this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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There are things LLMs are genuinely useful for.
Transforming text is one. To give examples, a friend of mine works in advertising and they routinely ask a LLM to turn a spec sheet into a draft for ad copy; another person I know works as a translator and also uses DeepL as a first pass to take care of routine work. Yeah, you can get mentally lazy doing that but it can be useful for taking care of boilerplate stuff.
Another one is fuzzy data lookup. I occasionally use LLMs to search for things where I don't know how to turn them into concise search terms. A vague description can be enough to get an LLM onto the right track and I can continue from there using traditional means.
Mind you, all of that should be done sparingly and with the awareness that the LLM can convincingly lie to you at any time. Nothing it returns is useful as anything but a draft that needs revision and any information must be verified. If you simply rely on its answer you will get something reasonably useful much of the time, you will get mentally lazy, and sometimes you will act on complete bullshit without knowing it.
This is a little besides the point, but even those use-cases LLMs have the fatal flaw of being obscenely resource intensive. They require huge amounts of electricity and cooling to continue operating. Not to mention most of them are trained on stolen data.
Even when they're an effective tool for a given task, they're still not an ethical one.
That's true; I didn't touch on those points but I very much agree. (Yes, while I occasionally use it. It's easy to ignore the implications of what you're doing for a moment.)