The AI files – posts that are leaving an impression

I am not ready yet to form coherent thoughts on AI, or rather, the subject has an almost unfortunate depth as companies with a near-infinite war chest are pouring billions upon billions of cash into LLMs to make the subject completely unavoidable in tech, drowning any critical voices by the sheer mass that has been put into motion to only God knows which direction.

Of course, many people have been thinking about the subject and this post collect a number of articles from people who still try to retain their own voice within a vast growing sea of AI slop. This post is mostly a collection of links to articles that have me thinking about the current trends in IT tech.

PEOPLE ARE LOSING LOVED ONES TO AI-FUELED SPIRITUAL FANTASIES

At Rolling Stone they wrote about people who seem to lose themselves in some alternate reality where LLMs sometimes seem all-too-capable to indulge you in whatever psychosis is becoming part of you.

Vibe coding may well destroy your ability to find solutions to problems out of your own intellect

This mastodon post describes a situation where a colleague is showing some strange behavior.

He basically rotted his own brain by compulsively using ChatGPT in lieu of actually thinking with most any of the projects he was working on. Instead of taking the time to read through code in our framework, look up documentation, or do any sort of debugging, he instead just begged and pleaded with ChatGPT to try and get somewhere because “it was faster.”

What are addictive activities? Indeed, repeated actions with variable reward. Prompting a LLM chat window to solve a certain task does carry quite a bit of that, if you think about it.

But, read for yourself.

I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now

This is an account where the emotional reaction to the current crop of generative AI is strongly negative, alas the author attempts to understand his position and raises awareness to important issues.

I have been trying very hard to correct for this bias, to try to pay attention to the facts and to have a clear-eyed view of these systems’ capabilities. But the feelings are visceral, and the effort to compensate is tiring. It is, in fact, the desire to stop making this particular kind of effort that has me writing up this piece and trying to take an intentional break from the subject, despite its intense relevance.

I am certain I will add further updates to this post as interesting posts come along.