The Quiet Disappearance of Skeptics in the AI Gold Rush
middlelayer.substack.com
middlelayer.substack.com
Plenty of comment sections with reasonable skeptical takes, they’re just not good headline fodder.
TFA mourns the disappearance of true believers — those pundits saying LLMs would quickly achieve AGI and then go on to basically destroy the world. As that prediction became more obviously false, the pundits quietly stopped repeating it.
"Skeptics" is not, and never was, the label for those unbridled believers/evangelists; the label was "AI doomers." But an essay titled "Where have all the AI doomers gone?" wouldn't get clicks because the title question pretty much answers itself.
There are different arguments as to why AI is bad, and they’re not all coming from the same people! There’s the resource argument (it’s expensive and bad for the environment), the quality argument (hallucinations, etc.), the ethical argument (stealing copyrighted material), the moral argument (displacing millions of jobs is bad), and probably more I’m forgetting.
Sam Altman talking about the dangers of AI in front of Congress accomplishes two things: It’s great publicity for AI’s capabilities (what CEO doesn’t want to possess the technology that could take over the world?), and it sets the stage for regulatory capture, protecting the big players from upstarts by making it too difficult/expensive to compete.
That’s not skepticism, that’s capitalism.
These LLMs are buggy as hell. They say they can do certain things - reasoning, coding, summarizing, research, etc - but they can't. They mangle those jobs. They are full of bugs and the teams behind them have proved they can't debug them. They thought they could "scale laws" out of it but that proved as unfruitful as it was illogical.
What class of software can work this bad and still have people convinced the only solution is to double the amount of compute and data they need, again?
Cloud providers :)))
For everyone who argues, "naysayers said that letting schoolchildren use calculators would ruin their minds, but it didn't," how many people do you know who can make a good estimate of their share of a restaurant bill without pulling out their phones? Think about how that translates to how well they grasp at a glance what they're getting themselves into with Klarna, car loans, etc.
We realized that AI isn't as smart as we feared and the real danger lies in the management believing the AI companies ads.
For me personally (and maybe for others as well?) there's two parts to this. The first is that it's exhausting to constantly be pulled into "debates" with staunch pro-AI supporters who can't accept that you have some reason to be against it or agree to disagree and move on from the conversation. The second is that I've noticed that even mild anti-AI sentiment lately seems to make people (especially tech people) see and treat you as an anti-science luddite or conspiracy theorist.
It's easier to just pretend I don't care or that I'm not interested in public than be a skeptic.
There are certain types of people who will always do this - and think they're right.
But I don't remember it ever being getting anywhere near as heated or pushed in real life conversations. That kind of borderline religious fanaticism mostly lived in online spaces.
I don’t think the skeptics disappeared, they just got drowned out with all the added noise that came with the new LLM hype cycle.
Nietzsche, probably speaking about IA
Vibe coding generates an infinite stream of „companies“ with proven business model and market fit and obviously unmaintainable, buggy, and impossible to scale software. But once there’s profits and their life depends on that pile of vibe-coded AI vomit continuing to work, they are happy to pay through the nose for a rewrite by experienced human coders. AI might ruin the job market for beginners, but the market for experts is exploding.
So why would I loudly complain about AI? It’s buggy as hell, but from my point of view, that’s a major upside.