I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group.
Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results.
I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something.
Gone
For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt.
And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with
Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anything." Without any sense of ownership or attachment whatsoever. If someone DMCA'ed one of my GitHub projects and made me take it down, I'd be pissed. But if someone DMCA'ed an AI-coded thinggy, I'd probably delete the repo and never think about it again in my life.
I kind of have a process with Suno, where I have Claude or a different model generate lyrics for me, then I generate a song, and tweak the lyrics when they sound off, eventually I have a song that's more "me" than "Claude" with lyrics that make sense, but sometimes Claude has some petty sleek lyrics. I mostly do this for fun, but I enjoy doing it a lot.
On that same spirit, Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well. I always loved music, and used to make beats with FL Studio (which was shunned by people much like AI for ages) and even within the Suno community I see people shunning others if they have AI writing lyrics for them, its really weird to me. I do feel weird if I try to make Suno make songs I personally cannot 100% relate to, or experiences I've never been close to living through, like I love gangsta rap, I would never feel comfortable making and releasing gangsta rap since it doesn't define who I was.
It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to spend the evening coming up with funny things to say with your friends, then you shouldn't use AI. If your goal is to finish the t-shirts so that you can move on to the next topic in organizing a very complex event like a marathon, then perhaps you should use tools. Using AI tools isn't a problem. It's lack of care and thoughtlessness. That is the problem. That's always been the problem. AI didn't create it, nor is it making it worse.
In general, AI is as impactful as any technology can be. However, for those of us who like to enjoy the process (the act of gathering the info, structuring them and editing them), whether it be writing code, or writing in general, there's a joy in the act of building - straight up finished pieces of work handed over to you, robs you of this space to think and formulate your own views.
I do agree on the "existential crisis" part of it. At work, every time I see someone sign-off of something AI generated without much edits, I feel this fear that we're on to slippery slope where there's no turning back.
I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction.
At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me.
We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery.
Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one.
Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue.
AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like.
Your shirt? Go to town! Draw something yourself and let AI patch up some rough edges. Do some style transfer. Or don’t use it. That’s still an option. As you said it is hard to create with AI without losing your soul but that’s not inherent to the tech. It’s a massive skill and tooling issue.
Instead of choosing between “do it fully myself” and “let someone else do it” you get a slider now. You get to pick! How awesome is that?
I salute your introspection. In my mind, it is better than the alternative cope.
My wife has an ongoing frustration with a colleague who has adopted the mindset, "I reviewed it, so I wrote it". I guess he must sleep well at night, and probably votes in the "AI gives me superpowers bloc", but it is pretty apparent he doesn't really review it much either, because it is full of flaws and absurdity.
"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."
AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.
Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.
On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.
After a year I could no longer write for shit.
Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.
>Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
> Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise
I'd like for it to be a choice. AI is injected into search now, when you install vscode they have a prompt input sitting there and they nudge you to use it. Of course you can opt out of this stuff but it has become the default.
As someone teaching their nephew how to code i really want him to struggle and exercise his problem solving skills instead of having every touchpoint offer him an instant answer.
Every new technology promises to fundamentally change learning, education, personal growth and ends up being used in the laziest way by 99% of people. Radio, TV, internet, now AI. Eating right and exercise or GLP1?
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
Isn't the point of the poem that you should, instead, ask a human? You'll get sidetracked and drawn into unrelated conversations, sure, but that's what it means being human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?
This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.
I really don't understand taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."
>If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
This was the optimistic view of the Internet. That we would be able to stay in touch with friends and families over vast distances. That we would be able to develop new relationships with people over shared interests not limited to geographical proximity. That we would be able to collaborate to create new things.
The reality was replacing human interaction with addiction to an algorithmic feed and endless hours of mindless consumption and very little creation and rapidly deteriorating mental health.
It is good to be skeptical of similar grandiose claims about AI, and consider what the reality might turn out to be.
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
Part of this is the changes wrought by the Internet already. At one point, almost nobody got into fly fishing out of an idiopathic urge to capture little trouts.
I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.
The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.
> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
So much to unpack here!
First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.
The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.
Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.
Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)
And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.
You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.
Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Mot everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.
Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug.
You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.
I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.
>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.
So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.
Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.
Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.
Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.
Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.
And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.
Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.
AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
> they don't understand it and therefore they fear it
I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.
I was thinking the other day about animals in their natural habitat versus in captivity. Remove a gorilla from its jungle and stick it in a small zoo enclosure and it tends to go insane at worst, at best depression sets in. With orcas their fin flops over and even when released back into the wild it never returns to form, we can only guess what happens to them psychologically. Humans in supermax prisons exhibit the same issues.
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.
I feel the same too. And I believe there is much more complexity in the question "will this be good for society overall" than technologists can apprehend. For example even though I recognize some benefits to social media, I'd have a hard time arguing that on a societal level it's not a huge net negative. Overall, people are more divided, more angry, depressed, egotistical because of social media and the attention economy. And ultimately, as one of my previous boss would say "it's all about people".
A great many today find themselves surrounded by people staring at phones, who express irritation any time they are asked to look up.
I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act.
It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.
The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human.
At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
> At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
Look. I am a massive fan of the janky old manually created website. <marquee> will never die and it is hilarious that browsers will have to retain the feature for years to come.
But "the blog was generated by a machine" isn't the problem with Substack. "Machine Generated" blog sites have been around ever since blogs went big. Blogspot and Wordpress were practically a duopoly in the peak days of blogging. The problem with Substack is two (really, only the latter):
1) It's gotten the Post-Zuckerberg "everything must follow our company letterhead" disease. That's not a substack exclusive problem and designers need to be bullied harder for it.
2) It's the nazi bar where all the nazi blogs are. This one is the actual reason you should not be using substack.
The "If it's on substack, it's not a real blog, it's just sparkling page bloat" take is a little strained for me.
The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content, and works on most people's devices. I would rather have read this on substack, than the author get frustrated at having to learn how to publish pages by hand and give up.
Maybe we just need a better alternative to substack if that's the problem.
This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now.
When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”
Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.
I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.
The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.
Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.
I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.
Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.
I’m still very conflicted about it.
I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.
I don't know if I would put recipes in the same 'real' stuff category as writing. I am sure celebrity cookbooks have been regurgitating the same recipes with slight modifications for decades now. What is the difference between buying and following Reese Witherspoon's cookbook and just asking an LLM?
It is not like either is putting your apron on and mixing the ingredients.
To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!
> Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
Hasn't it always been the case that technology reduces the contact with other people? Now with cars we don't need to sit next to others on trains, we don't need to ask pedestrians for directions thanks to GPS etc.
Facebook, sure, but Uber and AirBNB? I don't see how Uber has displaced some community function. AirBNB is arguably destructive to communities, but again how was community fulfilling the need it attempts to address?
Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.
Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.
Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.
How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...
Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...
And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.
You're being intentionally intellectually dishonest with your take here and this an absurd whataboutism. The author isn't telling people to stop using AI for work, coding tasks, etc he's saying to stop using it as a replacement for human interaction.
Anecdotally, I've seen the effects that people delegating their executive functions to AI have had and the damage is quick and harrowing
I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.
But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player.
I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.
OK, but you could write the same thing as "Please read books". Many times I have learned things from reading I could have learned, e.g., from a crotchety old neighbor in return for interacting with him.
If AI is not that special, just a tool, then treat it as such.
If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?
I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.
It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.
I don't see anything over-dramatic. He's writing about a real problem affecting real people, and he's not exaggerating. Just because you believe you are balancing things properly doesn't mean everybody should just shut up about it.
The problem is that we have incentivized efficiency over authenticity even in our inter-personal relationships. It's a systemic issue. It makes it very hard for most of us to resist the sirens of "let me just rephrase this important message so that it sounds more elegant/well-written/relevant/...". In the current cultural and societal context you need to swim against the current to _not_ be using AI for everything. So I don't think this is over-dramatization. Overall, on a societal level, we truly are moving in a direction where we are robbing ourselves of real, authentic moments by using AI because it's "convenient/efficient/easy/etc...". Even at work.
I think its fascinating how many people in tech think there's a clearly defined and agreed upon "right way" of using this technology that everyone knows and abides by. Paul Graham, for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457
It's like we memory holed the last 20 years of social media that was supposed to be all upside; just democratic, global connectionism, empowerment, etc. I have too much exposure to people using AI in various, even sometimes subtle "wrong ways" to really agree.
The same predictable comment comes up whenever there is a piece that isn't sanitized, blunted technical documentation. Why write long form literary pieces that take effort to digest when you can get a cliffs note. Why write poetry when you can write a tweet. Why have anything resembling anything with humanity when there are summaries and machine written slop.
This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.
I'd have thought people that are technologists at heart would have understood the benefit of the next Industrial Revolution but all anyone wants to do is whine about it.
After skimming through this, I want to write a post about how others are living their lives wrong. It must really feel great to be right about things on the internet. How do I start? I guess I'll just ask AI ...
I am truly envious of people who have the luxury of a supportive environment that allows them to write a post like this.
For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete.
I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming.
It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.
> fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
That's not necessarily because of AI. The trend has been going downward for some time, anyway.
Outsourcing has drawbacks; usually ones that aren't apparent, until it has been in place for a while (I won't go into what they are, because this isn't really the proper venue, and I don't feel like arguing). I think that many companies have been learning about these drawbacks, in the last few years.
But AI is likely to impact some (not all) jobs that would normally be offshored.
Though I deeply agree with this sentiment, the author fails to address that there can be multiple goals to an action. And writing can be for art or communication or both but not always both, and removing the art from communication doesn’t destroy its ability to communicate.
I've been pondering the question: "What does it mean to live well with AI?"
We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.
Even though I spent the majority of my work day with computers, my fascination with them starts and stops on understanding how they work. Aside from that, they’re only utilitarian. What I really like to do is grab a nice book, put on some nice album to listen too, and enjoy a quiet night with my SO. If not for the fact that it’s easier to get books and music in digital format where I live, I’d spend even less time with computers.
Everything old is good and everything new is evil. The irony of this being posted online in written form is lost on the author. Socrates would probably have an aneurysm.
I found this quite cringy and an attempt at pulling at one's heartstrings due to the lack of a strong argumentation.
I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.
If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.
The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.
I thought I'm jaded, and a bit of a poet myself, and already sufficiently "upset" by several things, but this still made me so profoundly sad, and at the same time incredibly proud of the author and hopeful of being human. And they don't cancel each other out. It's a very strong, odd mixture. This is with me now, and I hope it'll linger.
I don't have anything intelligent to say really. This poem made me go "Fuck yeah, poetry! Humans!!", and I'm grateful to the author, the submitter, and the people who upvoted it, so that I ended up reading it.
Be sure to use a mobile phone when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not come in person to
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals
I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them.
People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me.
I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.
I find these kinds of posts to be elitist and self-important. They draw a false dichotomy between tool use and lifestyle. I'm glad the poster has a lifestyle that works for them personally. This post really has nothing to do with AI. It's really just saying, spend more time talking to the people in your life. It seems to be written for the purposes of gaining clicks and engagement by using the phrase AI.
I love the trend of using AI to generate flyers/advertisements for everything: family reunion, restaurant, yard sale...
The shit all looks the same. Every taco truck in town uses the same crappy style advertisements, all the food looks the same (AI tacos, not pictures of actual food...)
I liked small business advertisements better when it was full of crappy fonts, clashing color choices, horrifying JPEG artifacts and all.
As someone who uses AI constantly - mandated at work. I fucking hate it. I hate what it makes me become: a mall cop of creativity. Endlessly directing little agents with feigned authority.
I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology.
I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.
Misses the mark IMO. You can already do all of these things. Just do them. As long as I get to fire half of my employees and you hit the token quota it’s all good.
I sometimes wonder if these same people pushing AI onto devs would ask the same of their lawyers and accountants.
If someone hasn't gotten the memo yet, writing code got that serious at least a decade ago when web ate the world and chrome had won the web. Probably even earlier for certain industries like financial institutions.
This isn't just about "human imperfections" or something else sentimental. It's the fact that quality really does matter in a huge number of situations and the consequences are not forgiving in the slightest.
I really dislike the condescending tone of the person who thinks they discovered the secret of happiness, but instead of distilling their wisdom for joy chooses to shame others in a passive aggressive poem.
Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?
Exactly. I have children too you know. In fact we had a blast last time with my five year old shouting nonsense at Suno and having it make some cool songs out of it. Does it make me less human? It’s all about how you choose to use the technology
I asked Claude what he thinks about this blog post and was surprised by the level of self awareness (you cant call it like that but I dont have better word)
I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.
I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.
I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.
Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased
When your router is not working, please use AI. Don't call your friend who is "good with computers" have him drop everything he's doing and have him trouble shoot the problem for you over the phone.
This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.
I had this moment when we designed shirts for the marathon we ran as a group. Instead of Brainstorming something funny, we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results.
I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone
For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with
Ever since I started experimenting with AI coding, I've totally lost that feeling of accomplishment. For projects I actually developed by typing in the code, it feels like I actually did something--like here's something I built and am responsible for bringing into the world. When I finish an AI-built project, I feel...nothing. Just that empty: "Code now exists where it didn't exist before, but I didn't really do anything." Without any sense of ownership or attachment whatsoever. If someone DMCA'ed one of my GitHub projects and made me take it down, I'd be pissed. But if someone DMCA'ed an AI-coded thinggy, I'd probably delete the repo and never think about it again in my life.
I kind of have a process with Suno, where I have Claude or a different model generate lyrics for me, then I generate a song, and tweak the lyrics when they sound off, eventually I have a song that's more "me" than "Claude" with lyrics that make sense, but sometimes Claude has some petty sleek lyrics. I mostly do this for fun, but I enjoy doing it a lot.
On that same spirit, Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well. I always loved music, and used to make beats with FL Studio (which was shunned by people much like AI for ages) and even within the Suno community I see people shunning others if they have AI writing lyrics for them, its really weird to me. I do feel weird if I try to make Suno make songs I personally cannot 100% relate to, or experiences I've never been close to living through, like I love gangsta rap, I would never feel comfortable making and releasing gangsta rap since it doesn't define who I was.
It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to spend the evening coming up with funny things to say with your friends, then you shouldn't use AI. If your goal is to finish the t-shirts so that you can move on to the next topic in organizing a very complex event like a marathon, then perhaps you should use tools. Using AI tools isn't a problem. It's lack of care and thoughtlessness. That is the problem. That's always been the problem. AI didn't create it, nor is it making it worse.
In general, AI is as impactful as any technology can be. However, for those of us who like to enjoy the process (the act of gathering the info, structuring them and editing them), whether it be writing code, or writing in general, there's a joy in the act of building - straight up finished pieces of work handed over to you, robs you of this space to think and formulate your own views.
I do agree on the "existential crisis" part of it. At work, every time I see someone sign-off of something AI generated without much edits, I feel this fear that we're on to slippery slope where there's no turning back.
The only reason to put a funny slogan on a shirt is as a reminder of an in joke or the shared process of coming up with the slogan.
It's like we no longer understand the purpose of language itself: to get thoughts out of our head and share them with other people.
We need to invent new reasons to be together.
I love people, I love spending time with them. Even though I am married, a parent, and living near to several relatives I still get lonely because of a lack of some forms of interaction.
At the same time, the form of interaction I'm missing is not "debating which font to use on a t shirt." I'm glad a robot can do that for me.
We need some genuine human creativity (or hell, use an AI if it gives you a good answer) for ways to get people to interact in joyful ways rather than over shared drudgery.
Let's go running together and let the computer make a t shirt to commemorate it.
Endless hours of putting soul into your shirt? I mean, good for you, but it sounds like your team wasn’t so stoked about that as you are. So I’m not sure you can blame AI for that one.
Give it time. This is a skill (and tooling) issue.
AI enables so goddamn much creativity. You literally don’t know what to do with it, but once society adapts and we all calm TF down we are free to create in whatever capacity we like.
Your shirt? Go to town! Draw something yourself and let AI patch up some rough edges. Do some style transfer. Or don’t use it. That’s still an option. As you said it is hard to create with AI without losing your soul but that’s not inherent to the tech. It’s a massive skill and tooling issue.
Instead of choosing between “do it fully myself” and “let someone else do it” you get a slider now. You get to pick! How awesome is that?
> ... we just prompted ChatGPT and chose one of the results ...
Notice how the blogger simply calls it "Chat".
I salute your introspection. In my mind, it is better than the alternative cope.
My wife has an ongoing frustration with a colleague who has adopted the mindset, "I reviewed it, so I wrote it". I guess he must sleep well at night, and probably votes in the "AI gives me superpowers bloc", but it is pretty apparent he doesn't really review it much either, because it is full of flaws and absurdity.
> so I had some kind of existential crisis
realization was that you had been generating slop all this while before ai and somehow convinced yourself that it was original and human ?
I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70) from a year ago.
"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."
AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.
Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.
On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.
After a year I could no longer write for shit.
Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.
Now I don't even write near a computer.
>Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.
> Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise
I'd like for it to be a choice. AI is injected into search now, when you install vscode they have a prompt input sitting there and they nudge you to use it. Of course you can opt out of this stuff but it has become the default.
As someone teaching their nephew how to code i really want him to struggle and exercise his problem solving skills instead of having every touchpoint offer him an instant answer.
Every new technology promises to fundamentally change learning, education, personal growth and ends up being used in the laziest way by 99% of people. Radio, TV, internet, now AI. Eating right and exercise or GLP1?
I agree with the sentiment, however, by definition most people will not follow your advice.
> So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.
Isn't the point of the poem that you should, instead, ask a human? You'll get sidetracked and drawn into unrelated conversations, sure, but that's what it means being human. Trying to optimize these distractions away means you deprive yourself from human interactions. And why optimize anyway, what's the end goal?
That's my take from the poem, anyway.
This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.
I really don't understand taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."
>If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I really don't understand the need to torture alternate meanings out of the writing of people we don't agree with. Nothing in the author's writing even comes close to implying what you're suggesting here.
This was the optimistic view of the Internet. That we would be able to stay in touch with friends and families over vast distances. That we would be able to develop new relationships with people over shared interests not limited to geographical proximity. That we would be able to collaborate to create new things.
The reality was replacing human interaction with addiction to an algorithmic feed and endless hours of mindless consumption and very little creation and rapidly deteriorating mental health.
It is good to be skeptical of similar grandiose claims about AI, and consider what the reality might turn out to be.
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Didn't that guy start his channel because he didn't have a father growing up? Seems like important context.
Part of this is the changes wrought by the Internet already. At one point, almost nobody got into fly fishing out of an idiopathic urge to capture little trouts.
I got into fishing because my neighbor liked to take his kids out and I came with. Then I ran into an old man on a lake who could do all sorts of wild casting techniques (through fly fishing) and who explained to me his scientific approach to catching fish. It sounded very interesting when he spoke about it.
The way of sharing information has been upgraded, but the way of forming communities has not. The people who want to catch trout are very well served by modern tools, but the people who wanted an occasion to talk to others in a quiet outdoor space are not.
> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
So much to unpack here!
First, one of terrible contemporary social fallacies that AI's convenience reinforces is that your fly fishing questions are urgent. Web search first cultured this impulse, and smartphones first amplified it, going so far as to convince people to interrupt real social interactions to go look up some insignicant trivia on their phone, but AI threatens to cement it.
The occasions on which you need a quick answer, let alone an unreliable one from the internet or an AI chatbot, are vanishingly rare.
Truly. If you find that inconceible, you're living in some kind of frantic alarm state and may want to check in on yourself before the stress and anxiety takes its inevitable toll on your health.
Second, the answers to your fly gishing questions are still within reach without AI. AI -- in tgat role -- is just a shitty aggregator and paraphraser. What answers it has are better and more humanely available by calling/emailing an outfitter (they'd love to help!), reaching through your friend network to deeper nodes (people love to share their comnection!), or by finding one of the dozens of online communities for the topic and engaging with a human there (that's why they gather there! To discuss these things!)
And all of the above applies to pretty much every topic besides the most urgent medical emergency (for which you should call an emergency dispatcher or teledoc service!), not just fly fishing.
You underestimate how easy it is to get someone who's into fly fishing to talk about fly fishing. You don't need to have known them for more than thirty seconds.
Even NYC has a fishing meetup group with over 1000 members.
> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
Consider the ways this actually would happen but a mere 3-5 years ago.
You would Google search for information about fly-fishing and find:
* Enthusiast websites & blogs * Enthusiast forums * Enthusiast YouTube & other social media
The source might not literally be your dad or your friend, but you would still connect with real people.
Go to a store that sells fly fishing equipment and talk to a customer or a staff. You may as well end up with a new friend.
> This makes me think about that "Dad, how do I?" YouTube channel that made headlines a few years back. People seem to be fine with such a thing existing, they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Mot everyone has a father to ask. His own family were abandoned by their father when he was 14 and his sister was 9. People die. Some people have abusive or neglectful parents.
Not every dad is good at everything.
> If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?
I know, right? The author clearly wants you to starve to death for the lack of a friend to teach you to fish
Eh, the poem doesn't suggest technology isn't ever useful. It's highlighting that the inefficiency of human relationship is a feature, not a bug.
You might not have a friend who is into fly-fishing, but surely you know somebody into SOMETHING you could ask about. Maybe that's less efficient, maybe it's less direct. But our whole reason for existing, all of the stuff that gives life meaning- it requires each other, and technology is getting dangerously close to replacing relationships altogether.
I don't think this is meant to guilt you for using tech, but it is totally a wake up call to remembering WHY we fly fish and go to weddings and write memoirs and so on.
Way to miss the point, there.
>they don't seem to be lamenting that people might go to that channel instead of asking their own fathers.
Much of the anti-AI sentiment has this sort of false dichotomy as its foundation. An imagination that the alternative to AI is the purest form of manual labour in some sort of idealized, bucolic form, filled with heartfelt, purposeful, sincere human connection.
So every time I'm thinking about what to make with the ingredients I have, I should text someone who cooks (I cook, so this is a hypothetical)? What a ridiculous canard, and absolutely no one would appreciate that. I can enjoy human contact without inventing ridiculous justifications.
Further, to quote from Unlearning Economics, everything already was AI [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg], at least in the demonized way that people use that phrase.
Wedding speeches? Overwhelmingly cliche bullshit, and if you've been to a number of weddings it starts to get incredible how blatant this is. The whole manner of "genres" of music, art, and so on, is everyone copying each other and mimicking styles.
Even the recurring "I can spot AI websites!" nonsense, as if everyone wasn't already copy/pasting the trend du jour.
Even programming, this site is stuffed with "I lament the loss of the craft" pearl clutching articles daily, yet most of you are terrible programmers. I mean this as nicely as I can. It's astonishing seeing the actual state of the industry and hearing people imagining the world's most skillful, conscientious, thoughtful developer as the only alternative to AI assistance. It's rather amazing.
And long before AI people were largely just duct-taping together whatever libraries they found mentioned in a StackOverflow post.
Is it possible to hand craft better creations? Absolutely. Was that the norm pre-LLM? LOL, not even remotely. People were churning out enormous volumes of garbage, in every field.
AI isn't the reason people aren't making "human connections", and the foundation of the article is perverse.
Beautiful piece.
I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.
> they don't understand it and therefore they fear it
I feel this whenever discussion of consciousness comes up. Even though consciousness is not well understood at all (e.g. no scientific progress whatsoever on the "hard problem"), some people would rather say "it's just molecules and we don't have free will, we don't really exist, it's all an illusion, science will reduce it eventually, etc. etc." It baffles me that some people would rather contradict their very experience and declare that they don't exist! Rather than admit there's something that may be impossible to understand.
I was thinking the other day about animals in their natural habitat versus in captivity. Remove a gorilla from its jungle and stick it in a small zoo enclosure and it tends to go insane at worst, at best depression sets in. With orcas their fin flops over and even when released back into the wild it never returns to form, we can only guess what happens to them psychologically. Humans in supermax prisons exhibit the same issues.
I think we're seeing some of this with people today due to doom scrolling and sedentary isolated lifestyles our technology is creating. AI is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for some as they genuinely treat these chatbots like they are friends and confidants and lose human connections to the real world.
Just look at how people behave these days, it's hard not to notice the widespread mental illness epidemic that has set in and seems to get worse daily. We've created little prisons for ourselves and locked the door. We're losing human connection in real time almost like people are willingly submitting themselves to the Matrix.
I feel the same too. And I believe there is much more complexity in the question "will this be good for society overall" than technologists can apprehend. For example even though I recognize some benefits to social media, I'd have a hard time arguing that on a societal level it's not a huge net negative. Overall, people are more divided, more angry, depressed, egotistical because of social media and the attention economy. And ultimately, as one of my previous boss would say "it's all about people".
> "Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
-Max Frisch
People like that probably hate AI, given how inscrutable it is
The whole idea of trans-humanism, so beloved by VCs and the AI cult, seems borderline psychopathic to me.
A great many today find themselves surrounded by people staring at phones, who express irritation any time they are asked to look up.
I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act.
It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.
The poem is absolutely on point. Nobody wants to consume AI content, especially on the parts that should be all-human.
At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).
> At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.
Look. I am a massive fan of the janky old manually created website. <marquee> will never die and it is hilarious that browsers will have to retain the feature for years to come.
But "the blog was generated by a machine" isn't the problem with Substack. "Machine Generated" blog sites have been around ever since blogs went big. Blogspot and Wordpress were practically a duopoly in the peak days of blogging. The problem with Substack is two (really, only the latter):
1) It's gotten the Post-Zuckerberg "everything must follow our company letterhead" disease. That's not a substack exclusive problem and designers need to be bullied harder for it.
2) It's the nazi bar where all the nazi blogs are. This one is the actual reason you should not be using substack.
The "If it's on substack, it's not a real blog, it's just sparkling page bloat" take is a little strained for me.
The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content, and works on most people's devices. I would rather have read this on substack, than the author get frustrated at having to learn how to publish pages by hand and give up.
Maybe we just need a better alternative to substack if that's the problem.
Being great writer and capable of self-hosting your blog is a pretty unusual combination once you venture outside of the realm of tech.
> instead of a hand-crafted custom blog
I think this kind of elitism also misses the point.
This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now.
When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”
Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.
I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.
The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.
Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.
I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.
Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.
I’m still very conflicted about it.
I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.
Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?
I don't know if I would put recipes in the same 'real' stuff category as writing. I am sure celebrity cookbooks have been regurgitating the same recipes with slight modifications for decades now. What is the difference between buying and following Reese Witherspoon's cookbook and just asking an LLM? It is not like either is putting your apron on and mixing the ingredients.
To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!
Did you use AI to write this ? Feels like you did.
This does not just apply to AI. Uber, AirBNB, Facebook, etc. all basically serve as paid surrogates for what once was done by community.
Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
> Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.
Hasn't it always been the case that technology reduces the contact with other people? Now with cars we don't need to sit next to others on trains, we don't need to ask pedestrians for directions thanks to GPS etc.
Facebook, sure, but Uber and AirBNB? I don't see how Uber has displaced some community function. AirBNB is arguably destructive to communities, but again how was community fulfilling the need it attempts to address?
For the sake of it: Just do everything manually.
Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.
Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.
Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.
How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...
Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...
And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.
You're being intentionally intellectually dishonest with your take here and this an absurd whataboutism. The author isn't telling people to stop using AI for work, coding tasks, etc he's saying to stop using it as a replacement for human interaction.
Anecdotally, I've seen the effects that people delegating their executive functions to AI have had and the damage is quick and harrowing
Hypocrite didn't even use AI to write this lovely poem.
We're optimizing the soul out of being human.
I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.
But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player.
I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.
Beautifully expressed. Using AI to remove even more opportunities for human contact is a tragedy.
OK, but you could write the same thing as "Please read books". Many times I have learned things from reading I could have learned, e.g., from a crotchety old neighbor in return for interacting with him.
Yeah, but no one has a book on pretty much anything at their fingertips that you open and find a hopefully good chapter on what you wanted.
With books you needed to consult people on which book to read first.
If AI is not that special, just a tool, then treat it as such.
If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?
I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.
It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.
Or just use AI when it makes sense, and call your friends too. Why do we have to over-dramatize everything?
I don't see anything over-dramatic. He's writing about a real problem affecting real people, and he's not exaggerating. Just because you believe you are balancing things properly doesn't mean everybody should just shut up about it.
Many people don't know "when it makes sense". This highlights when it does not make sense.
The problem is that we have incentivized efficiency over authenticity even in our inter-personal relationships. It's a systemic issue. It makes it very hard for most of us to resist the sirens of "let me just rephrase this important message so that it sounds more elegant/well-written/relevant/...". In the current cultural and societal context you need to swim against the current to _not_ be using AI for everything. So I don't think this is over-dramatization. Overall, on a societal level, we truly are moving in a direction where we are robbing ourselves of real, authentic moments by using AI because it's "convenient/efficient/easy/etc...". Even at work.
I think its fascinating how many people in tech think there's a clearly defined and agreed upon "right way" of using this technology that everyone knows and abides by. Paul Graham, for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/2058871512451412457
It's like we memory holed the last 20 years of social media that was supposed to be all upside; just democratic, global connectionism, empowerment, etc. I have too much exposure to people using AI in various, even sometimes subtle "wrong ways" to really agree.
"Ten scenarios that I invented in which AI is making my life miserable."
The same predictable comment comes up whenever there is a piece that isn't sanitized, blunted technical documentation. Why write long form literary pieces that take effort to digest when you can get a cliffs note. Why write poetry when you can write a tweet. Why have anything resembling anything with humanity when there are summaries and machine written slop.
This sort of comment plays exactly into the thrust of the piece.
Or you could use AI to explain to you how you missed the point.
I'd have thought people that are technologists at heart would have understood the benefit of the next Industrial Revolution but all anyone wants to do is whine about it.
"Please use social media" would be equally apt.
Reminds me of that silly Adam Sandler movie Click (2006).
In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction.
But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?
This movie hit harder than my highest expectations from an Adam Sandler movie.
After skimming through this, I want to write a post about how others are living their lives wrong. It must really feel great to be right about things on the internet. How do I start? I guess I'll just ask AI ...
I am truly envious of people who have the luxury of a supportive environment that allows them to write a post like this.
For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete.
I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming.
It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.
I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India.
AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.
> fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.
That's not necessarily because of AI. The trend has been going downward for some time, anyway.
Outsourcing has drawbacks; usually ones that aren't apparent, until it has been in place for a while (I won't go into what they are, because this isn't really the proper venue, and I don't feel like arguing). I think that many companies have been learning about these drawbacks, in the last few years.
But AI is likely to impact some (not all) jobs that would normally be offshored.
Though I deeply agree with this sentiment, the author fails to address that there can be multiple goals to an action. And writing can be for art or communication or both but not always both, and removing the art from communication doesn’t destroy its ability to communicate.
I've been pondering the question: "What does it mean to live well with AI?"
We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.
Even though I spent the majority of my work day with computers, my fascination with them starts and stops on understanding how they work. Aside from that, they’re only utilitarian. What I really like to do is grab a nice book, put on some nice album to listen too, and enjoy a quiet night with my SO. If not for the fact that it’s easier to get books and music in digital format where I live, I’d spend even less time with computers.
Please use books.
Please use the internet.
Please use search engines.
Please use AI.
Everything old is good and everything new is evil. The irony of this being posted online in written form is lost on the author. Socrates would probably have an aneurysm.
I found this quite cringy and an attempt at pulling at one's heartstrings due to the lack of a strong argumentation.
I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.
If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.
The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.
Oh to be human!
This is really beautiful and tragic at the same time. Very well written.
I thought I'm jaded, and a bit of a poet myself, and already sufficiently "upset" by several things, but this still made me so profoundly sad, and at the same time incredibly proud of the author and hopeful of being human. And they don't cancel each other out. It's a very strong, odd mixture. This is with me now, and I hope it'll linger.
I don't have anything intelligent to say really. This poem made me go "Fuck yeah, poetry! Humans!!", and I'm grateful to the author, the submitter, and the people who upvoted it, so that I ended up reading it.
Be sure to use a mobile phone when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not come in person to your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals
You’ve either willfully ignored the point, or completely missed it as it flew over your head. AI wants to replace “your friend” completely.
You've missed the point. You're describing replacing a method of communication, the poem describes replacing a relationship.
I agree with this sentiment.
I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them.
People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me.
I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.
what is up with the formatting on this post? does substack not have wordwrap and the guy is using manual carriage returns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse
I find these kinds of posts to be elitist and self-important. They draw a false dichotomy between tool use and lifestyle. I'm glad the poster has a lifestyle that works for them personally. This post really has nothing to do with AI. It's really just saying, spend more time talking to the people in your life. It seems to be written for the purposes of gaining clicks and engagement by using the phrase AI.
Really beautiful piece.
Soulfully! AI just a tool. Person constantly uses the tool instead of itself is felt as a robot.
Choosing AI over human authenticity is a death sentence.
Beautiful poem. Well said and hard cutting
I love the trend of using AI to generate flyers/advertisements for everything: family reunion, restaurant, yard sale...
The shit all looks the same. Every taco truck in town uses the same crappy style advertisements, all the food looks the same (AI tacos, not pictures of actual food...)
I liked small business advertisements better when it was full of crappy fonts, clashing color choices, horrifying JPEG artifacts and all.
As someone who uses AI constantly - mandated at work. I fucking hate it. I hate what it makes me become: a mall cop of creativity. Endlessly directing little agents with feigned authority.
I found
the weird line breaks
extremely jarring.
But it was an interesting
article nevertheless.
I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology.
I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.
Misses the mark IMO. You can already do all of these things. Just do them. As long as I get to fire half of my employees and you hit the token quota it’s all good.
This is beautiful.
Wow, so powerful, I could barely type this comment with tears in my eyes.
OP should consider a side career in poetry.
Every interaction I've had with AI has been negative. It's just not very good.
I sometimes wonder if these same people pushing AI onto devs would ask the same of their lawyers and accountants.
If someone hasn't gotten the memo yet, writing code got that serious at least a decade ago when web ate the world and chrome had won the web. Probably even earlier for certain industries like financial institutions.
This isn't just about "human imperfections" or something else sentimental. It's the fact that quality really does matter in a huge number of situations and the consequences are not forgiving in the slightest.
Beautiful.
Thank you!
I really dislike the condescending tone of the person who thinks they discovered the secret of happiness, but instead of distilling their wisdom for joy chooses to shame others in a passive aggressive poem.
Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?
Exactly. I have children too you know. In fact we had a blast last time with my five year old shouting nonsense at Suno and having it make some cool songs out of it. Does it make me less human? It’s all about how you choose to use the technology
I asked Claude what he thinks about this blog post and was surprised by the level of self awareness (you cant call it like that but I dont have better word)
Meh, here's a haiku from gemini
> write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff
I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.
I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.
I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.
Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased
The author’s point was more nuanced than ‘tool bad’.
> thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.
It's a pretty big stretch to liken a ranking algorithm based entirely on direct, intentional human inputs to what most people understand to be "AI".
When your router is not working, please use AI. Don't call your friend who is "good with computers" have him drop everything he's doing and have him trouble shoot the problem for you over the phone.
This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.