Ingesting every piece of art ever into a machine which lovelessly boils them down to some approximated median result isn’t artistic expression. It may be a neat parlour trick, a fun novelty, but an AI is only able to produce semi-convincing knock-offs of our creations precisely because real, actual people once had the thought, skill and will to create them.
You do not have to use generative AI.
AI itself cannot be held to account.
If you use AI, you are the one who is accountable for whatever you produce with it.
There are contexts in which it is immoral to use generative AI.
Correcting or fact checking generative AI may take longer than just doing a task yourself, or with conventional AI tools.
You do not have to use generative AI.
My main problem with AI is not that that it creates ugly, immoral, boring slop (which it does). Nor even that it disenfranchises artists and impoverishes workers, (though it does that too).
No, my main problem with AI is that its current pitch to the public is suffused with so much unsubstantiated bullshit, that I cannot banish from my thoughts the sight of a well-dressed man peddling a miraculous talking dog.
Also, trust:
They’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now?
I Feel Like I’m Going Insane
Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it’s abundantly clear that it absolutely isn’t and absolutely can’t.
Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to sustain this miserable, specious bubble.
We are in the midst of a group delusion — a consequence of an economy ruled by people that do not participate in labor of any kind outside of sending and receiving emails and going to lunches that last several hours — where the people with the money do not understand or care about human beings.
Their narrative is built on a mixture of hysteria, hype, and deeply cynical hope in the hearts of men that dream of automating away jobs that they would never, ever do themselves.
Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it’s fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we’re all fucking morons.
Being “in tech” in 2025 is depressing, and if I’m going to stick around, I need to remember why I’m here.
This. A million times, this.
I urge you to read what Miriam has written here. She has articulated everything I’ve been feeling.
I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an “agentic” web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind?
AI has the same problem that I saw ten year ago at IBM. And remember that IBM has been at this AI game for a very long time. Much longer than OpenAI or any of the new kids on the block. All of the shit we’re seeing today? Anyone who worked on or near Watson saw or experienced the same problems long ago.
I’m trying to be open to changing my mind when presented with new evidence.
Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.
I listened to a day of talks on AI at UX Brighton, and I came away disappointed by what wasn’t mentioned.
It’s almost as though humans prefer to use post-hoc justifications rather than being rational actors.
Using generative large-language model tools? Sleeping well at night?