I’ve written a little about how I’m using AI (in Claude techniques I like and Sync and Swim App). However, my actual feelings about AI are more complicated, and I was uncomfortable with the apparent endorsement of AI shown in those posts.

Some things that concern me:

• How do people learn to program when they don’t have to struggle with the early pieces? I don’t think this is just “I had to suffer and so should you”. Struggling to tackle early problems prepared me to take on harder ones. When the AI flounders, I know how to solve the issues it’s run into because I have hit problems like that before using AI.
• More generally, how do students learn when there’s a machine that can do all their assignments? It’s frustrating that AI companies dropped a cheating machine in the laps of the worlds’ students and now teachers have to figure out how to teach in the face of this big obstacle. Maybe it’s eventually helpful, but it’s definitely been a net negative over the last few years.
• It’s probably going to crash the world economy.
• The art that it makes is soulless. It takes money out of the pockets of artists.
• It will concentrate wealth. If AI makes knowledge workers more efficient, I believe there’s basically zero chance we’ll be able to translate that into less time working. Instead, the owners of capital will capture all of those gains.
• It’s incredibly rude to expect someone to read generated text that you couldn’t be bothered to write. There are reasonable ways to work with AI, but “well, here’s what ChatGPT said to do” isn’t one of them.
• Generated text, video, images, and audio are extremely powerful for propaganda, misinformation campaigns, and scams. More people will fall victim to these because of AI.

Despite all of these concerns, I’m still using AI at work and for side projects. I find it pretty fun, and am still surprised and delighted by how capable it is for programming and debugging. Eventually, society will figure out how to use AI responsibly and it will mitigate some of the drawbacks. I don’t think that abstaining from its use serves any useful end, but I didn’t want to seem to wholeheartedly endorse it.