AI questions blog challenge

Inspired by Kev Quirk's writing it's a challenge that's doing the rounds and I would like to Engage with the Discourse without going back on social media.

1. How was your first experience with AI models?

I remember the AI hype as coming hot on the heels of various blockchain grifts so I came in pretty opposed to it. I tried posing a few oceanography specific questions to ChatGPT and was unimpressed by the results.

2. Do you use AI or are you completely against using it?

I am strongly opposed to AI usage for a range of moral reasons, but am increasingly coming around to it having a part in automating some day-to-day drudge work and it does seem to have a place in software development. I think using an LLM to sound out ideas on how to structure a project, or troubleshoot code can be useful. Though I do not use it myself.

3. Do you have any preference among different models, for example Claude vs ChatGPT? If yes, how do you choose?

Running a local open-source LLM seems like the more responsible thing to do. Keeping control of the inputs and outputs at least.

4. What aspect of AI models do you like and what do you not like?

I think there is a (limited, closely monitored) use case for AI in the workplace. I have seen how it can greatly increase a user's ability to transform their ideas into (mostly) functioning code. I dislike how it is invading every corner of our lives. Hearing someone a conference say "I asked Cloud (that's what I named my Claude!) about this and he said X" was a deeply dispiriting experience. I think anti-human is not too strong a label for this technology

5. How do you feel about AI generated images? Does it annoy you if someone uses them in a blog post?

I find it morally offensive to use LLMs to imitate art and skip out the creative process. I can understand Kev's use case of having an LLM mock up alterations to an outbuilding and how they would look, using one to generate images whole-cloth as filler/header images for a blog makes me much less likely to want to read it.

6. Internet is flooded with AI slop now, full of generated text, images, audio, and videos. How do you filter it from authentic human creation? Do you have a strategy?

I will never forgive these wreckers for what they did to the internet. A network that allowed unparalleled connection to other people around the globe now filled with botshit and engagement farming noise. I read writing from people who I know are people.

7. Are you hopeful for a better future with A.I. or a dystopian one?

I think AI will mostly act as an accelerant to processes of enshittification, increasing concentration of power in a small group of billionaires and the world generally getting worse. As has been very eloquently expressed by Ted Chiang "most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism". I don't think AI is a revolutionary technology or game changer, but a step up in gear that entrenches existing inequalities and increases the ability of small, well funded groups to overwhelm the rest of us with noise. We're not likely to get a Butlerian Jihad at this point, but man I wish we could.

Footnotes

Inspried by Kev Quirk

Here's the template

1. How was your first experience with AI models?
2. Do you use AI or are you completely against using it?
3. Do you have any preference among different models, for example Claude vs ChatGPT? If yes, how do you choose?
4. What aspect of AI models do you like and what do you not like?
5. How do you feel about AI generated images? Does it annoy you if someone uses them in a blog post?
6. Internet is flooded with AI slop now, full of generated text, images, audio, and videos. How do you filter it from authentic human creation? Do you have a strategy?
7. Are you hopeful for a better future with A.I. or a dystopian one?