No AI Fridays

I don't make comments like the appalling one you quote, and I'm sorry someone said that to you.

That said, I do hate genAI, and so have decent grounds for guessing why people would say things like that.

In my case, my employers have mandated LLM usage and all but banned actually programming, and I can see it rotting my ability to code and understand things.

That is extremely demoralizing, and I expect others going through it would be very likely to lash out in anger when they see people praising genAI as amazing and wonderful.

Distinct from that, those of us who have at one point supported ourselves in a purely artistic domain we love, such as music or illustration, are deeply saddened to see genAI destroying the opportunity to be paid to do those things we love. We hope that other humans will continue to invest their wealth into art made by humans, but clearly some are not, and that group may grow as the generators get better.

The pain of seeing the opportunities you had destroyed, both for yourself and for others, is made even more acute when you see someone shouting about how wonderful the tools causing the destruction are. Angry aggression is the expected result, we humans being what we are.

Finally, many of us in the anti-genAI camp are both able to see that the tools can be effective force-multipliers, but can also see the manifold negative externalities of genAI: on-demand propaganda, genAI psychosis, anonymous virtual rape (I don't know a better way to describe generating and distributing videos of actual humans doing sex acts they've never done), super-persuader scammers, potential massive job loss, concentration of social / political power into the GPU-holders' hands, accelerated climate change from the massive resource consumption, actual unaligned paperclip optimizers (see e.g. the HuggingFace hack, which is a textbook example of a monkeys-paw / paperclipper scenario), actually-effective mass surveillance, the increasing risk of bioterrorism at massive scale, and the looming possibility that an ASI evolved from these systems will actually bring us to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" or extinction scenarios.

If you see all that, the urge to bully, insult, and denigrate people who are choosing all those consequences by using the things is very strong. Viewed from this angle, it's certainly hard not to conclude that those of us using genAI are being very, very selfish, choosing personal benefit over the collective good.

I feel guilty daily for not having the courage to refuse to use and accept the economic consequences (if I weren't a special-needs family's primary breadwinner, I would just refuse and accept the consequences).

Again, I'm sorry people are responding abusively to you, and I hope I will never react that way.

Have I helped you see why people might react cruelly to your comments?

My zone is like that of an orchestra conductor.

I point at the violins. I gesture the drums upwards. Sometimes I make a big broad gesture that encompasses the entire orchestra.

My agents are tasked, in part, with explaining the context with mockups and examples I can poke at for each job.

The problem with this site is that the studies it cites don't match the conclusions it draws.

"Accumulate cognitive debt": The paper is a preprint, isn't peer reviewed, and has already had a rather blistering critique (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00856) that raises concerns about sample size, reproducibility of the analyses, EEG methodology, inconsistent reporting, and transparency. Also the fact that they infer EEG connectivity = learning without evidence.

"Less engaged with your work": Doesn't measure engagement with work. It measured motivation, boredom, and sense of control on small tasks like writing a post or an email. The effects are small, and some of them cut against the site's thesis.

"Negatively impact your critical thinking abilities": It's a survey of knowledge workers about past tasks. It doesn't measure critical thinking ability at all. Even the paper's title says "Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects". It doesn't establish causation, and the direction is ambiguous.

"Hamper your skill formation": The one paper that has something, showing that using AI without learning about the things it's doing reduces knowledge acquisition (note it does not test retention). HOWEVER, the best AI users matched or beat the no-AI group!

Same thing happens when you're learning a (human) language.

You mentioned "coming back later" but being in the zone. That's the part I want to understand. So this metaphor isn't helping cause the conductor is constantly working, constantly seeing the output. Not coming back later.