Massively Against AI

What Does That Even Mean?

Armin Ronacher recently asked over on Mastodon:

Is this platform still massively against AI or has it moved more towards acceptance?

I started to answer on there, but figured I might as well post on my blog, since I have thoughts...

It seems like, for the most part, there is still a fairly consistent backlash on Mastodon against "AI," though I reckon that this has more to do with the usage of "AI" as an industry/marketing term.

And that is because "AI" is still a medusa. I don't think there is an agreed upon definition of what we're even talking about when we try to describe what it even means to be "massively against AI".

So if we turned around the question... If you're a proponent of using "AI" tools in your engineering workflow:

Are you massively pro deploying chatbots as customer service agents?

Are you massively pro introducing chat agents as stand ins for teen interactions?

Are you massively pro excessive water consumption from data centers meant to sustain industry trends?

Are you massively pro OpenAI planning to spend upwards of $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, expecting government subsidies (aka taxpayers) to foot the bill?

And honestly, I could go on and on...

I think perhaps the question was meant more to engage with discussions on optimizing engineering workflows through the usage of LLM/agentic tooling. And if that's the question, well, it's still hit or miss.

There is some of that here and there, including this very deep dive shared last week that I thought was very well done.

But, I stress, since the major tech companies are not willing or able to talk about "AI" without identifying many of the problematic issues plaguing the industry, it's hard to wholeheartedly embrace the tooling while ignoring everything else.