I don’t care how well your “AI” works
One day I was sitting at the door of a hackerspace, eating a falafel sandwich and listening to the conversation inside. As the topic shifted to the use of “AI” for everyday tasks, people started casually expounding on how they use “chat assistants” to write snippets of code or annoying emails. This situation is a template for many of the conversations I have had in recent months. What happened in most of them, almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why They The use of these tools is fine, while other approaches were careless.
I am especially dismayed to learn how deeply the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself into place, even in progressive hacker circles.
grind
I encountered friends who completely sucked me in vibecoding pieceSkilled, talented coders who appear to be experiencing some kind of existential crisis, Staring at the screen in disbelief, unable to leave the cursor or whatever the device is Nonsense Now. Sinking into an unconscious state of harmful coping. Watching this felt awfully like watching a friend develop a drinking problem.
And yes, I understand. We programmers are currently undergoing a devaluation of our craft, in a way and at a rate we never imagined. A fortune that designers, writers, translators, tailors or book-binders had lived through before us. It is not that their craft will perish, but that it will be mutilated – condemned to the difficult task of cleaning up what has been spoiled by machines. Not surprisingly, some of us are not handling the new realities well.
new realities
I personally don’t touch LLM with a stick. I don’t let them come near my mind. Many of my friends share that sentiment.
But I think it’s important to acknowledge that we’re in a privileged position to be able to do this. People are forced to use these systems – things become hard to learn because of UI patterns, boss expectations, knowledge pollution, or just peer pressure. The world is adopting these technologies, and not using them can be a big disadvantage in school, university or anywhere.
Most of the public debate about AI focuses on the quality of its output. Exposing biases, making bullshit marketing promises, mocking the cutesy ways they fail, etc. Of course, it is important to discuss practical issues, but we should not rely too heavily on that aspect in our philosophy and activism, otherwise we will risk missing the real agenda of AI.
No matter how well “AI” works, it has some deep fundamental problems that will not go away with technological advances. I would go so far as to say that they were done intentionally.
on control
Our ability to use tools is an integral part of the human experience. They allow us to do things we couldn’t do otherwise. They shape the way we think, and as a result who we are.
When we use a tool it becomes part of usThis is not just the case with hammers, pens or cars, but also with the notebooks used to organize ideas, It becomes part of our cognitive process, Computers are no different, While I’m typing this text, my fingers are moving across the keyboard, switching windows, opening notes, looking up words in the dictionary, While I am completely focused on the meta-task of bringing my ideas to light, I am unaware of all the little miracles happening,
Our brain is sensitive to external signals. When we read news articles we tend to believe what seems reasonable. When we review code we generally expect it to behave as it appears, even if we don’t have the context to assess it. The same is true for text: When we let a model turn notes into blog posts, a lot of context and nuance is added. We read it and believe that the outcome will be what we thought. It is subtle.
At a deeper level, writing is more than the process by which you produce a piece of text, right? It’s also about figuring out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. This post first existed as an idea in my head, then it started taking shape into words, and then I tried to get those words out to organize them in a way that (hopefully) gets my point across. There’s nothing extra, no fillers. I am the only one who can come up with this idea and writing is the way I do it.
Excerpt from a post by @thekla@mystical.garden
on power
In a world where fascists redefine truth, where surveillance capitalist companies more powerful than democratically elected leaders control our desires, do we really want their machines to be part of our thought process? To share your most intimate thoughts and relationships with them?
AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. Vast physical infrastructure designed to transform capital into power and back into capital. Those who control the infrastructure also control the people under it.
Being extremely resource intensive is not a side effect of AI systems – That’s it.
Craft, expression and skilled labor are what create value and give us control over ourselves. To further centralize power, craft and expression must be destroyed.And they’re certainly trying,
what is left
How can we be ourselves in this world? What we are dealing with here is not a question about AI, but about survival under metabolic capitalism. This is terrible, but there are some things we can do. I’m working on a post about it.
Until then, here are some starting points:
- Be present for the people around you. Message friends and show them they matter to you
- Organize into a union. together we are stronger.
- Take care of your mind. Spend less time on social media. Use free power to educate yourself, read a book
- bring into existence something that would not otherwise exist
The most defiant thing we can do is to thrive.
· Personal, AI
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