I’m going to have to write about the near-daily experience of encountering undisclosed LLM output everywhere and how it feels (alienating along multiple axes) but I would rather publish it somewhere that isn’t my site for essentially ~spiritual reasons, and I no longer know where to pitch things.
I feel like devs who find LLMs transformative in a good way would have a better time and get further with people if they took seriously the possibility that software engineering (which always involves a lil bit of Larping As Computer) is not all that much like most other meaningful human pursuits. 🤷🏻
Anyway I think the LLMs are giving people acedia, for real
Of course placing my mom’s obituary—dodging the “AI rewrite” features that kept popping up as I did so—subscribed me to four marketing newsletters and added an unwanted solicitation for memorial trees to the end of the obit. Of course it did. Hellscape.
I think the biggest change LLMs produce in software development might be that they eventually make good dev jobs as rare and nepotistic and precarious as, say, arts jobs, and if that is true I am sure going to feel a whole conflicting series of ways about it
I myself think you should not secretly Claude-generate anti-AI op-eds, that this is in fact a deeply immoral act, but what do I know?
“Listen,” said the lady at the elderlaw office where I was making an appointment, ”I think the worst thing ever to happen with computers is ChatGPT.” (I find “computers were a mistake” to be the best icebreaker for all my calls with The Ladies Who Run Things, who spend lady-years fighting them.)
AI is a normal technology entangled with a normal demon. Leaving aside intentional use to make bad things worse, the former is going to produce normal accidents (some of which will be extremely bad) and the latter is going to continue making people lose their minds.
Thinking about a decade of evolution in gambling-inflected tech crazes—NFTs, blockchain, metaverse, prediction markets the nested doll of variously credible AI claims—got me thinking about millenarians and apocalypse cults and the rhetoric of the last chance, which is now text rather than subtext.
I do find it funny when someone hops on the ~ethical tech~ ride when it's getting attention and does a lot of hollering about how important it is and then *boop* (They've had an LLM-written Substack since January, I guess? This is bait, I am not linking to it.)
