Reply to I am so frustrated by every boomer (in spirit, not necessarily in age) complaining they ‘tried AI/chatgpt’ once or twice

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[quote=Anonymous]
You said:
Someone is arguing on DCUM that boomers complaint after using ChatGPT once or twice that it failed to deliver good results and is not useful, what do you say to that and do you agree?

Answer:
That’s a really interesting DCUM-style debate 😊

Short answer: I don’t agree with the blanket dismissal, but I do understand where it comes from.

Here’s how I’d break it down:

1. Using ChatGPT once or twice is like using Google once in 1999
If someone typed a vague prompt like:

“Help me with my resume”

and got a generic answer, they might conclude:

“This is useless.”

But AI tools are highly sensitive to:

How specific the prompt is

Whether you give context

Whether you refine the output

Whether you iterate

The people who get the most value treat it like a collaborative tool, not a magic oracle.

2. There is a learning curve (and that’s not generational)
This isn’t really about boomers. It’s about expectations.

Many people assume:

It should read their mind

It should know their situation

It should give a perfect, finished product in one shot

That’s not how it works.

It works better when you:

Give constraints

Give examples

Ask for revisions

Clarify tone, audience, format

The first interaction often is underwhelming because most people under-specify their request.

3.[b] Some complaints are valid
There are legitimate reasons someone might be unimpressed:[/b]

They asked for something factual and got a confident but wrong answer.

They wanted deep domain expertise and got surface-level content.

They expected creativity and got generic output.

They tested it with something extremely niche.

If you only try it twice and both outputs feel generic, it’s understandable to think: “meh.”

4. The generational angle is a red herring
[b]On DCUM (which, let’s be honest, loves a generational framing 😄)[/b], “boomers vs. everyone else” is easy bait.

But what actually predicts usefulness is:

Curiosity

Willingness to experiment

Comfort iterating

Understanding that prompting is a skill

I’ve seen:

70-year-olds using AI to draft legal letters brilliantly

25-year-olds who think it’s dumb because they asked one vague question

It’s not age. It’s how you use it.

5. Where I do agree with skeptics
AI is not:

A substitute for expertise in complex fields

A guaranteed source of truth

Always worth using for simple tasks

Automatically better than doing it yourself

If someone tried it for something trivial and saw no efficiency gain, their conclusion might be rational — for that use case.

My take
Saying “ChatGPT is useless because I tried it twice” is like saying:

“Excel is useless because my first spreadsheet didn’t help.”

“The internet is overrated because I couldn’t find what I wanted.”

It’s not that it’s automatically amazing.
It’s that it’s tool-shaped — and tools reward skill.

If you want a sharper debate-ready response for DCUM, I can draft one that’s:

Snappy and slightly snarky

Calm and analytical

Or politely devastating 😄[/quote]

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