Re: Re: The AI has come for my code

Thoughts on the spread of AI in tech

OK, I rather enjoyed two recent gemlogs as follows:

Something I've been musing about a lot with my coworkers as of late is the meteoric rise and spread of AI slowly infecting abosolutely everything. I have no problems with AI in the traditional sense: machine learning techniques are extremely valuable across a wide range of different domains. I've been interested enough in it that I've done a lot of work teaching myself how a large array of machine learning tools actually work behind the scenes: circa 2016, I built a standard neural net, followed by a convolutional neural net completely from scratch, and also worked on implementing things like data augmentation techiniques, binarization, etc. I never quite got around to recurrence or backprop through time or any of those other really advanced techniques.

But, since the rise of attention mechanisms created the boom of LLMs, it's become truly infuriating to me. Initially, sure, the techniques piqued my interest (quite understandably). As the technology rapidly began to mature, I began to sour on it as I saw how it was being used.

As soon as I began to see people using the very earliest LLM models to be used for things like generating art and writing human-like text, it didn't take a genius to realize that companies would try to use it to replace workers, given the kind of world that we live in. I figured it would take a while because the early results were not particularly impressive to me.

Shoving AI into everything

The worst part of it all is the rapidity at which companies have began shoving AI into everything: and often in extremely half-baked ways. I could've told you from a mile away that shoving AI unnecessarily into things would break things, but companies have gon all-in because they're "afraid of missing out". Perfectly usable applications at work have become worse and worse and worse as companies shove more and more and more "AI Features" into them, while they're asking me "Are you using our new AI features? How do you like our new AI features?" Bringing in explicitly non-deterministic behavior is not a good way to line yourself up for success.

I use Quickbooks at work from time-to-time and the AI "Features" they've added have made my workflow slower and more error-prone. It was never a great piece of software to begin with, but over the past year or so, it's gotten noticably worse and my productivity has DECREASED because I'm correcting errors that only exist because of so-called AI "Features". Another tool I use at work replaced 100% of their support team with an AI chatbot. The first time I was having an issue after this happened, the chatbot helpfully hallucinated a menu that DOES NOT EXIST and told me that's where I needed to go. I was like, yes, that's exactly where I would put that button if it existed, but it doesn't, which is why I'm going to support.

And all for what? So that we can go cut back on labor budgets even further? In service of the allmighty dollar? At what cost to the long-term success of these companies? Surely they'll notice that a) customers actively dislike these half-baked AI "Features" and lose market share and b) that AI companies are following the same path as Uber et. al. where they burn obscene amounts of investor money to provide a service they're losing money on to get people locked in, so they can jack the price way up later.

Why would you use AI for that?

What really kills me the most is that seemingly sensible people have been brainwashed into the AI cult. I'd say most of my friends are rather intelligent people. The majority of them have been rather... muted... on the adoption of AI. One of my friends, with whom I ran a startup in college, got a job with an AI company and has gone completely insane IMO. He was asking me the other day if I'd "vibe-coded" anything! Like, bro, I know you are fully capable of writing really, really good code without relying on an AI tool to do it for you. Why would I "vibe-code" anything? If I were to do that, it would take me more time than to just write code myself, as it takes a LOT of time and effort to understand code that I didn't write myself. Why would you be using AI for that?

One of my coworkers is a very articulate person and a great communicator. They told me the other day that they "had to ask Chat to clean this email up for me". Like, what? I know you're fully capable of doing that yourself. It's not that hard and I know you're good at that. You literally have a dregree in communications, you are capable of communication by yourself.

In conclusion

My coworkers and I have repeatedly mused about how it sometimes feels like the entirety of the Big Tech world has been replaced by body doubles, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style. It's like the Star Trek: TNG episode "Conspiracy" where many in Starfleet Command have been taken over by weird parasites that are manipulating their behavior. Just the other day, we were talking about how abosolutely unhinged it would sound if anyone else was pitching their product the same way as AI companies are. Would you buy something if their only marketing pitch was: "You've got to get it now -- it's inevitable that you'll be using it at some point."?

I sure wouldn't.

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