The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam.

You are describing one type of AI, that being Generative AI. Even more specifically, Generative AI from publicly trained models, examples being ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. If you hate those, don't use those. This isn't the only AI that exists.

We're getting into data science here, but you can build and train Machine Learning models exclusively on your own data. So no theft/spam contamination here. If your needs are in the Generative AI space, you could even build and deploy your own Fine Tuned model from your own data on top of one of the public models, so it would have knowledge of your business or industry.

All AI incarnations are just tools. You don't start with a tool. You start with a problem to solve, and you use a tool to assist or make it better. So the beginning of this journey is asking the question: "What problem are you trying to solve?"

AI is pretty bad most things you do that are actually valuable so your critique definitely holds. It's bad for the environment and creates tech consolation and all round is creating around as many problems as it claims to solve.

AI as in neural networks are really good in most ways such as playing chess and detecting melonomas but I'm going to give some tips for spocifically LLMs.

Treat it as a dumb intern. You ask it to find research papers but you have to read them yourself to actually assess them. You can use it to draft an email but you still have to proofread it. You can use it to write code but expect bugs and unhandled edge cases.

I'm a software developer and I use an LLM to create code generators, internal tooling, a thing that takes a json and outputs SQL insert statements or to look up docs. The AI has not increased my productivity per se but the tooling I created with it has.

Another use case is to ask for critique, you paste some code block in and ask it to review performance for example and it can spot the "use a hash map there" cases pretty easily.

That's my 2 cents on the topic.

Do we work at the same place? Lol

I totally get you, despite some pedantic disagreement about what "spam" means. I'm in the same boat a bit.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I've kinda leaned into it in the sense that "if they're gonna make us use it, then I want to be in a position to steer the direction". While I discourage its use and preach to people about it's evils, I also try to improve the AI tools and processes that we're using. That probably makes me part of the problem, but it relieves a bit of the pressure of how shit it is day to day.

I'm actually kinda bearish on AI.
Or rather I think that either it's a bubble that will pop, or before too long it's gonna cause a global depression. Maybe a bit of paranoia and doomerism.

Pull up your big boy pants and use it?

Or don't. And if you're right about it not being a productivity boost then your numbers will reflect that.

ai is another abstraction of search. When integrated into software it can perform many things that individual plugins could before but it is one and done. If you had an intern that would prep work for you or look over what you are doing to identify errors you would likely consider yourself lucky but you know you have to evaluate everything they do. Its kinda the same. If you take away the energy usage I would be relatively fine with ai usage. You ask it something. It provides and answer along with references to where it got the information. You can read over the references and if everything looks good you saved yourself some time over a standard search. Personally my writing is way casual and full of bad grammar and misspellings unless I make drafts and review multiple times. ai being able to fix up what I write such that all the spelling and grammar is correct and maybe a bit more polite. thats great.