When I say “AI” on this page I don’t mean what the game industry has been using the term for for decades, nor am I talking about Spielberg’s Haley Joel Osment vehicle (which is better than you remember - the ending is good!).
No, what the term has overwhelmingly been co-opted by is the latest glut of generative systems. Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude or (hurk) Grok. Image generators like Stable Diffusion, music generators like Suno, voice generators like ElevenLabs.
I’m going to go on a bit of a rant below, so if you just care about whether I’m using it to make content for this blog or any of my code repositories the answer is no.
If you want to understand why, and why I likely never will, read on.
I’ve always found generative tech extremely interesting. Hell, I’m doing a bunch of it at work! The process of designing a system of rules and inputs, and then being surprised ny the output, is extremely fun and satisfying.
So why do I hate “AI” so much?
There’s all the externalities. The data center hyperscalers, causing immense harm to nearby communities, with basically no benefits. The fact that effectively all of them are based on vast amounts of stolen data, scraped and used without consent or remuneration, while real people’s lives have been destroyed by copyright holders to make an example, for the unspeakable crime of downloading a game or movie. The ways it has impacted workers in many fields, leading to mass layoffs and alienation from their work for those that remain. The frankly stupid way it has caused computer storage prices to skyrocket to unbelievable heights.
But it’s not that, or not just. If they invented a model that’s trained exclusively on legally obtained material and runs on your own computer with a reasonable energy footprint, I’d still not like it. And that’s because I don’t, can’t, understand it! Not really.
The joy of generating, to me, comes from seeing the cogs of the system, making tiny tweaks and seeing the output change. LLMs and their ilk don’t allow that, their innards are too opaque, even if you had full access to everything. I find the whole mode of interacting with them grating and frustrating, like trying to get an especially dense person to perform a task.
Maybe they’ll fix all of that at some point. I don’t have a crystal ball that tells the future. But until that happens I don’t see myself voluntarily engaging with them.