I have realised that my own "anti-AI" position is little to do with AI itself, and a lot to do with the flatly appalling culture around it, and my reluctance is partly to do with what navigating it has meant for me and people I care about.

I am willing to accept that I must learn these tools, so I am learning the tools. (Essentially: open source, open weights, open culture: the true state of the art.)

Now that I am learning these tools at my own pace, I can evaluate them all as the future boring technology they will soon be.

It has helped me see what I am "anti-", with clarity:

- I am "anti-" the way that tech people have brazenly underestimated the complexity, values, culture, traditions, and principles of the creative industries they have gleefully and derisively fucked up (I have a foot in multiple camps here so I can see this easily)

— I am "anti-" the exhausting burden-shifting of it all. Everyone has new stuff to deal with; every creative community has to develop new rules to stop "fix my AI generated thing" crushes, PR slop, "I asked AI and it said..." spam etc.

- I am "anti-" the tethering of this technology to "e/acc", and the "in the near future we will destroy all your jobs, we're deadly serious about this, sorry, I guess you're fucked haha, maybe learn AI" mentality that it has been riddled with since the earliest point

- I am "anti-" the sort of new tech industry imperial default: hey you can just change your business so it is dependent on pouring money into one of two American cloud startups that have demonstrated little commitment to openness or behaving in a predictable manner, that have subsidised pricing that will one day blow up, and is like Uber did, YOLO-ripping through regulations, legal principles and foreign commercial cultures, and at the end of it will get the government to change the rules so it doesn't have to do anything little people have to do like make a profit, and will leave said litle people holding the bag while they yomp on towards the next thing to fuck up.

In short, I am "anti-" the brazen, entitled, trollish trend of devaluing all of human culture and denigrating anyone who is not in the tech industry as expendable, inferior, quaint, classist etc.; it is like what happens to any social group when the spoilt children of the local overgrown rich-kid come to dominate it.

The technology? A bit less world-shaking than people realise, but possibly worth it for code-generation.

(This is just what I think and I'm not going to argue with your dissent, not least because as a middle-aged British man I am always right)