I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone
For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with
I sometimes wonder if people get into this to create an actual working something or they just enjoy sorting colored blocks for the heck of it.
I am on the other extreme end: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the code itself. The spec, the intent, the architecture, the contracts are what I find interesting. All the “file handling” and “logging” and syntax wrangling and caring if some “variable” is on the “stack” or the “heap” I can live without very happily. It’s not that they are uninteresting in and of themselves but I find it hard to justify keeping my focus on these microscopic issues again and again and again and again.
For my own sanity, I never allow AI to do everything. Either I write some code and turn to AI for debugging help and code review, or I let AI write the initial draft and I debug the AI-written code.
Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
There was always some subtle quirk, a bug that irks me once every so often, something I'd never want to unleash upon masses and although these people made their work available through various channels, paid or unpaid, for some reason I felt more of a grudge than gratitude.
And I tried to fix things I did. It was a breathless, thankless exercise of working through someone else's code line by line for decades while hardly being able to lift my head because of actual work I had to do to support my life. And thus a villain was born.
I am so glad it is over. It is all ingested into neural network weights and high-pressure sprayed to the masses through RNG. I am finally free. I don't have to learn your stupid aws commands, your helm configs, your systemd antics, your http api. I don't have to care about your life times, your gc params. I tell the computer and it clinks and clanks and eventually gets the job done like gene rodenberry intended.
Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue.
AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like.
Your shirt? Go to town! Draw something yourself and let AI patch up some rough edges. Do some style transfer. Or don’t use it. That’s still an option. As you said it is hard to create with AI without losing your soul but that’s not inherent to the tech. It’s a massive skill and tooling issue.
Instead of choosing between “do it fully myself” and “let someone else do it” you get a slider now. You get to pick! How awesome is that?
I think you may have misread the parent comment.
And currently AI has no creativity nor does it enhance a human's creativity. It simply regurgitates and at best the human user can lie to themselves that they did it. Look at the "rinse and repeat" of animated movies. Humanity has been in a cycle of regurgitation for quite some time and AI is only going to make it worse.
It definitely appears inherent so far. You could say infinite feeds optimized for engagement is just neutral tech too. The biggest mistake we made in the last tech revolution of ”social” media was to judge tech by its potential rather than the business model.
> You get to pick! How awesome is that?
It's awesome if you don’t derive meaning from the process. Like cheating in a single player game, you can just skip and watch the credits.
Ironically one of my most memorable game experiences ever is just walking and climbing for ages in Death Stranding, in poor weather, slipping, picking up baggage. It was miserable. But effort seems to create meaning.
The ONLY point of the words is to express a sentiment shared by the group, creating a bond and solidarity.
But if the sentiment did not come from anyone in the group or from the group as a collective, why put words on the shirt at all?
It's the lie of a shared connection without the reality. Just like social media "friends" or the "intimacy" of porn. Just another way to destroy a little more of our souls.
On that same spirit, Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well. I always loved music, and used to make beats with FL Studio (which was shunned by people much like AI for ages) and even within the Suno community I see people shunning others if they have AI writing lyrics for them, its really weird to me. I do feel weird if I try to make Suno make songs I personally cannot 100% relate to, or experiences I've never been close to living through, like I love gangsta rap, I would never feel comfortable making and releasing gangsta rap since it doesn't define who I was.
1. Things which are done primarily to accomplish a specific goal
2. Things which are done primarily for the joy of doing them.
Many tasks have aspects of both of these things. Automation, in all it's forms, is a way of maximizing the first, often at the expense of the second. When a new category of task first falls to automation, I think it takes a while for us to figure out how to pursue it solely for the second, but the two can co-exist. Backyard gardening and industrial agriculture both have their place.
Right now, coding and tech is, seemingly, in the middle of that transition. It's going to take a while before people learn to separate the two kinds of goal I think.
Getting an internet recipe from AI doesn't stop you from reaching out to your friend and finding out if they are going through anything, if anything it frees you up to do exactly that.
Same with this t-shirt slogan example. What you miss is the group activity and the spontaneity. But you can still do this without it being a side effect of a business objective. You can still talk to your friends, and with AI making everything faster you can talk to them even more now.
It's like we no longer understand the purpose of language itself: to get thoughts out of our head and share them with other people.
I do agree on the "existential crisis" part of it. At work, every time I see someone sign-off of something AI generated without much edits, I feel this fear that we're on to slippery slope where there's no turning back.
https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria
They were a race of humans that hated contact with other people. Each of of them lived in estates separated by acres of space.
We keep pushing our culture/society towards that sort of thing. We keep writing into to this "social" media (including what I am just writing) which is not social at all (but more akin to shouting opinions the middle of a mall).
I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction.
At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me.
We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery.
Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
No, I reject that. If there are to be pictures and shirts, let them be real, or let us forego them. If it's acceptable to offload something like this to AI, maybe it wasn't really that important anyway.
People are so accustomed to their community and purpose coming from their job that AI doing work on our behalf threatens not just our income, but our entire social identity.
The AI wasn't picking the font, it was picking the words.
But you're right to have an existential crisis if you're in the creative industry, we all have that capable someone else on our phones now for $20/month.
That doesn't mean AI isn't a net positive (I won't comment on whether or not it is), but this is probably the most visible, simple, undeniable downside.
Notice how the blogger simply calls it "Chat".
and feeding them into Chat
or Gemini
or Claude.I admit I was struck when I first heard someone use that shorthand in conversation at a party. It was the moment I knew that for better or worse LLMs use had permeated deep into regular life.
It’s certainly on the surface impressive, but when I dive into the details of what it creates, the slop becomes so apparent I cant unsee it and it distracts me.
My wife has an ongoing frustration with a colleague who has adopted the mindset, "I reviewed it, so I wrote it". I guess he must sleep well at night, and probably votes in the "AI gives me superpowers bloc", but it is pretty apparent he doesn't really review it much either, because it is full of flaws and absurdity.
realization was that you had been generating slop all this while before ai and somehow convinced yourself that it was original and human ?
Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.
I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context.
I thought this was amazing!
But I'm sure someone could point out that I took a mental shortcut, that I made myself dumber by not grasping Serbian and Cyrillic to have a go at translating myself. Or they could say that I lost the human connection that would have come by finding a resident who spoke English and asking about what that meant.
In a sense, this are plausible critiques. But the reality is that I was on a run, and I almost certainly never would have done those things if Claude (or smartphones with cameras, for that matter) didn't exist. I didn't become lazier or lose the imperfections of human connections, the whole thing was a net add for me.
And so, in that light - it's okay to use a recipe book, or ask an LLM about fly fishing, or do some web searches to get some advice about how to write a wedding toast.
If that's missing the point somehow, so be it. Perhaps you could enlighten me (and thus cultivate a human connection)!
So much to unpack here!
First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.
The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.
Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.
Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)
And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
It's a channel that increases access to knowledge for those who wouldn't otherwise have it, but disrupts a status quo in a way that some might find harmful. But in that case people seemed to pretty universally recognize that the pros outweighed the cons.
Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.
I love when I get someone to talk about something they clearly love, and they're giddy with joy and struggling to contain themselves. It's one of the finer pleasures of talking to strangers and not machines.
Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.
You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:
* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media
The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.
The reality was replacing human interaction with addiction to an algorithmic feed and endless hours of mindless consumption and very little creation and rapidly deteriorating mental health.
It is good to be skeptical of similar grandiose claims about AI, and consider what the reality might turn out to be.
I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.
The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.
Not everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.
Not every dad is good at everything.
I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish
You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.
I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.
But this is the thing. Many people don't, or have some other real or imagined barrier preventing them from it. Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.
While I relate to the heart of the poem, there is an aspect of it that's essentially criticizing people for their suffering. There's a "just stop drinking" vibe.
"It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love."
-- Stephen Hawking
I think we may be approaching some sort of watershed moment, if not conflict between those who hold such sentiments and those whose response is "oh yeah? hold my beer".
Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.
So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.
Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.
Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.
Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.
Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.
And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.
Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.
AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.
This is backwards. This false dichotomy is what irrational reactions against anti-AI sentiment use, not the anti-AI sentiment itself. It is exactly the false dichotomy the parent you are replying to is using.
On the other hand, maybe we should stop doing bullshit things instead of doing them more and faster. Maybe we ought to have fewer, shorter speeches, simpler websites and so on. Instead, we're drowning the world in noise. Speeches written by nobody, about nothing, for nobody in particular.
Sure, humans repeat patterns, but they add their own delightful uniqueness and imperfection to the mix. Tiny random mutations that eventually evolve the genre. Humans get really good at following rules, but then they develop the taste to break them. Wisdom shapes their craft in unpredictable ways.
And I guess that's what being an internet dad is. You live a long, imperfect life and you learn all sorts of lessons, many of which are subtle and never written down, then you apply those lessons to your craft. What can a machine teach us about fatherhood?
The narratives about people not calling their friends for advice, but instead using AI... these are basically unfalsifiable. How could he possibly know that this is a thing that commonly occurs? That's right, he doesn't.
>Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals
I don't know about you, but if a friend were to call me for meal prep advice, I'd honestly be worried that they're having some sort of crisis and just need to talk to someone.
>Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail
Personally, I consider it kind of rude to pester someone who is an expert in a subject with extremely basic questions. Yes, sometimes they wont mind and will even be glad to answer your questions, but they would probably appreciate that you took the time to do research and aren't just using them as human Google search. The more genuine way to reach out to this person would be to learn as much about the subject as you can, and ask them to sanity check what you've learned. This is a much more considerate way to go about things.
>Be sure to use AI
>and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th
>year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
>my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
>lest I scare away this moment,
What? Does using AI disqualify you from having this experience? This post is so ridiculous man.
"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."
AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.
Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.
If anything an underlying truth about humanity is being exposed: we take the easy way out far more often than we’d like to admit.
Perhaps, this truth being made explicit is a wakeup call that will teach us the value of that hard work anew.
After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.
There’s also limit to how much you can expect coworkers, friends, and family to review your work. An LLM can act as a rubber duck debug partner or a reviewer hundreds of times per time. You cannot have friends and family at your service all day.
No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find purpose and meaning, even motivation and inspiration in others. It is not anyone's "job" to make you a better person.
That's precisely the kind of thinking that's landed us in the mess we're in. Abdication of personal responsibility. Shifting blame and responsibility from yourself onto anyone nearby. It is your job to make yourself a better person for the people around you. Not the other way around.
Speeches haven't gone away, videos are more popular than ever, and consulting within our social circle will continue on.
I think there's something to be said about there being an isolationist phenomenon in society that might be contributing in part to low fertility, but that significantly pre-dates LLMs. It's easy and convenient for us to be alone - people create friction. We've been entertained by the TV set for a century now. That said, we remain social creatures and enduringly have a need to be with others, at least to some extent.
Isn't the point of the poem that you should, instead, ask a human? You'll get sidetracked and drawn into unrelated conversations, sure, but that's what it means to be human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?
That's my take from the poem, anyway.
As for why optimize, we should each decide what we care about, then optimize for that. I have personal reasons why I want to be a better speaker. Why I want to be able to stand in front of people, and have them connect with things that I care about. So it likely makes more sense for me to optimize building that skill, than for most.
You probably want to optimize on something else.
Taking the conversation to Derek of Veritasium feels like after having watched Koyaanisqatsi your mind goes to James Burke and how the invention of the plow has improved how we experience human society.
I'd like for it to be a choice. AI is injected into search now, when you install vscode they have a prompt input sitting there and they nudge you to use it. Of course you can opt out of this stuff but it has become the default.
As someone teaching their nephew how to code i really want him to struggle and exercise his problem solving skills instead of having every touchpoint offer him an instant answer.
Something that has a worse outcome for most people is worse for society.
Yeah it might be some antisocial hustler opportunity to get a leg up on everyone else. Huzzah.
Can SV Tech just make something that makes things better for society overall? No, impossible.
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.
After a year I could no longer write for shit.
Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.
Now I don't even write near a computer.
Personally, I find the idea of sounding even slightly more like ChatGPT repulsive. Would much rather just leave the gnarly bits in.
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.
We are destroying the environments humans were designed to thrive in.
Yes, but that kind of ignores the more active elements. This story didn't languish with few upvotes and a few shallow comments, it was an instant HN darling so had to be killed, or it would still be on the front page.
[0] https://hnrankings.info/48323101/
And whatever the reasons or rationalizations for that may be, you can be 100% sure it was by a tiny minority.
I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.
I know I have consciousness, and I know I am made up of molecules. I don't find that limiting or disappointing at all.
I am very confused by these people you say argue that we don't exist. I have never heard anyone argue that.
To me, the contradictory view is the one assuming that everything in the world can be explained, except for humans. So far, people found that, given enough time and core knowledge, they could understand anything about the natural world, and we've been refining that process ever since. Since humans are a part of that world, are created in it and live in it, why would I think we're any different? There's a difference between thinking that humans are unique (in a way that makes us have immensely interesting properties) and thinking that humans are special (not subject to natural laws or constraints).
The troubling view for me is the alternative - the one that always tries to draw a hard line between humans and the 'explainable' rest of nature, like we must be different, alien and special to be worthy of interest and appreciation.
-Max Frisch
But the more you lean on the internet or on technology, the more you feed that feedback loop of "in-person interaction = hard". Yes, things are difficult, but you're never going to figure out how to be comfortable in those situations if you're not actively putting yourself in them. Growth takes struggle, and I say that with all the empathy in the world.
As Snaut says in Solaris, man needs man.
Some of the least-mentally-healthy people I know see human dynamics as fundamentally 0-sum competitions, and I feel like some of these platforms are modeled on that, but not all of them (youtube is a mixed bag, reddit used to be pretty harmless).
Do you find HRT and gender-affirming surgeries to be borderline psychopathic? How about safe and effective cures for genetic, viral, and bacterial maladies that cripple or kill?
The big things about transhumanism are to figure out how fix the things that damage and destroy us, and figure out how to let each person shape themselves to be the best version of them possible. If your best you is a baseline human, then, great! More power to you! I know that mine sure as fuck isn't.
Will there be lots of trouble on the way towards teching up so that everyone can be the best version of themselves possible? Absolutely. Hell, we appear to be generally incapable of figuring out something so simple as how to provide good lives for everyone even if there's no useful work for them to do.
At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
Look. I am a massive fan of the janky old manually created website. <marquee> will never die and it is hilarious that browsers will have to retain the feature for years to come.
But "the blog was generated by a machine" isn't the problem with Substack. "Machine Generated" blog sites have been around ever since blogs went big. Blogspot and Wordpress were practically a duopoly in the peak days of blogging. The problem with Substack is two (really, only the latter):
1) It's gotten the Post-Zuckerberg "everything must follow our company letterhead" disease. That's not a substack exclusive problem and designers need to be bullied harder for it.
2) It's the nazi bar where all the nazi blogs are. This one is the actual reason you should not be using substack.
But I'm not entirely sure what you refer to in (1). Would you care to elaborate? I'd love to learn more.
The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content, and works on most people's devices. I would rather have read this on substack, than the author get frustrated at having to learn how to publish pages by hand and give up.
Maybe we just need a better alternative to substack if that's the problem.
I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.
It's like we memory holed the last 20 years of social media that was supposed to be all upside; just democratic, global connectionism, empowerment, etc. I have too much exposure to people using AI in various, even sometimes subtle "wrong ways" to really agree.
This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.
When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”
Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.
I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.
The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.
Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.
I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.
Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.
I’m still very conflicted about it.
I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.
Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?
Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
Hasn't it always been the case that technology reduces the contact with other people? Now with cars we don't need to sit next to others on trains, we don't need to ask pedestrians for directions thanks to GPS etc.
Technology has drawbacks, the question is are the drawbacks greater than it's benefits. Part of the answer is personal, some people can handle them better than others. Other parts are societal, what's the impact on society of the people that's can't handle it (mass shooters, roadrage, suicides etc).
It's a tough nut to crack.
In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction.
But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?
This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.
There's nothing "obnoxious" about this. It might be for you, and that's cool beans, but your post speaks in a broad generalization that just isn't accurate for everyone.
Pretending it's an AI novelty is... disingenuous.
I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.
I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.
Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased
It's a pretty big stretch to liken a ranking algorithm based entirely on direct, intentional human inputs to what most people understand to be "AI".
- My doctor friend does not wanting me pinging them asking for free medical advice every time I get health anxiety
- My chef friend does not want me calling them every time I'm struggling with a recipe
- My author friend does not want to read the 20th draft of my book, in which I've changed perhaps 10% of the content from the last draft
In these, the cost is a tax on the relationship -- relying on someone else too much to the point where it could potentially be impacting _their_ life.
Similarly, there are enough communities out there that are not accommodating -- even if I wanted to get a human answer and/or connect with someone, the interactions themselves can be painful. Do we remember what it was like posting on Stack Overflow? Do we believe Stack Overflow was a one-off outlier?
I also believe human imagination and knowledge shouldn't be bound to the relationships you have around you. What if my social group is small, or diversity of knowledge that my social group has is small? Should I not be able to think and explore an idea because my best alternative would be to contact a professor at a university that 99% of the time will not answer me?
I do believe that many people use AI now instead of learning and connecting -- I know my own programmatic knowledge has weakened now that AI has acted as a superhuman autocorrect. But on the other hand, with the help of AI I've also learned about a ton of things that would have otherwise been unavailable to me -- and I believe has improved me on the whole.
With books you needed to consult people on which book to read first.
I don't have anything intelligent to say really. This poem made me go "Fuck yeah, poetry! Humans!!", and I'm grateful to the author, the submitter, and the people who upvoted it, so that I ended up reading it.
If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?
I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.
It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.
People aren't reading what they're responding to.
AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.
That's not necessarily because of AI. The trend has been going downward for some time, anyway.
Outsourcing has drawbacks; usually ones that aren't apparent, until it has been in place for a while (I won't go into what they are, because this isn't really the proper venue, and I don't feel like arguing). I think that many companies have been learning about these drawbacks, in the last few years.
But AI is likely to impact some (not all) jobs that would normally be offshored.
We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.
I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them.
People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me.
I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.
Some people learned that lesson and are now pushing back on letting their kids access AI. But not everyone.
The only purpose of communicating is to transmit your thoughts to one or more other people.
If the thoughts are the thoughts of the AI, you are not communicating anything.
Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.
Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.
Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.
How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...
Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...
And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.
Anecdotally, I've seen the effects that people delegating their executive functions to AI have had and the damage is quick and harrowing
For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete.
I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming.
It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.
It seems unlikely to have happened to anyone else, ever.
"Before" AI there was internet, and before that often just your room, your computer, and tinkering with it for years before meeting anyone else with the same interest.
And trust me that there are many books better than AI.
I'm sorry for your experience, anyhow
Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?
I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.
If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.
The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.
Just because it gets results doesn't mean there isn't more out there, and that there isn't a benefit to engaging with your community.
I see the same sameness in the results when I use AI to explore such subjects. There's a certain level of homogeneity that comes with relying on Google, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, and AI for our answers.
I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act.
It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.
I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.
But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player.
I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.
On the other hand, if I live in 150 years ago where telephone had not been invented, I may never make such decision to live so far away from my parents at all.
"Technology giveth and technology taketh away"
Then there's this business about "AI removing connections to people". My wife's an artist (and now a Creative Director in a corp) and she used an early image model years ago to iterate on the design that we then had embroidered onto my sherwani[1] in India through a close friend's connection and I made a suno.ai tune to walk out for my wedding to. My wife and I use this new tech to model things and print it out on our 3D printer[2] so we can reuse my daughter's infant-stage play pen as gates now that she's older. My wife once tried to make us persimmon bread from a recipe that 3.5 gave us. We have a claw-like bot that is hooked up to our calendar, contacts, history, planes, airbnbs, hotels and so on and helps us with stuff.
By any measure, we are pretty social people and we are quite happy. And the thing to note is that, as far as I can see, we are not particularly remarkable. This seems to be the standard way most people I know use LLMs: to do things that they wouldn't cross the effort/reward threshold otherwise. And there's no grand disaster happening.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
1: https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665?s=20
2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...
If someone hasn't gotten the memo yet, writing code got that serious at least a decade ago when web ate the world and chrome had won the web. Probably even earlier for certain industries like financial institutions.
This isn't just about "human imperfections" or something else sentimental. It's the fact that quality really does matter in a huge number of situations and the consequences are not forgiving in the slightest.
The second part assumes AI writing can substitute mastery of writing, and simultaneously, not be good enough.
We have, for a several thousand years, continued to develop labor and cost saving technology. We have been OK thus far.
On the other hand, tech in general (not just AI) does make an easier and easier path for people to go inward and neglect their community/family/friends. This does suck.
No one is forcing you or pressuring you to not call friend to ask for recipe. Even AI would say that you should talk to friends.
OP should consider a side career in poetry.
as if you're choosing between "Claude, tell me how to make an omelette" and walking across the forest path to your sylvan neighbor, the former Michelin-star chef who set up an artisanal microgastropub by the pond
as opposed to googling "omelet recipe"
The only thing that makes sense is that it’s being flagged, I guess.
This is easiest to see in games, when people complain about the balance of a game, they often want some "problems" to be solved. "This map is massive, can't we just create teleportation nodes everywhere? Can't we just have a very fast flying mount?". To me this is missing the point, is battle mechanic an obstacle over the story? Maybe it is, but have you considered that they expected to experience the story with the combat?
In real life, it is not so easy to say "This problem is necessary for human life". If an LLM can infer what I want to say to someone in a much clearer form, should we do that? Should we use LLM to fix all of our grammars? Should making accounts be really cheap? Is market making a problem that we should solve? Should we really make it easier for people to invest i.e. democratizing finance? Should we really give everyone access to 1GBps bandwidth internet? Should we really want full internet access everywhere even in the middle of Amazon forest?
Personally, I don't know if the answer is that straightforward. For each of the items I listed, I can see things that we lose. A lot of humanity is problem solving, and we have solve a lot of problems that have kept humanity busy for most of their lives. We are not living in an era where problems that we face are unique and we are simply not designed for.
When I start thinking we programmers are the most pedantic people around, I just look at some writers and feel a little better.
The shit all looks the same. Every taco truck in town uses the same crappy style advertisements, all the food looks the same (AI tacos, not pictures of actual food...)
I liked small business advertisements better when it was full of crappy fonts, clashing color choices, horrifying JPEG artifacts and all.
Software, and knowledge work in general, is facing an even deeper form of alienation from AI. I don't see how I (just past 30) or future generations will be able to find deep satisfaction from "knowledge work" if this current trajectory holds. I don't think our brains are wired for a life of this without tremendous mental anguish.
Please use the internet.
Please use search engines.
Please use AI.
Everything old is good and everything new is evil. The irony of this being posted online in written form is lost on the author. Socrates would probably have an aneurysm.
AI is really cool technology, but the cost is tremendous.
Like I don't want to say it's a strawman exactly, because some people probably do use AI too much. But it's a really emotional (and not exactly logical) play to emotions that sort of implies don't use AI at all, which I don't agree with.
Like if you're writing a speech for my wedding, please do a sanity check against AI before saying a really crass or risky joke. Because some of us have those maybe-on-the-spectrum acquaintances and AI actually can be a great sanity check for those people.
- Dr. Snaut, Solaris (1972)
the weird line breaks
extremely jarring.
But it was an interesting
article nevertheless.
..which is only going to get worse the more you rely on a statisical model for things instead of talking to people.
Thank you!
I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.
> write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff
Let humans create,
Leave the soul to living minds,
Let code do the chores.