Since I want to write in a bit more detail about my personal LLM/AI journey so far I will just give a Tl;Dr here: I started as a hater for that barely functional piece of junk that dared to call itself AI and slowly started to come around once it became better and more reliable. Now, let’s start with the story time.

I still remember when cleverbot was the best way to talk to a computer and it was pretty shit, then suddenly ChatGPT popped up one day. I obv. had to give it a try and I was amazed that we already got that far and it happened basically over night (I know now that at that point the first LLMs existed for quite some time but it took a while for them to blow up and therefore me discovering their existence). At that point, they were pretty inacurate, couldn’t even do simple math (which I found really ironic since that is basically the only thing a computer can do and very well too) and was inaccurate most of the time. I always had to double check each output and had to manually fix it pretty much every time, if it even was salvagable in the first place. But usually, I was better and faster at any task I could possibly give it so I became anti AI, started hating on the technogy and mocking people who used it.

Half a year later I finally decided to give it another try and it actually improved. Simple math was correct most of the time, it started to get most facts straight and some tasks like formatting text was either correct or just had some small mistakes I could easily fix myself. That was the turning point for me where I stated using it more often and hating it less.

Now, I actually like AI/LLMs. I use it almost daily for questions about pretty much anything that isn’t about recent news (which is still very prone to errors) or about a nieche topic (same issue). The main reason why is because I stongly prefer getting taught new things with the chance to ask follow up questions or to clarify things I didn’t underatand. I also use it to do simple tasks for me I don’t want to do myself, like formatting texts in specific ways. And I also use image gen whenever I need an image, be it for my profile picture, banners or anything else, since I hate drawing stuff myself, do not have the money to commission stuff from actual artists and noone but AIs want to do it for free.

And as a developer, I of couse use AI coding tools. However, I have to say that I’m not a fan of agentic coding, better known as vibe coding to most non-developers, where you tell the AI what you want and it does all the coding for you. In my experience, the result sucks. Too many unneccesary comments, too many checks that usually just degrade the performance of the software and at some point, shit just starts breaking, the AI can’t fix it and the codebase is too messy for me to read into it and fix it myself so I have to start over and do it myself anyway. For small stuff, like a simple script to inject into a website to make a table sortable or a cronjob that deletes every file in a temp folder that is older than a week, I have no issue with letting an AI vibecode that for me, then reading through the result to make sure it actually does what it should before using it. But for larger projects, I just give the AI access to my codebase and then chat with it when I’m stuck, unsure which approach fits best or give it smaller tasks to do for me and always check the output manually, never trust it fully. So after auto-completing words, then lines, then code snippets/chunks, I see coding LLMs as the next step that lets me generate even lager chunks, or even entire files, but with a more cautious approach. And it replaced the rubber duck for debugging.

One thing I almost never do is use AI to generate, enhance or even correct texts I’m writing. Take this comment for example, I bet I’ve made multiple mistakes and an AI could find better words and write everything way shorter while still getting the important bits right, but for some reason I do prefer to rather keep the human imperfections in it. Only for more… professional settings, I sometimes rely on AI to do a bettrr job at writing than me, and most of the time, it delivers.

Now, what I am still concerned about is the future of AI. What I haven’t mentioned so far is that I never paid for AIs and never will. If they are trained on stolen works where the creators of said works never received any compensation, neither will any AI company see anything from me. But as long as I can use it for free, I will continue doing so. However, I fear that this will soon change, since investor funding will not last forever and looking at the current hardware market and electricity costs, they will need a whole lot of money to keep going. And I’m pretty sure ads won’t cut it this time so I’m really curious how this will end: Will the bubble burst and every large AI company will have to downscale massively to survive or will enough people decide to pay to keep them running the way they do right now? Once again, I will enjoy the benefits while they last and run local models once they try to start charging me, or just return to doing everything myself like before, but I will never support them financially.

it has rotten peoples brains to the point they cant function without asking it to hallucinate more.

Started like you. Fascinated by the reponses i was getting from the LLMs. Then started to notice hallucinations, read.up a bit, and deduced its a fundamental flaw of the approach they use. Its not.going to ‘get better’, because as i said, its fundamental to the methodology.

Nowadays, its a nice conversation piece, or a natural language interface to search. Not worth the investment.

Given my background in CS though, i still believe in traditional ai methods and wish the funding went into that instead. Some specialized ais, e.g. medical imaging are pretty good. Others are glorified brute force or hueristic filtering of large data sets. Not those.

There are some good uses, but that is outweighed by the vast amount of problems it is causing and will continue to cause as generations are raised with it existing from their birth.

I have a dirt cheap VPS running about 30 or so services all made by AI. They automate lots of meanial tasks and help me save money.

Tasks I would never care to do, can now be done for me. It’s a suboptimizers wet dream. The cost of personally tailored software is now really low.

Generative AI can get fucked. I’ll never use it.

The “AI” tools that are used for stuff like folding proteins and other beneficial work like that get a pass. Everything else should be relegated to the wastebin of history just like Facebook/Insta/Twitter, etc…

I want my job security back!

But yeah, I get it. LLMs and image gen was hella fascinating at first. No shame in greeting something new with curiosity.

It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, AI can be used to quickly find solutions to problems you might not have been able to solve and I’ve heard that AI can be used in some cases to help people who are disabled. I’ve been using free AI services occasionally for personal use and they can be pretty good for the most part, sometimes it seems like the AI knows exactly what I want while other times, it either seems to ignore part of my prompt or just have no idea what I need from it.

On the other hand, people are losing their jobs, it’s destroying the economy, people have already used it to spread misinformation and malware, it’s being used both to create and to promote scams, it’s possibly damaging the environment with all the water the data centers use, they’re all trained off of stolen data, and there’s probably a lot of other issues that I’m either forgetting or just not aware of.

All in all, it’s hard to promote the use of AI but I understand it’s usefulness. I will never pay for an AI service and when I use the free ones, I always use them with an ad-blocker so they don’t get any monetization from my usage.

well. was it trained ethically? no. has it been deployed ethically? no. but, has it made our lives easier? also no

As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

I mostly don’t care and as much as people flip out about it I odn’t think it’s any more relevant than, VIRTUAL REALITY, or BIG DATA or a BLOCKCHAIN.

or any of the other hype machines that come around every couple of years and then fizzle out into nothingness.

I was in the same boat as you - one of the earliest to get on Copilot (bing chat at the time) and ChatGPT, and I also played a lot with craiyon/dalle mini. I thought it was fun, and even regrettably used it for roleplay. I started to become skeptical around 2024 as well but I found it really difficult to stop using it. I was quite heavily addicted in a way, and it was really difficult to stop myself. It also completely wrecked my ability to independently think and be creative.

Now that I’m out of it, I am pretty strongly anti-genAI, and I see such little use for it. I’ve always enjoyed art and have been taking a lot of time lately to improve mine, and I am doing it for personal enjoyment but I also notice that I’m finding it particularly hard to be seen online or get commissions, and I think the saturation of AI is partially related to that. I also see it doing more in IT spaces, which is particularly scary as that was my strongest subject and what I want to go into as a career.

My mother has even started offloading parenting to it, asking it “how to deal with [me]” which really hurts, and I see more and more people just getting consumed by AI psychosis.

I really hope the situation with AI can change for the better soon somehow, it can’t be sustained like this

I think it’s a tool, but a tool that has been weaponized. I think “AI” (I use quotes because we are really talking about LLMs primarily) have some fantastic applications for automation, things like dictation, pattern recognition, etc.

But unlike non-AI tools that can do similar tasks (linters, non ai machine translation, dictation, hell even search engines at this point) AI does the task with the confidence of an expert, speaking in a confident voice, to people who generally don’t know if the information is accurate. It’s being sold as a knowledge hub, when in reality it is a tool, one that can be wrong and does not think. And the marketing is agressive. They want you to forget how to think for yourself so you have to pay a subscription for thinking.

AI psychosis is real, I’ve seen it happen in real time with my coworkers. The quality of our new hires has gone downhill because none of them seem to know how to solve a problem. I often hear “Claude thinks this” in response to issues that are just barely above basic level. There is no longer a desire to find knowledge or puzzle out a problem when it can be cognitively offloaded to the llm. There is danger in the very service that the llm provides - reduction in friction in your daily life also equates to a reduction in learning. Which sucks because noodling out complex problems with an llm as a rubber duck can actually be a great learning experience in situations where a product expert isn’t around to bounce off of. But it comes with the caveat of knowing how to check the answers and having the curiosity to delve into those answers and dig through them yourself. Without that crucial step you are just offloading your brain to the computer to think for you and you learn nothing.

And I can’t blame the AI psychosis on stupid people. It’s being marketed as an all knowing infallible assistant. Yet tangibly many every day people find their lives made worse for it. AI has been shoved into everything when it isn’t even as good as the thing it is replacing, or it fails more often.

Then we get to the actual generative functions of ai. Generative art, be it picture or text, is trained without permission or compensation, on the work of millions of artists, with the goal of making those artists obsolete. As an artist I’ve seen every single artistic industry be hit with this, from stock photography to furry porn to high budget movies. And much like the previous use cases of AI replacing currently existing software, it’s replacing artists with less quality products. AI art is recognizable because it is homogenized by default. And sure it’s tweakable, but by default it is recognizable as this uncanny homogenized “good enough” picture to get an idea across. And much like everything else it’s being used as a way to capitalize on industries, because at the end of the day the only reason to use generative ai for art is to make it faster and cheaper. Every single person that uses it that I’ve seen has used it for the same reasons. “I don’t have time to learn x” or “I need an idea out now” or “I can make more by doing this”. Its because art has become completely monitized. People don’t create for the sake of creation now, it’s for a job, or for a deadline, or for clout. Artists who love their craft and are not bogged by deadlines or bills are overwhelming against AI in general, as artists are some of the most vocal anti generative AI crowd.

When we look at all of this, AI is a tool that has some great localized use cases, especially in pattern recognition, dictation, language, etc. but it’s been coopted as a brain subscription by the people in charge of training it and selling it to us. It’s been shoehorned into every aspect of our lives, made everything more expensive, made people dumber, collectively destroyed the lives of artists off the backs of their work, and enshittified almost every single industry.

The tradeoffs aren’t worth it.

Edit: also forgot to add the privacy nightmare that comes from AI surveillance

I see AI as a sign I probably shouldn’t be patronizing a store/restaurant/what-have-you.

I’m also of the opinion that any use of AI to replace artists is a total waste and of zero or negative value.