AI ~ Um, pass

This ripple is not about all of the harms and ill that generative AI and AI models cause, which are many. I covered that in a previous ripple here. This is about why I don’t want to use the AI tools that are currently available to me.

The first reason is that I want to understand what I am doing. I get there there are some shortcuts that I can take in the interest of efficency. But I want to know inside and out the work that I am producing. Certainly if something were to go wrong, I don’t want to rely on a chatbot or AI software to try to fix the problem I created.

I realize that there are levels of abstraction on everything. I might write some code that does a business process or creates a web product, but I don’t have a complete understanding of how a cloud based hosting platform delivers that to the end user. I don’t have a complete understanding of how electricity converts bit data into a visual display on a screen. But someone out there does.

What if we create a generation of people who don’t actually understand how the tools they are using actually work. Studies have shown that people lose the ability to think and solve problems if they rely on LLMs and AI to answer all their questions. And what is the point? To earn more money for shareholders? What about teaching, learning, apprenticeship, and mastery? Sorry, that just doesn’t interest me. If that is the direction the business world is heading, I will be diving back into other crafts.