I don’t hate AI (specifically LLMs and image diffusion thingy) as a technology. I don’t hate people who use AI (most of the time).

I do hate almost every part of AI business, though. Most of the AI stuff is hyped by the most useless “luminaries” of the tech sector who know a good profitable grift when they see one. They have zero regard for the legal and social and environmental implications of their work. They don’t give a damn about the problems they are causing.

And that’s the great tragedy, really: It’s a whole lot of interesting technology with a lot of great potential applications. And the industry is getting run to the ground by idiots, while chasing an economic bubble that’s going to end disastrously. It’s going to end up with a tech cycle kind of similar to nuclear power: a few prominent disasters, a whole lot of public resentment and backlash, and it’ll take decades until we can start having sensible conversations about it again. If only we would have had a little bit of moderation to begin with!

The only upside AI business has had was that at least it has pretended to give a damn about open source and open access to data, but at this point it’s painfully obvious that to AI companies this is just a smoke screen to avoid getting sued over copyright concerns - they’d lock up everything as proprietary trade secrets if they could have their way.

As a software developer, I was first super excited about genAI stuff because it obviously cut down the time needed to consult references. Now, a lot of tech bosses tell coders to use AI tools even in cases that’s making everyone less productive.

As an artist and a writer I find it incredibly sad that genAI didn’t hit the brakes a few years ago. I’ve been saying this for decades: I love a good computerised bullshit generator. Algorithmically generated nonsense is interesting. Great source of inspiration for your ossified brain cells, fertile grounds for improvement. Now, however, the AI generated stuff pretends to be as human-like as possible, it’s doing a terrible job at it. Tech bros are half-assedly marketing it as a “tool” for artists, while the studio bosses who buy the tech chuckle at that and know they found a replacement for the artists. (Want to make genAI tools for artists? Keep the output patently unusable out of the box.)