The first ten minutes I spent on social media this morning made me feel all kinds of things. Why is it that people who routinely use LLMs are so loud and brash and proud, making these tools appear as essential and inevitable?

A post by a dev whose app I use said something along the lines of: "no use exercising your coding skills, AI is too good now, you can't compete with it anyway".

Another post by a user on an instance I try to engage with wrote - literally: "tired of overthinking every decision?" and then disclosed he had created an AI that will "run a weighted decision matrix so you don't have to." In all seriousness.

What is this dystopian world where human qualities are devalued, critical thinking is discarded and surveillance capitalism is ignored at the altar of AI worship?

If they are loud and proud, maybe so I can be too... but in the opposite direction.

This weekend I will start the MIT's Missing Semester class (the 2020 Lectures, so pre-AI) because in this brave new world hyping up techno-fascist LLMs, knowing the basics of code are essential IMHO.

So my March "project" will be a deep dive in MIT's Missing Semester and my April project will be off-grid mesh radio communication.

What about you, what are you doing to resist?

Special props to @emilymbender @cwebber and @tante for being outspoken on these issues... you're my beacons of hope

#NoAI

@elena @emilymbender @cwebber @tante

I'm thinking there's something about the false mastery of it. You type in a prompt, and something emerges, fully formed.

You modify the prompt, the resultant slop appears to bend to your will, the closest thing to magic you will ever attain, you're a sorcerer now, not a lowly apprentice, you believe you've discovered the shortcut around years of study, and drudge, and boredom.

It's so euphoric, you don't even bother to check if it works.