In Defense of "AI"

Over the weekend I saw a post on Mastodon listing a few reasons why LLMs are terrible (stolen data, power hungry, speculation bubble, ruining your brain). I won't refute these points because everything can be true and untrue at the same time, just depends on context; for the record, replace "LLMs" with "people" and the solution isn't to get rid of people.

I've been using LLMs (I dare not call it "AI" because…that's not intelligence IMO so why scaremonger?) for maybe a year or two and loving it for the most part. I started with ChatGPT, then spending money on it, not liking the results, to trialing Anthropic's Claude, to subscribing to their service ever since. For background, I am a self‑taught design engineer. I got my start in the recession of 2008. I couldn't find work so spent a lot of time on the internet imitating the cool stuff my friends were doing on deviantART. Anyhoo, fast‑forward a decade and I'm utilizing StackOverflow for answers to questions I don't even know how to formulate sometimes…and getting absolutely shit on for it. There was a time period after I was fired this one time[^1] that every question I posted to the StackExchange network got downvoted with no comments, and this happened for months).

You know who doesn't give a shit about your dumbass questions? LLMs.

The best of humanity is great. We are the culmination of hopes, dreams, aspirations, and the wide range of emotions that flourish from that. On the flip side, when can get nasty and downright evil if motivated enough. I don't need to suffer through YOUR bad day because you happen upon my naive request while in a horrible mood and you can't help but put me down, or whatever the case may be.

This is pretty much my argument for why LLMs aren't totally bad, haha! There's not much space for nuance on the internet these days so your opinion isn't swayed if you think LLMs are a scourge upon the Earth. The same was said for television in defense of newspapers and radio. It'll be fine. Railing against "AI" is fine but to pretend that it isn't useful is a crock of shit. Speaking for myself, I am not an expert so having an approximation of one at my disposal at any time of day or night is an indispensable tool I happily utilize to figure things out or get research about things I've wondered about.

Case in point, I'm thinking about starting a magazine. Claude researched for about 5 minutes while I did something else. Could I have done this myself? Of course. Would I have a comprehensive report in 5 minutes or less? In this (search) economy? With Google, absolutely not. With Kagi, possibly. I could also turn screws manually or use a power tool. It doesn't matter.

For another recent project, I got Claude to scaffold me a video transcoder built on ffmpeg and it didn't work, no matter how many times I badgered it to fix its issues and stop adding mystery functions. The transcoder works now of course, but the logic was fixed by me, a human. An enthusistic junior developer could make the same mistakes Claude makes but understands, "Hey, this isn't working," doesn't mean tear down the entire project, rename some variables, and call it a day.

I resent the phrase, "AI is stealing jobs," because no, they aren't. Middle managers and CEOs who read articles light on substance about the marvels of AI are firing people, realizing AI is not a replacement for people, and hiring people back.

You still need to understand how to code to make LLMs work for you. These tools are NOT a drop‑in replacement for people, nor will they be for quite some time. As a replacement for elitist cis‑White male dominated Q&A spaces, my Black ass will take an LLM any day.

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[^1]: In 2015, my wife (then girlfriend) and I experienced a miscarriage and I didn't know I should take time off instead of being depressed at work and after given a throwaway project to work on (a website for the CEO's father), I was fired.