I want my job security back!

But yeah, I get it. LLMs and image gen was hella fascinating at first. No shame in greeting something new with curiosity.

It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, AI can be used to quickly find solutions to problems you might not have been able to solve and I’ve heard that AI can be used in some cases to help people who are disabled. I’ve been using free AI services occasionally for personal use and they can be pretty good for the most part, sometimes it seems like the AI knows exactly what I want while other times, it either seems to ignore part of my prompt or just have no idea what I need from it.

On the other hand, people are losing their jobs, it’s destroying the economy, people have already used it to spread misinformation and malware, it’s being used both to create and to promote scams, it’s possibly damaging the environment with all the water the data centers use, they’re all trained off of stolen data, and there’s probably a lot of other issues that I’m either forgetting or just not aware of.

All in all, it’s hard to promote the use of AI but I understand it’s usefulness. I will never pay for an AI service and when I use the free ones, I always use them with an ad-blocker so they don’t get any monetization from my usage.

I mostly don’t care and as much as people flip out about it I odn’t think it’s any more relevant than, VIRTUAL REALITY, or BIG DATA or a BLOCKCHAIN.

or any of the other hype machines that come around every couple of years and then fizzle out into nothingness.

Generative AI can get fucked. I’ll never use it.

The “AI” tools that are used for stuff like folding proteins and other beneficial work like that get a pass. Everything else should be relegated to the wastebin of history just like Facebook/Insta/Twitter, etc…

It has its uses. It’s just ruined by the bad apples of people who’ve long have had malicious intent where if you put anything that was intended for a good purpose in front of them, they’d ruin that for everyone.

For example, when there are things I do not know about like objects, I can take a picture of it, direct and show ChatGPT by asking what it is and it’ll tell me. It’s convenient to talk to an LLM to understand phrases, slang, slurs and their history about them in real time. I also have enjoyed using it to fix and enhance images that my phone’s piss-poor autofocus fucks up on with some images.

I think what really ruins AI is that, select people and companies are way too heavily reliant. It is not a solve-everything tool. It is not something you go to about everything, like mental therapy. It is not something you should be using to cheat on homework, to have it help you with getting by in colleges and school that rely on your own problem solving skills to navigate.

well. was it trained ethically? no. has it been deployed ethically? no. but, has it made our lives easier? also no

As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

I was in the same boat as you - one of the earliest to get on Copilot (bing chat at the time) and ChatGPT, and I also played a lot with craiyon/dalle mini. I thought it was fun, and even regrettably used it for roleplay. I started to become skeptical around 2024 as well but I found it really difficult to stop using it. I was quite heavily addicted in a way, and it was really difficult to stop myself. It also completely wrecked my ability to independently think and be creative.

Now that I’m out of it, I am pretty strongly anti-genAI, and I see such little use for it. I’ve always enjoyed art and have been taking a lot of time lately to improve mine, and I am doing it for personal enjoyment but I also notice that I’m finding it particularly hard to be seen online or get commissions, and I think the saturation of AI is partially related to that. I also see it doing more in IT spaces, which is particularly scary as that was my strongest subject and what I want to go into as a career.

My mother has even started offloading parenting to it, asking it “how to deal with [me]” which really hurts, and I see more and more people just getting consumed by AI psychosis.

I really hope the situation with AI can change for the better soon somehow, it can’t be sustained like this

I see AI as a sign I probably shouldn’t be patronizing a store/restaurant/what-have-you.

I’m also of the opinion that any use of AI to replace artists is a total waste and of zero or negative value.

kinda negative. It tends to do a good enough job at time but can’t really make anything all that great to me compared to human experts/professionals. I think its very useful for the average person when they can’t afford to pay and expert and need something. So like the person who wants to make a picture of their pathfinder character. Before someone might be able to hire someone if they had the cash or if they were lucky had an artistic friend who could do it. Now anyone can. Its use in business spaces now for communication is painful. Many people don’t proof read the output and allow the message to get lost in the communication they had written. They need to remember they are communicating with people.

I think it’s a tool, but a tool that has been weaponized. I think “AI” (I use quotes because we are really talking about LLMs primarily) have some fantastic applications for automation, things like dictation, pattern recognition, etc.

But unlike non-AI tools that can do similar tasks (linters, non ai machine translation, dictation, hell even search engines at this point) AI does the task with the confidence of an expert, speaking in a confident voice, to people who generally don’t know if the information is accurate. It’s being sold as a knowledge hub, when in reality it is a tool, one that can be wrong and does not think. And the marketing is agressive. They want you to forget how to think for yourself so you have to pay a subscription for thinking.

AI psychosis is real, I’ve seen it happen in real time with my coworkers. The quality of our new hires has gone downhill because none of them seem to know how to solve a problem. I often hear “Claude thinks this” in response to issues that are just barely above basic level. There is no longer a desire to find knowledge or puzzle out a problem when it can be cognitively offloaded to the llm. There is danger in the very service that the llm provides - reduction in friction in your daily life also equates to a reduction in learning. Which sucks because noodling out complex problems with an llm as a rubber duck can actually be a great learning experience in situations where a product expert isn’t around to bounce off of. But it comes with the caveat of knowing how to check the answers and having the curiosity to delve into those answers and dig through them yourself. Without that crucial step you are just offloading your brain to the computer to think for you and you learn nothing.

And I can’t blame the AI psychosis on stupid people. It’s being marketed as an all knowing infallible assistant. Yet tangibly many every day people find their lives made worse for it. AI has been shoved into everything when it isn’t even as good as the thing it is replacing, or it fails more often.

Then we get to the actual generative functions of ai. Generative art, be it picture or text, is trained without permission or compensation, on the work of millions of artists, with the goal of making those artists obsolete. As an artist I’ve seen every single artistic industry be hit with this, from stock photography to furry porn to high budget movies. And much like the previous use cases of AI replacing currently existing software, it’s replacing artists with less quality products. AI art is recognizable because it is homogenized by default. And sure it’s tweakable, but by default it is recognizable as this uncanny homogenized “good enough” picture to get an idea across. And much like everything else it’s being used as a way to capitalize on industries, because at the end of the day the only reason to use generative ai for art is to make it faster and cheaper. Every single person that uses it that I’ve seen has used it for the same reasons. “I don’t have time to learn x” or “I need an idea out now” or “I can make more by doing this”. Its because art has become completely monitized. People don’t create for the sake of creation now, it’s for a job, or for a deadline, or for clout. Artists who love their craft and are not bogged by deadlines or bills are overwhelming against AI in general, as artists are some of the most vocal anti generative AI crowd.

When we look at all of this, AI is a tool that has some great localized use cases, especially in pattern recognition, dictation, language, etc. but it’s been coopted as a brain subscription by the people in charge of training it and selling it to us. It’s been shoehorned into every aspect of our lives, made everything more expensive, made people dumber, collectively destroyed the lives of artists off the backs of their work, and enshittified almost every single industry.

The tradeoffs aren’t worth it.

Edit: also forgot to add the privacy nightmare that comes from AI surveillance

I think if it were being done responsibly and thoughtfully it would actually be pretty exciting and cool. If it was all in some kind of public trust, owned by everyone equally, or if it were TRULY open source I would honestly be banging the drum for it… as it is, it’s just an accelerant stoking the fire of inequality and a weight disadvantaging those already at the greatest disadvantage, even while it bouys those already the furthest ahead. Fuck the clankers, and anybody who thinks this is ethical needs to wake the fuck up

I think the technology is cool and holds a lot of promise in certain niches. I’ve been into it since 2019 and learned a lot just watching it evolve.

That said, I’m skeptical and I think some folks rely on it too much. I work with someone who just copy/pastes Claude on every response. You have to do your own thinking and you have to double check everything it outputs. It follows direction, but it doesn’t hesitate to make incorrect assumptions and inferences, and often the things you tell it isn’t what it does.

I saw an AI guy explaining some prompt technique where you tell the AI to ask questions until it is 95% certain what you want it to do, but it doesn’t have certainty and it can’t achieve 95% of something it doesn’t have, so it asks questions — sometimes pointless ones — until it has performed the ceremony of achieving 95% certainty. And I suppose maybe that that ceremony does help in some cases, but it’s not doing what you tell it to do.

AI has a lot to offer. Sometimes when I ask it to write code, it does so using libraries and annotations I wasn’t aware existed. I learn about things that way. It writes cleaner code faster than I do because it doesn’t hesitate and overthink. But everyone knows about the hallucination issues. And you have to make your instructions as narrowly scoped and unambiguous as possible — approaching the complexity of code.

I get frustrated because I am a believer in AI, but I’m surrounded by people who don’t seem to know how to use it appropriately and it’s frustrating. Skepticism and critical thinking is crucial to successful use of AI, otherwise you’re going to be caught with your pants down, having relied on it to do your thinking for you, and suddenly you realize you don’t understand the very thing you’ve supposedly done.