The obligatory AI post

The obligatory AI post

July 31 2026

I’ve written very little on my blog about so-called Artificial Intelligence, an old term applied to a relatively new technology, Large Language Models (LLM). I don’t think I have anything new to say about the subject, and my first-hand experience with LLMs is negligible, since I eschew them. Fortunately, my employer does not force me to use AI. (I’m self-employed!) The benefit of writing a blog post expressing my opinion about AI is that I can refer to it in the future when someone—some idiot—inevitably, unjustly accuses me of writing “AI slop” based on dubious evidence such as my careful proofreading or my punctuation—the em dashes. (I recently saw a commenter highly ranked on the Hacker News “karma” leaderboard label an article as AI slop before realizing that the article was published in 2018.) I honed my writing skills decades ago in academia, an unwitting source of LLM training materials. The only significant previous discussion of LLMs on my blog was the last paragraph of one post: If computers are the future, why are computer users expected to be permanently illiterate?

The latest front in the war against power users is Artificial Intelligence. The promise of AI appears to be that you’ll never have to learn anything. Don’t know something? Just ask AI for the answer. Can’t do something? Just ask AI to do it. Ignorance is bliss. Laziness is encouraged in the name of efficiency. The prospect that one may have to work and struggle to achieve one’s goals is considered abhorrent. The very notion of self-improvement becomes obsolete. Life under AI is a video game, pure joy… as long as you continue inserting tokens into the machine. Hopefully my video arcade metaphor hasn’t become obsolete too. A more contemporary example: playing guitar, which practically anyone can do with practice, is replaced entirely by playing Guitar Hero. I’m sure that there are Guitar Hero heroes, people who have mastered the game, but could a single one of them ever write a song? I guess we have to ask AI to write our songs in the future. The public debates whether AI will eventually become as intelligent as humans, or even super-intelligent, when I think the relevant question is whether humans will eventually become as dumb as AI, or even super-dumb, as in Idiocracy. I fear that none of this will end well, except for the computer and LLM vendors.

I stand by my earlier statement. However, this objection to AI is just the tip of the iceberg. I fear that AI will contribute to the melting of the icebergs, because training and disseminating AI appears to require an inordinate amount of resources and power, in a world where unrestrained industry has already polluted the atmosphere and destabilized our climate, our ecosystems. I find it ironic that AI, which promises to make computing easier for the masses, has triggered mass shortages of computing components, thereby making it more difficult for consumers to obtain personal computers. AI is also making electricity more expensive for consumers. The LLM vendors have perpetrated mass theft of intellectual property, aided by regulatory inactivity, itself a product of political corruption financed by the LLM vendors. Business leaders unabashedly state, celebrate, that AI will allow them to automate away the jobs of human workers. The workers who haven’t yet been laid off are becoming deluged and burned out (to mix my metaphors) by AI-generated busywork and insatiable management demands for increased productivity. Many observers of the stock market describe AI as an investment bubble, but I would describe it as an investment black hole, a singular mania that exerts a gravitational pull sucking up economic activity. AI all the things! I doubt that a burst of the bubble is imminent; after all, the bubble has not burst for cryptocurrency, the grossly inflated long-term investment value of which was based nominally (delusionally) on the expectation that everyone would adopt cryptocurrency for short-term spending. Markets can remain irrational, yadda yadda.

Given the shallowness of my personal experience with AI usage, I try to avoid wading into the ubiquitous debates about its personal utility, focusing my critiques instead on the obvious societal consequences of AI. When I’ve tried ChatGPT a few times, it has produced both truth and lies (euphemistically, “hallucinations”). I still write all of my source code the old-fashioned way, manually typing into (older versions of) BBEdit or Apple Xcode. Believe it or not, I also write all of my blog posts with BBEdit, in raw HTML format! I’ll talk more about the production of software momentarily, but as a consumer of software I’ve seen no indication that AI has benefitted the industry. So many software developers claim that AI makes them so much more productive, but I honestly haven't noticed or enjoyed the results of this alleged productivity. As far as I’m concerned, the...