this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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I'm with Linus Torvalds and GrapheneOS on this. AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.
you mean the guy who started losing his marbles like 5 years ago?
Nuances?! on MY Fediverse?! tbh im also mostly with Linus and also do not expect his PRs to drop in quality, because of it. He does sometimes say weird things regarding AI though, like that its a great way for upcoming developers to learn and I do not think that is really true, but again: Nuances. I myself keep AI usage minimum and in the constraints of a chat bot, not because its not useful but because I dont wanna get stupid :(
you know what also was a useful tool? chlorofluorocarbon
"If you ignore the negatives for everyone else and just focus on the positives for me, it's pretty great"
Mhmm. Right, ok.
Go live under a rock then because that applies to almost anything in life. Selective morality is fine but when it is to be a science denier you are just a fuckwit.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool
The crux of that article is buying into Heidegger‘a definition of a tool, specifically, “thing that lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to.” If you disagree with that premise, the article doesn’t hold up.
Tools aren’t about letting you do something you would otherwise not have been able to do, they are simply a force multiplier for capability or efficiency. You still need knowledge and skills to do the thing.
I am not a carpenter. My knowledge and skills are near zero. This multiplied by any number is still damn near zero, and I have no idea about the culture, safety, or history of carpentry. I’m not stupid enough to jump right into using an lathe without a lot of research or someone to guide me, because I’m not a fucking moron.
People with programming knowledge and skills using AI will eventually figure out a workflow that works. Laypeople using AI to vibe code? They’re probably fucking morons. Sure, maybe even most of the time, it will be fine. But eventually, someone is going to be degloved.
That's something I see in my workplace even without AI, just with coding/scripting/automation.
It helps you do things faster. It doesn't ensure you're doing the right thing (unless you have someone skilled build in all the guardrails).
So many of my coworkers are at the "This chainsaw is amazing! I bet it would be great at driving nails!" level of scripting, and AI is only making them more reckless.
I was ready to roll my eyes at the title and move on, but i'm glad I spent the time to read this.
TLDR; i very much disagree with the premise, but the author brings up an interesting bit of philosophy that is helpful to the conversation.
When people say "it's just a tool", it is not to assert that the tool is neutral, only that the thing being referenced should be thought of and discussed in a similar fashion as we do when discussing other items in the same category. This is in opposition to the tendency to ascribe moral features or aesthetic to things that aren't inherent to their 'essence', but rather features external to the thing being discussed or features that are commonly shared by items in the set but not exclusive to it.
What comes to mind (possibly because of the great effort it took to read and understand it) is Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the 'assemblage'. Here's an excerpt from "A Thousand Plateaus (that happens to contain my favorite passage in possibly all of philosophy) that I think adds a contrast:
spoiler
[...] These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse "can do." They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can't get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother's bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame .. . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, "playing" horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans's nor the horse's, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what way would that ameliorate Hans's problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked?The author here is correct to point out that tools are not neutral - and the connection to Heidegger's conception of the Gestell is very well received. I just wish they hadn't stopped at their conclusion and actually kept the analysis going. Taking their example of SUV's engendering 'asshole driving behavior' - it isn't just that the existence of SUV's bears a causal relationship to asshole drivers because of what that gestell produces, but that the existence of SUV's reshapes the relations of all the other assemblages in close proximity to it regardless of how it's used and by who. They even kind of preview this more balanced conclusion in their comparison of javascript and vue, stating that it's not a matter of one being better than the other, but simply that they have different purposes and enable different types of collaboration.
I think the entirety of the problem of this argument could be captured just in this part of the blog,
All other things couldn't possibly remain 'equal'. The addition of those tools fundamentally changes the relations and constituent parts of all the assemblages around it, including concepts like "freedom" and "democracy". To take it one step further - if the signs and symbols that refer to those assemblages and relations - that have now necessarily changed by the new addition - do not also change with them, then they simply stop being practically useful to describe them.
Any tool is going to have a non-neutral affect on those who use them - that's mostly the point of the assertion.
I am sure I will be down voted on Lemmy for this but using AI for development by a team who is already experienced in development of the product they are working on is not a moral failing.
personally don't care at all but the morality argument is not about the experience of the developers lol
My personal experience but the people who blindly bitch about AI are, quite frankly, idiots.
I use AI daily for work it's an extremely helpful tool as you stated. I still have concerns with it.
The difference is I understand human nature and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. We need governance and standards and it needs to be a utility just like hydro, water and The Internet. There also needs to be a global UBI yesterday.
What people are bitching about with AI amount to the lack of control we the people have over it.
I'm surprised you haven't been downvoted but I bet I will for calling a spade a spade in these people so rigidly opposed.
i trust no business to use ai coding properly, they cut so many corners in crunch already that pure unfiltered slop will for sure end up committed
we already see this with microslop windows 11 updates
it is even worse that many coders think it makes them better at their jobs because given how many issues pop up with factual ai use elsewhere i am sure no one rational expects coding to be exempt from this problem, so the least knowledgeable will be the most impacted with false assurance or worse we have other agents validating agent generated code that never has human eyeballs on it
slop-centipede of shit code
the biggest coding bugs either fail silently or succeed incorrectly and ai usage makes both of these worse
I mostly agree, but instead of better regulating AI governments and corporations have just been using it as an excuse to lay people off
I don't think anyone is "blindly bitching". I think people have understandable concerns regarding its development, use, and proliferation.
The other idea that it needs to be a utility is straight from the wet dreams of every AI company. Realistically, the average person has little use for AI and it's much more likely to be a detriment to them than otherwise. I know someone who is an exec in a big company and they get AI through their work. They use it for inane things mostly, but recently they used it to generate a list of reasons that their kids *dont need to go to school. This is an educated person with a good job who can't figure out that AI has no idea what their kids need.
I don't think AI needs to be used by nearly the number of people currently using it, but my bigger concern is letting anyone, be it a private company or a government, have access to something people treat like a magic answer anything machine.
There are absolutely rabid anti-AI people on Lemmy even who think it's just autocorrect.
NO! I think its just auto-complete (and I only think that about LLMs)
I disagree in part. Many people have replaced searching with AI.
Take a pic of something in chatGPT. "What is this?"
It's highly useful in everyday life.
The problem is that people my age were skilled before AI so it is literally just making things easier for us which is the point.
Kids on the other hand, it is taking away their opportunity to learn as my generation did and that's a huge problem.
Then we get back to the underlying problem. Governance and standards.
Should AI be allowed in school? Should companies be forced to continue entry level jobs that could be phased out by AI?
You could ask a million questions.
The problem with human nature is we are great at figuring out if we can do things we don't stop to think of we should do things.
If you think taking a picture of something and having AI identify it for you is something that 1) people should do on a daily basis and 2) the government should support AI as a utility for, then we have such different concepts of the world we want to live in that I don't think we'll come to an agreement here. I cannot imagine how that would be "highly useful in everyday life" for the average person.
The whole "You could ask a million questions" while supporting the idea it should be a utility is so weird to me. Like, yes, we could ask a million questions, and I think we should before suggesting it is a service that every citizen should be somewhat entitled to access from the government in some way (with all the caveats that come with a utility etc etc). It seems like you have fallen into the trap you suggest is inherent to human nature and you haven't bothered to ask if we should do that.
Don't forget the negative internalities (it makes it's users dumber and the codebase less maintainable).
But yes it is useful, and the knee jerk hate comes mostly as a reaction to the marketing lies told by the companies selling it.
Experienced developers benefit from it, my guess is because they've already formed their knowledge, habits, opinions, etc.
I don't think any company has shown productivity gains amongst experienced developers due to AI
Those are still external to the thing, not internal.