I know that I have had a lot of harsh words to say about "AI" and LLM's lately on my Mastodon account. I thought I would do a longer piece here on my blog since endless threads on Mastodon are no substitute for longer-form writing. Besides, I haven't blogged in two weeks and already broke my promise to myself of weekly posts here.

Anyway, onwards.

We're Being Bamboozled

First off, let's get my main objection out of the way. This is not Artificial Intelligence in any way, shape, or form. It is the triumph of marketing and people desperate to grab dynastic wealth for themselves.

Large Language Models are, in my opinion, very cool technology. Their ability to take some text written in a more natural language and generate some output from them is really good. Writing parsers and interpreters is hard. Making one where the language you use is not full of weird syntax is even harder.

No, the real issue is that a bunch of people who want to get rich enough so they never have to interact with us are lying. This is not artificial intelligence. It is a stochastic parrot, stringing words together that sound reasonable but very often are full of shit and not what we asked for.

Since our industry is full of unserious, mediocre people who think they are competent and serious, the full-press marketing effort to convince the people who make decisions at companies across all sorts of industry that "AI is here to make you easy profits!!!!" is on.

I am not the first person to point out that while the technology has not gotten to the point where so many people can be replaced by an LLM, way too many CEO's and other senior leadership have been convinced that it has reached that point.

The outcome of this is going to be disastrous for any leaders who have not already figured out how to ensure their compensation is not tied to the actual performance of their companies.

We're Being Told Stealing Is Okay If Money Is Good

I was there when Napster became a thing. It was awesome to be able to find all sorts of music you liked and download it to your computer. I also remember how the music industry freaked out and intended to sue people for millions of dollars for downloading one song.

As with everything, this freakout was because they had not figured out a way of making money off the renting of music to people. In our streaming world, our fate has been sealed -- it is becoming harder and harder to own "physical" copies of popular items, especially film and music.

But for this new business model of providing natural language prompts that take our questions and respond with useful answers to work and make monopoly profits for all involved, they have to read in as much information as possibly to train their systems. This also means they are brazenly reading in all sorts of material they do not have permissions to do so.

Then, with a straight face, they tell us we must let them do it or else.

Look, for many years I posted content for free all over the internet. My old blog (of which the archives are part of this one) and thousands and thousands of posts to Twitter and Facebook. I understood that as long as I was deliberately making these posts publicly, I was okay with other people slicing and dicing up the content.

This is the main premise of the internet I joined and embraced in the early 2000's.

However, I have produced content for which I have been paid. Multiple books, conference talks, and videos for sale. I am 99.999% sure that books and videos I have created were slurped up by one of these companies. I did not give them permission. But given how favourable the US legal system is towards corporations (plus the fact that I live in Canada) the chances of me getting any kind of compensation for them making unauthorized copies of what I created is pretty much zero.

They are, from my perspective, thieves wearing business suits or hoodies, depending on your mental image of what you think an "AI" business owner looks like.

Fuck you, pay me.

Scraping Used To Be Okay

To head off some more popular arguments, yes, search engines could not exist without people giving permission for their content to be scanned, summarized, and categorized. Again, I am okay with this since by posting my things publicly I gave permission for this.

It is pretty much impossible to become a programmer with a broad range of skills if you do not have search engines that accurately answer your prompts. We have questions. We do not necessarily work or are in close contact with people who have answers. So we go online and search for those answers.

For a long time, search engines were useful. Then Google, flush with cash and convinced that having created one incredibly technology, could do anything it wanted. So it used their incredibly search engine and plastered it with ads to make money. But failure after failure caused them to lean more and more onto what was now an advertising platform with a side effect of providing some answers to questions.

Someone much smarter than me has pointed out that LLM's help create the illusion that so many grifters and non-technical people wanted to believe: that ideas are what mattered instead of the ability to execute on those ideas.

There is a reason the stereotype of the "bro with an idea who justs needs a technical person to implement it" persists.

Now, LLM folks believe if we will just shut the hell up and let them steal everything that isn't nailed down (and take a lot of stuff that is nailed down but nobody is actively watching) they will no longer need the implementers. Their grand ideas will finally see the light of day. More importantly, they won't have to share the money with anybody else.

I will not willingly help these people. I am not some cog in their wheel of ambition.

Is There Anything LLM's Are Good For?

Of course there are.

One of my co-workers has started using a service called Otter to take transcripts of our meetings at work so they have reference material. There is nothing revolutionary about taking notes for meetings to use later. However, it is not a replacement for not attending the meeting. Too many folks are presenting it as such. Come to the damn meeting and stop acting like you are too special to be here and discuss the issues with us.

LLM's are providing a lot of value to people as tools to help them solve coding issues. I am not using them out of choice but I suspect there may come a time when search engines become enshittified enough that I will have to resort to an LLM to provide me with the skeleton of solutions to my problems. These sort of tools are nothing more than fancy autocomplete. There will not be a time any time soon where I can feed it a list of requirements for a web application and it will create one that works flawlessly and does not need maintenance.

As a tool for applying a vast number of changes to a code base in a short period of time, they will be awesome. As a tool to replace someone who understands how to turn natural language requirements into code? No chance. But too many greedy business owners have bought the hype and believe they are. I look forward to seeing those businesses suffer the consequences of poor management.

Takeaways

So, what can we really do?

Well, I think people who work in this industry like I do can stop hyping it as a replacement for problem solving and critical thought. These systems do not learn from their mistakes. They will just keep making them over and over again.

I also feel it is critical to not turn a blind eye to the fact that these companies are asking us to allow them, for free, to slurp up everything they find online in an attempt to sell it back to us.

Given how they fought to have anyone who touched anything that belonged to them, do not let them off the hook now that stealing stuff is their best interests. A lot of these companies have already been stealing wages from you. Don't let them take anything else.

Finally, understand that being a luddite doesn't mean that you hate technology -- you hate the exploitation of people via the use of technology.

Band together. Don't let companies treat you like garbage. Don't believe the AI hype. This is another bubble and the companies that are choosing to make the bubble their identity will fail.