Ben Ui wrote a very good list of reasons why he refuses to use AI:

• Deskilling
• Built on Stolen Labour
• Negative Environmental Impacts
• Introduces Reliance on Subscription Service
• I Like Programming
• Fundamentally Hostile to Human Learning
• Worse Quality Code
• It's a Black Box
• Inaccuracy and Bad User Experience
• Fundamentally Designed to Make Stuff up
• The Statistical Average is the Least Interesting Result
• Inability to Solve Novel Problems
• Used to Obfuscate Responsibility
• LLMs Ruin the Web
• Non-deterministic
• Valuing Your Time over Others is Selfish
• Suspiciously Similar to NFTs, Crypto

What I would add to the list, is the horrible job of categorizing raw data for LLMs, so that its users don’t see the worst of humanity when using it. Plus, most of that work happens in developing countries, which basically makes it modern colonialism.

benui.ca/why-i-refuse-ai

The arguments around the use of "AI" are exhausting. I'm tired of re-typing my reasons, so this document is a summary of some of the many reasons why …

To me the future of technology is a lot closer to Bret Victor’s vision of computational public spaces than private and centralized AI black boxes and middlemans, that try to get as much data about us as possible. It’s the complete antithesis to today’s narratives about technology.

I especially enjoyed comparing the values of urban design and computing. It’s also a bold claim, that we will always give up our privacy when computing is bound to screens, but probably true. And lastly, it’s such a good observation that we managed to build a somewhat democratic and civilized society based on very complex infrastructure systems, but never managed to make these systems transparent and visible to us, so that we can understand and therefore govern them.

Our brains haven’t changed in a hundred thousand years, but we’ve built this very complex society around ourselves, and we’ve decided that we want to collectively govern it.

We can’t do that, if we can’t see or understand how any of this works.

📺 Youtube video

Externalising thinking to an "AI" is convenient, because giving in to stupidity is convenient. Chatbots are a shortcut to incompetence disguised as a shortcut to knowledge.

Ed’s latest (very long) post is putting a lot of what I experienced in my career and what we all experience right now into words. We are living in the era of business idiots.

wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot

Think of the Business Idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of …