Yes, I am a luddite. Why is my school promoting students to become codependent on LLMs for basic tasks? Has everyones brain truly turned to complete mush for them to have to ask ChatGPT to summarize a simple poem, or for it to solve a maths question which they could easily master with practice and patience?
Also - as someone who works with AI professionally - it’s wrong or inept quite a lot.
AI tools, in my experience, are good for two things: summarizing data sets and having meaningless conversations. Atlassian’s built-in AI can navigate our enormous confluence and Jira database and pull relevant information for me much faster than I could find it myself, and it can provide links to sources and useful context. It’s an incredible tool in that way. It can also convincingly simulate human interaction, because it has been engineered to be addictive, like social media.
Many people believe it to be excellent for coding. It can be, in a lot of ways. It’s great for generating boilerplate HTML or whatever. But if you’re executing complex code you don’t understand in the context of any kind of meaningful computation you’re a moron and you deserve the inevitable cascade of failure that is coming for you.
In the end, general-purpose AI tools trained on enormous data sets encounter a lot of contradictory, false, poisoned, out-of-context, or otherwise bad data.
Also, and this is critical, IT CAN’T THINK. It is an enormous statistical algorithm that calculates the probability of the next word being encountered given recent context. Mediocre people think it is amazing because it is programmed to sound like a mediocre person. The executive class loves it because it’s an empty, vacuous, soulless machine that tells them what they want to hear, and that’s their idea of something smart: it validates their own sense of superiority regardless of whether they’re right, wrong, or even remotely in touch with reality.
ChatGPT can’t possibly give you a good answer about anything important because the core data is largely garbage. That AND it can’t think, AND the bot has been built to be an addicting little sycophant, not a useful source of truth. In addition to the soul of the bot being rotten, it seems like everyone’s forgotten the core principle of computing: GIGO. I guess for those who want a world of garbage it’s fine. But I want something better.




















