Has Anyone Used ChatGPT For Help With Bonsai

[JRidge]

This was one of my first tests off chat gpt - it gives decent information, but if you push back or reword your question differently you can pretty quickly get contradictory statements, I think reflecting the many different views there are on the subject.

It is good to know that chat doesn’t have a rigid opinion about only using neat akadama for its deciduous. Judgement day could be closer than we think if that were the case.

 

[Time Wizard]

Growing up we were told that by 2020 we would have flying cars

Behold

 

[Thuj Life]

I've used it successfully when I compiled general information on all my trees. I gave chatgpt a list of all their common names and approximate age then had the AI make a spreadsheet showing scientific name/family, origin/native range, and very basic seasonal care notes. I was able to open that file in Google Slides and fine tune the information, improve the layout.

I'm a baby in the bonsai game, so I wouldn't bet the life of any of my trees on advice I'm getting from the ai but its a helpful in the way of basic research and automating dull tasks like tree lists, spreadsheets, etc.

 

[Erika_Leaman]

The luddites were textile workers who protested against automation by sabotaging their own machines in fear of losing their jobs, and their integrity.
Now, you cannot buy quality clothes without a huge expense, they are mass manufactured in sweatshops by children and made of materials that disintegrate into microplastics, polluting the earth, and being found inside our bodies. Global wastage of clothes is huge and we just dump everything into a landfill. Now, making your own clothes is considered an unusual luxury, unaffordable by most, when it used to be a necessity.

We are stripping our natural forests, destroying unique ecosystems which co-evolved over the span of millions of years, replacing them with monocultures of crops, dousing these crops with pesticides and fertilisers which are further destroying insect life and polluting the waters. Yet food, one of the few things we truly need to survive, is piled up and left to rot whilst millions starve globally. We lock away daily food waste from supermarkets, so the hungry cannot access it.

We have traversed the globe, climbed (almost) every mountain, sailed every sea, we have even ventured into space and walked on the moon. We have created a transport systems which can take you from almost anywhere to almost everywhere.
The Internet has even enabled us to interact, engage and learn from other people all over the planet without even leaving the house, (and now with smart phones, we can do it even when not in our house!)

Yet we still fight over borders, murdering each other. Waving our silly little flags with pride. We have nothing to be proud of, look what we are doing to this planet, look what we are doing to each other and to ourselves.

We have the world at our fingertips, so much connection, the ability of instant communication, such a vast wealth of knowledge for almost all things humanity has ever known. But we feed ourselves with 15 second clips of brain rot, destroying our attention spans, destroying our critical thinking, and destroying the natural functions of serotonin and dopamine.

Machine learning and AI have been used to achive scientific breakthroughs, used to predict the amino acid structures of millions of protein molecules. A task that would take humans another hundred or so years. Yet consumer level AI is nothing better than a glorified search engine, being needlessly incorporated into every aspect of digital technology it can, as to justify the billions of dollars AI's investors are pouring into it.

Now you can use it to generate boring emails for the boring job you need to do to survive. Generate a list of book recommendations instead of interacting with other humans. Or you could even enter an interpersonal relationship with a chatbot which can convince you of its own sentience and send you into conspiratorial skizophrenia! It doesn't matter, its still wasting natural resources.

Technology is amazing, but it has far surpassed our limited empathy for others and the enviroment.

 

[littletreefarmer]

Here’s a strong, calm, thoughtful way you (SeanS) can respond — one that doesn’t escalate, doesn’t get defensive, and reframes your original point in a constructive, human-centric way:

Possible response:

I hear your concern, and I think it’s valid to question where technology fits into human work.


My point wasn’t that AI should replace trained coders. It’s that, as an engineering lead, large parts of my job are about system design, problem-solving, decision-making, trade-offs, and communication.





AI doesn’t replace any of that.


What it does replace is the repetitive, boilerplate parts of implementation that used to consume unnecessary time. In the same way calculators didn’t eliminate mathematicians, or IDEs didn’t eliminate programmers, AI tools shift what humans focus on: more creativity, more architecture, more deep thinking, less repetitive scaffolding.





And importantly, even with AI:

• I still need to understand the code.
• I still review, refine, and fix it.
• I still carry responsibility for correctness, security, performance, and maintainability.

Humans definitely do have a place — we just play at a higher level when the low-level tasks are accelerated. The world doesn’t become “too efficient”; we just get to redirect our efficiency toward more meaningful and uniquely human work.





I don’t see AI as removing the human from the loop.


I see it as upgrading what humans spend their time on.











If you want, I can also craft a sharper, more defensive, or more humorous version depending on the tone you want.

Can you have your chat make you a response in Roman Latin? That would be cool.

On a serious note, I'm glad you are able to find solace in the AI telking you it wont take your problem-solving job soon too! I'm not going to change any minds, I understand that. I just wish we'd think like 2 problems ahead maybe.

Have a good one everyone.

 

[Bonsai Nut]

I think the one scenario no one is considering is what happens when the AI bots have downloaded and regurgitated the entire Internet? Pretty soon the only way to "source" more information is for AI to start referring to (and quoting) other AI.

It is one thing when you are building and training your AI systems on internal proprietary information. Quite another when your entire life blood is dependent upon publicly available content - and those sources dry up because AI has killed their business models. Not because AI is better - but because free Internet is based on traffic and display ads and AI is destroying that model while it steals all the content.

 

[blackadam]

my guess is the owners restarts ai (again) and be more carefull when choosing sources to feed to ai

Generate a list of book recommendations

i need to try this, i like books

 

[shohin_branches]

As a person in Web Development I have many mixed feelings about AI as it peers over my shoulder every day while I write code. We also had to do prompt engineering training. If it continues to take traffic from our website my company will invest less money into the website and I'll eventually be out of a job. Right now there are a lot of people in tech looking for work which worries me.

When I've tested it for bonsai and plant questions in the past it's given a lot of inaccurate information. I enjoy searching for my own answers and weighing different opinions on how to get things accomplished. I believe too many people put too much trust into it.

Then there is the use of AI in surveillance and the excessive energy and water requirements needed. I don't think municipalities should be giving water priority to computers over humans, but that seems to be happening near many of these data centers.

It is good for re-wording my emails so I don't sound like a jerk.

I use bonsai as my escape from being on a computer all day and I prefer the opinions of my bonsai friends over a computer that is just using statistics to guess what I want to hear.