It is such good news that so many of my fellow humans are saying a hard "no" to this hazardous technology. How quickly it came--and how quickly it seems to be leaving,or being forced out. I lost a good chunk of my academic editing business when the chatbots showed up--why pay a human $50 an hour when ChatGPT will rewrite your paper or even your dissertation for nothing? It will be interesting to see how long before grad students start showing up at my door again!
As I commented recently elsewhere, it's gone so far that I, a longtime computing professional who has designed, built, and used machine-learning systems for both scientific and commercial purposes, am ready to say that anyone who embraces this shit is contributing to the demise of human civilization.
It bears emphasis that technology is never merely technique. No technique is fully separable from the people developing and advocating it or the purposes for which it's used. In the case of "generative AI", many of those people and purposes are vicious. Rusty Foster made a good start on explaining how and why:
"Terry Pratchett wrote every decent person's favorite summary of the bedrock of humanist morality in a fantasy book for young readers called *I Shall Wear Midnight*: 'Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.' Treating people as things can begin in many ways, but I think one of them is the idea that things can be people. The motivated muddling of categories so prevalent in writing and thinking about A.I., beginning with the very name 'artificial intelligence,' is intentional and serves the narrative that this software can and will take over for human workers, doing their jobs cheaper, faster, better and without requiring rest or dignity. The A.I. industry is selling a dream of digital slavery - infinite human labor with no actual human involved."
It is, of course, a dream, or, more bluntly, a lie, in that a great many humans are, in fact, involved in "generative AI". The whole sleazy business is founded on vast amounts of hidden labor by people, who both produce the (mostly stolen) training data and "tune" the "pre-trained" models to exhibit a simulacrum of humanness. The systematic obfuscation of this labor is another indication that many of the people leading or cheering the industry are depraved.
Well said! I've often thought of genAI as anti-worker, anti-human tech. In a healthy society, the idea of deliberately replacing our own God-given capacity to think and create would be rejected on principle.
Quietly mute/block any stackers using AI. Refuse software updates which lack transparency - these are vectors for unrequested AI features. Disable such features. Relentlessly spread word of the dangers of this forced, giant sociological experiment.
So to be clear: the "ai" that is at issue here are those derived from LLMs, Large Language Models. This includes Generative AI (art and video) and Agentic AI (autonomously automated workflows).
Datacenters and their environmental impacts, the "dumbing down" of habitual users, the FOMO, the plagiarism, the layoffs, all of these are just *symptoms* of the core issue. And that issue is as existential as it could possibly get:
We are in the midst of a multi-trillion dollar project, supported by every superpower, purposed to replace the economic value of human knowledge workers with machine simulacra. Succinctly: this AI project is purposed to clone the human mind. To replace us. To strip humans of our economic value. To make us---obsolete.
That is the goal. For corporations, for the bilionaires behind this project, for the militaries developing their ai drone armies.
LLMs are "trainable" They "learn" by expanding their databases. One of the primary ways this is accomplished is by convincing humans to USE this ai. Because simply by the use of LLM derived ai, users are helping to train it to replace them. Thus the full-court press to impose use of this tech on well...everyone, coming from above.
Case in point: Agentic Ai. This is a LLM-derived form of ai that is designed to replicate human workflows, autonomously, and "learning" via every workflow it is applied to. This is why corps who have implemented this ai in their employee base encourage users to use agentic ai to automate "up to their skillset". IOW, use it for every workflow until the point it fails. But, this point of failure, thanks to the "training" this ai absorbs thru use, is a moving target, which constantly presses upward into ever more complex realms of the workflow. There is not necessarily a ceiling inherent in it's ability to progress and refine itself. And the hope is that, thru continued use, it will eventually be capable of automating the entirety of a given employee's workflow and then be in a position to replace that employee entirely. Use of LLM ai, trains LLM ai, and hastens their ability to refine to the eventual end goal of replacing the user altogether.
Make no mistake: everything humans do can be reduced to a workflow, of varying complexity. Everything. Options->evaluation->decision->action. Our reasoning is a workflow, a surgeon doing surgery is a workflow, a author writing a novel is a workflow, an artist creating a painting--is a workflow. Our brains function as a workflow (albeit a very complex one) and so, if these workflows can be duplicated? *We* are duplicated. Digitally cloned.
Brian wrote: "The more people use AI, the less they like it, and the more concerned they are." I feel that there is a very specific explanation for this contrary-seeming behavior and it doesn't have anything to do with this tech's accuracy, or utility. No, i feel this concern and distaste comes from a far more fundamental place in our psyches: our base instinct of fight or flight. I feel when we use this tech, on a core, even subconscious level, we recognize it as a Predator. The wolf in granny's nightdress. The stealthy movement just outside the light of our campfire. We sense that this tech is *coming for us* and it does not intend for us to economically survive.
"Omg this is ridiculous hyperbole!" you say and scroll away dismissively. Ok. But just consider one final point: Is this all...*possible*? If your answer is "No", ask yourself "Why, then?" And if you cannot come up with an answer imbued with absolute certainty, ask yourself: Do i want to roll the dice, continue to use and train these LLMs, and take the chance that I am *not* helping to dig my own economic grave? I guess that is up to you.
I know what my choice is.
I won't let these "Mind Snatchers" take me without a fight. It isn't that difficult to resist. Just don't use them. For anything. At all. Ever.
Might I also suggest that we go a bit lower on the food chain to nip this whole thing in the bud and that is to oppose and ban Chip Factories, like Micron, from our communities . It's the chips that are the building blocks of these data centers that create the AI.
And the processing of these chips requires as much, if not more electricity, water and land, not to mention the enormous amounts of chemical wastewater that needs to be "treated" before being returned to our rivers and lakes - that make them as environmentally destructive as, if not more so than, data centers, but seem to be below the radar in this scenario ...
Brian, thank you for this as ever. My own field is outdoor/adventure publishing in the UK – a small niche, but a passionate one. Over the last 12 months I have seen a consensus starting to form. Two years ago, many of my colleagues were AI-curious, or at least not actively against it; they wanted to keep an open mind about new developments, and who can blame them? This industry is hard, really hard, and nobody wants to ignore a potential advantage. But in the time since then, almost everyone I know has changed from AI-curious to anti-AI. People have lost jobs, or seen their jobs degraded (as you illustrate in your book). People have seen pay decline. The square root of nobody has seen things get actually better for themselves. The result now is a new consensus within my corner of publishing: we must resist this.
I've worked as hard as I can to galvanise resistance in my field, including debates on stage at mountain festivals and countless real-world conversations, but I certainly can't take most of the credit. This is a grassroots movement heading in one direction.
I personally edit two magazines and have put comprehensive anti-AI policies in place for both. We do not allow AI-generated content, full stop. Sadly, many potential contributors do not read these policies, and we are getting an ever-increasing volume of AI-generated (or AI-contaminated) pitches. It's taking more and more of our time to sort through the crap. But, on the other hand, everyone is getting better at recognising this dross. I've found it surprising how attuned my own eye has grown!
Worth mentioning that we do still get new contributors who are trying to use AI in good faith, i.e. they are oblivious to the broader context and simply don't know what they don't know. I find it helpful to remain diplomatic and polite, and in some cases minds have been changed and positive relationships forged. When (gently) confronted, people using AI are often very much open to dropping it and developing the story the human way instead.
Of course, not everyone is – sometimes the confrontation leads to a total breakdown of comms. But this, I'm glad to say, is rare.
Final note: last year something took place that really shook me, and acted as a wake-up call. I got quite far along the development process with a story that turned out to be fake. And not only the story, but all the images, the video, and even *the contributor*. This is after many emails back and forth. Something started to smell off and I did a bit more digging. The entire thing was generated by AI. This led to me sharpening up my practices, and to be honest I now often insist on video calls with new potential writers, just to check they are real humans.
I dread the day when AI agents are able to convincingly mimic real humans over video call...
Anyway, Brian, I just wanted to say thank you. You've been a huge inspiration and source of knowledge for me in my own journey of resistance to AI. Please know that your work is valued and valuable.
Unfortunately, the one genuine business model for fake-AI is *fraud*. It's quite good at automated fraud. All the people paid in boiler rooms in Myanmar to defraud people will be out of work, it will all be automated by fake-AI.
Given that the only business model for this crap is fraud, it really should be outlawed completely.
This AI technology is the only tech we invented presents most abilities of misuse due its ability to mimic human language and intelligence without having understanding or intelligence.
The result is hype, and outright lies about almost everything the tech can do now or in the future.
I'm sad that this will be the actual real impact of Hinton's creation that he is still confused himself about hiw it actually works.
Lecun finally came to his senses and broke (kid of) thei AI crowd.
The tech has usability but not even by far the way it is pushed in every nook and cranny of the imagination.
This abuse and missuse of the tech comes directly from the sunk cost bias that started few years ago when the first to be fooled were the VCs and CEOs.
Now we pay the price of that gullibility since they won't stop until they recoup they investments or we are all dead.
No kidding we are in a huge pickle with this thing.
My motto is: "I fear not the Terminator but the Hallucinator".
I'm in accounting (DevOps), and the push to implement AI into everything possible, not because we should, but because "we have to compete with the companies who are using it", is honestly one of the most disingenuous arguments I've ever heard. And yet, right now, I can choose to die on this hill and lose my job, or move forward with implementation of whatever platforms the deeply uninformed executive team want.
Dear God, accounting is absolutely the last place the bullshit generators should be allowed. An accounting firm which uses fake-AI is setting itself up for overnight bankruptcy.
Hard agree with the thrust of this article, and I love that it's happening. As a professional audiobook narrator and producer, I can confirm that (at least anecdotally) readers do NOT want AI writing, especially in romance, which means moves like Hachette's are welcome and choices like Harlequin's recent decision to create animated AI slop shorts from its titles are bewildering. Who do they think their audience is??
However, even within this context, I found the following (excellent) reporting by the Drey Dossier Substack to be really important for us all to consider.
Tl;dr: the journalism process that led to Shy Girl's contract cancelation by Hachette is suspicious AF, the encoded racial and gender biases of AI products (of which Pangram is one!) cannot be ignored in the discussion of the cancelation of a first time black female author, and why on earth are we trusting AI to tell us when something is written by AI (as Pangram does)? Who actually trusts that??
I didn't, when it highlighted mistakes and let me know to fix it. But now that it's half-autocorrect, it actually introduces errors into my writing -- mostly because it can't recognize any but the most milquetoast white names. More advanced doesn't always mean better.
The chess example is more complicated than what Barkan describes in that note. If you're playing in a chess tournament, using a chess engine like Stockfish during a game is cheating, and the punishments are severe. But it's not cheating to use Stockfish to study and map out an opening variation to great depth, which you can then memorize and spring on an unsuspecting opponent. Given the huge number of possible chess positions, this is something only the pros do effectively, but it shows how computer use in chess governed by a highly contextual group of rules. If a writer used AI like a top chessplayer uses Stockfish, they'd have it plan and organize the piece of writing, memorize as much of it as possible, and then reproduce said writing by hand on paper with a judge watching them to make sure they don't consult their phone.
The more direct parallel to AI use in chess and in writing is that AI has made it much easier to cheat. You end up with a lot of suspicions that something isn't legit - a series of chess moves, a paragraph - but it's hard to prove anything conclusively, and it's easy to get paranoid.
I love this article so much. I don't use "AI", refuse to use it, and run it down relentlessly to whoever is around. I despise the tech industry and wish it would be nationalized and then have every square inch of Silicon Valley razed to the ground, with salt sown over the soil out of pure spite. The industry is evil, its executives are evil, and they are a threat to human happiness and flourishing in countless ways. I'm glad that I am not alone with my feelings.
Actually, I do dislike spellcheck quite a bit. At least half of the time it makes 'corrections' where none are necessary because it 'thinks' it knows better, when in fact it is simply displaying the cultural ignorance of the people who built the spellchecker.
It is such good news that so many of my fellow humans are saying a hard "no" to this hazardous technology. How quickly it came--and how quickly it seems to be leaving,or being forced out. I lost a good chunk of my academic editing business when the chatbots showed up--why pay a human $50 an hour when ChatGPT will rewrite your paper or even your dissertation for nothing? It will be interesting to see how long before grad students start showing up at my door again!
Sorry this happened to you Betsy! I too hope there is a correction on this front…
As I commented recently elsewhere, it's gone so far that I, a longtime computing professional who has designed, built, and used machine-learning systems for both scientific and commercial purposes, am ready to say that anyone who embraces this shit is contributing to the demise of human civilization.
It bears emphasis that technology is never merely technique. No technique is fully separable from the people developing and advocating it or the purposes for which it's used. In the case of "generative AI", many of those people and purposes are vicious. Rusty Foster made a good start on explaining how and why:
"Terry Pratchett wrote every decent person's favorite summary of the bedrock of humanist morality in a fantasy book for young readers called *I Shall Wear Midnight*: 'Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.' Treating people as things can begin in many ways, but I think one of them is the idea that things can be people. The motivated muddling of categories so prevalent in writing and thinking about A.I., beginning with the very name 'artificial intelligence,' is intentional and serves the narrative that this software can and will take over for human workers, doing their jobs cheaper, faster, better and without requiring rest or dignity. The A.I. industry is selling a dream of digital slavery - infinite human labor with no actual human involved."
(https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people)
It is, of course, a dream, or, more bluntly, a lie, in that a great many humans are, in fact, involved in "generative AI". The whole sleazy business is founded on vast amounts of hidden labor by people, who both produce the (mostly stolen) training data and "tune" the "pre-trained" models to exhibit a simulacrum of humanness. The systematic obfuscation of this labor is another indication that many of the people leading or cheering the industry are depraved.
Well said! I've often thought of genAI as anti-worker, anti-human tech. In a healthy society, the idea of deliberately replacing our own God-given capacity to think and create would be rejected on principle.
Quietly mute/block any stackers using AI. Refuse software updates which lack transparency - these are vectors for unrequested AI features. Disable such features. Relentlessly spread word of the dangers of this forced, giant sociological experiment.
I've stopped automatically downloading software updates for exactly these reasons. I don't want AI being forced down my throat anymore.
i love when your writing gives me hope
🤖🔨❤️
So to be clear: the "ai" that is at issue here are those derived from LLMs, Large Language Models. This includes Generative AI (art and video) and Agentic AI (autonomously automated workflows).
Datacenters and their environmental impacts, the "dumbing down" of habitual users, the FOMO, the plagiarism, the layoffs, all of these are just *symptoms* of the core issue. And that issue is as existential as it could possibly get:
We are in the midst of a multi-trillion dollar project, supported by every superpower, purposed to replace the economic value of human knowledge workers with machine simulacra. Succinctly: this AI project is purposed to clone the human mind. To replace us. To strip humans of our economic value. To make us---obsolete.
That is the goal. For corporations, for the bilionaires behind this project, for the militaries developing their ai drone armies.
LLMs are "trainable" They "learn" by expanding their databases. One of the primary ways this is accomplished is by convincing humans to USE this ai. Because simply by the use of LLM derived ai, users are helping to train it to replace them. Thus the full-court press to impose use of this tech on well...everyone, coming from above.
Case in point: Agentic Ai. This is a LLM-derived form of ai that is designed to replicate human workflows, autonomously, and "learning" via every workflow it is applied to. This is why corps who have implemented this ai in their employee base encourage users to use agentic ai to automate "up to their skillset". IOW, use it for every workflow until the point it fails. But, this point of failure, thanks to the "training" this ai absorbs thru use, is a moving target, which constantly presses upward into ever more complex realms of the workflow. There is not necessarily a ceiling inherent in it's ability to progress and refine itself. And the hope is that, thru continued use, it will eventually be capable of automating the entirety of a given employee's workflow and then be in a position to replace that employee entirely. Use of LLM ai, trains LLM ai, and hastens their ability to refine to the eventual end goal of replacing the user altogether.
Make no mistake: everything humans do can be reduced to a workflow, of varying complexity. Everything. Options->evaluation->decision->action. Our reasoning is a workflow, a surgeon doing surgery is a workflow, a author writing a novel is a workflow, an artist creating a painting--is a workflow. Our brains function as a workflow (albeit a very complex one) and so, if these workflows can be duplicated? *We* are duplicated. Digitally cloned.
Brian wrote: "The more people use AI, the less they like it, and the more concerned they are." I feel that there is a very specific explanation for this contrary-seeming behavior and it doesn't have anything to do with this tech's accuracy, or utility. No, i feel this concern and distaste comes from a far more fundamental place in our psyches: our base instinct of fight or flight. I feel when we use this tech, on a core, even subconscious level, we recognize it as a Predator. The wolf in granny's nightdress. The stealthy movement just outside the light of our campfire. We sense that this tech is *coming for us* and it does not intend for us to economically survive.
"Omg this is ridiculous hyperbole!" you say and scroll away dismissively. Ok. But just consider one final point: Is this all...*possible*? If your answer is "No", ask yourself "Why, then?" And if you cannot come up with an answer imbued with absolute certainty, ask yourself: Do i want to roll the dice, continue to use and train these LLMs, and take the chance that I am *not* helping to dig my own economic grave? I guess that is up to you.
I know what my choice is.
I won't let these "Mind Snatchers" take me without a fight. It isn't that difficult to resist. Just don't use them. For anything. At all. Ever.
Copycat plagarist LLMs are incapable of using outside information to come up with a better process.
Might I also suggest that we go a bit lower on the food chain to nip this whole thing in the bud and that is to oppose and ban Chip Factories, like Micron, from our communities . It's the chips that are the building blocks of these data centers that create the AI.
And the processing of these chips requires as much, if not more electricity, water and land, not to mention the enormous amounts of chemical wastewater that needs to be "treated" before being returned to our rivers and lakes - that make them as environmentally destructive as, if not more so than, data centers, but seem to be below the radar in this scenario ...
Brian, thank you for this as ever. My own field is outdoor/adventure publishing in the UK – a small niche, but a passionate one. Over the last 12 months I have seen a consensus starting to form. Two years ago, many of my colleagues were AI-curious, or at least not actively against it; they wanted to keep an open mind about new developments, and who can blame them? This industry is hard, really hard, and nobody wants to ignore a potential advantage. But in the time since then, almost everyone I know has changed from AI-curious to anti-AI. People have lost jobs, or seen their jobs degraded (as you illustrate in your book). People have seen pay decline. The square root of nobody has seen things get actually better for themselves. The result now is a new consensus within my corner of publishing: we must resist this.
I've worked as hard as I can to galvanise resistance in my field, including debates on stage at mountain festivals and countless real-world conversations, but I certainly can't take most of the credit. This is a grassroots movement heading in one direction.
I personally edit two magazines and have put comprehensive anti-AI policies in place for both. We do not allow AI-generated content, full stop. Sadly, many potential contributors do not read these policies, and we are getting an ever-increasing volume of AI-generated (or AI-contaminated) pitches. It's taking more and more of our time to sort through the crap. But, on the other hand, everyone is getting better at recognising this dross. I've found it surprising how attuned my own eye has grown!
Worth mentioning that we do still get new contributors who are trying to use AI in good faith, i.e. they are oblivious to the broader context and simply don't know what they don't know. I find it helpful to remain diplomatic and polite, and in some cases minds have been changed and positive relationships forged. When (gently) confronted, people using AI are often very much open to dropping it and developing the story the human way instead.
Of course, not everyone is – sometimes the confrontation leads to a total breakdown of comms. But this, I'm glad to say, is rare.
Final note: last year something took place that really shook me, and acted as a wake-up call. I got quite far along the development process with a story that turned out to be fake. And not only the story, but all the images, the video, and even *the contributor*. This is after many emails back and forth. Something started to smell off and I did a bit more digging. The entire thing was generated by AI. This led to me sharpening up my practices, and to be honest I now often insist on video calls with new potential writers, just to check they are real humans.
I dread the day when AI agents are able to convincingly mimic real humans over video call...
Anyway, Brian, I just wanted to say thank you. You've been a huge inspiration and source of knowledge for me in my own journey of resistance to AI. Please know that your work is valued and valuable.
Unfortunately, the one genuine business model for fake-AI is *fraud*. It's quite good at automated fraud. All the people paid in boiler rooms in Myanmar to defraud people will be out of work, it will all be automated by fake-AI.
Given that the only business model for this crap is fraud, it really should be outlawed completely.
"I could go on. I think I will."
That's what we're here for buddy!! Good to read through this, thanks for bringing it to us Brian.
This AI technology is the only tech we invented presents most abilities of misuse due its ability to mimic human language and intelligence without having understanding or intelligence.
The result is hype, and outright lies about almost everything the tech can do now or in the future.
I'm sad that this will be the actual real impact of Hinton's creation that he is still confused himself about hiw it actually works.
Lecun finally came to his senses and broke (kid of) thei AI crowd.
The tech has usability but not even by far the way it is pushed in every nook and cranny of the imagination.
This abuse and missuse of the tech comes directly from the sunk cost bias that started few years ago when the first to be fooled were the VCs and CEOs.
Now we pay the price of that gullibility since they won't stop until they recoup they investments or we are all dead.
No kidding we are in a huge pickle with this thing.
My motto is: "I fear not the Terminator but the Hallucinator".
'No is not enough' is the title of one of Naomi Klein's books. Whilst I think this is true, it's a great place to start.
I'm in accounting (DevOps), and the push to implement AI into everything possible, not because we should, but because "we have to compete with the companies who are using it", is honestly one of the most disingenuous arguments I've ever heard. And yet, right now, I can choose to die on this hill and lose my job, or move forward with implementation of whatever platforms the deeply uninformed executive team want.
So what I'm saying is... Who's hiring?
Dear God, accounting is absolutely the last place the bullshit generators should be allowed. An accounting firm which uses fake-AI is setting itself up for overnight bankruptcy.
https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bullshit
Hard agree with the thrust of this article, and I love that it's happening. As a professional audiobook narrator and producer, I can confirm that (at least anecdotally) readers do NOT want AI writing, especially in romance, which means moves like Hachette's are welcome and choices like Harlequin's recent decision to create animated AI slop shorts from its titles are bewildering. Who do they think their audience is??
However, even within this context, I found the following (excellent) reporting by the Drey Dossier Substack to be really important for us all to consider.
https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/the-shy-girl-ai-scandal-is-way-worse
Tl;dr: the journalism process that led to Shy Girl's contract cancelation by Hachette is suspicious AF, the encoded racial and gender biases of AI products (of which Pangram is one!) cannot be ignored in the discussion of the cancelation of a first time black female author, and why on earth are we trusting AI to tell us when something is written by AI (as Pangram does)? Who actually trusts that??
"Do you hate spellcheck too???"
I didn't, when it highlighted mistakes and let me know to fix it. But now that it's half-autocorrect, it actually introduces errors into my writing -- mostly because it can't recognize any but the most milquetoast white names. More advanced doesn't always mean better.
The chess example is more complicated than what Barkan describes in that note. If you're playing in a chess tournament, using a chess engine like Stockfish during a game is cheating, and the punishments are severe. But it's not cheating to use Stockfish to study and map out an opening variation to great depth, which you can then memorize and spring on an unsuspecting opponent. Given the huge number of possible chess positions, this is something only the pros do effectively, but it shows how computer use in chess governed by a highly contextual group of rules. If a writer used AI like a top chessplayer uses Stockfish, they'd have it plan and organize the piece of writing, memorize as much of it as possible, and then reproduce said writing by hand on paper with a judge watching them to make sure they don't consult their phone.
The more direct parallel to AI use in chess and in writing is that AI has made it much easier to cheat. You end up with a lot of suspicions that something isn't legit - a series of chess moves, a paragraph - but it's hard to prove anything conclusively, and it's easy to get paranoid.
This looks more like using it to study rather than using it to play / write for you. Personally, I think this is totally fair use.
I love this article so much. I don't use "AI", refuse to use it, and run it down relentlessly to whoever is around. I despise the tech industry and wish it would be nationalized and then have every square inch of Silicon Valley razed to the ground, with salt sown over the soil out of pure spite. The industry is evil, its executives are evil, and they are a threat to human happiness and flourishing in countless ways. I'm glad that I am not alone with my feelings.
Actually, I do dislike spellcheck quite a bit. At least half of the time it makes 'corrections' where none are necessary because it 'thinks' it knows better, when in fact it is simply displaying the cultural ignorance of the people who built the spellchecker.