Permies' lived experience versus AI

Hello, Permies! It's been a LOOOONG time since I last posted here, and lots of things have happened since (I've started a new permaculture project, which is now in its 3rd year - but more about that in a separate post).

There have been a few reasons why I haven't posted on Permies - being busy / lacking time was one of them, but not the main one.

Over the years, I have turned repeatedly to this forum for advice on all sorts of issues - but with the emergence of AI, suddenly I'm given the opportunity to ask complex, potentially difficult, and very specialised questions on ANY topic, and - within seconds - to obtain answers / solutions that are relevant, reliable, and tailored / specific to my own situation (climate, exact location, soil type, etc.).

Obtaining information of comparable specificity / relevance and detail on Permies or similar forums would be next to impossible - there is no guarantee that relevant or usable info will turn up in the answers to my posts, and what does turn up has to be sorted through and organised, before I can arrive at something that I can use.

So my question is: has the role of this forum (or the way it is being used) been redefined / adapted in any way since the emergence of AI, and if so, how? I have a vague feeling that members' lived experiences - especially if described in adequate detail, and documented with quality photos / videos - may provide value - inspiration? other? - that cannot be offered by AI. I'd like to hear your opinions.

Today I decided to see if ai is better at stuff yet.  I asked if a specific brand of danish oil can be used over acrylic paint.  Ai said no, never, then 6 paragraphs on how to do it, including several passages where acrylic and oil paint are confused, and how oil paint can be dry in under an hour, but acrylic must wait several weeks. Then two paragraphs why danish oil is the best finish for acrylic paint but must never be used on raw wood or poison will happen.

Self contradictory and wrong.  

Wrong when compared to the safety data sheet, the company's website, and my personal expierence with the product.

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AI has a long way to go for accuracy.   Although it is improving at organizing data, it doesn't hold a candle to personal expierence for answering questions.  For that, I adore these forums.  

And sheep don't read books, or the internet, or watch YouTube.   The information from those sorces have no influence on their behaviour.  The material available online is only a starting point.  But that's all the material ai has to work with.

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The other big issue is the cost of using ai. My query above took about .3 to .5wh that's almost 30 min on my led light bulb.  

Given how many power supply companies depend on oil and gas, and with global events of march 2026, the price of running ai is about to skyrocket.   They will probably move to the next phase where they get the customers to pay for it sooner than expected. Although I suspect they were hoping to get more people addicted before that.

AI is not currently sustainable and wicked icky for the environment.  

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We've talked about adding some ai to permies, but it's not as good as a real human evaluating each situation individually.   Nor would it be good if we came to rely on it and the cost suddenly increased.

And with the site being all about permaculture and sustainability, ai isn't there yet,

But we run samples, experiment, observe, and wait for the technology to improve.

Levente Andras wrote:with the emergence of AI, suddenly I'm given the opportunity to ask complex, potentially difficult, and very specialised questions on ANY topic, and - within seconds - to obtain answers / solutions that are relevant, reliable, and tailored / specific to my own situation (climate, exact location, soil type, etc.).

That hasn't been my experience. I'm an IT guy for a living and an enthusiastic futurist. I look forward to the time when we birth machines smart enough to replace us. These "AI" tools you're talking about are laughably crude and hide incorrect information among correct-sounding stuff ALL THE TIME. People on Permies can be wrong too. Or their experience in a Mediterranean climate doesn't shed much light on how things will work for me up north. But it isn't ever tricking me into trusting that it's anything more than it is.

But good luck with your work and I'm hopeful that it'll keep getting better!

I'd rather have an answer or an opinion from a real person than an AI bot - permies is by real people for real people.

As r ranson says AI answers can't to be trusted to be correct, and the social cost is immense and mostly hidden. I dislike the way they are being promoted so you can hardly avoid AI, but there is a financial reason for that - it's not 'free'.

AI is interesting!

I asked for discounted flights for seniors over 65.   Came back and said discounts ONLY if you were 55 years old.   Got a good chuckle over that.

Overall the AI answers have been good, but I don't fully trust it.

AI is only as good as the multitude pseudo gardening/DYI websites loaded with ads from which AI takes its information. These websites are copies of each other in terms of contents and usually very vague and generic. Because I'm interested in empirical knowledge of real persons and things that work I use Permies as the reference and basically get serious information only from forums from real people with experience. The good thing is that sometimes AI uses Permies as the source, but at the end nobody will guarantee the answer is correct or some algorithmic delusion. I was disappointed so many times on specific questions related to IT or engineering that gave plain wrong answers that I can only imagine that the solutions to more abstract topics may be equally wrong. If AI had robots in all parts of the world that would be doing gardening, building, developing within local conditions and materials THEN it would have some merit.

100% of the time I have used AI for biographical information  it includes information that is doubtful and I cannot substantiate elsewhere.   In some cases I find strong contradictory information.For  example, most recently I “learned” of Clint Eastwood in action in France in WW2.  The problem I have with that is no place else had a record of Eastwood serving in WW2. I suspect that AI might have confused a movie he was in with reality.

I think that I would sum up the info on the WWW and AI in the context of a follow up question I always like to ask when I get advice and the advice giver is not clear on their direct experience with the thing they are giving the advice about; Was that your experience?

If I watch a video on how to change the brakes on a XXXX model XXXX, I get to see it in action and see that the person in the video does the work. Not sure now with ai generated videos and if they have penetrated the "how to" market. I do not need to contact the maker of the video and ask if it was his experience. If ai videos are in the how to section, I may have to reconsider.

We eat roasted peanuts. If I search the web or ai, I see I should never feed the shells to my meat rabbits. If I ask a friend of ours up the road who has kept rabbits for decades, she says; yes you can, in moderation less than sunflower seeds.

I say all that to say I think this forum and others like it will never be replaced with ai. Maybe ai can help me search the forum better but will not have the full breadth of the value of other peoples experiences. When I read posts and replies, I am normally able to see the posters zone or location and put the reply in that context. Then I experiment for our location.

Maybe the only improvement to the forum would be if every person on this forum, lived in my community so we could talk face to face. But, if that were the case, I would probably not try and fail, or try and succeed with things people do in other parts of the country or world.

Time + Experience = Wisdom. I do not think ai will ever be able to accomplish that mantra in most of the areas of our life that matter the most. Real life is much too nuanced.

There is nothing better than learning from someone with dirt under there fingernails.

Real dirt not fake dirt.

Stick with information from known sources.

Libraries are full of book by leading authorities.

Levente Andras wrote:... specific to my own situation (climate, exact location, soil type, etc.).

I'm not sure AI will be right about all those things.

There's a permie living only about 15 km south of me. Their farm is further from salt water, at a higher elevation, but likely has similar soil. Their weather and growing experience is *very* different from mine.

The difficult answer is that you need to get a whole lot of people in your region to study and start practicing permaculture! Developing a varied and deep local data base seems like the better medium term plan.

Anne Miller wrote:There is nothing better than learning from someone with dirt under there fingernails.

Real dirt not fake dirt.

Stick with information from known sources.

Libraries are full of book by leading authorities.

Yes! Those of us with real dirt under our nails know something (not everything) but we've made it work in our locale.

And leading authorities who write books are mindful that they, and their publishers, can be sued for providing grossly incorrect and dangerous information. How about AI?

I favor Permies much more!

AI, in my experience, is just computer software that 'pretends' to have a personality and presents the work of others as its own facts.
Frequently the information offered is strangely irrelevant or flat wrong.
AI confuses and misleads many - and using it deprives us of the delightful activity of *doing research*!
It seems to me that reliance on AI is weakening to the mind and funnels thinking into narrow paths.
Permies is frequented and maintained by many individuals with many backgrounds and real-life experiences in particular places.
Sometimes the posts on Permies.com goes beyond mere information or knowledge - sometimes Wisdom is shared here.
I am so glad Permies is here!  I hope AI becomes a humble calculator type tool instead of a demigod figure.

If you ever want to lose faith in AI, just ask it questions about things you're a specialist in...

LLMs scrape answers for your questions from places like Quora, Reddit, Wikihow, etc. then make a bunch of assumptions to fill in the rest of the information that they can't find, but because it's "superhuman intelligence" people will take those suppositions for fact and act on them as such.

There are extremes of this issue where people develop "Chatbot psychosis" after being gaslit by their AI into believing they are destined to save the world, etc. Ultimately it will feed you answers that will keep you spending tokens.

If you are looking for a place for forums to co-exist with AI, you can always treat forum communities as a second opinion.

Alex Howell wrote:If you ever want to lose faith in AI, just ask it questions about things you're a specialist in...

Agreed. It is embarrassingly bad. LLM's are trying to do everything, arrogantly -- and failing, spectacularly.

But there is more to AI than LLM's. Outside of the current hype, it seems there are small AI's in radiology, astronomy, chemistry, being trained specifically on hard and proven scientific data. The analyzing potential is astonishing; and I suspect these are the AI models that will matter to us all.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:
there is more to AI than LLM's. Outside of the current hype, it seems there are small AI's in radiology, astronomy, chemistry, being trained specifically on hard and proven scientific data. The analyzing potential is astonishing; and I suspect these are the AI models that will matter to us all.

Totally agree with you here. As with all tools it depends on how they're used, and the expectations you have for them.

You wouldn't call an axe useless because it isn't good for digging holes.