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I’m constantly reassessing whether the decision to think about, write and work with new generative AI tooling is justified. I struggle to reconcile the new capabilities with the undoubtedly bad background and grim impact of releasing the capability to the world.

Above all my stance is that there’s no going back. While it’s sometimes appealing to pretend we can hope it goes away, it’s not going to go away. Less gently:

No one will ask your permission to build a world you do not understand.

Appearing at just the right time to bolster this threadbare justification is an extended quote from Patrick Tanguay’s Sentiers. It’s a response to the first of Robin Sloan’s pop up newsletter on the topic of AI:

To those who think the piece might be too positive about LLMs, I’ll remind you that one can be critical of all the pitfalls and misunderstandings, and be aware of the semantic traps, and still have their brain explode when working with LLMs. All these things are true. The biased training and permissionless taking of people’s work, the purposeful use of words to make it sound like it’s human/actually thinking, the extractive business models, the imperial attitude, the broligarchy, the misleading chat-focused interfaces, etc. But also the breadth of what they can do, the uncannyness of it, the power, the potential, the questions. It’s in part why I find the field so fascinating, but also, I think, why it’s so cleaving.