Please Use AI

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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 want it easy, but I don't think that's what we really want at the end of the day. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

This is really beautiful and tragic at the same time. Very well written.

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.

Really beautiful piece.

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.

Or just use AI when it makes sense, and call your friends too. Why do we have to over-dramatize everything?

Wow so powerful, I could barely type this comment with tears in my eyes.

OP should consider a side career in poetry.

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.

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?

Every interaction I've had with AI has been negative. It's just not very good.

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

    Let humans create,
    Leave the soul to living minds,
    Let code do the chores.

It's a real shame this somewhat interesting tech is entirely under the control of the most insane, inhuman, sociopathic monsters produced by our modern society. There's lots of genuinely cool, interesting uses for this tech, but instead of exploring those uses, the monsters have used it to drive a wrecking ball crane into the middle of our society and then call us morons for not saying "thank you sir, may I have another round of beatings, please?" as they tear down everything our society worked to build over hundreds of generations and plunder the copper pipes from the wreckage. Whatever uses the tech may possibly have had, they're all tainted with the stench of the 5-day-old corpse the tech bros keep shoving into our faces and telling us is the only food we're allowed to eat, and I want nothing to do with any of this AI/LLM crap.

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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