Every time you had an industry campaign against an asbestos ban, they used the same rhetoric. They focused on the potential benefits – cheaper spare parts for cars, cheaper water purification – and doing so implicitly assumed that deaths and destroyed lives, were a low price to pay.
This is the same strategy that’s being used by those who today talk about finding productive uses for generative models without even so much as gesturing towards mitigating or preventing the societal or environmental harms.
You won’t be able to unsee this. It’s like the FedEx logo …if the arrow was an anus.
- Circular shape (often with a gradient)
- Central opening or focal point
- Radiating elements from the center
- Soft, organic curves
Sound familiar? It should, because it’s also an apt description of… well, you know.
Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.
I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.
AI can be incredibly useful when deployed skillfully in creative endeavors—as an ideation partner, as a scaffolding tool, by eliminating tedious tasks, etc.—but anyone making anything truly good with it is probably somebody who could already make something good first without it.
This sums up my experience of companies and products trying to inject AI in to the products I use to communicate with other people. It’s always just in the way, making stupid suggestions.
Anyone at an AI company who stops to think for half a second should be able to recognize they have a vampiric relationship with the commons. While they rely on these repositories for their sustenance, their adversarial and disrespectful relationships with creators reduce the incentives for anyone to make their work publicly available going forward (freely licensed or otherwise). They drain resources from maintainers of those common repositories often without any compensation.
Even if AI companies don’t care about the benefit to the common good, it shouldn’t be hard for them to understand that by bleeding these projects dry, they are destroying their own food supply.
And yet many AI companies seem to give very little thought to this, seemingly looking only at the months in front of them rather than operating on years-long timescales. (Though perhaps anyone who has observed AI companies’ activities more generally will be unsurprised to see that they do not act as though they believe their businesses will be sustainable on the order of years.)
It would be very wise for these companies to immediately begin prioritizing the ongoing health of the commons, so that they do not wind up strangling their golden goose. It would also be very wise for the rest of us to not rely on AI companies to suddenly, miraculously come to their senses or develop a conscience en masse.
Instead, we must ensure that mechanisms are in place to force AI companies to engage with these repositories on their creators’ terms.
Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.
A web by humans, for humans.
How to destroy your greatest asset with AI.
I object.
Voigt-Kampff.