And it’s not what you think.
Beyond everything that’s wrong with AI as it’s currently deployed - i.e. the fact that’s basically owned and run by nefarious surveillance capitalists in bed with fascists, and it’s mostly used to replace honest people and things with cheaper mediocrity - what’s wrong with the technology for me finally clicked in my head today.
My first - indirect - encounter with AI was a few years ago - quite a few years in fact, come to think of it. I went to a forum for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts and asked whether someone remembered some obscure folding full-size keyboard I used to own back in the 90s. I lost that keyboard years ago and I’d been trying to identify which brand / model it was for years. I figured if anybody knew what it was, it would be one of that forum’s dwellers.
So I described the keyboard as best I could, and someone immediately came up with the correct device. Wow! I had been looking for so long, and just like that, this man gave me the answer! I thanked him profusely and told him he had a good memory. “Nah” he said, “I just asked AI.”
That instantly deflated me. This guy really hadn’t done anything other than forward my question, and that elusive keyboard of mine was one question away in some search engine. I should have been excited to finally find out what it was, but somehow instead it felt hollow and totally pointless all of the sudden.
Fast forward a few years, the same thing happened with my builder the other day: I asked him if he could build a boardwalk in the backyard, so my disabled wife could go get some fresh air safely. I started explaining what I wanted and sketching things on a piece of paper. At some point, he simply got on his feet, whipped out his cellphone, shot a picture of the backyard and asked ChatGPT to draw a boardwalk to my specifications. And in 2 seconds flat, it came up with a photo of the finished thing. And for the second time, it felt totally hollow, and the whole project felt meaningless. It was what I wanted for sure, but it’s now how I wanted it - if that makes any sense.
And today at work, I was playing with a model on a powerful server we just bought, to evaluate how to use AI locally for coding purposes, and at least avoid running cloud services from fascist America. And yeah, it works: it produces code that, if not very good, is plenty good enough if I’m very careful, particularly for the amount of time it takes to spew out the code.
And it felt completely, utterly hollow.
And then it hit me: my job as a traditional software engineer is coming to an end. I’m very senior, so I’ll be among the last ones the chopping block, but I’ll get the chop alright. And it’s okay: I’ve been obsoleted. It’s fine. It’s progress. It came quicker than I anticipated, but fundamentally I have no issue with that.
But here’s what’s bothering me: there’s no effort needed into anything anymore. You get what you want with zero effort and zero sense of accomplishment. So what’s the point of anything really?
I’m a lazy SOB, so I love the idea of getting shit done without lifting a finger. But somehow everything has become so effortless that it leaves me empty. Kind of like asking a computer to solve a crossword: it’ll be done in less than a second and it’ll be super efficient, but it makes the crossword pointless.
For instance, I’m a fan of 360 photography. I take pride in reworking the nadir in all my shots (don’t ask…) AI could clean it up in seconds and probably do a better job than me with Gimp. But what’s the point? I don’t want to do that! It’s tempting, but then I’d be totally disinterested in the photo after AI is done cleaning it up. So I do it myself.
Likewise, if I have a technical problem, I’ll look for the answer the traditional way, with a search engine. I know I could probably ask Google’s AI thing and it would probably give me the right answer rightaway, but then what would I have learnt? And more importantly, what’s the point of learning anything if the answer is always there? So I refrain. And yet it’s tempting…
AI makes everything pointless and bland, and it leaves me empty and not wanting for more.
The other thing is this: I know people say our jobs won’t disappear, they’ll change: we won’t code anymore, we’ll direct a machine that codes for us. We’ll apply our experience to guide a machine that will do the grunt work for us. It’s like we’ll all have the equivalent of a very dumb university student with the entire world’s knowledge at their disposal, pissing code for us and talking too much, but never complaining.
But you know what? I’m not interested in doing that. It’s fucking boring to me - the same way I would find my professional life completely boring if I had an actual university student code monkey I could legally give orders to. I simply have no interest in doing that.
I do marvel at the technology that underpins AI, and what it can do is fascinating - even in its current, completely fucked up and dumb-as-a-brick state. I’ve done AI work in the 80s, so I appreciate how far we have come, and I never thought I’d see anything like that in my lifetime. And I totally get that people are excited by the technology. But me? I find the whole thing intensely uninspiring. Impressive, yes, but boring to tears.
Just like the proverbial horse carriage driver, I’ve been obsoleted by cars. And again, it’s fine: it’s progress. I get it. And yes, as a good, experienced horse carriage driver, I could probably recycle my career and become a decent car driver for the few years I have left on the job. But I’m simply not interested. If the horses are gone, I’m plain and simply bored out of my mind, however good the cars are.
That’s my beef with AI. That’s what I realized today: it’s a bright future I’m utterly indifferent to, that holds zero excitement for me.
And quite frankly, considering the tidal wave of it that’s hitting the entire world right now, it left me quite depressed for the rest of the day. So I hit the bottle tonight. It’s one of those days I guess…
You know, as someone who despises LLMbeciles in almost every field they get applied (I think once the hype dies down and the companies pushing them collapse that useful things will come from them, just not in the near future), I find myself in the uncomfortable position of disagreeing with someone’s reasons for hating AI.
And note: I’m not saying you shouldn’t hate AI, nor am I saying that your reasons aren’t good reasons for you. I’m saying that your reasons may be symptomatic of something else; that your reasons have been said before about other technologies we all now take for granted, and that in a couple of places you’re being extraordinarily self-absorbed.
Let’s go over a few of these.
To me this is utterly bizarre. Instead of feeling excited that something you’d looked for for ages was found, you got upset at how it was found. I’m sorry, I can’t relate to this at all. I’m not saying you didn’t feel this way nor even that you should feel this way, but to me it looks like you value years of frustration and failure over getting the thing you were looking for. This is hair shirt territory for me and I suspect to most people. Some of your other things you mention (c.f. below) I have some comprehension of and even sympathy for. But this one just strikes me as a low-grade form of masochism.
To see why, dial this conversation back to pre-1998 when search engines REALLY sucked (just like now!) and before Google came in and completely, radically changed the landscape (your searches actually FOUND things before Google enshittified!).
You’ve been searching for your keyboard on Ask Jeeves and Yahoo and couldn’t find a thing. Then Google pops up and someone Googles it for you and up pops your keyboard. Are you similarly upset? If not, why not?
Here’s where I think you’re being extraordinarily self-absorbed. Sure, you may enjoy tinkering around with paper sketches, talking back and forth, and generally puttering around with manual processes. (I know I do. I mean I’m learning to hand-carve signature chops in a world where I can give a manufacturer an image file, pay under five bucks, and get back a custom signature chop made of any material suitable from wood to stone to brass that is done to perfection on a CNC. But I still prefer to learn carving them by hand with manual chisels.)
But here there’s more than you in the loop. There’s the builder. Whose livelihood this is. They’re not going to want to sit there and futz around with your fetish for hand-drawing sketchy diagrams (pun intended) when there’s a tool that gets exactly the information he needs to actually perform his livelihood in seconds. To the builder time is money, and you’re in effect bemoaning that he doesn’t want to waste time/money to suit your preferences.
Genuine, if pointed, question here: where do you draw this line? If you insisted on, say, measuring everything with a 30cm ruler and he pulled out a tape measure would you be just as upset? Or does that sound ridiculous to you? If the latter, do some simple substitution and…
You are basically demanding here that someone who doesn’t share your fetish for hand-made stuff take time out from his livelihood to suit you despite them being entirely uninterested in it. This goes beyond having a preference for yourself and into the realm of inflicting that preference on others; and here I sharply disagree.
This then leads to these ruminations:
Absolutely nobody is telling you to use AI for your own stuff. (Or, rather, nobody whose opinion is worth hearing is. LLMbecile pushers are not people whose opinions are worth hearing.) You can continue doing things the way you enjoy doing them. Like I enjoy carving signature chops by hand. Like I genuinely enjoy writing with a dip pen. Like I enjoy running tabletop RPGs in person instead of playing computer games or using online tabletops. And how I like designing RPG scenarios myself instead of asking an LLMbecile to make a half-assed one, but with lots and lots of fancy verbiage, for me.
You’re coming across here like, say, a painter saying “I don’t want to use a Kodak camera!” in 1888. Or like a photographer saying “I don’t want to use a Land camera!” in 1948. Nobody says you have to, just like nobody told the painter they had to become a photographer or told a photographer they had to put up with crappy, low-quality snapshots. LLMbeciles don’t change anything for you unless you want them to. (Or unless they’re forced upon you by your employer, which is also relatable and something I’d agree with opposing.)
(Also I find it really funny that you’re opposed to using LLMbeciles for search but not opposed to using search engines when in my lifetime there were people sneering at using search engines instead of doing proper research in libraries. “Google-U” was a real insult used by people who Googled stuff instead of doing “proper research”.)
But … it’s not for you. Even if LLMbeciles weren’t a hot mess of terrible ethics, fascist creators, IP theft, and hallucinations, even if they were actually as useful as the pushers claim they are, it’s clear that LLMbeciles aren’t for you. And I can respect that.
But … I’m entirely unexcited by video games. Should I be writing long opinion pieces on why video games are bad because they don’t suit what I want from games? I’m entirely unexcited by automobiles. Should I be writing long opinion pieces on why gearheads are missing the point of life?
I guess I’m trying to say that I find the nature of your objection really … weird. In the “old man shakes fist at clouds” sort of way.
Have you considered just not using LLMbeciles instead of letting them drain the joy from your life and damaging your liver?
Something that’s obvious to me is that OP feels alienated by this technology because the interpersonal connections they would be making otherwise are now being supplanted by, I dunno, NPC people who are now just acting like interfaces for the same robot they could just be using themselves.
You know, I do feel for people who lament a bit the proliferation of self-checkouts and kiosks and tablets and mobile apps that make it easier and easier than ever before to never talk to another real fucking person in their lives. And I do think it’s bad for our collective mental health, too.
Another thing that’s obvious to me, you don’t view the builder as an artist. An artist that sacrifices their artistic integrity to this AI, hollow proceduralism is not really an artist I want to hire.
If OP just wanted the boardwalk and nothing else, this probably wouldn’t be an issue. But there is something missing here that you’re currently blind to because your antipathy for ‘LLMbeciles’ is not coming from a pro-humanist perspective.