- I think we’ve all learned with social media that sometimes tech companies create products with good intentions that are later weaponized against their users.
- The foundation of agentic LLMs is fully precipitated on creative and knowledge theft. They stole our bread and now want to sell it back to us, one token at a time.
- Banning AI has an intention to slow down its adoption while society weighs in on its projected consequences. When did we as a society collectively agree tech entrepreneurs get to release anything they want without any oversight?
This “just accept it” attitude is democratically lazy and so very ignorant of history of what rich people in power tend to do to the working class when they don’t need their labor anymore. There’s blood in the machine, friends.
I think most people would prefer to find a useful application of a tool compared to being compelled by corporate overlords to clock in at a certain level of token spend. It isn't magic or a cure-all - it's something that's very useful sometimes and insanely expensive (in dollar cost and wasted effort of real humans) other times. Right now we seem to be in a weird honeymoon phase where it gets used for everything disregarding how much utility or cost it will have in that setting.
1. It's impossible because for decades we've had plenty of neural network applications and other ML uses that are quite useful.
Frankly, as much as I would prefer an in-between solution, it might not be feasible. If I could press a button that made AI disappear forever, I would, despite the sacrifice. The downsides as compared to the upsides, in practice, are just so overwhelming.
Actually, the analogy is compelling - an addictive habit that is pleasurable to the user, profitable for the supplier, but others around them must suffer the effluent with consequent deleterious effects on [mental] health. And similarly, the worst [mental] health effect is of course on the user themselves.
As with smoking, probably we can't/shouldn't stop individuals from indulging in this habit, but surely we can protect the rest of society.
The barrier is low, but the benefit is negligible or even negative. You're outsourcing your creative process to some mega-corporation. What you get back from it might be interesting to you, but it won't be to a lot of other people except maybe as a novelty, because it's from the same megacorp that sells its services to everyone else. I know some people seem to genuinely enjoy the outputs of the AI models now, but the novelty hasn't worn off yet.
Also, congratulations, you get to live with the stigma of being an AI slop pusher. And if you try to pass the work off as your own, good luck hiding the truth for the rest of your life, because you'll never regain trust if people find out.
krat0sprakhar•1h ago
I get what the author is trying to say but this does not match my experience nor does it match the employee productivity findings from AI adoption in enterprises.
jamesjhare•55m ago
happytoexplain•55m ago
(And of course there is the uncharitable alternative - that they are simply incompetent. But we don't actually need to go there.)
sudb•52m ago
I am struggling to reconcile your viewpoint with this but may have found the wrong profile!
munk-a•50m ago
Also, there are plenty of non-development related uses of AI that are genuinely valuable - document extraction and data repair are strong domains for application.
scott01•51m ago
Gigachad•50m ago
conqrr•49m ago
happytoexplain•47m ago
vishalontheline•26m ago
And, of course, like everyone else, I've used it instead spending a lot more time searching and sifting through things online. I used to think replacing the search bar with an AI prompt was gimmicky, but then the replies improved.
Those use-cases alone have been massive time savers for me.
sublinear•3m ago
What if I told you that your dramatic statement is totally misreading the vast majority of office workers and their work? If there are waves, it doesn't resemble a riptide, but stop-and-go traffic.
Their work isn't hard for them to begin with. They're bored and stuck in endless meetings. The bottleneck is the rest of the organization.
For every nontrivial goal, all decisions up to that point will await approval from one person. The baton is then handed off to someone else and so it goes. As tempting as it is for some people, you cannot jam your AI middleman pirate grift machine into this process without violating centuries of accountability laws.