this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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yea, honestly, i don't get people saying AI is just "useless". it certainly hasn't been useless to me, it speeds up my work a lot even setting aside the time it takes me to correct its mistakes and verify its answers (though i don't really ask it to "make" stuff, it's mostly an assistant). and the way my work goes, this actually does translate into more free time for myself
also, generally speaking, it's usually better to just produce something at 70% quality if it takes 10% of the time. "but everything becomes shittier in the process!!" yea, that's not AI's issue, it's been the story of capitalism since the industrial revolution when intricate handicraft was replaced by loomslop. that standardized, replaceable piece of shit fabric we're wearing was seen in the same way that we now see AI slop, it just got normalized because entire centuries have passed. i'm not kidding, i have literally personally read the exact same complaints in documents from the 19th century in some of my courses as a former history undergrad. they are seriously indistinguishable. even the issue of stealing people's work was already there when industrialists, for instance, stole the "paisley" pattern from indian craftspeople. even the name is a symptom of this, as "paisley" is the name of the scottish town that started mass-producing this shit and displacing workers all the way in india, so we now know something that is iranian-indian by origin from a scottish name. again, AI is nothing new. it's a merely quantitative difference, not a qualitative one
What's happening here is that people have decided that they hate this tech, and that becomes a foregone conclusion. They're never actually going to try using it, nor do they care if it works or not. It's just a hip thing to hate because they know can't do anything about the underlying problem of capitalism, so they just lash out against the symptoms of the system.
This is a hilarious strawman by the way. You're right there's a number of people who've never tried it but to imply that ALL those who are anti-AI have never engaged with it hilarious.
I have spent hours and hours of my life engaging with these stupid machines and trying to get myself to like them because I know they're only going to get more everywhere over time and it's obviously bad for my mental health to fucking hate this stupid fucking technology so much, I know they are in fact useful for a ton of shit, hell, I've even begrudgingly used them to dig through erratz unorganized databases many times.
I still fucking hate them, and I still do not think the technology is in any way worth the negative effects on cognition, society, the arts, and human culture as a whole.
it's pretty much a blind spot at this point. i try to argue, but really, it's no use. at least china is going forward with it, so i guess it doesn't matter how they feel
yep. it's the same thing for stuff like fast fashion. i honestly blame whoever it was that first said "saying there's no ethical consumption under capitalism doesn't mean you don't have to watch how you consume!". like, it actually does mean that.we also don't own the means of production, so saying things in the manner of "each prompt you make spends whatever amount of water!" makes no sense. nothing you do within AI spends anything, just as buying and wearing your clothes doesn't pollute the waters, just as buying a new plushie doesn't enslave any southeast asian worker. all of this happens within production, not consumption. and it's the mode of production that defines consumer culture, not the other way around, hence there's nothing we can do except literal revolution. but admitting that means to acknowledge a level of individual powerlessness that makes one very uncomfortable, it means nothing good will ever happen unless you organize. which also takes time, when everything feels incredibly urgent. all of this makes you feel like shit, but it's the reality
If AI "speeds up your work a lot" you probably have a bulletin job. And hey no shade get that bag but as someone with experience in the fields pushing Ai productivity that is not a flex.
Damn near every job is formulaic and repetitive on some level, there are very few jobs that require true creativity and ingenuity in every step of the job.
i'm a historian. it speeds things up when i need to look for more specific bibliographical references, something google sucks at (and has somehow become worse since around 2020, especially with the ad spamming). it helps me communicate in conferences. as an editorial board member of a journal, it helps me search for peer reviewers, something google and google scholar are also remarkably bad at. i used to translate my abstracts by hand (my first language is portuguese, but english language abstracts are required by most journals), and i can safely say AI does 90% of that job within a fraction of the time, which is especially good when doing portuguese to english (the structure in portuguese language makes this a big headache). the only thing i'll probably never do is asking the thing to write for me from scratch, or even to do text review, since it always results in a dry, artificial pile of words
And llms have a lot to do with that.
a moot point as long as it effectively replaces and improves on what google used to do. the process of using google now is worse than it's ever been; but for my purposes, the process of using AI instead has been better than googling ever was, before or after llms