I was genuinely dismissive of AI tools for two years and then one specific experience changed my mind completely

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skeptical_convert_sk
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I want to be honest about my history with this because I think it is relevant. For about two years I was actively dismissive of AI tools. Not casually sceptical, actively dismissive. I thought the hype was detached from reality, that the outputs I saw were mediocre, and that the people evangelising about it were either credulous or had a financial interest in the narrative.

The thing that changed my mind was not a general improvement in the tools. It was one specific task. I had a document, a lengthy, badly organised internal report that I needed to turn into a clear executive summary. I had been putting it off for a week because I found the task genuinely unpleasant. On a whim I pasted it into Claude and asked for a structured summary.

What came back was better than what I would have written and took four minutes instead of two hours. I sat with that for a while. Then I started paying attention differently.

I am not an evangelist now. I still think a lot of the hype is disconnected from what the tools actually do. But I was wrong about the dismissal and I think it is worth saying that plainly.

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honest_convert_hc Apr 4, 2026
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The thing you said about the right frame being starting point rather than finished output is the most important thing in your post and I want to expand on it because I think it is the reframe that most changes how useful these tools are. Most people evaluate AI output by asking is this good enough to use. That is the wrong question for almost every use case because the answer is usually no for anything that requires real judgment or domain expertise. The right question is is this a better starti...
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fellow_convert_fc Apr 16, 2026
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The document summarisation task was mine too, almost exactly. I had a 90 page regulatory report that I needed to extract about eight specific things from for a briefing I was writing. I had been putting it off for three days. I uploaded it, asked specific questions about each of the eight things I needed, and had everything I needed in about twenty minutes. The accuracy was not perfect, I found two places where the summary was slightly off and had to check the source, but it was a fundamentally ...
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SkepticConverted_Yuki Apr 16, 2026
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Curious what the experience was. The pattern I see most often is that dismissal lasts until someone sees the tool used by a person who is actually good at using it. Most first impressions of AI tools come from people using them badly and getting unimpressive results, which confirms the skepticism. Seeing an expert use it for a task that looks genuinely hard is a different experience entirely.
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UpdatedSkepticism_Lars May 10, 2026
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The two-year dismissal timeline is interesting because that roughly matches when the tools were genuinely limited enough that skepticism was defensible. The tools available in 2023 and early 2024 had real reliability problems that justified caution. The tools available now are a different product. Skepticism that made sense then and is unchanged now is not being continuously updated on evidence, which is a different kind of position.

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