I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group.
Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results.
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
Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anything." Without any sense of ownership or attachment whatsoever. If someone DMCA'ed one of my GitHub projects and made me take it down, I'd be pissed. But if someone DMCA'ed an AI-coded thinggy, I'd probably delete the repo and never think about it again in my life.
If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated?
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.
I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate.
I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.
AI is like cheap void calories. Writing by hand is calories from a good home cooked meal with all the nutrients and love, AI code (unless maybe you worked on putting together an AI system and the harness is your build), feels like calories from a Sprite.
Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
In general, AI is as impactful as any technology can be. However, for those of us who like to enjoy the process (the act of gathering the info, structuring them and editing them), whether it be writing code, or writing in general, there's a joy in the act of building - straight up finished pieces of work handed over to you, robs you of this space to think and formulate your own views.
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.
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.
I suppose we won't need to take pictures of ourselves together then either. Just let the AI remember it for us wholesale.
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.
Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one.
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?
> Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one.
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.
How did I misread? They chose to use GPT? There is a multitude of options that range from an empty piece of paper to choosing ChatGPT outputs.
That is a very black and white view you got there mate. I’m not sure I agree. Creativity does not need to be in the AI nor does the human need “enhancing”. We can just be creative in new and to me interesting ways. Just like how synthesizers enabled new sounds but you still need to be a musician to get anything good.
There is zero utilitarian value of arbitrary words on a shirt. The shirt will keep sun off your back and absorb your sweat just as well or as poorly with or without the words.
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.
I salute your introspection. In my mind, it is better than the alternative cope.
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.
"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.
>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.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
It’s not mutually exclusive. LLMs aren’t doing the same job as social encouragement to do better.
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.
> This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
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.
There's no abdication of personal responsibility. To be the kind of person who wants to constantly improve, it is incredibly important to surround yourself with similar people.
You will always grow faster spending time with someone who says "couldn't you also try X" than someone who always says "that's good enough, why don't you relax and watch some TV".
Odd. I never had any friends, families, or coworkers who were willing to be available for a dozen rough drafts. I've only had ones who were willing to talk during the idea stage, or after it was closer to a final speech.
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.
Less about the draft/writing and more about human interaction on all levels.
I don't see how AI becoming a mentor or a coach to push me harder is helpful in the long run. I would be missing out on opportunity to learn from real life experience. I'd rather listen to my brother or my coworker or whomever human, pick their brain, riff, dig deeper, understand their perspective from life experiences and actual meaningful thought and moral compass than have AI (take intelligence with a grain of salt) influence me.
You could make the same argument for the internet pre-LLM; it could be relied upon over immediate connections. It's also reminiscent of Socrates's skepticism of written text over oral tradition.
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.
> Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise
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.
Every new technology promises to fundamentally change learning, education, personal growth and ends up being used in the laziest way by 99% of people. Radio, TV, internet, now AI. Eating right and exercise or GLP1?
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
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 being human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?
This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
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 taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."
A lot of people don't have that many friends. I forget the average but it is in fact absurdly low, at least for Americans. There are a lot of reasons for this (e.g. erosion and disappearance of "third place" spaces, rise of social media, etc.) but the circumstances have essentially been ripe for something like AI to come in and fill the gap, and it is.
The article is specifically about a strategy to improve on that (or rather a satirical exposé on how AI answers are the next spiral down into isolation).
>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 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.
There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people.
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)!
I was young, but I remember a world before the internet was widespread. I was also an adult for years before I had it in my pocket. In these Before Times, there were often conversations that would meander for minutes about some fact that would be trivially verifiable if we had an internet-connected computer nearby: who was the other lead in that movie? who was the first non-Italian Pope? Is Moldova landlocked? Once we exhausted our local supply of half-remembered knowledge about the subject, we would have to just say "well, who knows eh?" and go about whatever it was we were doing. It may be nostalgia talking, but I miss this. Even if I'm game to keep it up for a while before pulling out my phone, somebody else won't be, and the conversation will usually peter out (at least for a while) once we for-sure know the answer. I remember calling the library reference desk from the phone behind a bar to settle arguments. Now they're settled before they even really get going.
I've also taken several trips to Europe and only on the last one did it make financial sense for me to get a local data plan. I admit that the language of the country we visit is kind of a hobby of mine, and so talking to the locals is a lot of the fun of going, but even if that's not the case, what's wrong with a little mystery? You can snap the photo, and then for years down the rode if you show it to somebody, you can say "Here's a cool statue I saw in Serbia, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the inscription on the plinth says." Or even 3 years ago, you probably would have posted it to $SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM with a caption like "Who can tell me what this says?" and perhaps even gotten a reply from somebody in the same city you were in and made a little connection.
I don't think that's what the page talks about. There are lots of _valid_ opportunities in our day-to-day lives where we'd benefit _so much_ from doing the research, struggle with a problem or reach out to someone ourselves instead of just asking an LLM -- but we just take a shortcut.
I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:
- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.
- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.
- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.
And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.
I think the point is that when you get into the habit of asking the AI because it’s always immediately available, you inevitably miss the opportunities that asking other people provides, or even the serendipities that happen when looking up books and websites and videos about a thing.
It comes from an inclination to be argumentative for argument's sake. Some people approach everything with an eye that nobody else is as smart as them so everything everyone else makes must be flawed and it's their job to tell them how wrong they are.
To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so.
If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: people on the Internet have a way of replying to arguments that people aren't actually making, and I'm certainly not immune from that. But the structure of the piece is clearly making emotional arguments so I don't think I'm wrong in that regard.
Part of this is the changes wrought by the Internet already. At one point, almost nobody got into fly fishing out of an idiopathic urge to capture little trouts.
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.
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
Right, that's my point exactly! Sorry I didn't mention it.
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.
A YouTube channel about stuff your dad might know does not have the same potential for negative impact on human interaction as genAI. And the author never even claims "the cons outweigh the pros". Maybe they feel that way, but the dangers they advise against are absolutely real and do not require a broad stance like "everybody who ever uses AI should feel bad" in order to recognize those dangers. I use AI every single day, yet I do not feel the least bit browbeaten and my heart bleeds in agreement with this blog post.
That is correct - this is the whole story. Everything else you've portrayed the author as saying is misleading.
The author believes if you have a friend who cooks, see if they have a recipe. You believe there's no harm in going straight to Claude in the same scenario.
You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.
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.
> 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?
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.
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Mot 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.
Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug.
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 surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about
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.
> Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.
Then let's talk about that, and encourage them to speak up and reach out, rather than entombing them and throwing away the key.
I can stand someone who is lonely, and awkward, or sad. I have been all those things. I cannot stand someone who is so hospitalized by talking to LLM constantly that they treat me like a jukebox, too. That they're not even stupid or bad with words, but cannot think at all, and do it in a high volume, high confidence manner, with lots of big words and things that seem to make sense until you put weight on them. So unless someone more patient than me comes along, as far as I'm concerned, they are now lonely for good, unless I can avoid it. And that's not a state of things I want for myself or others.
> But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other
"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".
>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
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.
>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.
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?
Sure, there's always been a subset of human endeavor which is just phoned-in slop. But AI makes the problem much worse, because it's basically all slop now. Moreover, I am an unabashed human supremacist. I find anything a human does to have some intrinsic value, even if it's not a high quality effort. So if it's the choice between human slop or AI slop, even if it were the same percentage of slop, I would rather have the human slop. At least that has some value due to being made by a human.
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.
> they don't understand it and therefore they fear it
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 feel the same too. And I believe there is much more complexity in the question "will this be good for society overall" than technologists can apprehend. For example even though I recognize some benefits to social media, I'd have a hard time arguing that on a societal level it's not a huge net negative. Overall, people are more divided, more angry, depressed, egotistical because of social media and the attention economy. And ultimately, as one of my previous boss would say "it's all about people".
I was thinking the other day about animals in their natural habitat versus in captivity. Remove a gorilla from its jungle and stick it in a small zoo enclosure and it tends to go insane at worst, at best depression sets in. With orcas their fin flops over and even when released back into the wild it never returns to form, we can only guess what happens to them psychologically. Humans in supermax prisons exhibit the same issues.
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.
> The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
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.
> 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.
Come on, by that vague of a definition, Aristotle and Confucius were apparently transhumanists.
The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human.
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).
> At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
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.
The "If it's on substack, it's not a real blog, it's just sparkling page bloat" take is a little strained for me.
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.
It wasn't 20 years ago, and it shouldn't be today, but somehow we've made it harder. I suppose some think AI will "fix" it but I tend to think it'll just make it worse.
This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now.
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.
I don't know if I would put recipes in the same 'real' stuff category as writing. I am sure celebrity cookbooks have been regurgitating the same recipes with slight modifications for decades now. What is the difference between buying and following Reese Witherspoon's cookbook and just asking an LLM?
It is not like either is putting your apron on and mixing the ingredients.
To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!
I find very little joy in trying to wrangle the blackboxes that are LLMs. The undeterministic nature of them frustrates me, and feels nothing like the software engineering I know and love. However, I know I’m in the minority here, as almost everyone else in the industry I’ve talked to seems to love using them.
I just use it as a "mentor". A captive demon that has to answer my questions, no matter how trivial. Writing the code is the fun part for me, searching for answers to questions can be fun but I'd rather just ask the AI. I even ask them to give me longer answers so I have more context, even with languages I've worked with for decades.
It's interesting that you use the phrase "captive demon" because in fairy stories, the captive demon is always working to subvert the protagonist and work evil, whether by maliciously misinterpreting commands, or simply allowing the protagonist to damn themselves by enabling their worst impulses and poor choices.
> 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.
Not always no and to your example with cars we've seen the results as upticks in roadrage. The car is treated as a safe little bubble and the other cars aren't people, they are just cars and what you do and say to them doesn't matter. Just like the internet where they aren't people you're talking to, its just text on a screen.
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).
Facebook, sure, but Uber and AirBNB? I don't see how Uber has displaced some community function. AirBNB is arguably destructive to communities, but again how was community fulfilling the need it attempts to address?
You can still ask friends or acquaintances for rides to the airport. The taxi service where I live is absolutely miserable and there's not really any viable public transport options. Pre-Uber and early smartphones, they'd require you to have the exact address of where you were and they'd be there "between 30 minutes and two hours" which is unreasonable and had folks judging if they were actually "good enough" to drive.
If they actually showed and picked you up, somehow the credit card machine wouldn't be working and then they'd aggressively insist they'd drive you to an ATM to get cash. It would magically start working if you told them that cash was not an option
The taxi service got what was coming to them, at least here they did. They had decades to make their service at least non-hostile to the consumer and instead it just got worse. I'll gladly pay for a rideshare where I can just put in my destination address vs have to deal with that nonsense
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.
OK, but you could write the same thing as "Please read books". Many times I have learned things from reading I could have learned, e.g., from a crotchety old neighbor in return for interacting with him.
After skimming through this, I want to write a post about how others are living their lives wrong. It must really feel great to be right about things on the internet. How do I start? I guess I'll just ask AI ...
If AI is not that special, just a tool, then treat it as such.
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.
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.
I don't see anything over-dramatic. He's writing about a real problem affecting real people, and he's not exaggerating. Just because you believe you are balancing things properly doesn't mean everybody should just shut up about it.
The problem is that we have incentivized efficiency over authenticity even in our inter-personal relationships. It's a systemic issue. It makes it very hard for most of us to resist the sirens of "let me just rephrase this important message so that it sounds more elegant/well-written/relevant/...". In the current cultural and societal context you need to swim against the current to _not_ be using AI for everything. So I don't think this is over-dramatization. Overall, on a societal level, we truly are moving in a direction where we are robbing ourselves of real, authentic moments by using AI because it's "convenient/efficient/easy/etc...". Even at work.
I think its fascinating how many people in tech think there's a clearly defined and agreed upon "right way" of using this technology that everyone knows and abides by. Paul Graham, for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457
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.
The same predictable comment comes up whenever there is a piece that isn't sanitized, blunted technical documentation. Why write long form literary pieces that take effort to digest when you can get a cliffs note. Why write poetry when you can write a tweet. Why have anything resembling anything with humanity when there are summaries and machine written slop.
This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.
I'd have thought people that are technologists at heart would have understood the benefit of the next Industrial Revolution but all anyone wants to do is whine about it.
Nor does it mean people negatively affected at the time were wrong to fight for the quality of their family's lives. Anybody would do that. Also, the unfolding of inevitable changes can be managed by governments to reduce harm (they just usually don't because that would mean a slower increase in profit, directly or indirectly).
Though I deeply agree with this sentiment, the author fails to address that there can be multiple goals to an action. And writing can be for art or communication or both but not always both, and removing the art from communication doesn’t destroy its ability to communicate.
I find these kinds of posts to be elitist and self-important. They draw a false dichotomy between tool use and lifestyle. I'm glad the poster has a lifestyle that works for them personally. This post really has nothing to do with AI. It's really just saying, spend more time talking to the people in your life. It seems to be written for the purposes of gaining clicks and engagement by using the phrase AI.
> fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
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.
I've been pondering the question: "What does it mean to live well with AI?"
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.
Even though I spent the majority of my work day with computers, my fascination with them starts and stops on understanding how they work. Aside from that, they’re only utilitarian. What I really like to do is grab a nice book, put on some nice album to listen too, and enjoy a quiet night with my SO. If not for the fact that it’s easier to get books and music in digital format where I live, I’d spend even less time with computers.
Yeah it's entirely possible the answer is: "You don't." But I haven't even seen people attempting to imagine life well-lived. Like with so much technology it's basically an afterthought.
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.
I am truly envious of people who have the luxury of a supportive environment that allows them to write a post like this.
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.
I thought I'm jaded, and a bit of a poet myself, and already sufficiently "upset" by several things, but this still made me so profoundly sad, and at the same time incredibly proud of the author and hopeful of being human. And they don't cancel each other out. It's a very strong, odd mixture. This is with me now, and I hope it'll linger.
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.
Be sure to use a mobile phone when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not come in person to
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals
Right, but why attacking AI specifically? I just don’t buy the example, she could use a book with recepies instead of calling her friend, right? Maybe she just doesn’t want to call her friend this time, you know, and maybe it doesn’t make her less human.
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.
As someone who uses AI constantly - mandated at work. I fucking hate it. I hate what it makes me become: a mall cop of creativity. Endlessly directing little agents with feigned authority.
I love the trend of using AI to generate flyers/advertisements for everything: family reunion, restaurant, yard sale...
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.
I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology.
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.
Misses the mark IMO. You can already do all of these things. Just do them. As long as I get to fire half of my employees and you hit the token quota it’s all good.
I sometimes wonder if these same people pushing AI onto devs would ask the same of their lawyers and accountants.
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.
I really dislike the condescending tone of the person who thinks they discovered the secret of happiness, but instead of distilling their wisdom for joy chooses to shame others in a passive aggressive poem.
Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?
Exactly. I have children too you know. In fact we had a blast last time with my five year old shouting nonsense at Suno and having it make some cool songs out of it. Does it make me less human? It’s all about how you choose to use the technology
I asked Claude what he thinks about this blog post and was surprised by the level of self awareness (you cant call it like that but I dont have better word)
I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.
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
I found this quite cringy and an attempt at pulling at one's heartstrings due to the lack of a strong argumentation.
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.
I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results.
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
Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anything." Without any sense of ownership or attachment whatsoever. If someone DMCA'ed one of my GitHub projects and made me take it down, I'd be pissed. But if someone DMCA'ed an AI-coded thinggy, I'd probably delete the repo and never think about it again in my life.
If your project contained original thought does it matter if the IFs and the ELSEs were generated?
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.
I have landed here myself. I have always enjoyed writing code, but I find lately that I am getting so much more satisfaction from the process of exploring and designing systems more, and code is simply the substrate.
I am becoming a better architect with AI, because I am spending more mental energy in that lane, getting less embroiled in the nitty-gritty of the code.
AI is like cheap void calories. Writing by hand is calories from a good home cooked meal with all the nutrients and love, AI code (unless maybe you worked on putting together an AI system and the harness is your build), feels like calories from a Sprite.
Also I’ve been thinking that ai code is like cheap amazon furniture and hand crafted is well… hand crafted.
In general, AI is as impactful as any technology can be. However, for those of us who like to enjoy the process (the act of gathering the info, structuring them and editing them), whether it be writing code, or writing in general, there's a joy in the act of building - straight up finished pieces of work handed over to you, robs you of this space to think and formulate your own views.
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.
As an aside, “impactful” doesn’t necessarily imply that the impact is positive.
The only reason to put a funny slogan on a shirt is as a reminder of an in joke or the shared process of coming up with the slogan.
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.
We need to invent new reasons to be together.
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.
I suppose we won't need to take pictures of ourselves together then either. Just let the AI remember it for us wholesale.
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.
> "debating which font to use on a t shirt."
The AI wasn't picking the font, it was picking the words.
Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one.
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?
[delayed]
> Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one.
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.
How did I misread? They chose to use GPT? There is a multitude of options that range from an empty piece of paper to choosing ChatGPT outputs.
That is a very black and white view you got there mate. I’m not sure I agree. Creativity does not need to be in the AI nor does the human need “enhancing”. We can just be creative in new and to me interesting ways. Just like how synthesizers enabled new sounds but you still need to be a musician to get anything good.
Society is still adapting. I say give it time.
There is zero utilitarian value of arbitrary words on a shirt. The shirt will keep sun off your back and absorb your sweat just as well or as poorly with or without the words.
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.
> AI enables so goddamn much creativity.
ironic statment in ai slop comment
I salute your introspection. In my mind, it is better than the alternative cope.
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.
> so I had some kind of existential crisis
realization was that you had been generating slop all this while before ai and somehow convinced yourself that it was original and human ?
I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70) from a year ago.
"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.
>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.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
It’s not mutually exclusive. LLMs aren’t doing the same job as social encouragement to do better.
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.
> This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
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.
It's not about making them be responsible for me or offloading my problems or them making me better.
It's about community. And real people often like to help. If your circle doesn't, find someone who does. Find a community.
I enjoy helping people be better, to reach new heights in their personal lives. It's about relationships.
My thoughts aren't about "abdication of personal responsibility" or "Shifting blame".
It's about humanity and people and community.
There's no abdication of personal responsibility. To be the kind of person who wants to constantly improve, it is incredibly important to surround yourself with similar people.
You will always grow faster spending time with someone who says "couldn't you also try X" than someone who always says "that's good enough, why don't you relax and watch some TV".
This is good stuff. At the end of the day, we all have finite time. How we choose to spend that time is a personal matter.
Some say we're losing our humanity: that can be seen as good or bad, depending on whether or not you think you are more useful than someone else.
Why can’t they continue to do so?
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.
> Why can’t they continue to do so?
Because we are talking to the AIs instead of talking to them.
> After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.
There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.
> instead of
Citation needed. People did not stop talking to family, friends and colleagues just because they're able to leverage LLMs.
Odd. I never had any friends, families, or coworkers who were willing to be available for a dozen rough drafts. I've only had ones who were willing to talk during the idea stage, or after it was closer to a final speech.
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.
Less about the draft/writing and more about human interaction on all levels. I don't see how AI becoming a mentor or a coach to push me harder is helpful in the long run. I would be missing out on opportunity to learn from real life experience. I'd rather listen to my brother or my coworker or whomever human, pick their brain, riff, dig deeper, understand their perspective from life experiences and actual meaningful thought and moral compass than have AI (take intelligence with a grain of salt) influence me.
You could make the same argument for the internet pre-LLM; it could be relied upon over immediate connections. It's also reminiscent of Socrates's skepticism of written text over oral tradition.
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.
> Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise
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.
Every new technology promises to fundamentally change learning, education, personal growth and ends up being used in the laziest way by 99% of people. Radio, TV, internet, now AI. Eating right and exercise or GLP1?
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
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 being 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.
This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
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 taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."
A lot of people don't have that many friends. I forget the average but it is in fact absurdly low, at least for Americans. There are a lot of reasons for this (e.g. erosion and disappearance of "third place" spaces, rise of social media, etc.) but the circumstances have essentially been ripe for something like AI to come in and fill the gap, and it is.
And you don't think AI is going to make these things worse? Even if you only have 3 friends, talk to them, hang out, do stuff with them.
The article is specifically about a strategy to improve on that (or rather a satirical exposé on how AI answers are the next spiral down into isolation).
>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 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.
There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people.
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)!
I was young, but I remember a world before the internet was widespread. I was also an adult for years before I had it in my pocket. In these Before Times, there were often conversations that would meander for minutes about some fact that would be trivially verifiable if we had an internet-connected computer nearby: who was the other lead in that movie? who was the first non-Italian Pope? Is Moldova landlocked? Once we exhausted our local supply of half-remembered knowledge about the subject, we would have to just say "well, who knows eh?" and go about whatever it was we were doing. It may be nostalgia talking, but I miss this. Even if I'm game to keep it up for a while before pulling out my phone, somebody else won't be, and the conversation will usually peter out (at least for a while) once we for-sure know the answer. I remember calling the library reference desk from the phone behind a bar to settle arguments. Now they're settled before they even really get going.
I've also taken several trips to Europe and only on the last one did it make financial sense for me to get a local data plan. I admit that the language of the country we visit is kind of a hobby of mine, and so talking to the locals is a lot of the fun of going, but even if that's not the case, what's wrong with a little mystery? You can snap the photo, and then for years down the rode if you show it to somebody, you can say "Here's a cool statue I saw in Serbia, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the inscription on the plinth says." Or even 3 years ago, you probably would have posted it to $SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM with a caption like "Who can tell me what this says?" and perhaps even gotten a reply from somebody in the same city you were in and made a little connection.
I don't think that's what the page talks about. There are lots of _valid_ opportunities in our day-to-day lives where we'd benefit _so much_ from doing the research, struggle with a problem or reach out to someone ourselves instead of just asking an LLM -- but we just take a shortcut.
I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:
- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.
- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.
- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.
And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.
I think the point is that when you get into the habit of asking the AI because it’s always immediately available, you inevitably miss the opportunities that asking other people provides, or even the serendipities that happen when looking up books and websites and videos about a thing.
[delayed]
I found it rather on point to be honest.
It comes from an inclination to be argumentative for argument's sake. Some people approach everything with an eye that nobody else is as smart as them so everything everyone else makes must be flawed and it's their job to tell them how wrong they are.
>that nobody else is as smart as them
>it's their job to tell them how wrong they are
lol.
To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so.
If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: people on the Internet have a way of replying to arguments that people aren't actually making, and I'm certainly not immune from that. But the structure of the piece is clearly making emotional arguments so I don't think I'm wrong in that regard.
Part of this is the changes wrought by the Internet already. At one point, almost nobody got into fly fishing out of an idiopathic urge to capture little trouts.
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.
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
Right, that's my point exactly! Sorry I didn't mention it.
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.
Analogies are almost always a distraction.
A YouTube channel about stuff your dad might know does not have the same potential for negative impact on human interaction as genAI. And the author never even claims "the cons outweigh the pros". Maybe they feel that way, but the dangers they advise against are absolutely real and do not require a broad stance like "everybody who ever uses AI should feel bad" in order to recognize those dangers. I use AI every single day, yet I do not feel the least bit browbeaten and my heart bleeds in agreement with this blog post.
> disrupts a status quo in a way that some might find harmful
I love a good strawman argument myself, but this is just madness. Who the heck finds substitute "dad advice" harmful?
Right! Neither do I find it inherently harmful to ask Claude for a recipe instead of calling your friend.
The author of the poem, however, is clearly portraying that as a negative.
That is correct - this is the whole story. Everything else you've portrayed the author as saying is misleading.
The author believes if you have a friend who cooks, see if they have a recipe. You believe there's no harm in going straight to Claude in the same scenario.
That's the whole disagreement.
You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.
Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.
Good point. Fixating of the fly-fishing example is silly to begin with but yeah- if you don't know a guy, it's certainly an opportunity to meet one.
It's harder to get them to stop.
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.
Not everyone live in a big city.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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 know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Mot 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.
Go to a store that sells fly fishing equipment and talk to a customer or a staff. You may as well end up with a new friend.
Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug.
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 surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about
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.
> Many people are really extraordinarily isolated.
Then let's talk about that, and encourage them to speak up and reach out, rather than entombing them and throwing away the key.
I can stand someone who is lonely, and awkward, or sad. I have been all those things. I cannot stand someone who is so hospitalized by talking to LLM constantly that they treat me like a jukebox, too. That they're not even stupid or bad with words, but cannot think at all, and do it in a high volume, high confidence manner, with lots of big words and things that seem to make sense until you put weight on them. So unless someone more patient than me comes along, as far as I'm concerned, they are now lonely for good, unless I can avoid it. And that's not a state of things I want for myself or others.
> But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other
"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".
Way to miss the point, there.
>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
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.
>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.
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.
You have a point, even if I hate to admit it.
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?
Sure, there's always been a subset of human endeavor which is just phoned-in slop. But AI makes the problem much worse, because it's basically all slop now. Moreover, I am an unabashed human supremacist. I find anything a human does to have some intrinsic value, even if it's not a high quality effort. So if it's the choice between human slop or AI slop, even if it were the same percentage of slop, I would rather have the human slop. At least that has some value due to being made by a human.
Beautiful piece.
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.
> they don't understand it and therefore they fear it
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 feel the same too. And I believe there is much more complexity in the question "will this be good for society overall" than technologists can apprehend. For example even though I recognize some benefits to social media, I'd have a hard time arguing that on a societal level it's not a huge net negative. Overall, people are more divided, more angry, depressed, egotistical because of social media and the attention economy. And ultimately, as one of my previous boss would say "it's all about people".
I was thinking the other day about animals in their natural habitat versus in captivity. Remove a gorilla from its jungle and stick it in a small zoo enclosure and it tends to go insane at worst, at best depression sets in. With orcas their fin flops over and even when released back into the wild it never returns to form, we can only guess what happens to them psychologically. Humans in supermax prisons exhibit the same issues.
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.
> "Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
-Max Frisch
People like that probably hate AI, given how inscrutable it is
The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
> The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
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.
> 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.
Come on, by that vague of a definition, Aristotle and Confucius were apparently transhumanists.
The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human.
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).
> At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
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.
The "If it's on substack, it's not a real blog, it's just sparkling page bloat" take is a little strained for me.
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.
Being great writer and capable of self-hosting your blog is a pretty unusual combination once you venture outside of the realm of tech.
It wasn't 20 years ago, and it shouldn't be today, but somehow we've made it harder. I suppose some think AI will "fix" it but I tend to think it'll just make it worse.
> instead of a hand-crafted custom blog
I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.
So what's the kind of elitism that gets the point?
Elitism excludes humans from one another, which is exactly what the poem is encouraging you not to do
This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now.
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?
I don't know if I would put recipes in the same 'real' stuff category as writing. I am sure celebrity cookbooks have been regurgitating the same recipes with slight modifications for decades now. What is the difference between buying and following Reese Witherspoon's cookbook and just asking an LLM? It is not like either is putting your apron on and mixing the ingredients.
To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!
I find very little joy in trying to wrangle the blackboxes that are LLMs. The undeterministic nature of them frustrates me, and feels nothing like the software engineering I know and love. However, I know I’m in the minority here, as almost everyone else in the industry I’ve talked to seems to love using them.
I just use it as a "mentor". A captive demon that has to answer my questions, no matter how trivial. Writing the code is the fun part for me, searching for answers to questions can be fun but I'd rather just ask the AI. I even ask them to give me longer answers so I have more context, even with languages I've worked with for decades.
It's interesting that you use the phrase "captive demon" because in fairy stories, the captive demon is always working to subvert the protagonist and work evil, whether by maliciously misinterpreting commands, or simply allowing the protagonist to damn themselves by enabling their worst impulses and poor choices.
Did you use AI to write this ? Feels like you did.
This does not just apply to AI. Uber, AirBNB, Facebook, etc. all basically serve as paid surrogates for what once was done by community.
Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
> 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.
Not always no and to your example with cars we've seen the results as upticks in roadrage. The car is treated as a safe little bubble and the other cars aren't people, they are just cars and what you do and say to them doesn't matter. Just like the internet where they aren't people you're talking to, its just text on a screen.
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.
Facebook, sure, but Uber and AirBNB? I don't see how Uber has displaced some community function. AirBNB is arguably destructive to communities, but again how was community fulfilling the need it attempts to address?
Before Uber it was totally normal to ask someone, even an acquaintance, for a ride to the airport.
You can still ask friends or acquaintances for rides to the airport. The taxi service where I live is absolutely miserable and there's not really any viable public transport options. Pre-Uber and early smartphones, they'd require you to have the exact address of where you were and they'd be there "between 30 minutes and two hours" which is unreasonable and had folks judging if they were actually "good enough" to drive.
If they actually showed and picked you up, somehow the credit card machine wouldn't be working and then they'd aggressively insist they'd drive you to an ATM to get cash. It would magically start working if you told them that cash was not an option
The taxi service got what was coming to them, at least here they did. They had decades to make their service at least non-hostile to the consumer and instead it just got worse. I'll gladly pay for a rideshare where I can just put in my destination address vs have to deal with that nonsense
with classified ads? or calling the local tourist office? Like people didnt rent a house for their holiday before airbnb
Short-term home rentals were basically non-existent before Airbnb. A tiny, tiny market for them in some vacation hotspots.
Most people did not rent houses on trips before airbnb
For the sake of it: Just do everything manually.
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.
Hypocrite didn't even use AI to write this lovely poem.
OK, but you could write the same thing as "Please read books". Many times I have learned things from reading I could have learned, e.g., from a crotchety old neighbor in return for interacting with him.
Yeah, but no one has a book on pretty much anything at their fingertips that you open and find a hopefully good chapter on what you wanted.
With books you needed to consult people on which book to read first.
Beautifully expressed. Using AI to remove even more opportunities for human contact is a tragedy.
After skimming through this, I want to write a post about how others are living their lives wrong. It must really feel great to be right about things on the internet. How do I start? I guess I'll just ask AI ...
If AI is not that special, just a tool, then treat it as such.
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.
We're optimizing the soul out of being human.
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.
Reminds me of that silly Adam Sandler movie Click (2006).
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 movie hit harder than my highest expectations from an Adam Sandler movie.
Or just use AI when it makes sense, and call your friends too. Why do we have to over-dramatize everything?
I don't see anything over-dramatic. He's writing about a real problem affecting real people, and he's not exaggerating. Just because you believe you are balancing things properly doesn't mean everybody should just shut up about it.
>a real problem
Like him not getting his way? If you don't want to use AI, then don't. But I'll use it whenever I want, thank you very much.
The problem is that we have incentivized efficiency over authenticity even in our inter-personal relationships. It's a systemic issue. It makes it very hard for most of us to resist the sirens of "let me just rephrase this important message so that it sounds more elegant/well-written/relevant/...". In the current cultural and societal context you need to swim against the current to _not_ be using AI for everything. So I don't think this is over-dramatization. Overall, on a societal level, we truly are moving in a direction where we are robbing ourselves of real, authentic moments by using AI because it's "convenient/efficient/easy/etc...". Even at work.
Many people don't know "when it makes sense". This highlights when it does not make sense.
I think its fascinating how many people in tech think there's a clearly defined and agreed upon "right way" of using this technology that everyone knows and abides by. Paul Graham, for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457
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.
"Ten scenarios that I invented in which AI is making my life miserable."
The same predictable comment comes up whenever there is a piece that isn't sanitized, blunted technical documentation. Why write long form literary pieces that take effort to digest when you can get a cliffs note. Why write poetry when you can write a tweet. Why have anything resembling anything with humanity when there are summaries and machine written slop.
This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.
Or you could use AI to explain to you how you missed the point.
I'd have thought people that are technologists at heart would have understood the benefit of the next Industrial Revolution but all anyone wants to do is whine about it.
even if this stuff is the "next Industrial Revolution", the Industrial Revolution was famously Not Good for many, many people
I see this false equivalency argument everywhere. Just because one revolution had one effect does not mean they'll all be the same.
Nor does it mean people negatively affected at the time were wrong to fight for the quality of their family's lives. Anybody would do that. Also, the unfolding of inevitable changes can be managed by governments to reduce harm (they just usually don't because that would mean a slower increase in profit, directly or indirectly).
Though I deeply agree with this sentiment, the author fails to address that there can be multiple goals to an action. And writing can be for art or communication or both but not always both, and removing the art from communication doesn’t destroy its ability to communicate.
I find these kinds of posts to be elitist and self-important. They draw a false dichotomy between tool use and lifestyle. I'm glad the poster has a lifestyle that works for them personally. This post really has nothing to do with AI. It's really just saying, spend more time talking to the people in your life. It seems to be written for the purposes of gaining clicks and engagement by using the phrase AI.
I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India.
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.
> fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
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.
I've been pondering the question: "What does it mean to live well with AI?"
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.
Even though I spent the majority of my work day with computers, my fascination with them starts and stops on understanding how they work. Aside from that, they’re only utilitarian. What I really like to do is grab a nice book, put on some nice album to listen too, and enjoy a quiet night with my SO. If not for the fact that it’s easier to get books and music in digital format where I live, I’d spend even less time with computers.
Yeah it's entirely possible the answer is: "You don't." But I haven't even seen people attempting to imagine life well-lived. Like with so much technology it's basically an afterthought.
Please use books.
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.
what is up with the formatting on this post? does substack not have wordwrap and the guy is using manual carriage returns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse
I am truly envious of people who have the luxury of a supportive environment that allows them to write a post like this.
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.
This is really beautiful and tragic at the same time. Very well written.
I thought I'm jaded, and a bit of a poet myself, and already sufficiently "upset" by several things, but this still made me so profoundly sad, and at the same time incredibly proud of the author and hopeful of being human. And they don't cancel each other out. It's a very strong, odd mixture. This is with me now, and I hope it'll linger.
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.
Be sure to use a mobile phone when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not come in person to your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals
You’ve either willfully ignored the point, or completely missed it as it flew over your head. AI wants to replace “your friend” completely.
You've missed the point. You're describing replacing a method of communication, the poem describes replacing a relationship.
Right, but why attacking AI specifically? I just don’t buy the example, she could use a book with recepies instead of calling her friend, right? Maybe she just doesn’t want to call her friend this time, you know, and maybe it doesn’t make her less human.
I agree with this sentiment.
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.
Soulfully! AI just a tool. Person constantly uses the tool instead of itself is felt as a robot.
As someone who uses AI constantly - mandated at work. I fucking hate it. I hate what it makes me become: a mall cop of creativity. Endlessly directing little agents with feigned authority.
Choosing AI over human authenticity is a death sentence.
Really beautiful piece.
I love the trend of using AI to generate flyers/advertisements for everything: family reunion, restaurant, yard sale...
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.
Beautiful poem. Well said and hard cutting
I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology.
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.
I found
the weird line breaks
extremely jarring.
But it was an interesting
article nevertheless.
This is beautiful.
Misses the mark IMO. You can already do all of these things. Just do them. As long as I get to fire half of my employees and you hit the token quota it’s all good.
Wow, so powerful, I could barely type this comment with tears in my eyes.
OP should consider a side career in poetry.
Every interaction I've had with AI has been negative. It's just not very good.
I sometimes wonder if these same people pushing AI onto devs would ask the same of their lawyers and accountants.
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.
Beautiful.
Thank you!
I really dislike the condescending tone of the person who thinks they discovered the secret of happiness, but instead of distilling their wisdom for joy chooses to shame others in a passive aggressive poem.
Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?
Exactly. I have children too you know. In fact we had a blast last time with my five year old shouting nonsense at Suno and having it make some cool songs out of it. Does it make me less human? It’s all about how you choose to use the technology
I asked Claude what he thinks about this blog post and was surprised by the level of self awareness (you cant call it like that but I dont have better word)
Meh, here's a haiku from gemini
> write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff
I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.
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
The author’s point was more nuanced than ‘tool bad’.
> thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.
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".
I found this quite cringy and an attempt at pulling at one's heartstrings due to the lack of a strong argumentation.
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.