[[Future me: this blog would be a dump of different ideas and point of views I always think of. I am so bad at speaking my mind and can’t construct meaningful sentences, so don’t read it as a book or expect any returned value. Criticism is more than welcome.]]
But what am I against exactly?
AI. GPT’s. Claude. LLMs doing everything and anything.
I cannot express how much I disgustingly hate LLMs, especially when they are used for things that don’t need that much computation. Or when they’re used to solve fairly easy problems in a sloppy, reductive manner. Sometimes I just hate it for no reason or just to ragebait the people hyping it and insisting “give it a shot man, you’re very behind!”.
Do not get me wrong, I’m not against using it. I just want to share why I think AI —and LLMs in particular, are being misused and abused, and how this is pushing things in the wrong direction.
How I think AI/LLMs are being misused & abused
“I use it as a second brain” and/or “let it do the lazy work” comments.
People nowadays are so dependent on a “second brain” to think beside them and/or to do the “lazy work”. But come on, what kind of problems do people face on a daily bases that require this much mental effort every day? Are we suddenly building rockets in our garages? Or making quantum laptops that run at room temperature? No, people are rebuilding stuff they didn’t know it already exist, or exhausting tokens because they still can’t decide which css theme to use for their portfolio made by Cursor, and there is no real value being made. Most people just live in a fantasy where the “eat. sleep. build.” posters hanged in their bedroom would somehow make the world a better place to live, while all the heavy lifting is done by silicon chips melting a 50K ton iceberg up north.
From history: Struggles leading to elegance
An example from my humble knowledge in history (which I’m very bad at btw): how did we get from manually calculating $1+2+3+4+\dots+100$ to simply using $\frac{n \times (n+1)}{2}$? Because someone used his brain and some boredom to convert a struggle into elegance. Thanks to Gauss, we’re now able to solve such problem with high efficiency using only pen and paper. Now imagine if Gauss had a TI-89 Titanium calculator or some ultra-fast computing instrument. I bet he wouldn’t bother thinking about the elegant formula he would’ve created, he’d just let the machine do the sum, and the discovery might never have happened, because why bother finding a faster algorithm? my instruments are fast enough and capable to brute force everything. Powerful computation can make even a genius lazy, and that what worries me about today’s use of AI.
AI use in industries & how it affect its people
Most of the people I see, at least in my environment aka. university use LLMs to:
- Solve introduction chapter mcq homework,
- vibe code their full semester project,
- or cheat in all sorts of exams.
And when I ask them “what’s wrong with doing it yourself and actually learning?” they respond with the most negative, laziest shit I’ve ever heard: “man i got things to do, maybe you have the time to waste but i dont” when they, for a fact, don’t have anything to do in life after their last class, and it shows. And you WILL see this mindset in every industry that prioritize a scoring system over real talent, when outcomes are measured by points and not mastery, there you see minds that go nowhere whether AI powered or not and laziness will eat through their flesh, then they are worried about AI replacing them.
Negative impact on the youth
In a student club that I’m part of, we were chatting about this topic and once a guy I know was complaining about his procrastination and how he failed to finish 5 programming languages courses and build his startup, and my reply to him and everyone participating:
“Our current issue is that no one got patience, you want to build your startup, learn X amount of programming languages, finish Y amount of courses to post them on Linkedin, take datacamp courses for your sudden ignited enthusiasm in data science, and do a ton of things in a 2 week vacation between semesters. You’re trying to keep up with an era faster than you, and in order to do so you give up your mental and physical health.”
“I dont get it, what has AI to do with this?” he replied
“You try to mimic ChatGPT’s performance when it takes him seconds to answers questions you were studying all night to find an answer for. Gemini provides you with a 2-day-before-exam study plan you manage to finish before your final exam that should’ve taken you 4 months in university’s plan. You complete a 32 chapter book by listening to it in a 2 hour podcast made by NotebookLLM on your way home (yeah it takes this long from home <–> to university). Then when get free spare time or vacation comes you think you’ll be able achieve yourself what you’ve been achieving by using these powerful tools, It created a feeling of emptiness inside you, and you began to see yourself as insignificant in front of your former self, even though you haven’t changed but things around you have changed so much, and your nervous system burned trying to catch up.” said me
~~adapting~~ leading vs. resisting
This is the part I want to explore in the future:
- How can I adapt to using Claude AI in my workflow without losing my principles?
- How do I navigate the pressure of this new era, where not using AI might make me feel left behind?
- Can adapting selectively help me stay efficient and critical?
Soon to be known, I really don’t have the experience now to decide.