what counts as useful. If our definition is "This is only useful if it leads to longterm happiness" that seems way too specific and would exclude too much.
It's stupid to cheat, I agree and try to make that clear. What I'm saying is the claim "Students think they're learning when they cheat using AI" assumes students are so stupid that they think cheating off of a robot will help them learn as much as writing an essay themselves. That's obviously wrong.
You provided a list of things you don't think should exist, which is equating them on some level to me, but okay. That context matters, which is why your "guns and balloons" example isn't meaningful.
Ultimately, I'm reading into this that you're deflecting from your actual point that you can't really defend by only bringing up nuclear weapons as a response to a statement about all the other items on that list of things that you think should be banned.
> Yes, it is possible for something to be useful in specific circumstances but still be bad overall.
Of course. No one is disputing that. That doesn't mean that things in that category should be banned outright, because it would make no sense to do so in many cases. Therefore, regulation exists.
> We have disagreements about what counts as useful. If our definition is "This is only useful if it leads to longterm happiness" that seems way too specific and would exclude too much.
You seem to disagree with nearly every person interacting with you (and the rest of us don't disagree with each other) about the definition of "useful" and a couple other key words, which really makes it hard to discuss your content. Even more so when you refuse to provide an explanation of what seems to be a very obvious contradiction in your reasoning.
FYI, no one I saw is using the definition you provided above either, which would be another very unusual definition of the term.
> It's stupid to cheat, I agree and try to make that clear. What I'm saying is the claim "Students think they're learning when they cheat using AI" assumes students are so stupid that they think cheating off of a robot will help them learn as much as writing an essay themselves. That's obviously wrong.
That is wrong, and no one I'm aware of is claiming that, so I have no idea what the point would be of arguing against it.
If you care to explain your answer to the question I've asked repeatedly now in order to continue the discussion, feel free. Otherwise, I'll leave you to continue to beat on your strawmen (there are at least 3 in this response alone) in peace.
If you bought a hammer and never used it, so it never actually improved yourself, would you say the hammer itself isn't "useful"?