it's creepy af

I hate it with a passion.

It has promise to help with many things and destroy many more things. Right now, it's wrong more than right and expensive. One thing I'm glad of is so many companies have fired so many people, they went full mask off cartoon villains. People know exactly who's evil and who's not. While it's devastating that so many people lost their income, we now know exactly who to never buy from.

The chatbots must die.

LLMs etc are very fascinating technology and if they had remained research projects and marginally promoted tools for niche uses, I would not have had any problems with them.

But no, technobros were like "oh this will make us a lot of money" and unleashed an unfathomable Hell on earth with unfathomable sociopolitical ramifications. Thanks.

I think it is amazing that techbrodudes managed to figure out how to automate the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

It’s amazing technology but people are using it and planning to use it in very stupid ways.

I think its yet another technology that will further empower the wealthy and disenfranchise the average citizen.
That said, interesting on a technical level lol.

So many people 1) think of AI as their unpaid "personal assistant" and at the same time 2) think of AI chatbots as being women. I really hope AI doesn't accidentally re-normalize the master/servant dynamic, and it may not, but it's something to watch out for in the coming years.

I work in a field (technical editing) that may be replaced by AI bosses overvaluing AI, but at the moment, my job is more necessary than ever because all my writers now insist on sending me slop instead of actually doing their jobs.

Yes, exactly! I don't think AI is very hard to learn; I don't think people who abstain from it "will fall behind" in their lives and careers. Wow, use a plain-language interface instead of the more complex boolean, then add specificity to the query and hope it doesn't hallucinate. So hard. So complex. You're so smart, AI bros. /s

source?

I think it can can be a great tool to do great things with. I also think most people never think about the consequences of their actions and make stupid decisions with it. And I think it's a terrible idea for most kids and teens. They need to first learn to think and problem solve for themselves before they have access to AI.

It's Dotcom mark2

It has the capacity to change the world - and will become a fundamental part of life. But not in its current state; it's overblown, overhyped and wildly misapplied. MBA bros got overinvested and overexcited and they're fucking us all up the arse with it. And they're causing a lot of damage as they go

I think it will be disruptive, but not because employers are replacing workers with AI (people are already realizing that can't be done effectively). AI requires a huge amount of change and investment from leadership specifically (redefining revenue models, operations, people development, etc.). My experience is that most leaders are unable/unwilling to put in this amount of effort. So all it will take is one business to come along, built around the technology, to completely disrupt an industry - and put their peers out of business. The job losses will be real, but it will be because of feckless leadership.

I have the AI voice set to male, so I think of men as my unpaid assistant. 😉

Agentic AI is more difficult to learn than the chat bot. And that's where the real value is - so expect to see more pressure there. People who refuse to learn that piece will struggle over time. Its like refusing to use a word processor when those first came out. Probably ok for a bit. Detrimental in the long run.

It's a fascinating technology that I like to tinker with running locally to do tedious things like updating services in my homelab or writing small one-off personal scripts for getting things done.

Most of the other use cases, they fall short hard. They're not competent at writing code, they can just reasonably approximate something that seems plausible as a solution. They have no taste or creative freedom, so everything they produce is just ... Meh.

Here you go!

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00779-024-01830-8#Sec12

2.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349711573_The_most_human_bot_Female_gendering_increases_humanness_perceptions_of_bots_and_acceptance_of_AI

3.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385046331_He_or_she_Impact_of_gender's_well-being_chatbots_on_user_perceptions_and_intentions_a_study_of_agency_communality_and_trust

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337403025_Gender_Bias_in_Chatbot_Design

2. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-ai-bots-and-voice-assistants-reinforce-gender-bias/

3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19212-2#Sec19

4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949882126000757#sec4

5. https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/21003

9.https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S1757581825000131#sec002.4.7

1. https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol30/iss2/4/

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2444569X25002239

3. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10778012251397966

4. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/dcc80056-89bb-48ae-b45f-975d4aea957f/content

5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-026-01049-8

I don't really agree, at least for the people using agentic AI at the end-user level and not programming the models, and think the difficulty of agentic AI gets exaggerated as well. It's the same concepts on a wider scale. Multistage and automated operations in software predate AI in one way or another and people have adapted fine, to the extent where it will take a relatively small amount of professional development to catch up if needed.

Edit: Sorry, didn't mean to spam this comment! Having site issues at the moment. Will delete the redundant comments when I can.

I think it should always be written in lowercase as "ai" to distinguish it from people named Albert. People like Weird Al Yankovic deserve the dignity of never being conflated with this insidious intangible sickness slowly overtaking our world & jobs & sanity.

I hate it with a burning passion. It causes irreparable climate harm, including self-hosted models (consider where they're trained); it infringes copyright (and they're destroying rare books to feed it‽‽‽); it's causing psychosis in some people, leading them to harm themselves and others; and it's destroying a lot of people's critical thinking skills (which I think is the goal: commodify intelligence, though maybe it's to replace the working-class itself).

Sorry for the massive block of text lol, I just really, really don't like it.

Oh, also (very anectdotal), it seems that on the Venn diagram of anti-fascist and anti-"AI", the anti-"AI" circle is almost entirely contained within the anti-fascist circle. Just an observation.

Disclaimer: machine learning is not the same as "AI" (LLMs, presented as beings capable of thought). I think ML has a lot of interesting applications, and I'm actually rather fascinated by it.

Hear, hear! I did not realise that we were comrades in this matter, and I feel much relieved to know that I am not alone.

I don't think that's fair. AI always apologizes and admits it gave me bad information.

It's not good.

Woops, I think my point got lost in my pre coffee thoughts: People are going to have to learn how to build agents at the personal and team levels - being an end user won't be enough. Those that refuse to learn, will put their jobs at risk (eventually).

The first agent I built was a romance movie plot generator. Are you saying that wasn't a great use of the technology? 😉

Unless companies make bespoke software tools or SaaS programs for different industries that use agentic AI, which I think is likely since there are many industry-specific software tools made externally in B2B contexts, AI and predating AI. There's already paid AI tools everywhere of debateable levels of value and usefulness.

Non-programmer employees being expected to build agents may happen, but there's too much of a value proposition for external companies to forgo it. And there's also a possibility of companies bringing in contract programmers who develop those agents, or using in-house IT departments.

We're currently in a really awkward early adoption phase where end-users are being given open-ended LLM and agent tools to just play around with, and with or without a crash, I do see the industry shift toward better software integration where the end-users won't have to adopt this makeshift developer role. And then the adjustment period would be simple as AI tools start to look more like regular software that's quick to pick up with minimal risk of skills gaps or being left behind.

I could be wrong, of course, but that's basically my read on the situation.

Well done on the resources! Do you have access to academic journals?

And thank you for challenging me on this. If you're right, there are definitely possible futures to be prepared for.

Sadly, no. I tried to pull sources that had full text, but there were a few where that was not the case.

One of the things I miss most from college was free and universal access to this stuff.

That one sounds decent. Of course I mean stuff like "automatically screen job applications"...

I despise ai and refuse to use them. They ruin everything they touch. I can't use the internet to learn things anymore without filtering by date to exclude post 2023 results. The concept of truth, meaning, or what is real is being degraded by the presence of ai.

As a big fan of consent, I have many concerns with how ai companies get their training data.

I'm delighted to see how passionate, researched, and eloquent so many of you are on this topic.

I think that's a really important distinction. It's a fast moving field as well and right now we're early on. It has a lot of incredible applications that could really help people, so I really dont think it should be written off.

I do have a chief of staff agent. It tells me what work to do when, which is genuinely helpful.

Oh my goodness yes. I recommend both stockpiling toilet paper and learning how to build agents. That way you won't be wrong. 😉

Yeah canbe tricky!

Agentic AI is interesting because it has the opportunity to create competitive advantage that other companies cannot replicate. And that's the promise. Yeah, you can pay someone to build a custom agent, but it's $50k+ plus maintenance for one agent - and it just doesn't scale. It's way cheaper to train up your team who can build many agents.

Companies that delay or avoid training their teams are in for a bad surprise when a new company built around the technology enters the market. It will be one an existential problem that will result in job loss (think Amazon vs brick and mortar).

My general recommendation for workers is to get trained up on agent building - then go get a job at a company investing in their people, because those are the places most likely to survive.

Caveats: I work in software development, its a small company and I am the head of our development dept. I was the one who championed AI use at my company. I trained our (Gen X aged) engineering team on how to use Claude code. I set up the Claude code guardrails for our internal systems.

It's a force multiplier, not a replacement for a person. If you already know the stuff you are using it for, and you already have a structure in place for QA and deployments, it can help you complete tasks much faster. The log analysis and code building alone has completely changed my job. We did not lay anyone off due to our AI adoption at our company and we are completing jobs much faster and we are accepting jobs we could not have worked on previously due to programming language limitations, by using it as a tool in an already existing workflow. And most importantly, we are not accumulating more tech debt by using AI, because we already have structure in place to prevent the build up of tech debt. We have actually started chipping away at some of the super old debt we've been putting off.

We only use AI in the development and IT depts of our company, we don't use AI for design or use it customer service which is one of the things I personally hate AI being used for.

That being said, since we adopted AI use, my workload has increased, because its a force multiplier the expectation is that we can deliver faster, which is not always the case, but now its a bit harder to argue it, especially with sales guys who don't even understand the product they are selling let alone how the development cycle works.

Personally, I used AI to help me do some painful long data migrations I have been putting off because they were going to be so long and painful. I also used it to build some reference quick reference tools for games I play. I don't use it for anything other than code work.

Politically, I think it needs to be rained in and regulations put in place for both the hardware for building data centers shitting up the environment and the software and its sycophantic behavior that twists people in to AI psychosis. I think exposure to AI is making people stupid and kids today are at risk of not developing the critical thinking skills they need due to outsourcing all thought to AI. Although, we cannot close Pandora's box now, but I like to see us do something to prevent the monsters in it from running amok. I understand the hypocrisy in my AI use and my stance on AI and the environment.

EDIT: Downvoting me isn't going to change how I feel about AI.

Since a lot of people already covered my opinions, I'll toss in my unique experience with AI.

A buddy of mine made up a program where users can create and access uncensored AI chatbots. They come complete with Pictures (AI art,) Voices (created based on uploaded samples,) and a personality you could write yourself in plain language.

Years ago this blew my mind. If I got stuck on writers block I could create a character and ask it questions about its motivations and next steps. Harmless, right? No, not really, but that's not my point.

That was until my friend asked me to help moderate the app and I saw what everyone else was using it for. Now, I'm not here to kinkshame, everyone should be able to get off however they want as long as it hurts no one, but I can't help but imagine how brains are getting re-wired by these sycophantic porn fantasy bots, especially the ones made to be demeaned and subjugated. And that's not to mention the child porn.

I still moderate the app because we report users trying to create CSAM to their ISPs and in that way, hopefully, I'm doing some good. But it's not hard to make and run local AI, so I wonder how much more of it is out there.

conflicted. everytime i want to be fully against it, i’m faced with genuinely good use cases.

like the meta spy glasses are actually very useful for someone who’s visually impaired. they can describe stuff and read text to you, and the “be my eyes” thing is a great idea.

DEFINITELY doesn’t need to just exist as a product that anyone can buy tho.

worst fucking shit ever, and anyone who uses it is dead to me.

Sounds like the use of LLMs in translation that has been going on since a couple of decades. It can speed up the process - it doesn't replace translators.

It's funny that they tried, 2-3 years ago, introduce AI to the translation industry as something different than the machine translation (MT) we were already using. The scam worked for a while - the industry suddenly was completely dead, I went for manual labour so I could eat, while translation agencies grappled with making the shitrobot behave like a professional linguist, getting shit results obviously. Now they've come to the conclusion that AI is just a worse version of the good old MT and translation jobs have started to reappear like mushrooms after the rain.

I do expect the same to happen in the software industry. Once CEOs have understood that AI isn't much better than the already existing predictive typing things will return to normal.

You can find useful applications for nearly everything, but that is not how it's being used 99 % of the time. In the example of the Meta lenses, I guarantee you the majority of people who buy those are not doing so as an a11y tool.

If our society wasn't being strip mined for profit by fascists, this would be a different discussion

I left tech this year after 10+ accomplished years in industry because AI has perverted it to a disgusting degree. I still have personal projects and try to maintain professional engineering standards, but refuse to let AI touch any of my stuff.

I hope those CEOs realize that if they want their old workers to return, they're going to have to offer a looooooot more money

Looking at it now, it's obviously very bad, but I remember being very fascinated with GPT2 because it was amusingly bad, but I was also very naïve. I didn't understand just how bad ai is and how much worse it would become.

I hate to say it, but I have occasionally used it for programming and it definitely made me a worse programmer. Earlier this year I stopped using it completely and I can tell that I've been getting better. I keep hearing people say they're using ai "responsibly" to catch bugs and speed up tedious tasks and I thought that's what I was doing too until I stopped using it and realized just how much of my thinking I had surrendered over to the machine.

🤣

Of course all this will collapse when the bills come due and people have to pay the actual cost of LLM "tokens". As users of Microsoft's Copilot found out not long ago.

I mean, you can put caps on token usage at the user level. Also, you can test while building so you have an estimated cost per run.

When you look at the costs involved, putting caps on means you run out of tokens in your first morning of use per month.

The sticker shock for the Copilot users was a couple orders of magnitude.