I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.
I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.
I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.
What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.
I use google “ai” in when thrifting for audio gear. Minimum 80% of the time it gets something GLARINGLY wrong. “Oh ho ho! You correctly pointed out that I was completely wrong on all counts! An astute observation! Let me try again but this time give you the CORRECT information.”
Exactly. I use AI primarily as a natural-language search engine, when searching for things that can quickly be independently verified. One of the best uses for it is when you know a thing probably exists, but you don’t know the name for it. You can describe to the LLM the object or problem in detail, and it will give you a name. You can then take that word and do a non-AI search to instantly confirm if it got it right.
I’ll never use an AI for something I can’t at least verify without an AI.
I really like a song that has intro and outro samples and I wanted to know where they were from, so I googled. Google AI promptly informed me that the song has no samples. Guess that settles that.
My husband was recently trying to find an exact quote from Richard Pryor’s character in Lost Highway, so he Googled it.
Google’s AI overview said that Richard Pryor was not in Lost Highway and instead gave some suggestions for other films we might be thinking of.
The quote he was trying to remember was, “There’s nine people down here, and you can ask seven of them. If you can get that price from one of them, I’ll let you ask the other two.”
I do potatoes in my instant pot but leave the water in, it just gets absorbed. So the salt is effective in that case. I salt the potatoes themselves and toss them before adding the water, too, so they should get reasonably seasoned.
Also i use soup stock.
Mashed, though.
Salting the water would increase the boiling temperature I guess, but it seems like a waste of salt because that info isn’t meaningfully changing the cooking time
Salting the water is relevant when not using a pressure cooker. It makes no sense when you’re steaming them in a pressure cooker. AI is a good tool, sometimes. But for everyday tasks, it is irrelevant and often wrong.
That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.
I use AI as a writing tool, not as a substitute for authorship.
The ideas, intent, perspective, and final judgment are mine. I decide what I want to say, what belongs in the piece, what does not, and whether the finished version accurately represents me. AI may help me organize my thoughts, clarify a sentence, improve the flow, or find wording that better expresses what I already mean. That is not fundamentally different from working with an editor, dictating to a transcriber, or revising a draft after receiving feedback.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it. By doing that, I take responsibility for every sentence. If the writing is thoughtful, accurate, and effective, I am responsible for those choices. If it is careless, misleading, generic, or full of slop, that is also my responsibility. Blaming the tool would be an attempt to avoid accountability.
AI does not decide what I believe. It does not decide what I am willing to defend. It does not decide what I publish under my name. I do.
The tool may assist with the writing process, but the authorship comes from intention, judgment, selection, revision, and responsibility. The final work is mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, and signed my name to it.
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Could you tell me which part of my argument you think is wrong?
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I was hoping “a writer that doesn’t write” was the conclusion to an argument rather than the entire argument. I’m perfectly happy to be wrong. What I can’t do is respond to an argument you’re keeping to yourself.
You didn’t make an argument, you listed your justifications for using plagiaristic genAI as a shortcut instead of doing the actual work yourself.
I did make an argument. My argument is that authorship is grounded in the origination of the ideas and intent, control over what goes into the work, endorsement of the final form, and responsibility for the result. Assistance with the linguistic realization does not, by itself, transfer authorship.
I’ve thought through that position, refined it, and I’m willing to defend it. Calling AI use “plagiaristic” or a “shortcut” doesn’t actually address the argument.
So which part do you reject: that I originated the ideas, that I exercised control over the final work, that I endorsed it, or that I’m responsible for it? And why?
None of “your work” is yours in any meaningful way the second you use a tool that cannot exist without plagiarism therefore any aspect of its contribution immediately forfeits all ownership of the ideas conveyed. Because they’re not yours, they’re stolen by an inherently plagiaristic tool. Unless you’re using a local model trained exclusively on your own writing, none of your AI powered work is in any way yours. Even then it still wouldn’t be original or created by you, it would be algorithmic nonsense. You are not a writer if you use an LLM to do the actual writing. Couldn’t even write that fuckin response without your gpt slop.
I spent this morning sitting with this exchange, coffee in hand, reading back over what I had written.
I’m not especially interested in responding to the insults. And I’m going to set aside the argument about how AI systems are trained, plagiarism, consent, compensation, and so on. Those are legitimate ethical questions and I share them, but they are a different conversation.
The part that stayed with me was the simpler claim underneath all of that:
“You didn’t write this.”
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my original answer had blurred together several different things.
I had been treating “writing,” “authorship,” “ownership,” and “responsibility” almost as synonyms.
They aren’t.
You can originate an idea, develop an argument, direct how it is expressed, edit it, approve the final version, and take responsibility for publishing it without necessarily having composed every sentence yourself.
Nickiwest had responded to my original comment and said “That sounds more like the job of an editor than the job of a writer.” and that got me thinking about my old work as an art director for a studio.
I could come up with the concept, find references, explain what I wanted, reject drafts, change direction, combine ideas, and go through revision after revision until the finished image expressed what I had in mind.
That was real creative work.
But I still wouldn’t say I drew the picture.
The idea might have been mine. The direction might have been mine. The judgment might have been mine.
The drawing wasn’t.
I think AI creates a similar complication with language.
If I give an LLM a thought and it produces a sentence, then no, I did not necessarily compose that sentence in the ordinary sense.
If I argue with it, reject things, rearrange them, rewrite parts, refine distinctions, change the reasoning, and decide what survives, then I have obviously contributed something substantial. But calling every form of that contribution “writing” may sometimes be too simple.
Sometimes “writer” will be perfectly natural.
Sometimes “editor,” “director,” or simply “AI-assisted” may be more accurate.
What interests me more than the title is what happens during the process.
I can put a half-formed thought into language and look at it from the outside.
Sometimes I read a sentence and realize, that sounds like something I believe, but it goes further than I mean.
Sometimes two ideas I had been treating as the same turn out not to be the same at all.
Sometimes an argument looks convincing in my head and falls apart the moment I see the missing step written down.
Sometimes the model gives me wording I dislike, and figuring out why I dislike it forces me to understand my own position better.
Then I put that thought back in and try again.
The result I am looking for is not better prose, it is a better thought.
That is basically what happened to me this morning.
My original position was that the work was mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, put my name on it, and accepted responsibility for it.
I still think responsibility matters enormously. If I publish bad reasoning, false claims, unsupported accusations, or generic slop, I do not get to shrug and say, “The AI wrote it.”
I chose to publish it.
But I no longer think responsibility settles the question of who “wrote” something.
An editor can be responsible for publishing a piece without having written it. An art director can shape an image without having drawn it.
So now I think the more interesting questions are smaller ones.
Who originated the idea?
Who developed the argument?
Who decided what belonged?
Who noticed the mistakes?
Who revised the thinking?
Who directed the expression?
Who actually composed the prose?
Those answers may not always point to the same person, and maybe that is fine.
What I don’t think follows is that the human contribution disappears the moment a machine becomes involved.
My ideas do not disappear. My judgment does not disappear. The things I accept, reject, revise, and ultimately stand behind do not disappear.
But neither do I need to pretend I personally composed every sentence if I didn’t.
I’m comfortable with that distinction.
And I think it leaves me somewhere more interesting than where I started.
What fascinates me about A.I. is the strange process of having a thought, seeing it reflected back, noticing where it fails, and slowly discovering what I actually mean; what I believe.
This reply is a product of that process. I do not care what title we end up giving the result, I enjoyed spending my morning with it.
that’s bullshit.
Why?
“authorship is when i make a few edits and sign my name to slop”
if you have willingly handed over your primary writing tool to a machine (for which there is no real meaning, association, appreciation, or delight in words), it is difficult for me to take your commitment to writing or “authorship” seriously.
I did not say “authorship is when I make a few edits and sign my name to slop.” That is not my argument.
My argument is that authorship is grounded in the origination of the ideas and intent, control over what goes into the work, judgment over how those ideas are expressed, endorsement of the final form, and responsibility for the result. Assistance with the linguistic realization does not, by itself, transfer authorship.
You point out that the machine has no meaning, association, appreciation, or delight in the words. I agree. But I do. That is precisely the distinction I am making. The machine does not know what I mean, care whether it represents me, recognize when an analogy fails, or decide whether an argument is worth defending. I am doing those things.
You seem to be defining “writing” as personally generating the initial sequence of words. Maybe that is where we actually disagree. But that definition cannot simply be assumed and then used to prove that I am not writing. Why should authorship reside specifically in first-pass word generation rather than in the thought, intention, judgment, revision, and control that determine what the final words mean?
That is the argument I am interested in having.
i started to read your response, and then i remembered i can’t trust the degree to which you authored it.
i’m not interested.
All their comments are very clearly gpt slop.
A sneer is easier than an answer, and certainty is a lovely refuge when you have no intention of defending it.
You accuse me of surrendering thought to a machine, and then, the moment you are asked to justify that accusation, you surrender thought entirely.
How convenient.
With a wave of the hand, every difficult question disappears. You declare the words contaminated by the tool that helped shape them and thereby absolve yourself of any obligation to consider what they actually say.
No examination. No argument. No possibility of correction.
You accuse me of regurgitating the output of a machine, yet what have you offered in return?
A familiar sneer. A borrowed insult. A conclusion retrieved intact from the cupboard of approved contempt.
You recognize the hated object, produce the expected response, and call the reflex thought.
That is the irony you seem determined not to notice.
My argument from the beginning has been that a machine must be tempered by a human mind. It possesses no responsibility for what it produces. Whatever value emerges from its use depends upon the person capable of examining it, rejecting it, correcting it, shaping it, and finally standing behind it.
But a mind cannot temper anything if it refuses examination itself.
And that is where your position becomes more interesting than your insult.
A mind that refuses examination begins to resemble the very machine you claim to despise. It receives a familiar stimulus, reaches for the familiar pattern, and produces the familiar response without troubling itself over whether the response is true.
Input. Recognition. Output.
The machinery of contempt.
Ignorance itself is no shame. Every one of us is ignorant of almost everything. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again. If you can show me where, I gain something from the correction.
But there is something contemptible in making a virtue of ignorance.
In encountering an argument and proudly announcing that you will not examine it, then mistaking that refusal for discernment. In treating incuriosity as wisdom. In believing that because you have protected yourself from an argument, you have somehow defeated it.
You have not defended your position.
You have insulated it.
Those are not the same thing.
Thought requires a certain vulnerability. You must permit an idea close enough to examine it. You must risk finding weakness in your own position. You must allow the possibility that another person, even one using a tool you despise, might know something you do not.
Without that, certainty does not become strength.
It becomes brittleness.
You tried to cut me with the accusation that I had surrendered my mind to a machine. But in your eagerness to make it, you performed the very surrender you condemn.
You saw the signal.
You retrieved the response.
You refused examination.
You produced the slop.
And so the question remains exactly where I left it:
Will you defend what you believe?
Or is your conviction only strong enough to survive so long as you never allow an argument near it?
“I dont write anything but i take credit for everything”
I was reading the initial comment with peer-reviewed publications in mind and it all sounded like standard practice, but then I read yours and was like “oh, are we talking about books now?”
Either way, its still a bad look. Peer review is even worse than Op Eds, or fiction, or what have you… But its all equally socially degenerate
Interesting. When you want to criticize the argument, the words are mine enough to hold me responsible for them. But when I claim responsibility for those same words, suddenly they’re not mine.
“I don’t write anything but take credit for everything” is a straw man. If you disagree, address what I actually said.
That sounds more like the job of an editor than the job of a writer.
When I was an editor, my job was to assign stories to writers and then to work with the editorial team to revise and refine their output into an end product that the publication could stand behind.
Your process sounds a lot like that.
I think that is a fair comparison, and it is much closer to the conversation I was hoping to have.
I used “writing” and “authorship” pretty broadly in the original comment. I was talking about expressing my thoughts in things like letters, emails, comments, essays, and so on. What has been interesting is watching people get very hung up on the labels “writer” and “author,” then react to what they think I am claiming without really engaging with the process I was describing.
Your editor comparison is interesting because I used to work as an art director, and there are similarities. I did not paint or draw. I would explain an idea in words, hunt down reference images, point to compositions or details I liked, and work with a concept artist through round after round of sketches. I would say, “this is closer,” “that misses the idea,” “combine this with that,” or sometimes realize that my original concept itself needed to change.
I did not draw the artwork, and I would never claim that I did. But I was still doing creative work, and more importantly, the process was refining my own thinking.
That is the part of using AI that interests me most. I give it a thought, see that thought reflected back at me in language, judge what works and what does not, clarify what I actually mean, reject bad reasoning, discover distinctions I had not articulated yet, and then go through the process again.
Sometimes I come out of that process with better prose. More importantly, sometimes I come out of it with a better thought. So whether we ultimately call that “writing,” “editing,” or something else is honestly less interesting to me than what is happening in the process itself. I am not just refining the words. The act of interrogating and refining the words is also refining me.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it.
that’s just called writing.
That’s my point.
I don’t think they’re all lying; most are just misinformed or using the term differently than Cory.
It’s like saying “global warming is changing everything.” Technically, not true, but the knock on effects of specific aspects of it recently hit an inflection point that causes it to affect the lives of everyone.
This has also happened in the field of artificial intelligence; LLM chatbots are only the visible mushroom fruits of the vast mycelium network that has been silently growing underground for years.
silently growing underground for years.
And not so silently, for decades. Even J. Edgar Hoover was using early forms of AI to manage his data trove.
Ooo what’s the reference for this?
Hoover maintained separate, master national blacklists—such as the Security Index—which tracked tens of thousands of citizens deemed “subversive” or political dissidents for immediate detention in the event of a national emergency. He managed his master national blacklists through a fluid, multi-tiered indexing framework that evolved over five decades. These blacklists were not mere static documents; they were part of a highly coordinated operational pipeline designed for the mass roundup and indefinite detention of American citizens during a perceived national emergency.
To add or manage a person on a master blacklist, Hoover’s Bureau followed a strict administrative lifecycle:
The Dossier Trigger: When an individual was flagged via covert programs like COINTELPRO, agents opened an investigative file.
The Index Card Core: If the person was deemed a threat, a dedicated index card was generated. These cards contained the person’s name, aliases, address, physical description, occupation, and a specific "detention rationale.
"The Geographic Apportionment: Cards were duplicated and cross-filed. One went into the master archive at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and another went into the local FBI Field Office responsible for the geographic area where the target lived.
The Arrest Portfolio: For top-tier targets, field offices maintained ready-to-go arrest portfolios. If Hoover or the President gave the command, field agents could immediately seize the individual without needing to waste time researching where they were or why they were being detained.
The Fluid Evolution of Sub-Lists
Hoover managed the master blacklist by segmenting it into constantly shifting sub-indexes based on perceived ideological threats, which allowed him to scale the operation up or down
As the lists ballooned to over 20,000 active high-priority targets (and over 10 million Americans cross-indexed in general domestic files), Hoover modernized his management using early technology. The Bureau adopted mechanical punch-card sorting systems. This allowed clerical staff to instantly filter the master blacklist by city, profession, or political affiliation, providing Hoover with rapid statistical snapshots of domestic dissent to present during congressional budget hearings or White House briefings.
What has AI changed so far?
- Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
- we have AI child porn now, awesome
- we have AI undressing apps, cool
- we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
- we have AI, the great misinformation tool
- we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
- there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay
And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…
I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering
Only pro is laborious, tedious programming tasks have become significantly faster to do, along with testing edge cases and stuff a programmer should be able to do but maybe doesnt need to.
Just about everything else is negative.
Oh yeah, all that is definitely worth the list of negatives
Don’t get me wrong, there are good applications for AI, but its damn near literally 99.9% utter crap versus the 0.1% “oohh, really actually nice!”
Is it worth it? I’ll say a million times no. I wish we never got any of this AI trash, because I’d still have a job, I’d still be able to buy hardware, I would have to worry about people making porn videos about me daughter, my family wouldn’t have to deal with AI scam calls, I’d still be able to host a nice website without it being slaughtered by AI bots, and I can go on for a while.
The very little pros do not even make a dent in the negatives
If it weren’t for the overwhelming harm and the insane ramblings of those pushers, we could actually rationally discuss all of the useful things that can be done with it. There are plenty - its a pretty good tool in any engineers toolbox - but there’s no point in itemizing them because the much greater issue is the ai psychosis taking over our entire financial, economic, and governmental systems.
Eh, it also fixed search because it can read through all the SEO crap that fucked over regular search engines.
As long as you click the link to the website attached to the summary of course.
I don’t know, it’s also fun to do role play games with a locally hosted thingamabob-bot-computer-talker. I recently played a 1930s noir detective in New Orleans RPG with AI. It was neat and kept me entertained for hours.
There are also real people who would have a great time doing this with you. Ai does not need to exist in this scenario.
In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It’s very simple.
I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.
Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.
AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI’s at once and they’ve consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.
I love your approach. This way, you don’t even have to bust the students for using AI!
It’s often very difficult to tell the difference between a student that uses AI and a student that performs a traditional search of the topic and just copies facts blindly and uncritically. AI writing detectors are simply not reliable enough to serve as the basis for a charge of academic misconduct. What do you do if you accuse someone of using AI, and it turns out they just happen to write in a style that’s reminiscent of AI? What do you do if someone claims they just happen to write how an AI sounds? What if someone says they just used Grammerly, so now it’s ambiguous what portion of their writing is their own? Academic misconduct and AI gets very thorny very quickly.
But your approach? Brilliant. Just give them a paper whose topic you taught them correctly, but you know AI will screw up. No need to affirmatively prove the cheater used AI. Just give the cheater a failing grade on the paper, because it clearly doesn’t reflect what you taught them. They have no ability to later argue that they’re innocent or lie that they did not in fact use AI. Their paper simply wasn’t good enough to get a passing grade.
Honestly, it’s pure genius. As a fellow educator, I commend you!
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
I’m no economist but I had plenty of professors who wanted their particular theories reflected back at them.
While students should do their own reading and writing, using ‘they write mainstream ideas’ as a litmus test for writing and AI seems parochial. And I’d go so far as to say AI is becoming a standard research and writing aid like the web word processors, and you sound like teachers who ranted against those too.
Have you engaged either group in open discussion about comparing the perspectives you’re challenging? I bet several modern models could debate your philosophy on merit, I wonder if you ever gave students the chance.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
Not every class is debate. Plenty of courses are simply taught by an expert in their field, and students are graded on how well they learn from that professor’s instruction. Is it a perfect system? No. But that’s why we have experts. Some classes exist to simply establish a baseline of knowledge among the students. Such classes cannot be continuously derailed by engaging in rigorous debate about topics that experts in the field consider unambiguous and long-settled. Students are free to form their own opinions and whatever conclusions they want, but they need to demonstrate that they have at least learned the material as taught. You can believe the Universe is 6000 years old if you want. You cannot expect your astronomy professor to spend half the class debating with you about it.
A creationist student doesn’t have to believe in evolution to get an A in an evolutionary biology class. But they do have to demonstrate mastery or at least competence in the principles of evolutionary biology as taught by their professor. If they want to view the whole course as “a silly exercise in memorizing the lies of evolutionists,” well they’re free to do so. It’s a free country. Believe whatever you want. But that doesn’t mean they can just write, “God did it” to every answer on the final and still receive a passing grade.
You’re free to believe or reject anything a teacher or professor teaches you. That doesn’t mean you get out of learning the lesson entirely.
I’m pretty sure the fucking economist you’re replying to is not “teach(ing) something different from the mainstream” that’s the whole point of their post.
The whole point is the AI tools are hallucinating* completely incorrect answers and that students trying to use them as study aids and tools to learn with are going to have a lot of fake and wrong information to sort out and good luck to them knowing what is or isn’t incorrect or wrong when they’re just trying to learn a subject they know nothing about.
The only reason you or I or anyone else knows when AI hallucinates in its output is because we know stuff from our prior knowledge and can catch it that way. If you’re ignorant to a subject and trying to learn stuff you’re not going to know off hand the AI is lying to you if it sounds convincing enough for a layperson to accept.
*which I kind of hate that term because to the AI there’s no difference between truth and hallucination - it’s just output as far as the robot is concerned
I teach what is correct, but the incorrect mainstream understanding is what AI provides. It’s the crux of the problem I focus on in my research.
AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.
I generally respect this guy’s opinion (I probably use the term “enshitification” multiple times a week!), but pretending that “AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.
If the internet was “turned off” after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.
I think you’re making a strawman argument here. He isn’t arguing that it’s a binary switch that has failed to throw, he’s arguing that we don’t have compelling evidence that the ends justify the means:
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
And this is completely true! Supposedly “data informed” organizations are trying to find a yardstick that shows actual, meaningful improvement in business outcomes from AI. In my own organization we have people touting LOC yet again because “big number”, but anyone who’s ever worked in software can tell you it’s an asinine metric to use as a KPI.
It’s inherently unscientific to start with the answer and work backwards to a satisfactory question. His point that this push is coming from the least knowledgeable of real processes- and more closely resembles religious fervor than business acumen- seems to at least warrant consideration.
The world is full of people who insist that “AI is changing everything” but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they’re pretty sure that AI will change everything.
If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country’s chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country’s ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
He is definitely pretending that change is either on or off.
Are CEOs jumping the gun on how quickly they adopt AI into workflows? Definitely. However, there’s a big difference between “AI isn’t at a threshold where it is disruptive” and “AI isn’t disruptive”. Or, to belabor the metaphor: CEOs are jumping the gun, but the race is about to start and they’re on the correct track.
If you watch a full podcast (he has done a ton in the last couple weeks), he clearly identifies AI as not a mere hype technology, as something interesting and potentially useful from a technology perspective, and he definitely doesn’t conflate a chatbot with all AI. That doesn’t undermine the vast problems with it, how it’s being used against regular workers, the threat the bubble poses to the economy, the criti-hype cycle, etc.
I think you’re oversimplifying “Cory Doctorow” based on the article you’re reading or specifically how he presents a more complex idea to different audiences.
Watch the Jon Stewart podcast interview if you want more nuance:
A key word in that sentence is “if”, it is a rhetorical example, that’s probably pretty much correct at this point. It’s not a recommended course of action, it’s a declaration that it contrary to crazed hype, it isn’t currently as core to everything as would be befitting the current hype level.
I would argue that the CEOs aren’t on the correct track, they aren’t really in a particularly specific trajectory. I just had a debate with someone on this and their stance was “well in a hundred years do you expect things to be like they are”. My response “I cannot possibly speak to that, but we need to speak to today instead of pretending we know how things will be in a hundred years and pretending they are already at that level”. The “imagine a hundred years from now” by a relative outsider to the tech is dominating CEO mindset, and that’s problematic.
Once the bubble pops, we will almost certainly see a more durable and sane adoption for these technologies. For now, the hype is a problem as it enables some of the worst possible stewards of the technology and favors grift over progress.
Corey Doctorow isn’t speaking to you, he’s speaking to the many, many people who have been fooled by the ai craze.
And often I wonder, how many people have been fooled, and how much of the enthusiasm and over the top fantasy is astroturfing by a few people incentivized to sway public opinion?
And how much of the doomerism is a campaign to keep the common man from using a revolutionary tool for, well, revolution, by alienating those most likely to do revolutionary things with it?
Once you look at the actual numbers for pollution, water usage, etc it becomes very clear that the issues are vastly overstated. So, why?
That’s one for the fooled side.
Yeah. I guess we’ll see.
EDIT: you should go on claude’s reddit and look at all of the tools people have built to keep companies and politicians accountable, to renegotiate billing, to improve their lives at the expense of capital. Or you can just go on thinking you’re right!
Fuck reddit but i have a friend who automated fooa requests with claude, sent foia requests to every county in the state and has all the tracking and everything automated. Only thing he needs to do is review the emails before they get sent. It’s amazing and he’s bring transparency to every corner of the state using ai.
Yeah I personally use it to analyze public data bases for fraud.
I keep comparing the datacenter numbers to Bitcoin - only BTC, not all of crypto, is still using more electricity than AI. That may change in the future, but JFC people, where was the outrage about the global Ponzi scheme?
“AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable
In the same way that most people if you say you’ll take them to their destination with your vehicle, they assume in your car and not on the back of your bicycle, although both are technically correct.
“Chatbot” style AI is wildly good and bad at varying kinds of tasks, and a lot of that has to do with how it has been prepared.
Some LLMs have been trained to make images - I’ve not been too impressed with them, but that’s what they’re “good” at - and better than the LLMs that have been trained to write computer code when you ask the coding LLMs to draw a picture.
The code writing LLMs have actually improved the most at reviewing code over the past 8-9 months, and that ability to review their own code makes them dramatically better at writing code as well.
I find Google Gemini to be pretty impressive at scanning laws and regulations and finding, not creative, but functional solutions to stated problems within the constraints of (often frustratingly bizarre) legal structures.
And all of them will lie to you, tell you what a great idea you have, etc. They’re not really lying, they’re mostly just taking what they read at face value without checking corroborating sources enough to find the obvious (to you) blunders. If you want the LLM to be sure, ask it to go on the RAG (Research Augmented Generation) - check everything before saying it, they can do that, especially “paid mode” engines, but it reduces their capacity for analysis of complex problems by 3-10x, because they’re spending so much context window “being sure” - you can alternatively spend 3-10x as long solving complex problems / accomplishing complex tasks if you have them do their homework, verify everything from “the best” available sources 3x and build up a local document set of “trusted information” which is used in preference to whatever it might find at random on the internet. This isn’t as sexy as “Hey Claude, code me up a database that does X Y Z” and getting the result in 30 seconds, but it is how professionals have been doing their jobs for centuries: learn reliable information first, then act on it.
Pretending AI and Chatbot are interchangeable is a marketing strategy by the companies who make these advanced chat bots. “They are artificially intelligent bro”.
I don’t disagree that the term AI has shifted significantly in the last 4 years or so, but I was actually meaning it in the other direction, as in, there is more to generative AI (what people are calling “AI” these days) than just chat bots.
I think it’s a worthy simplification that sums up the current state of things well. We have AI that broadly has different uses and then we have the ChatBot/ChatBot derived AI applications. The market is not going insane over the broader AI category. Executives are not tripping over themselves to say things like machine vision is going to replace all labor, or at least all white collar labor. The chatbot is the only thing in the conversation of consequence.
All the “everyone says AI is the reality, so everyone feels like they must say AI is the reality” refers to this specific category. It might be veering towards being oversimplified, but it’s trying to balance a perspective that is also oversimplified. Generally, we aren’t good at weighing simple straightforward takes against complex nuanced takes, so you have to “net it out” to have any hope of the point landing.
I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren’t gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.
I need a new line of work
Yeah, right. My boss gave me a bunch of risk assessments to read through and let slip that AI had ‘helped’ produce them. So I said I’d get AI to summarise them. All this vast computing power and climate damage is being used for bullshit.
Person A gives an AI a list of bullet points and instructs it to expand the bullet points into an email.
Person B receives the email and asks AI to summarize it into bullet points.
An ocean of water could have been saved if the Person A had just emailed the bullet points directly, and the information transfer would have been far superior.
Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.
AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.
The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.
Honestly, I didn’t jump on the AI hate train like everyone else did. And I was wrong. I literally only use it to make profile pictures on steam to make a sekiro photo. Other than I literally can live without it.
And at this point all of the damage it is doing to our communities; I am angry at this point that people in positions of power are blatantly ignoring the people they represent who say they don’t want this. This is almost as bad as the epstein corruption. Just blatantly lying to our faces and ignoring frustration.
Not just ignoring it but trying to grift to their supporters that these ‘contrarians’ aren’t Americans and flew in. I’m so unbelievably sick of conservative influence in my home country just using lies as a real mantra. Because everyone around me values money over anything else and it seems like they genuinely are dissonant and don’t understand this is a bubble waiting to burst unlike anything we have ever seen.
Work keeps insisting we use it and I keep telling them to fuck off.
I get more done than my colleagues BECAUSE i don’t use the not-actually-AI “AI” tool.
I can’t say AI hasn’t changed how I work, it has. Instead of going to Google, vendor docs, or the manpage for whatever code or system I am working on I will ask Claude or Gemini to take a stab at building the initial pass of the code or to look up what some cryptic error code means for me. Or even a better way to write some code that I think can be more concise.
The key I think is I never let it make the final decisions for me. The workflow is always look up information > shows it to me > ask for permission to do the thing > do the thing.
But none of that is “changing everything” in the way executives and the Sam Altman’s of the world want to profess. It is just a sometimes more efficient for me way of doing the same thing I was doing before.
A lot of people I have seen that crow about how they are using AI to change their work lives are just doing really fancy Github workflows and actions to automate something they used to still do manually for some reason. They rarely are doing anything that couldn’t be done with the time to research and test without AI.
They didn’t have the framework knowledge before to automate the thing. It’s exactly where I was before AI. I knew that I could work more efficiently, but spending months learning Python was a lot slower than the 45 minutes, every other week I save by having a script do something for me. I don’t save enough budget to actually afford the time and effort to find a programmer, tell them what I need and then pay them to write it for me. Took 20 minutes worth of tweaking with the free tier of Claude and it was done to a “good enough” standard to save the time.
Same here too busy to automate before AI and exactly this would have lead to more efficiency.
I could have told people I am sick for two weeks and then went on to learn and write scripts.
my routine was search for similar function, read/understand a piece of code. copy/paste block. modify for my context. test, move on hardly ever wrote anything from scratch because it just took longer. ai seems like an unmodified copy/paste that doesn’t quite work. like generated art for non–artists, sucks. generated code for non-coders also sucks.
It’s also notable that MBAs tend to be people who are into the networking versus the work and they will follow the trends wherever they leave because that’s what good monkeys do.
This unfortunately, MBAs are the worst, too many of them simp for the billionaire broligarchs
I work at a university and manage large teams of students. Without exception, each time I have hired a business student, they have had a fantastic interview and then contributed nothing to the team. In most cases, they stayed long enough to create a resume entry and then went on to the next “bigger” thing. I don’t discriminate against hiring from them, but I do not advertise job openings in their circles anymore.
But it IS changing everything, and not in a good way
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.
It’s changing a lot of things, but many of them in only relatively minor ways. It’s not affecting e.g. food supply systems in a significant way - it might be screwing up the management structures of companies involved, but that will be repairable fairly quickly…
AI would be great if(currently its mixed for me,and whats the best thing you can do ATM ):
- The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid(or used solar energy + air cooling only,the only way to solve this is Local LLMs currently or specific AI solutions that isnt ChatGPT or Gemini and so on. )
- the LLM is not trained on copyrighted data(non-public domain) and not Paying the artists or not ask the original creator to train on their work.(Local LLMS partially solve this,and this requires specific LLMS too.)
- People did not use AI mindlessly to write Code for you(well i think this requires the user to use their brain)
and so on…
and AI should stay as a “TOOL”, not a full replacement for human work like most sane people do.
edit 1:
i forgot to mention AI is a big contributer to the AI crisis.The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid
Do a little research and look at the actual numbers - yes, it could grow to become a problem, no - AI data centers aren’t anywhere near that kind of problem yet. At the moment, after over a year of hype and growth, AI datacenters use less electricity than Bitcoin miners (which, in my opinion, is too damn much electricity for Bitcoin, but it doesn’t seem to set the news on fire the way AI power usage does.)
not trained on copyrighted data
A lot of really good data is copyrighted - there should be some way to cycle that benefit back to the people who made it in the first place. Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…
People did not use AI mindlessly
Good luck with that one.
Do a little research and look at the actual numbers - yes, it could grow to become a problem, no - AI data centers aren’t anywhere near that kind of problem yet. At the moment, after over a year of hype and growth, AI datacenters use less electricity than Bitcoin miners (which, in my opinion, is too damn much electricity for Bitcoin, but it doesn’t seem to set the news on fire the way AI power usage does.)
but… but… i saw news about AI causing power grid issues,though i did also hear a power company shut down ai datacenter(s?) to free up electricity used .
i also forgot to add AI causing the ram crisis thing.there should be some way to cycle that benefit back to the people who made it in the first place.
exactly,also good idea.
Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…
i think its about making people own the AI??
Bernie’s soverign wealth fund idea isn’t a bad one…
i think its about making people own the AI??
It’s modeled somewhat on the Alaska permanent fund, which is compensating Alaskans with profits from the oil being extracted from their state.
There are unlimited ways to screw it up, but if AI suddenly becomes ridiculously profitable, having 50% of those profits cycled into the general fund could pay for things like UBI…
thats sounds awesome
Well, in part it answers the question “what if I lose my job to AI” - at least you don’t become deadweight in the economy, you’d still have income to spend on housing, food and whatever else.
at least you don’t become deadweight in the economy
In theory, yes.
Reality: we already have shit welfare programs and I doubt UBI will fix it. I also doubt we’ll even get to a point of UBI in my remaining career time. At least not without a lot of blood.
The present as is is pretty bad, I’d hope we can fix that before theorycrafting the future. economists 100 years prior theorycrafted 15 hour work weeks, and look how far we’ve come.
Reality: we already have shit welfare programs and I doubt UBI will fix it.
Reality: we have 134 federal shit welfare programs, every one of them with some needs based proctological exam required prior to qualification to apply for possible consideration for aid as a last resort when the other 133 programs won’t cover the needs. That is toxic bullshit driving guilt and shame among a majority of flyover state conservative voters who are in denial that their ass is on Federal assistance so they get vocal about how bad it all is (but quietly: don’t you dare cancel MY aid program, I deserve it.)
Reality: every single living breathing human being in this country NEEDS a certain amount of money to pay for food, shelter, and if you happen to be fortunate enough to own your shelter outright and grow your own food, you have a shit ton of taxes to pay, so…
If we would start with UBI, shitcan all the piddly little needs based programs that provide less than UBI anyway, people could actually put the time, effort and emotional energy that’s wasted on qualification for needs based programs into something positive. Even sitting on the fucking couch getting stoned while watching Netflix brings more positive energy to our country than the welfare programs.
In effect, after all the hoop jumping and contorted political favors, we have a progressive tax system that does provide UBI plus a dose of https://genius.com/The-clash-know-your-rights-lyrics Investigation, humiliation And if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation… and then it turns around and lowers the percentage tax rate on the wealthiest, so it’s the middle class that’s getting screwed, and when we get done destroying the middle class who’s going to pay then? UBI + flat tax makes a progressive tax system. The current US budget could be revenue neutral with $600 per month + 31% flat tax, and still give the rich as much in “incentive programs” as the population is getting in UBI.
It’s not lying if they have no idea what they’re talking about and constantly swoon over it.
What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.
Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.
