This is a bit of a random one, but I wanted to just do a bit of a link dump. There’s been an absolute shed load of noise about generative AI and LLMs in the last year or so and here’s some of the writing I’ve found most interesting.
AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?
Molly White is great on this stuff. She’s big on opinions, but opinions based on what’s there, rather than thought experiments and hypotheticals. Her takedowns of the last big tech grift topic were fantastic to read.
Then again…
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
This is as hilarious a polemic as you could hope for, which is compelling in a really different way to White’s deliberate and explicitly measured approach. Absolutely unequivocal and maintains the same tone you get from the title. My day job is helping folks organise information and so specific quips that cross over with that, like this one, were particularly lol-inducing:
Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don’t actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit.
My fave of the three things I’m dumping here is the longest and arguably not so much about what’s wrong with AI, although AI is its subject. It’s the author’s write up of her experience being invited to be the closing, “honorary contrarian speaker” at a tech industry conference on conversational AI.
It really makes it clear, to a lesser or greater extent, that almost none of the misgivings about AI are really about the (or any) technology, and a huge amount about shit (social) systems (such as the tech industry). If you’ve ever been in the industry and witnessed the enthusiasm and the conviction and come away feeling intense cognitive dissonance, this one’s for you.
Preston’s stuff about her experience playing as Mechanical Turk behind a chat bot for some kind of property management company is really grim, and it’s worth reading the whole essay for just that bit, IMO.