📄 Reading the Pivot to AI blog.

This is high-grade fodder for those of us who harbour a significant amount scepticism for the recent boom in AI, especially of the generative type.

Don’t get me wrong, when this stuff works it can seem like magic, and I do use it in small doses many days. But it really doesn’t need to be shoved into every vaguely-digital product, forced down every throat, and used as a threat to the job security of any folk who might well actually be doing their job way better than a robot brain can - even when the AI often exists only because the companies involved took-without-asking the work of the human workers concerned in the first place. Of course improving quality of output isn’t the real reason people are being “replaced”.

The blog reminds me a bit of Molly White’s justly iconic Web 3 Is Going Just Great blog. But instead of incessant reports on the pointlessness, scamminess and criminality that appears to be infused into the soul of blockchain-world, here we see frequent examples of where we’re burning natural resources and consuming vast amounts of money and compute on AI rather than crypto in the name of getting something rather worse than what we had before.

Sample quote from the most recent post:

The main use case for LLMs is writing text nobody wanted to read. The other use case is summarizing text nobody wanted to read.