Why I'm Boycotting AI
unherd.com
unherd.com
>AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphisation
People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter.
What's important is if it is useful.
E.g... create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv. People would embrace AI like that instead of complaining about it.
If a pundit tried to advise the consumer who wants to avoid ads, "you know, that ad-skipping technology is _just_ fancy linear algebra and there's no _real_ intelligence behind it! You're dumbing down your brain by letting the AI mute the ads automatically instead of you doing it yourself." ... that's not a compelling argument. The usefulness of blocking ads outweighs any theoretical thresholds for real intelligence.
A lot of generative AI is not useful, so people will complain about it by falling back on the "it's not real intelligence" argument.
> What's important is if it is useful.
Except the usefulness expectations almost completely rely on the intelligence (it's right there in the name)! Without this you wouldn't have so much hype&money in this topic. So the complaint is rightfully directed at the core selling point
You, individually, can try out the product and see if it's useful for you. Many people have done so and found it extremely useful for themselves (myself included).
Some of the information out there is many, many people saying they do use Genai products and find them valuable. You shouldn't ignore that info either.
> But then why would you pick this specific products among a million of others? You wouldn't even know about it without the hype!
That's true of everything ever to different extents. You wouldn't have heard of any product if someone hadn't told you about it, either word of mouth, advertising or you seeking it out in some. I don't see how that possibly matters.
And yes, the fact that there's a lot of hype - a lot of people very excited and saying this is something that is super useful for them - is absolutely the reason most people have heard about it. That's good! A lot of people finding value in a product and telling others is pretty good evidence.
I'm not the one suggesting ignoring the core hyped value proposition and "just try yourself", so where am I ignoring anything?!
> to different extents
> I don't see how that possibly matters.
Sure, if you ignore the difference, you will not see what's different. The "extent" is key, few things command so much attention!
It matters because you have to keep it in mind when judging its output EVERY TIME. You can't trust it to not tell you to poison yourself, or invent people/things that don't exist, or make up stories about people that _do_ exist.
Can they be wrong? Absolutely, but it's relatively rare. Will they decide to just lie to me? Extremely unlikely, given the stakes.
My mum was a big beliver in homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. Kept sneakily dosing me and my dad with one "for memory". She ended up with Alzheimer's just shy of 20 years younger than her mum.
I could name a lot of elected officials over the years that made up stories about people, the hard part is picking one sufficiently uncontrovertial that nobody will object to the example.
What matters is the rate at which these things happen, given AI is now sufficiently competent at presenting as a human to be a problem for those who need to know they're discoursing with a human (job interviews, grading essays, is this video call really with your relative who really needs an emergency payment or is it all fake, political propaganda).
It matters because they called it artificial intelligence. The point I sew people bring up, though, boils down to whether its intelligent at all, not fake vs real. Debating whether "artificial" and "fake" are synonymous would be an odd stance to take, its the "intelligence" part that is the sticking point.
Beyond just the name, it matters because the risk of it going wrong is different. If it is a useful tool but not intelligent, the risk is mainly in how people will use it. That's no different than any technology.
If it is intelligent, the risk is in how it will use itself. It depends on how you want to define intelligence but, at least in my opinion, the ability to determine your own goals and desires is a prerequisite for intelligence. From that view, we can only hope that an AI is aligned with us...and given that we have all but abandoned both the alignment problem and the interpretability problem that doesn't seem likely.
The risks aren't the same here. Computation, if we want to say these "AI" tools are nothing more than complex math, is only as risky as the person using it.
Intelligence is potentially more dangerous, regardless of what traits you may think is required in addition to computation to make it intelligent.
We don't actually know how these LLMs work at time of inference and we can't analyze the trained dataset to understand why it would give an answer. That's fairly benign under the "its just computation" view, but that black box is full of unknown risk with any definition of intelligence because we don't actually understand how the thing works, why it does what it does, or what it will do next.
When intelligence comes into the picture the question is what the intelligent thing will do, not how a person will use it. If its just a tool that a person can use it almost certainly isn't itself intelligent at all.
But, there is a very small set of meat consumers that seem to "need" that element of the product. They want something to have suffered or died and removing that component of it is not desirable for them.
Why does anyone care to want these kinds of "real" things? If suffering can be reduced who cares?!
for me the conclusion is that everything synthetic is more likely dangerous in some form than it is helpful. i'd rather give up meat before eating synthetic meat. i also avoid synthetic materials in clothing, etc...
i am all for reducing the suffering of animals, but health and the environment come first.
OK so there are a couple of approaches to this issue, e.g. based on audio signal level, constant audio patterns, constant video patterns - and you don't really need to involve machine learning here. You can call it automation and it is perfectly fine.
People have been using the term "AI" in so many contexts for so many things that it's almost meaningless because it's so vague.
Consider these absurdities: “I don’t need to test this new drug before releasing it to market, as long as it is safe and effective!
Or “I don’t need to worry about phishing scams. I can click on any link as long as it is safe.”
Or more to the point: “This food tastes good, so it must be good for me. There’s no need for hygiene and food safety laws.”
I don’t trust LLMs, because I have tested them, and continue to test them, and they are patently unreliable. They can still be useful in a momentary, self-contained way. But my studies have led me to use them only for answers that are easily verified.
Precisely why I don't use AI. It is not. I can't trust it bar for some "research this for me" followed by a thorough review of the source material, which is something I am already really adept to do myself, so no value here.
LLMs are an ok iteration on search with up and downsides.
One of the upsides is better contextual hinting from the users input. One of the downsides is that it also makes it trivial to spew out so much bullshit content that soon I doubt it will be able to train on most of the public internet anymore.
We had that in 1990's VCRs with no "AI" required. It also fast-forwarded through the commercials during recorded programs.
It worked pretty good on my Panasonic.
Yes, I owned several of those Panasonic VCRs with the "Commercial Advance™" feature. Also had a Hitachi VCR with same feature licensed from ADLE. The heuristics used a combination of detecting a fade-to-black screen transitions and higher audio levels of loud commercials. It was simplistic criteria but was "good enough".
The problem is that VCR required 2 separate passes of the VHS tape. The 1st pass was to record the video and then the VCR automatically rewound the tape and the 2nd pass played it back to itself to analyze and mark the ad segments.
That approach does not work to watch live feeds of sports broadcasts. To use the Panasonic VCR approach, one would have to "record" it first -- which defeats the purpose of watching the game live. To instantly block live ads without any waiting, you need technology with more "intelligence" or "smarts" or whatever people want to call it.
My point is that if you hype up a "live-tv-ads-skipping device" with "Unicorn Fairy Dust Technology" -- people won't complain that the company called it "unicorn whatever" -- as long as it actually works and improves their lives. It's when such a device does not work (e.g. Apple Intelligence fiasco) is when the meta analysis and lectures about such as "you know, that device doesn't actually have any horses inside of it with a horn coming out of its head".
You are correct. However, in your rush to defend your position, you failed to read what I wrote.
The VCR had both the ability to skip recorded commercials, and also mute live commercials.
Read the comment again.
If he has an iPhone, there’s no need to download it. It’s already there.
That said, he has some good points.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we won’t be able to “opt out,” forever. At some point, ML is bound to become endemic.
It’s like those stupid scan-guns that supermarkets in my area are starting to ask customers to use. They are scan guns that you pick up, as you go in, and scan each purchase. When you check out, you just scan a barcode on the cashier stand, and Bjorn Stronginthearm’s your uncle.
I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.
Sooner or later, however, I am unlikely to be able to avoid them.
This reminds me of when the bus company of my hometown transitioned to having a driver + cashier to only having a driver that takes cash. Half of the workforce just gone overnight. Of course the writing was on the wall with electronic ticketing, but still.
It makes me feel I'm part of a "First They Came" situation. Sure maybe these people found other jobs for themselves (or so I tell myself) but still.
Bullshit jobs are HR and project management. Made up fluff nobody really needs.
I'd point to the poisons we're willing to dump on our fields as the primary reason for so many jobs being replaced. The combine is just what replaced them, not the root cause of why they could be replaced.
My point is that it's still weird seeing people getting fired.
Endure, don't embrace. Or whatever, I'm a random on the internet - not a cop.
But that's not a great job in the first place and I am not a fan of keeping jobs for the sake of it. So we do need to figure out a way of income for those who cannot make a transition, but my mission is not to keep cashiers.
From what I have seen, they actually make shoplifting much easier. It's just that the product loss is less than salary and benefits of the cashiers, and I'll bet that the company has some way to recoup the losses.
I have no idea what the next iteration will be, or if this is considered acceptable in terms of profits.
You think I stole it? Get the real cops. I actually paid for everything, enjoy.
Why'd I stop going? Armed private security with more ego than training. Much better options. Absolutely not advice, but usually the right look/pace does wonders. It helps to be defensible.
In "better" areas where people are by default more honest (or have money to spend), the losses aren't that bad.
But stores in less affluent areas have dropped self-checkout completely because it isn't worth it due to theft losses.
If you go back in time to when the original super market designs were made, prices where on items with printed labels and the person at the checkout actually did the adding up by entering the numbers!
ie checkouts originally existed because adding up to total cost was a non-trivial job, and then you had to hand over cash and somebody needed to calculate the change, work out how you split that into the notes and coins and count it out.
Overtime these steps were automated way - first with barcodes for cost totalling and then both electronic payment methods and payment machines that take cash and automatically give change.
Then the job just became swiping the items across the barcode scanner and pressing a couple of buttons to enable the electronic payment and it took a while for people to realise the original reason for the job had gone and customers could do it themselves.
That's great, why would I pay someone to do something I absolutely don't mind doing myself, and even save some time while doing it. Do you also still pay someone to pump fuel into your car?
In my town, you actually have to let them. There's a law. I think it has something to do with smoking morons blowing themselves (and others) up.
Like I said, I do it on a human principle; not because it's not a good idea.
They are annoying, though, because they chirp at you with ads, as you pass items on the shelf.
Until like two years ago I did (now-rural Oregonian). Now I pay the same for gas, getting it no faster and having to do the work and even sometimes I now even have to deal with loud commercials they put on the pumps. The only upside is it's easier to fill up late at night, yay.
That and I've been in public restrooms and seen how few people wash their hands. I hate having to touch public screens. Touch public screens and then handle my food? Pass.
It's like if restaurants started making you cook your own food. Why even bother to go?
Ever been to a Korean steak house?
;)
You pay a fair penny to cook your own food.
They are a much faster, more convenient experience than standing in line waiting for a cashier lane, scanning items after picking. It's just great, as the customer.
I'm glad they still have 1-4 cashier lanes for refuseniks, pensioners and people without the loyalty card (etc) who don't want to deal with it. Everyone's happy.
But they still exist to fire cashiers.
Thanks for the "broad-brush" of folks that you don't agree with.
If we want to truly want to automate away jobs, we should also change our economic system such that people don't have to work like they do today. Without that we'll just create more jobs for everyone to fill, automating away some while cresting others and all we really sis wash shake things up and stress out those involved.
I travel a lot for work(200+ days a year) and so I see the best and the worst. In every country I've been, the self checkout is implemented differently. Only in certain countries, low trust societies, do you have to wait for the scale to calculate the weight of the goods to prevent shop lifting
In Switzerland as an example, self checkout is a breeze. There is no such scale at all. Fast, highly efficient with good software.
Same in Sweden, though for some reason some grocery stores in Sweden insist on being a member before you can use the self checkout lanes. I think because they were early adopters of the technology and weren't sure they could trust their customers(hint: they could). Another annoying thing is that you have to scan your receipt to exit the store. This you usually don't have to do in Switzerland.
I've seen the same type of inefficient system you're accustomed to in the UK at pretty much all the stores over there and in Rimi in Riga. Frankly it works a lot better in Latvia than the UK, though still annoying and disrupts the workflow.
The [REDACTED DRUG STORE CHAIN] ones are the worst. They get confused at the drop of a hat, and have some employee, constantly intervening. I suspect they run “brogrammer” code.
I don't agree at all. I think they're a terrible customer experience. I stopped using them a while back and am much happier for that. I'm not alone -- some stores have already started staffing more checkout lanes and removing some self-checkout kiosks.
I'll have to start shopping in your town.
At every supermarket in my city, there is a long line of people waiting to use the self checkouts. I keep an eye on the last person in that line, and I'm almost always done first by using a human cashier.
People just buy into the "tech=better" meme without even thinking.
I don't hear people wanting to opt out of ML though, they want to opt out of AI.
Beyond just the bad name of these tools though, one absolutely can opt of out then. It just depends on how far one is willing to go to avoid using them and what all they will give up in the process.
Jobs are not supposed to exist for the sole purpose of generating paychecks. There is supposed to be real work that needs to be done.
A "dig a hole and fill it in" job is a symptom of a society unable to benefit from it's own progress.
Other animals don't do busywork as a means of survival.
only if youre on ios 18
The main thing about 18, is moving into the hardware, and adding a lot more of it.
Google is also replacing Assistant with Gemini on Android: https://gemini.google/assistant/
I use them because it lets people not be cashiers and they can be stocking the store and doing something more useful than being a glorified barcode scanning robot.
I have nothing against people using self-checkout, but making it sound like you're doing something good for people seems absurd and is only there to make oneself feel better when, in reality, jobs WILL be lost because of it. No need to sugarcoat it.
I haven't heard anyone being "fulfilled" by being a cashier in a large supermarket, the kind that usually has self-checkout.
It's not like the mom&pop corner bodega is installing them.
Also, I am less rushed because I can go at my own pace.
Ok why is that
> AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it.
That sounds fine.
Its like when you hear a conservative pundit claim that all antifa are weak people who need extra genders, and then in the next breath complain that they are an effective, brutal, brick throwing, pundit punching street militia.
Pick a lane.
>As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness?
So now its issue is that it doesnt give you good feelings?
From my experience trying this. It isn’t quite that easy. The AI has a massive amount of difficulty staying on track and remembering earlier facts when writing a story. There is zero risk of them replacing writers for anything but short stories for now.
Sudowrite literally breaks out the story into chapters, and has you arrange all the facts of the story so they can be summarily accessible at all times.
Like I had it write a cool opening chapter to a short story based on nothing but my notes.
And another time, I had a boxer punch someone 2 floors above him on a balcony.
Those two aren't mutually exclusive.
I haven't met many (any?) Antifa members and wouldn't begin to categorize them, but a person can both want non-binary genders and throw bricks.
The comment does not itself appear to be making the claim "wanting extra genders is weak", but rather is criticising those who do say that.
Sure, I get that. I wasn't trying to make that point.
I take issue with the idea that weak people can't be violent or physically dangerous.
It depends a bit on what kind of weakness they mean, but physically weak people can still throw bricks or pull triggers and emotionally weak people can still lash out when they feel they have no other choice.
I'd actually argue that weak people are more likely to be more violent if/when they do lash out because it may be a last resort for them. Bottle things up for too long and they tend to blow up.
The issue is that novels used to have value because they required effort and time. Now being able to produce one means its value dropped significantly. Only for the artificial ones, though, of course.
That part isn't very convincing. I have no charges on my bank account from Apple or Google.
Anyway, i think a potential reason to reject AI is what Kurt Vonnegut has laid out in his 1952 novel "Player Piano": Do we want automation take away jobs we actually like? I highly recommend reading this book, it is once again very relevant today.
That premise is "For something to have worth, someone has to be willing to pay for it".
That is only true for the narrowest definition of worth. If worth is reduced to a property to facilitate trade and nothing else then it works.
Worth can also carry a sense of non-tradable value, It can be meaningful. You can do something because you like doing it and someone else could be glad you were doing it. Requiring a financial transaction to turn that goodwill into self esteem seems to be a fundamental problem with our society.
I enjoy understanding what my programs do to the deepest level, so making or using AI are both boring; they remove the fun part of programming and leave only the boring parts (mainly debugging). I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason.
I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body. A thinking body part is always more annoying to deal with, because you have to reverse-engineer what it's doing to get it to do what you want.
I don't think this reasoning applies to everyone. I think it's fine for other people to use ML algorithms. I just don't want them myself.
de-skilling (reducing skills), not desk killing, for anyone else as illiterate as me
When that started going away, I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum".
"Deepest level" in GP presumably refers to the deepest level of the existing source code.
Those were the days. Nothing like that delicious smell of crude oil vapour as the fractionation column warms up…
Yup, that is exactly what AI autocomplete is. AI does the boring parts, you do the thinking.
>I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason.
That is your problem. You are stuck in 2010s. But the last couple years have had giant enormous leaps.
Can someone explain this part? It's not something I can relate to at all. Maybe because I'm not from the US?
Maybe it’s not fair but I find a Framework running Linux gives a good first impression.
In tech circles, you would probably make a pretty big impression, if you pulled out an old laptop running MS-DOS (and still did an impressive demo).
This too. The author just has the drama on everything turned up to a thousand percent. It’s incredibly irritating and made me stop reading.
That statement is simply false even in the US.
The "one of us" mentality has shifted to other things over the years, but some industries still live on the image.
I don't think there is much more too it. "If I didn't buy Apple it would hurt my career". Obviously, completely absurd but how else can you grow a company to be worth 3.3 trillion selling tech gadgets at a massive premium.
It is easy to convince oneself too that this marketing is factual reality after spending so much money too. I mean that new iphone wasn't an expense, it was a career investment!
We all know very well that buying something isn't the difference between why our peers will or won't engage with us. However devaluing others into superficial strawman is an accessible coping mechanism for social rejection.
When children say something like this, it's because they're not aware they're being bullied and buying the <thing> isn't going to fix it. When an adult says it, it's a bit more concerning - it shows that they perhaps have certain unaddressed social anxieties, or are avoiding dealing with their antisocial behaviours that are leading to their social rejection.
I'm not talking about entire societies of people like the Amish.
I'm talking about people who otherwise use technology, but then do something like this publicly etc.
I want to know if time even remembers these people beyond that one tid bit. I am curious if they went on to do anything else or what technologies "caused" them to defect.
Sounds hard to curate. Do you have a specific threshold of notoriety in mind? There could be tons of average people doing this and no good way to find out about it.
There are plenty of game developers who reject game engines in lieu of building their own from varying levels of scratch. Jonathan Blow, for example, made a number of successful and artistically meaningful games that heavily leveraged his custom tech stack.
There is a time and place for an air powered ratchet or big rattle gun. To think “my muscles will atrophy and I’ll stop thinking of clever ways to loosen that thing” is just wrong. It’s confusing the desired outcome with the method.
I did resist copilot up until recently and now laugh at myself. Use it to power through the boring template crap and leave yourself the juicy morsels. It’s faster and more satisfying.
There is still value for beginners to do things the hard way for a while. Write the unit tests by hand, see how they all repeat the same pattern 90% of the time. Now you see the pattern and you can use LLM-assisted intellisense to speed it up.
And because you know how they're supposed to look like, you can see when the LLM goes off the rails.
I don't want a tool to help me power through the boring template crap.
I don't want to power through the boring template crap.
I don't want the boring template crap to exist.
I want to be actively working on things that make the boring template crap cease to exist.
I think there are a lot of risks with AI, but I'm not convinced that it's intrinsically bad for "our minds, creativity, or competence". In many ways it's let me be MORE creative in the ways I want to be, by helping me overcome obstacles that were always blockers in the past.
Like I did a bunch of RSS-feeds for sites that don't have them (or they're crap quality). I just gave Cursor (Claude 3.7 I think) the HTML page and told it to write a parser that generates an Atom feed with Go from the page.
In most cases it was right on the first go, a few I had to adjust to make them look right in FreshRSS.
It even automatically suggested caching entries in a sqlite db to reduce load on the original site. This was for feeds that only have a link with no content, the application opens the link, fetches the relevant content and adds it to the custom feed.
random CLI app I don't know how to use > explain in plain english what I want to achieve > ChatGPT outputs the command I need
Ok, not random but I use it for FFmpeg all the time. Example from yesterday when I needed to convert a TrueHD audio file into stereo FLAC: https://i.imgur.com/5ib99qh.png
100% works and it's perfect
"I want to find all mp4 files, convert them to AV1 and move them to this directory" -> SLM generates script and maybe even runs it automatically Claude Code -style. All locally with no internet needed.
Add this to ~/.bashrc :
# bind Alt-e on the command line to replace text with command
_aichat_bash() {
if [[ -n "$READLINE_LINE" ]]; then
READLINE_LINE=$(aichat -e "$READLINE_LINE")
READLINE_POINT=${#READLINE_LINE}
fi
}
bind -x '"\ee": _aichat_bash'
find . -type f -name "*.mp4" -exec ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -c:a copy ~/Videos/{}.mkv \;
I think there was a recent Show HN with a wrapper for this process.
Is someone working on this? I'd love to contribute. I have this idea every time I see someone watching commercial TV. The volume (and volume!) of ads is insane.
I was easily able to make a podcast ad remover with LLMs, but real-time ad muting of a video stream is something I haven't tried yet (possibly easier because of closed captioning?).
I don't think this will be possible for much longer. Google is getting so unusable, I am actually starting to believe that they are intentionally screwing their traditional search product to force users to "onboard" on to their AI results instead.
I'm terrified of AI companies. They have no qualms about destroying economies and societies, burning the planet down with carbon emissions, whatever they think will make it more likely for them become the Google or Amazon of AI. They will fuck the rest of us over without a second thought, if it means they might win.
> Unwary, I fell for the techno-optimism of the past two decades and ended up with a diminished attention span and a bunch of mysterious subscription charges to show for it. Well. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on Sam Altman. I know, much better now, the folly of turning over my own mental powers to a bunch of techies promising a brilliant future.
> I’m not making that mistake again. Nor should you.
Context:
> The people pushing AI now are the same sorts who spent the 2010s promoting web 2.0 as a new vision of freedom and global connectivity, all while destroying traditional media and ripping off as much private data as they possibly could and cheerfully selling it to advertisers.
> This recent history raises an important question: why in the world should we trust these people ever again?
> These are remarkable achievements. But they do infantilise us. I’m pretty sure that, if my phone were taken away from me, I couldn’t find my own way from my home to my place of work.
And the author alludes to the creation of further dependency on Big Tech such as OpenAI. This totally ignores the fact that there are quite a few (actually) open models out there. One can do a fully local setup, use a model service such OpenRouter, or even self-host a model on a GPU service such as Runpod. There are all these options available, depending on user preference and skill, so one doesn't have to become dependent on Big Tech's gated offerings.
Overall, the only thing I can really say is I hope the author is very close to retirement or already there, as if they keep this stance on AI they'll eventually fall very far behind, unless they're into plumbing or a similar extremely hands-on field.
This claim would stand better if it wasn't able to solve math and physics problems I struggle with.
Like imagine rejecting the internet in it's entirety because the "dotcom" era was way overhyped. That's what the author sounds like right now. Whatever rises out of the ashes of this hype will be far more useful than what we had before and we all move forward.
We don’t have AI. We aren’t particularly close to AGI. This effort has about reached the top of the S-curve.
So, along comes AI, which promises to solve my problems - I won't need to learn the messy details because I just sort of describe what I want and AI handles the details.
God, what a disappointment. I don't know what I was thinking that AI was supposed to do for me, but this doesn't seem like what I wanted. I'm missing the details, which is where the interesting bits lie.
Probably why I avoid management - sure, managing people and things has details, but those details aren't interesting to me. I probably do need AI to help with that bit … except, hahaha, upper management doesn't need me there, or anywhere, because AI can do that stuff (but probably not the messy details - those were "handled by someone else's code" which was just copied into the system).
The future is kind of disappointing right now, in that regard.
I dunno, HN. I think you are losing the plot.
Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes said almost a century ago that as technology advanced people would have to do less work. I think if AI lives up to the hype it could be a tremendous boon for everyone if we can restructure our societies to take advantage.
>Text predict combined with data mining’…is all 99.9% of [what we have quaintly come to define as] human intelligence is, too.
>Learn a trade, Sam. Start a manufacturing company. Go and dig ditches. Perform brain surgery. Fly a chopper. Provide hands-on care for someone who is ill. Be a stay-at-home dad, even. AI can’t do anything,
See if it's useful, ignoring the religious like hype, and use it for what it's worth. And stop calling it "AI" because it doesn't have anything to do with "intelligence".
LLMs will write the code for you is bullshit. LLMs will get you some starter or reference info if it's a widely discussed subject is true.
Apple products are crap, software wise. They're just less crap than the competition so I use them.
I use ChatGPT in many useful ways. For instance, I ask ChatGPT to explain my texts back to me to help prevent misunderstandings due to misleading sentences. How's that a bad thing? This is incredibly useful when there's nobody around to proofread my texts.