As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

GenAI is a technology. You shouldn’t make a religion from it.

As with all technologies, it has it’s strengths and weaknesses, and it has it’s good and bad uses, and so on.

Currently, many people do not take proper care of it’s failures.

It’s a tool. There are uses. However we’re currently in the ‘if all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail’ phase. Overhyped, oversold.

Whats often left out is that it’s often trained illegally and should carry the same punishment that private people have to face on illegal acquisition of things.

Basically it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s the current thing that’s financially blown way out of proportion to shovel our money around and to a select few, if we want it or not.

I don’t think about it but I use it daily throughout the day. I hardly ever visit Wikipedia anymore and don’t go through 10 websites to answer my questions. I use Gemini because all my documents and data is in Google drive.

Shit peaked before 9/11 when SmarterChild dropped on AIM

Started like you. Fascinated by the reponses i was getting from the LLMs. Then started to notice hallucinations, read.up a bit, and deduced its a fundamental flaw of the approach they use. Its not.going to ‘get better’, because as i said, its fundamental to the methodology.

Nowadays, its a nice conversation piece, or a natural language interface to search. Not worth the investment.

Given my background in CS though, i still believe in traditional ai methods and wish the funding went into that instead. Some specialized ais, e.g. medical imaging are pretty good. Others are glorified brute force or hueristic filtering of large data sets. Not those.

when it first came out I was skeptical of their claims they wouldn’t replace people with it, because what company wouldn’t replace a person with a bot.

as it became apparent that not only was my original mistrust of them appropriate, but that they were literally breaking laws to build it, my dislike solidified into loathing.

then they began to force the use of it through companies, selling it as a product that can improve productivity while studies had proven the claims as false. my loathing precipitated to hatred when people started losing their jobs for not using it or just being replaced by it.

finally when my government began to use it to kill and oppress, my feelings about AI changed into those of active rebellion.

now, when faced with interacting with AI at work I perform as an idiot. I pretend I don’t understand how to use the tools, or how to set them up. I pretend that I don’t understand what the slop means that someone just vomited up in chat. I pretend that I am such a useless idiot that the only way to help is by personally interacting with me.

weaponized incompetence is a fine line to walk, but I’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years.

so yeah, fuck AI, fuck LLMs, fuck anyone who willingly supports fascist tools.

Mixed feelings. I’m kind of an AI pilled doomer.

I see that AI can be a productivity boost - if used correctly in the right places. But I’m also increasingly worried that it might one day replace any work that’s done on a computer (which is most white collar work).

I’m doing a lot of data processing work. I’ve been able to see AI do all this in one go:

• Read a vague Jira task item about some data error.
• Diagnose on real data what the underlying problem might be.
• Find the line of code that need to be changed.
• Rerun the data pipeline with the new line of code.
• Verify on new data that the error has been fixed.
• Submit a pull request describing the change with a detailed report on impact analysis.

Is it perfect? No, it’s often making mistakes and digs deep into the wrong rabbit holes. But is it crazy that it has managed to do all of this once? Yes it is. This was unimaginable just a few years ago.

If this level of automation going to continue in this pace, what’s left for us humans?

As long as I can still detect it I block those who use it.

Since I want to write in a bit more detail about my personal LLM/AI journey so far I will just give a Tl;Dr here: I started as a hater for that barely functional piece of junk that dared to call itself AI and slowly started to come around once it became better and more reliable. Now, let’s start with the story time.

I still remember when cleverbot was the best way to talk to a computer and it was pretty shit, then suddenly ChatGPT popped up one day. I obv. had to give it a try and I was amazed that we already got that far and it happened basically over night (I know now that at that point the first LLMs existed for quite some time but it took a while for them to blow up and therefore me discovering their existence). At that point, they were pretty inacurate, couldn’t even do simple math (which I found really ironic since that is basically the only thing a computer can do and very well too) and was inaccurate most of the time. I always had to double check each output and had to manually fix it pretty much every time, if it even was salvagable in the first place. But usually, I was better and faster at any task I could possibly give it so I became anti AI, started hating on the technogy and mocking people who used it.

Half a year later I finally decided to give it another try and it actually improved. Simple math was correct most of the time, it started to get most facts straight and some tasks like formatting text was either correct or just had some small mistakes I could easily fix myself. That was the turning point for me where I stated using it more often and hating it less.

Now, I actually like AI/LLMs. I use it almost daily for questions about pretty much anything that isn’t about recent news (which is still very prone to errors) or about a nieche topic (same issue). The main reason why is because I stongly prefer getting taught new things with the chance to ask follow up questions or to clarify things I didn’t underatand. I also use it to do simple tasks for me I don’t want to do myself, like formatting texts in specific ways. And I also use image gen whenever I need an image, be it for my profile picture, banners or anything else, since I hate drawing stuff myself, do not have the money to commission stuff from actual artists and noone but AIs want to do it for free.

And as a developer, I of couse use AI coding tools. However, I have to say that I’m not a fan of agentic coding, better known as vibe coding to most non-developers, where you tell the AI what you want and it does all the coding for you. In my experience, the result sucks. Too many unneccesary comments, too many checks that usually just degrade the performance of the software and at some point, shit just starts breaking, the AI can’t fix it and the codebase is too messy for me to read into it and fix it myself so I have to start over and do it myself anyway. For small stuff, like a simple script to inject into a website to make a table sortable or a cronjob that deletes every file in a temp folder that is older than a week, I have no issue with letting an AI vibecode that for me, then reading through the result to make sure it actually does what it should before using it. But for larger projects, I just give the AI access to my codebase and then chat with it when I’m stuck, unsure which approach fits best or give it smaller tasks to do for me and always check the output manually, never trust it fully. So after auto-completing words, then lines, then code snippets/chunks, I see coding LLMs as the next step that lets me generate even lager chunks, or even entire files, but with a more cautious approach. And it replaced the rubber duck for debugging.

One thing I almost never do is use AI to generate, enhance or even correct texts I’m writing. Take this comment for example, I bet I’ve made multiple mistakes and an AI could find better words and write everything way shorter while still getting the important bits right, but for some reason I do prefer to rather keep the human imperfections in it. Only for more… professional settings, I sometimes rely on AI to do a bettrr job at writing than me, and most of the time, it delivers.

Now, what I am still concerned about is the future of AI. What I haven’t mentioned so far is that I never paid for AIs and never will. If they are trained on stolen works where the creators of said works never received any compensation, neither will any AI company see anything from me. But as long as I can use it for free, I will continue doing so. However, I fear that this will soon change, since investor funding will not last forever and looking at the current hardware market and electricity costs, they will need a whole lot of money to keep going. And I’m pretty sure ads won’t cut it this time so I’m really curious how this will end: Will the bubble burst and every large AI company will have to downscale massively to survive or will enough people decide to pay to keep them running the way they do right now? Once again, I will enjoy the benefits while they last and run local models once they try to start charging me, or just return to doing everything myself like before, but I will never support them financially.

Generative AI will completely die out, it’s only a matter of time. And, it will happen sooner than later.