While CEO's see "AI" as tool to ensure they no longer have to pay/depend on people, workers adopting "AI" get taught that skills they don't have/other professions are worth less. This destruction of worker solidarity and interdisciplinary collaboration is a core function of the "AI" discourse.
"But you can't deny that it's useful" is what I hear often when I criticize "AI". But that's not the argument because everything is useful to someone for some purpose usually at someone's cost. "Child labor" is _useful_. Question is: Do the uses bring more social value than the cost?
The shift from "you need to optimize your thinking/rationality" to "yeah, LLM use breaks your cognitive abilities but what can you do" that so many middle aged men went through is literally brainmelting.
Looked at the UN report on "AI" (written by a bunch of mostly computer scientists who to a large degree have close ties to big tech) and it's really bad. Just "AI" hype based on studies that are long shown to be garbage.
OpenAI wanting the US government to take 5% is not "democratization" or something, it's a bailout. OpenAI can't get the money from private investors or the stock market and needs the hole in their budget filled so they are trying to take US tax dollars.
> The use of AI Coding Assistants in software development is as of now widely regarded as industry best practice That is exactly why software development as an industry is such a shit show and explicitly not engineering.
I am increasingly leaning away from calling "AI" generated stuff "slop" towards calling it "corrosion". Because that's what it does. To our information landscape. To the quality of artifacts around us. To our social connections. To our mental health. To our cognitive abilities.
"But Libraries also destroy books, AI critics are so dumb!!11" a) Libraries make sure to not destroy the last copies of rare books b) "someone else does the thing you criticise" is not a good legitimization for the bad thing
"AI will keep going, companies are switching to self-hosted open weight models" Okay but who keeps pouring money into those to keep them up to date with the state of the world? Who will burn through millions and millions of dollars to give away those models for nothing?
"AI" is inevitable, it's just here now is what we get told. We also get told that "AI" mustn't be properly regulated or everything goes to shit. These two statements are not consistent.
