I hate AI

Look, I get it. It’s a revolutionary technology maybe. People who make a lot of money off of people believing that say so, it HAS to be true.

I get it. I see the benchmarks. I see how they get a problem they’ve been trained to solve correct almost 80% of the time.

I get it, I know I’m using it wrong, I’m using the wrong verbage in my prompt. The AI can sense my cowardice through my use of ampersands, yes, you and I using the exact same prompt SHOULD get us two completely different wrong answers. I AM holding the phone wrong, I know.

You need another few hundred billion dollars and more public water and energy? Yeah sure we can go ahead and just spend taxpayer money on that, sure. Yeah John Q Public will foot the bill, after all, in Capatalist America, we socialize the losses and privatize the gains! Something something trickle down something or another.

Why do I dislike it so much? It’s clearly a scam. A grift, a rug pull to beat all rug pulls. You cannot look me in the eye and tell me that you think that AI investments are legit, sustainable and going to lead to the “Infinite Money Glitch” you expect it to be. If you’re investing in to AI and your investments don’t include a Million Dollar WalMart steak at Mar-A-Lago then you’re not an investor, you’re a bagholder.

Follow the money, it’s not hard, literally look at anyone saying AI is anything but a hype train without breaks. Every. Single. One. Has financial ties to AI Investments. The only reason anyone gives two flying shits about AI is because rando bastards will make an absolute gobsmacking amount of dosh up to and during the bubble pop. Which is where the most exciting part comes in to play

The Bubble Pop

AI is a bubble. It’s going to pop. It’s going to cause a massive economic downturn that’s going to make us all poorer for generations. You cannot sit there and wholeheartidly believe that Nvidia being 15+% of our Economy is healthy. As an aside: I really dislike when someone states the common fact that AI is a bubble and the bagholders run, tripping over themselves, literally falling overthemselves to be the first to say that “NO! AI IS THE FUTURE OF CODING, YOU ARE NOT LONGER NEEDED!!11” like dude, I get it. You’re heavily invested. The fact that AI is a bubble doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s bad for a whole lot of other reasons. Remember: The Internet had it’s own Bubble…the Dot-Com Bubble…They should have named it something else, but that’s not important right now.

It’s happened before, it’s gonna happen again. Unfortunately, in the American economic system, these sorts of things happen for the benefit of the wealthy and it’s just part of a normal American way of life. The ole’ “Boom/Bust” cycle. But when that bubble pops doesn’t matter. It will eventually and that’s when AI will actually become an interesting tool that I’d be excited to use.

Once the investments dry up and all the shit eaters and grifters pack up and move on to the next thing (It will be General-Use Home Robotics) the actual good shit will be left behind, ready to be built upon. This is where we’re going to see a lot of FOSS and low cost models operating, getting 80% of the results for 20% of the resources of the rapidly abandoned “Flagship” models. Only when the grifters have pulled the rug on the bagholders will we really get a real go at this thing and apply it to problems that matter.

Look, I’m REALLY HAPPY 40% of my phone’s battery will be devoted to AI running in the background so at a MOMENTS NOTICE I can generate a picture of myself getting spin kicked in the head boobs. I really, really am. But you know what’s going to be better? The Local Model hosted on my server that my Home Assistant can tap in to. My $10 dumb cameras that locally connects to that server from the fridge and pantry keeps an eye on the stock of all my groceries. Generating me a shopping list as I go, creating meal lists and recipe suggestions based on what I have and what’s on sale (AI connects to an email I control and I auto-forward my local grocery store weekly flyers to it…We really need to mandate an API for grocery prices but that would be awkward, for several reasons, for a specific administration…)

So when I’m all pau with work, I have a shopping list ready that has the best stop/distance/price ratio AND it gives me a “Fuck it, we ball” list with just one store. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Imagine getting off work and you open your phone to find a full shopping list and meals that you like, plus a few new suggestions. Break it up over a few days “Today you can go here and here, or here and do here and here on these days”. you can compare the price to getting it delivered “if you went yourself, you’d save $120, that’s enough for half of a Nintendo Switch game!”

Why don’t we have this? Because useful tools aren’t the point of AI right now. Right now, the entire point of AI is scamming your boss and investors. They want investors to dump literal trillions of dollars in to the furnace, because these grifters have convinced them that they can convince your boss to dump Trillions X infinity in to their coffers at the promise of firing you and all your coworkers to achieve the infinite money glitch. It’s really the perfect scam. They promise the Moon, knowing it will never happen. But your consulation prize is the stars! Well, I mean, some stars, maybe. For sure! Oh that one, right there? Yeah that’s yours buddy, for sure. I’ll add it to the list of Owned Stars right now!

Because when your claim of “Fire all of your workers to achieve Infinite Money” won’t pan out, your second bullet is “100X MORE PRODUCTIVITY! 1000X MORE PRODUCTIVITY! 10000000000 MILLION BAJILLION QUADRILLION MORE PRODUCTIVITY!” actually sounds…believable. Almost. It’s not “Infinite money” but to your boss? That’s close enough.

But here’s the deal. I actually do use some AI Coders and this leads me to my final thoughts:

It’s not so bad.

When I started this blog site thing. I used Arise, a REALLY cool bash based site generator that I loved strictly because…it just needed bash (and pandoc). I liked the idea of a super sturdy little script that just…build my site from a list of files that I gave it. Once I got everything tweaked the way I liked it in the CSS, I could just write posts…

But the problem was that it didn’t easily let me add new pages. So you see that I have a “Home” and “About” and a “Blog” page. Home and Blog? Easy peasy. About? Yeesh, no way, Hose-ayy.

So I gave up on Arise and swapped over to 11ty which…was a massive npm project that was just…clunky. I really disliked how much wrangling I had to do. I mean once the wrangling was done…it was done! But having to run npm update all the time and getting the THIS PACKAGE IS LITERALLY ABOUT TO STONE COLD STUN YOUR DOG warnings got old, quick.

So I went back to the Arise git repo and was poking around and I had a think…What If I asked one of these LLM Jokers to help me add that functionality to this script? It’s…just a script after all, how hard could it be?

The answer is that it was a MASSIVE pain. Mostly because it kept going in to stupid damn loops. I mostly iterated through Kagi Assistant, which was fine. I changed models and poked and prodded. I used all kinds of models and prompts and eventually it gave me a…working product. I wouldn’t call it Great, but it’s definitely Good Enough. It cost me about 10 bucks and a full day but had I done it myself? Well I wouldn’t have done it. I just don’t have the time.

See: that’s where I have found a lot of use for these BS coding assistants. They can help me slap together a “good enough” for a small tool or project that I want. In this case the LazySiteGenerator. A VERY simple bash script that converts markdown files to HTML and poops it all in a folder so you can scp it over to a dang webserver. It’s oldschool, it’s easy, it works.

Will I ever release it? Maybe, I guess I will. Right now it’s kinda garbage. It works…okay. You gotta fiddle with it. But maybe i’ll file it down and make it a bit nicer…we’ll see.

But hey, helping the occasional guy make a tool just right for them is probably worth a few trillion dollars…for sure.

The current problem with AI, as I’ve shown is that it’s competeing with cheap human labor. It’s competeting with fiverr. Because again: the point isn’t to do something cool or interesting that’s actually useful, it’s to trick your boss in to thinking that they can basically buy a money printer. Because here me out right here and now: if AI could do anything the grifters claimed, they would be doing it themselves and not selling you the shovels. It’s the classic scam of the guy selling you the book “How to earn a trillion dollars”. I’m not saying AI is useless, I’m saying AI sucks because it could be great…and it will be great…eventually…when our economy collapses because Jenses needed to have more money than God.

Anyway, sorry for the Hiatus. I hope to do more posts later. I’m working on some projects that are Game related so hopefully those come off as interesting!

Mahalos to you for reading my little comeback post here. I’d like to post more when/if I find the time. I wonder who reads this stuff anyway.

~Dad