ai criticism

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The Obligatory AI Post
2 months ago
- The author has minimal firsthand experience with AI and eschews its use, but feels compelled to write a blog post to defend against false accusations of writing 'AI slop' based on stylistic choices like em dashes.
- AI is criticized for promoting ignorance and laziness by replacing the need to learn or struggle, with the goal of making humans 'super-dumb' rather than AI becoming super-intelligent.
- AI's resource consumption exacerbates climate change, causes hardware shortages, and raises electricity costs, while vendors engage in intellectual property theft and regulatory capture.
- The author views AI as an investment bubble or 'black hole' that incentivizes job automation, worker burnout, and productivity theater—such as generating countless apps that nobody buys.
- Speed in software development is seen as a vice; AI-generated code may be fast but software engineering is an art, and mature software should be changed cautiously.
- Using the example of Google fixing bugs with AI, the author argues that corporations could have hired humans but prioritized feature release over bug fixes, making AI a cheap substitute.
- Drawing on '2001: A Space Odyssey,' the author warns that AI like HAL 9000 is an 'idiot savant' that makes catastrophic errors due to human overtrust, and AI should not be dismissed as 'just a tool' since it fundamentally changes society.
<antirez>
2 months ago
- Critics who previously dismissed LLMs as fundamentally flawed now claim that reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 are not 'just LLMs,' but this is false.
- DeepSeek R1 is a pure decoder-only autoregressive model using the same next-token prediction criticized earlier, with no explicit symbolic reasoning.
- R1 Zero achieved strong reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought generation without any supervised fine-tuning.
- The S1 paper shows that as few as 1,000 examples can enable complex reasoning, indicating that pre-training already encodes the necessary representations.
- Reasoning models are fundamentally LLMs, and those who declared LLMs a dead end were wrong; attempts to rewrite history are unacceptable.
Yudkowsky and Soares' Book Is Lacking (2025)
2 months ago
- The book lacks evidence or discussion of how AI might achieve superintelligence, merely asserting it without argument.
- Authors rely on narrow AI successes (e.g., chess, protein folding) but do not address whether these tasks are analogous to broader intelligent behavior.
- They admit humans do not know what intelligence is and that current AI is shallow, yet claim superintelligence is imminent.
- Their definition of intelligence as 'prediction and steering' is tautological, essentially saying computers are intelligent because they do what computers do.
- They argue we don't need to understand intelligence to build it, deferring to future researchers or AI itself—a circular and unsubstantiated claim.
- The book misrepresents the mystery of AI: we know AI finds correlations, not that it thinks, yet they use ignorance to imply potential superintelligence.
Why Linus Is Right and AI Is Wrong
2 months ago
- Linus Torvalds affirms Linux is not anti-AI, views AI as a useful tool, and tells critics they can fork or walk away.
- The author argues pragmatic engineers are natural allies of AI critics because excessive AI use is unpragmatic and wasteful.
- The author uses rhetorical analysis (Kings Council pattern) to show how Linus's words are being weaponized by AI hype to silence critics.
- Criticism of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for inciting panic, manipulating markets, and using alarming predictions to gain power.
- Proposes language reforms: avoid disempowerment terms (e.g., 'left behind'), call technologies by specific names, and reject anthropomorphizing AI.
- Calls for solidarity among AI critics and recognition that most developers are allies despite surface-level pro-AI rhetoric.
- The author supports right of refusal for AI use in projects, citing examples like Ghostty and Zig, and criticizes purity tests.
'Weird Al' Yankovic Pulled Out of AI Ad
3 months ago
- Weird Al Yankovic declined a lucrative offer to appear in an AI-related business software commercial, citing his dislike for AI.
- Hollywood performers like Kane Parsons, Emma Thompson, and Madonna have criticized AI for being harmful, irritating, and counter to artistic risk-taking.
- Despite Madonna's criticism, her own short film "Confessions II" utilized AI artists, highlighting the complex stance on AI in the creative industry.

ai criticism

The Obligatory AI Post

<antirez>

Yudkowsky and Soares' Book Is Lacking (2025)

Why Linus Is Right and AI Is Wrong

'Weird Al' Yankovic Pulled Out of AI Ad