I don't want anything your AI generates

Can you trust search results without AI summarization? They’re mostly SEO spam.

> The images it generates are, at best, a polished regression to the mean. If you want custom art, pay an artist.

Most visual art that people consume is polished regression to the mean. It’s designed for mass appeal, not originality.

> I want to talk to a person, not a chatbot. The chatbot wastes time while you wait for a person that can actually help.

Have you spoken to an outsourced call center in the last, oh, 20 years?

> I don't want music recommendations from something that can't appreciate or understand music. Human recommendations will always be better.

I’m old enough to remember hearing the same popular song 10 times a day on the local radio station because their rotation was designed for broad appeal to maximize ad sales, not to uncover new and interesting music for eager listeners.

> I don't want AI mediating social interactions that it cannot and does not understand (though it may appear to). If I'm weary of too much volume on any social platform or in any news feed, I'll cut back on what I'm following.

This one I agree with, but it’s been our reality for at least a decade now, not a new development.

> If you're having AI attend a meeting for you, it probably wasn't that important.

True

> If you're having AI write your email, it probably wasn't that important.

Even in important emails there is a lot of “copy”, and AI-generated copy is no worse than human-generated copy. It’s just copy.

> If it's screening job candidates for you, you're missing quality candidates.

If the alternative is keyword screening, I’ll take AI screening, thank you.

The middle road I've taken is that I use various consumer AI tools much the way I used the Macintosh or the Atari ST with MIDI when they showed up while I was in music school, as tools that may be used as augmentative technology to produce broader and deeper artistic output with different effort.

There's something mystical and magical about relinquishing complete control by taking a declarative approach to tools that require all manner of technique and tomfoolery to achieve transcendent results.

The jump from literate programming to metaprogramming to what we have in the autonomous spectrum is fascinating and worth the investment in time, assuming the output is artistic, creative, and philosophical.

AI is not free, but the price being paid comes at the cost of creators trying to create safe technology usable by anyone of any age.

Given the similarity to selling contraband, these AI tools need far more than just conditional guard rails to keep the kids out of the dark web... More like a surgeon general's warning with teeth.

Bard and Bing should be treated as if they were Therac 25, because in the long run we may realize that like social media, the outcome is worse.