I’ve seen nothing that AI can do that justifies the economic or ecological cost.
GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), likely coined in the late 1950’s is just as relevant today.
You need to know how and understand to operate a handsaw to use a bandsaw or a mill. You need to understand variables, loops, strings before writing an “app” (and then you need to understand user models, security models, databases, UI / UX).
You can’t “trust” AI / LLMs without first giving it fresh and relevant content -or it will make information up. You need to give it the important information for it to synthesize correctly -and that relevant info needs to be in the current context. You can’t just ask a question and expect it to “do the research”. You need domain expertise to be able to validate the response.
AI is just a tool to make it easier to use your existing tools.
it’s a gloried spell checker, basically.
and yeah, it’s a really good spell checker.
Honestly, I didn’t jump on the AI hate train like everyone else did. And I was wrong. I literally only use it to make profile pictures on steam to make a sekiro photo. Other than I literally can live without it.
And at this point all of the damage it is doing to our communities; I am angry at this point that people in positions of power are blatantly ignoring the people they represent who say they don’t want this. This is almost as bad as the epstein corruption. Just blatantly lying to our faces and ignoring frustration.
Not just ignoring it but trying to grift to their supporters that these ‘contrarians’ aren’t Americans and flew in. I’m so unbelievably sick of conservative influence in my home country just using lies as a real mantra. Because everyone around me values money over anything else and it seems like they genuinely are dissonant and don’t understand this is a bubble waiting to burst unlike anything we have ever seen.
AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.
The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.
AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.
^ This. This is the actual truth of it. You can always find a 500 person company that does a shit job at forced integration and you can find a 2000 user company that tied all their systems together and moved at paces that made everyone sick with risk. You can find individuals who tried to make copilot write micron code (horrible) and who used claude to write ansible code (~magic)
I love Doctorow, I read most of his stuff, I recently read Reverse Centaur, it had its informed moments. It made some strong points that stand out as to where using AI makes sense. It also has some perspective issues, being written by someone who focused on case studies with the worst possible outcomes. A lot of the same problems in this article.
AI can, in the right circumstances with the right needs, remove many manhours of tedious shitty labor, or it can be used by shitty people to vacantly crap out slop 24x7. It’s only as useful as its implementation/workload.
But what never gets better is the societal and ecological impact. The slop pouring into journalism, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the scams running with perfect English vocabulary. The shitty AF water and electricity usage. The corporate bribery. Those are along for the ride by default.
If AI went away, right this very moment, my job would grind to a snail’s pace for months while we once again pivot back to another way improved but not unlike we did prior. We would have a man-century of meetings on how to recreate all the processes affordably. We are doing more now with fewer people, but they’re paying more in tokens + labor. This is not to say that any of us would be horribly sad.
This article is based on a case study by one guy on a 500-person company that didn’t want to implement AI and did a poor job of implementing it. Yeah, many of us work for some place like that and some of us work for places that got it working. That’s the reason for the big divide. It’s not always a delusional asshole lying about it working, it’s about it working when engineers who have the right workload use it to solve their needs. Still too fucking expensive on all accounts.
AI is not worth the investment. It’s not worth the money. It’s not worth the damage. But the argument that it doesn’t do anything because you see it do jack shit somewhere doesn’t hold up to even light scrutiny.
And ecological
Amazing analysis, thank you for sharing it.
In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It’s very simple.
I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.
Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.
AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI’s at once and they’ve consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent, and we as humans really bad at acknowledging how little we individually know about the world around us.
The easiest example to ask AI detailed questions about something that you know you have expertise in. If you try to test its limit, no matter what your particular expertise is, I’m confident that in 5-10 minutes you’ll realize it’s no more intelligent than an average Joe who spent their lunch break Googling the subject or maybe someone who read a book about it once.
To give credit where it’s due, that does mean that these AIs have a much wider breadth of knowledge than any one person could have and that is, objectively, very cool.
On the other hand, that’s why it’s so easy to believe that AI is this all-knowing oracle that can replace all of humanity. It can give you a way better answer in an instant about things you know nothing about than you ever could off the top of your head, so it seems unbelievable. It’s instant gratification that also feels really valuable.
Despite the trick that AI plays on our psychology, you could also just read a book or two or participate in any form of genuine learning, and it really doesn’t take long for you to outgrow whatever the AI is capable of. It takes a bit longer, but now you have grown your actual intelligence and you get to keep it for a $0/month subscription and they don’t need to build another data center in your backyard.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent
Yeah it’s almost like the AI is an unthinking machine trying to model what a person would answer to the question (prompt) provided to it.
I’m so goddamn tired of people (not you) acting like an LLM “knows” anything nevermind whether it’s right or wrong or could even tell you if it didn’t know the answer. It’s not like a person that can say, “I don’t have that knowledge so I know any answer is likely wrong” the machine is going to give you an answer every time. That answer will never be “idk” it’ll be whatever hallucination it’s confident enough is right based on the model and training.
I do think there are use cases for it and the technology is cool but the vision being sold and propping up our economy with a venture capitalist circle jerk is so far removed from reality.
that’s also how really successful human beings work. they bullshit and lie and appear confident, and people believe them and ignore the people who don’t do that, because they don’t appear as confident.
also why people basically fall in love with AI, because it spouts nothing but bullshit at them and they eat it up like candy because being fed back bullshit is a dopamine hit.
interacting with real people doesn’t supply endless dopamine and they might not tell you what you want to hear.
You will get an email at some point asking you if you would accept some well paid contract to train an LLM to answer like you would. That’s how they simulate professional behavior on top of the probabilistic monsters that is behind.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
I’m no economist but I had plenty of professors who wanted their particular theories reflected back at them.
While students should do their own reading and writing, using ‘they write mainstream ideas’ as a litmus test for writing and AI seems parochial. And I’d go so far as to say AI is becoming a standard research and writing aid like the web word processors, and you sound like teachers who ranted against those too.
Have you engaged either group in open discussion about comparing the perspectives you’re challenging? I bet several modern models could debate your philosophy on merit, I wonder if you ever gave students the chance.
I’m pretty sure the fucking economist you’re replying to is not “teach(ing) something different from the mainstream” that’s the whole point of their post.
The whole point is the AI tools are hallucinating* completely incorrect answers and that students trying to use them as study aids and tools to learn with are going to have a lot of fake and wrong information to sort out and good luck to them knowing what is or isn’t incorrect or wrong when they’re just trying to learn a subject they know nothing about.
The only reason you or I or anyone else knows when AI hallucinates in its output is because we know stuff from our prior knowledge and can catch it that way. If you’re ignorant to a subject and trying to learn stuff you’re not going to know off hand the AI is lying to you if it sounds convincing enough for a layperson to accept.
*which I kind of hate that term because to the AI there’s no difference between truth and hallucination - it’s just output as far as the robot is concerned
Yep. Sounds about right
This is me right nowWhat do you mean? Cory figured it out like 20 years ago already, he was reporting on tech bro grift from the beginning
He’s a funny one though, cause whilst warning about it, he does two really annoying things;
- “LOOK AT HOW SMART I AM” self-aggrandizing, he seems to think he’s the smartest person in every room
- Falling for other different grifts
Falling for other different grifts
Which ones? I’m not familiar with this side of him
Cory has been that “crazy” guy warning of all sorts of grift, exploitation, privacy fuckery and security forever like a modern-day Kassandra. Now that we start to see the direction the technology sector is headed more clearly, his warnings finally start to ring true.
I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.
I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.
I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.
What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.
It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
I mean… it gave you the amalgamated wisdom of the internet after a very complex game of telephone.
I use google “ai” in when thrifting for audio gear. Minimum 80% of the time it gets something GLARINGLY wrong. “Oh ho ho! You correctly pointed out that I was completely wrong on all counts! An astute observation! Let me try again but this time give you the CORRECT information.”
I mean, to be fair, that’s a dirt cheap model you’re talking to, and Google is not exactly at the forefront of any tier of model, cheap or otherwise.
Is that you being fair or is that you rushing to defend something?
As if you don’t know these “tools” don’t work.
I really like a song that has intro and outro samples and I wanted to know where they were from, so I googled. Google AI promptly informed me that the song has no samples. Guess that settles that.
I do potatoes in my instant pot but leave the water in, it just gets absorbed. So the salt is effective in that case. I salt the potatoes themselves and toss them before adding the water, too, so they should get reasonably seasoned.
Also i use soup stock.
Mashed, though.
That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.
Salting the water would increase the boiling temperature I guess, but it seems like a waste of salt because that info isn’t meaningfully changing the cooking time
Salting the water is relevant when not using a pressure cooker. It makes no sense when you’re steaming them in a pressure cooker. AI is a good tool, sometimes. But for everyday tasks, it is irrelevant and often wrong.
I use AI as a writing tool, not as a substitute for authorship.
The ideas, intent, perspective, and final judgment are mine. I decide what I want to say, what belongs in the piece, what does not, and whether the finished version accurately represents me. AI may help me organize my thoughts, clarify a sentence, improve the flow, or find wording that better expresses what I already mean. That is not fundamentally different from working with an editor, dictating to a transcriber, or revising a draft after receiving feedback.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it. By doing that, I take responsibility for every sentence. If the writing is thoughtful, accurate, and effective, I am responsible for those choices. If it is careless, misleading, generic, or full of slop, that is also my responsibility. Blaming the tool would be an attempt to avoid accountability.
AI does not decide what I believe. It does not decide what I am willing to defend. It does not decide what I publish under my name. I do.
The tool may assist with the writing process, but the authorship comes from intention, judgment, selection, revision, and responsibility. The final work is mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, and signed my name to it.
You’re lost in the sauce. Do you know any other writers in real life? How do they feel about this?
“I dont write anything but i take credit for everything”
I was reading the initial comment with peer-reviewed publications in mind and it all sounded like standard practice, but then I read yours and was like “oh, are we talking about books now?”
Either way, its still a bad look. Peer review is even worse than Op Eds, or fiction, or what have you… But its all equally socially degenerate
that’s bullshit.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it.
that’s just called writing.
apparently ai just broke a cryptographic scheme, hawk, that the us government was assessing to standardize.
What has AI changed so far?
- Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
- we have AI child porn now, awesome
- we have AI undressing apps, cool
- we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
- we have AI, the great misinformation tool
- we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
- there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay
And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…
I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering
Only pro is laborious, tedious programming tasks have become significantly faster to do, along with testing edge cases and stuff a programmer should be able to do but maybe doesnt need to.
Just about everything else is negative.
I don’t know, it’s also fun to do role play games with a locally hosted thingamabob-bot-computer-talker. I recently played a 1930s noir detective in New Orleans RPG with AI. It was neat and kept me entertained for hours.
- two of my friends finally have diagnoses for their health problems they had been living with for decades, and can now get appropriate treatment
That’s awesome! Imagine if we took all the resources spent on pushing AI for stuff it isn’t good at and invested them in training models for detecting, classifying and correlating medical indicators and using that to anonymously connect people with a network of physicians and psychiatrists for further evaluation and preliminary diagnostics to help with getting actual treatment.
We could bring a more reliable version of that help your friends happened to get to more people, with less of a random chance that the model will reinforce the issues or misdiagnose people with dangerous consequences. We could improve the world.
Instead, they burn books, fire people and abuse eminent domain to displace people so they can run power lines to feed data centers fucking up the water supply for residents that got no say in whether they want oversized heaters in their backyard.
I’m glad your two friends got some use out of this. Is that really worth the price?
Trust me, bro!
They are real people these friends of mine, but you don’t know them, because they are from a different school. And you won’t see them this summer at all because… they are both actually models in Canada during the summer.
But totally cured and now they get boners also with THIS ONE TRICK that doctors HATE it!!!
The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.
AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.
An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.
Medical AI is usually more along the lines of ‘we’ve created a proprietary model for computer aided diagnostics specific to x disease being scanned with y modality and we’ve taken this through the regulatory process in z jurisdiction’ than ‘put your symptoms into an LLM lol’.
There are studies that show that LLMs (chatbots) perform as well or better than human physicians.
I’m not suggesting getting rid of physicians, though. This is a tool for humans, not a replacement.
@joe @mobyduck648 [citation needed]
@joe if it’s a tool for doctors to use then it will simply increase the costs of providing care even if there is an increase in the quality of that care. That means adoption of that particular type of “AI” will be limited. If it’s possible to replace doctors with a chatbot, that will decrease costs even if the quality of care also decreases.
Which one do you think is more likely to be widely used in a profit-driven, anti-human system?
These are concerns with the healthcare system, not concerns with AI.
> The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
This is demonstrably untrue.
AI tends to increase dangerous racial bias in healthcare.
- https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/healthcare-bias-in-ai-a-systematic-literature-review/
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5C_id=3747737
- https://tech4future.info/en/algorithmic-discrimination-healthcare/
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-022-00590-8
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40615-024-02237-0
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231213820
- https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(24)00321-5
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01746-4@joe @Snapz AI is dangerously unreliable in a clinical setting and often provides dangerous medical advice in and out of clinical settings.
- https://futurism.com/typo-ai-doctor-haywire
- https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260
- https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AIoa2300015
- https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732121
- https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1181131532/eating-disorder-helpline-takes-down-chatbot-after-it-gave-weight-loss-advice
- https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/serious-medical-error-from-perplexitys
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732039AI can make medical professionals less competent
- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10462-025-11352-1deleted by creator
Just adding my two cents to this because I have heard this before. The AI wasn’t programmed to do this. It was training to based off the racist shit on the internet that it takes from. Systemic racism just doing it’s thing.
To be clear, I didn’t mean to imply that AI was flawless or had no room for improvement, only that it has made real, tangible improvements. This is why it shouldn’t be used as a replacement for humans, but as a tool for humans.
@joe Please cite your sources. What improvements? How were these improvements tested, studied, and documented? Where were the results published?
I trust you’re capable enough to do your own Google search.
Super cool! Well we can base your personal healthcare on AI’s sole guidance and if you are misdiagnosed, injured or dead as a result of an “oopsie”, no human will be held legally liable - fun!
So no real stakes for anyone to get it right, as with human-led interventions (with careers on the line at every stage to keep people engaged and honest). But corporations will probably just naturally do the right thing.
But you’re brave, you offer yourself as tribute to the lying machine. Tight tight tight!!!
You seem very passionate about this topic, but you’re not really adding much to the discussion.
Don’t worry, its coming across loud and clear that AI could cure cancer and you’d still think it was better to have cancer than use AI. I get it. AI = bad, full stop. Message received.
“AI” isn’t a thing. Computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing and neural networks are. These can all be useful tools when regulated and maintained with active oversight to balance with society’s other core priorities. What’s at question is the current method and human cost for this frivolously hyped, deceptively marketed lying machine with a single tangible use to date, being the operating system for Facebook’s pervert glasses. You didn’t read, of missed the entire point of, this important article, shared from an important contemporary mind.
Name and cite SPECIFIC examples of anything you claim.
P.s. you don’t “cure cancer”… cancer is a broad heading for hundreds of unique types of disease, presenting in different, completely unique systems within the human body. Like AI, “a cure for cancer” is a broad generalization of complex underlying systems that ignorant people make frivolously - People who think they HAVE the entire knowledge of the world in their brains, when they actually only have a plastic rectangle in their pants pocket with privilege-gated access to a (mostly corporate) CURATED VERSION of the world’s historic knowledge. So if you’ve “cured cancer” friend, why aren’t you treating the 20-30k humans that will die from a form or cancer today worldwide?
Funny how my experience is the American health care system is still 100% absolute shit that costs me 2k a month for the privilege of said shit. My wait times are the same, my “go fuck yourselves” are the same, my healthcare workers are still underpaid, and the systems for consumers are still shit.
“But the charts say AI is helping”
Once again it’s consumers get to wait for the piss to trickle down our backs. AI hasn’t done shit for the average Joe except make everything cost more while providing a worse service. Please, tell me how my healthcare experience has improved in the past 2 years. Go.
You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.
They’re not using LLMs to analyse MRI scans. There are image processing algorithms for that, but they’re a whole other thing to what this entire thread is about.
Also, are you a fucking bot? I’ve read all your comments so far in this thread and uhh yeah. Please feel free to jog on now.
I’ve read all your comments so far
I’m flattered. Did you read the first one where I said it was reductive to equate AI with chatbots?
c/nothingeverhappens
It’s not lying if they have no idea what they’re talking about and constantly swoon over it.
What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.
Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.
I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren’t gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.
I need a new line of work
Well I wouldn’t recommend data & analytics right now, if you treasure your sanity.
Imagine tech debt accumulated over decades absolutely skyrocketing because LLM can generate thousands of lines of SQL or Python that noone understands.I mean, I’m sure the same applies to all tech sectors and likely worse. I do admit it also helps us fix and uncover some old and buried bugs. It’s just not used with any sort of care or long term plan.
I’m a long term contractor. Process engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with up to date ASQ certs. I can technically go anywhere but i really love manufacturing processes.
Yeah, right. My boss gave me a bunch of risk assessments to read through and let slip that AI had ‘helped’ produce them. So I said I’d get AI to summarise them. All this vast computing power and climate damage is being used for bullshit.
That’s all an LLM is, a gas-powered bullshit firehose.
Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.
Lots of luddites in this thread. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. We are at the dawn of a Cambrian explosion of intelligence. Frontier level models are finding novel solutions to decades-long unsolved maths problems. The only limits are compute power and even more simply, energy. See you guys in the singularity
I view this more like a Pandora’s Box situation rather than a genie. I agree though, we’ll never be able to go back to what it was like before LLMs, and that makes me sad. We just have to live with it now.
Yes I am a Luddite, a proud tech-loving Luddite. And if you think there’s a contradiction in that, then you need to read up on what the Luddites stood for.
The problem is not that AI tech exists. Machine learning has been around for quite a while, and the modern neural processor chips are a great evolution of it. The problem is that corporations are using the tech for exploitation, plagiarism on an industrial scale, and creating misinformation ant terrifying speed.
Though you reference to the Luddites is quite appropriate in that they opposed the replacement of skilled labourers with child workers, just as modern day opponents of AI slop seek to stem the tide of skilled programmers being replaced with vibe coders, artists and illustrators with prompt writers, and the myriad of workers being replaced with inferior imitations of intelligence.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Frank Herbert, Dune
AI isn’t real, but it’s gonna ruin society anyway. There is absolutely zero possibility for genAI to develop intelligence because it’s just a probablistic chatbot. It doesn’t know anything; it’s just rolling dice to guess what word to spit out each time. A high school student who copies his friend’s calculus homework will eventually learn a little calculus. A chatbot will never learn any calculus. Claiming these genAI models will develop intelligence with better compute technology is like claiming a puppet will develop intelligence with better string technology.
I rank LLMs as game changing as Google Search when it first came out. It’s a tool, nothing more.
It does seem like it’s positioned to replace search engines
It is better at producing relevant information, but it may never be great, or even as good, at producing reliable information.
Looking at the shape it’s taken so far, do you really think you’ll be included in that singularity? Or will you be just another ape roasting to death as your brain rots? If it’s energy-intensive, then what matters is who controls the factors of production. They see you as a cost, not a useful friend who simped for Pascal’s Basilisk.
We could have a positive singularity, or we could have a malevolent singleton. And it depends on your rationality right now.
