on AI hate
i never really understood hate toward machine-generated content. i don't consider myself an artist, so when machines started to be capable of reproducing and re-mixing pictures and lately music and videos i found it amusing, not threatening. now, they say, AI will take the jobs of programmers and engineers. it may be true that in a couple of years my current job will become obsolete, but it's not AI that's going to do that - it's people. technology is never good or bad, it's always how we decide to use it that matters.
despite the word "agentic" being one of the nominees for the 2025 word of the year there is not much actual agency inside LLM. whenever you get a bot message, spam email or read slop text - there is always human behind that. it feels unfair to blame gmail for the spam (even though they can and should do something to help us filter it) so why do people blame AI for the slop content?
i think agency is a critical point here. while AI evangelists keep pushing narratives about agentic-this-and-that, actual people feel like their own agency is inversely proportional to the AI's. the more your phone or computer "thinks" for you, the less you need to, right? so we can all spend saved mental effort to do stuff we love! that narrative holds until AI starts to creep inside the things we love, taking them away as well. in work context many companies are starting to mandate AI usage. people feel left behind if they don't use AI for everything. and obviously everything gets better if sprinkled with a bit (most likely a lot) of AI.
the approach that has worked for me so far is to mentally keep AI in the "tools" category. for that reason i prefer using the term LLM instead of AI. it reminds me of its nature, of all the hard work and research people put into creating them and that in the end they are just that - models. models that summarize language in such a way that they could simulate real-world work and be good enough to cover, let's say, 80% of the cases, but are still just models.
i'm not sure if this number will grow or the complexity of life and tasks will increase so machines will never outperform humans. but i do hope that we keep our agency and only outsource tasks consciously and deliberately. let's build the future we want without blaming matrix multiplication for our actions along the way.