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Meet the academics refusing to use generative AI
(www.nature.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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You're basically making a "if only people would just..." argument, but people are not going to "just". There's no world out there in which "AI" (again, using a pretty strict definition) exists, but there is no search results polluted to the brim with slopsites, idiots using AI as though it was a reliable source of information, automated propaganda, moguls trying to gaslight the world into thinking workers and artists have no leverage, deepfake porn, chatbots encouraging suicidal thoughts etc. etc. So you need to weigh the costs and the benefits. And the cost-benefit analysis of AI looks considerably different from the hammer's.
Well, I say all that, but it's not as though I believe the world can't be made a better place. If we can set up society so that these bad behaviours aren't incentivised to begin with, it would mitigate some of the worst problems associated with AI (though I would argue that such a society wouldn't waste its resources on such a worthless application of the technology in the first place). But when is that going to happen, tomorrow? Worse yet, AI empowers the people who don't want society to change in that way far more than it does the people who do. So until we finish fixing society with our hands tied to our backs, we'll just have to suffer through all of AI's problems, and for what? So you can feel smug about misunderstanding a sentence in a scientific paper, because you were in no position to determine whether the rephrased sentence an AI ejaculated accurately conveyed the information in the original sentence, because if you were, you wouldn't have needed the sentence to be rephrased in the first place?
Most people are thoughtful and well-intentioned. But one, the minority that isn't are enough to cause a lot of problems, and two, not all problems associated with AI are caused by bad intentions.
You say that we should just blame the people for how they use AI, but aside from that there's not always a person to blame or the people causing the problems are often effectively invisible, people are already being blamed, there's just nothing to make them care. So how do you propose we hold them accountable? The law? I mean, there's not a whole lot of political will for that right now, but even if there were, a lot would be difficult to encode into law and even more difficult to meaningfully enforce.
Also, having to hold people accountable is also a cost that needs to be weighed against the basically non-existent benefits.
No, it's not. Other than a few specific products, it's not marketed like that, it doesn't have an interface that suggests that it's that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn't limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: you are getting some use out of AI that at least in your subjective experience, for now, is positive, and that's all the justification for its existence you need. All the problems in the wider world associated with it, you just magic away with the phrase "personal responsibility" so you can just stop thinking about it. But that's not good enough.
What are you even talking about? LLMs, which is mostly what "AI" has been referring to in this conversation, are text prediction systems. You prompt it with text and it tries to predict what text comes next based on its statistical model generated from its training data. Add some cute pre-prompting and wrapping of user input behind the scenes, and you can give it an imperative interface that gives the impression that it's responding to user queries and instructions. The output is entirely too unreliable and the input entirely too imprecise to be valuable to anyone with good intentions, but I digress. The point is that it has nothing to do with programming, other than that if code was part of the training data, the model can be induced to generate text that includes code, and some products exist that have been optimised to generate and interact with code.
"Agentic" (ugh) just means that the model was induced to generate output in a format that the client can parse and turn into actual operations, like deleting a database. I guess that kind of overlaps with what a pipeline or a script can do, but I'm not entirely sure where you're going with that, I'm pretty sure I already made it clear that it's not my view that AI can actually replace workers, just that it can be used to keep up the pretense that it can for long enough to cause harm.
It's not just that line, everything you've been saying suggests that's what your view is. You've acknowledged yourself that the real use cases of AI are very limited, but despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it, and we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy (not to mention that sometimes there is no person to hold accountable, because it's the model itself causing the problem). All for a small sliver of value to you, that in my mind doesn't even exist. How is AI itself not part of the problem here?
Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed. Workers getting laid off by the thousands to raise shareholder value, misinformation, assholes on the internet trying to get people to kill themselves for the "lulz" etc. And these problems need to be solved regardless of AI existing. But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve. So you'll have to excuse me that I'm not very keen on the idea of letting our enemies have mechanised infantry so we can have a toy to play with.
The large majority of text is not code. To begin with, LLMs being able to generate code was more of an incidental discovery than anything, only then did you get specialised products for that purpose.
That's my whole point: if it's not easy, then you have to justify the cost. And while yes, as you say, behind a lot of the problems associated with AI, there are deeper underlying problems that have nothing to do with AI, but that doesn't mean that AI doesn't significantly add to the problems and the cost to solve them. Let's say you're in conflict with someone, in what situation do you expect that it's easier to resolve by talking it out: when they're unarmed or when they have a gun aimed at you? Same underlying problem, different difficulty in resolving the problem.
I don't understand how this is not getting through. Something can be worthless to one group of people and very valuable to another. If you care about truth, human wellbeing, creating value for society and so on, then AI (as in LLMs and other similar generative AI) is less than worthless to you. If you only care about gaining wealth and power and don't give a damn about what is true or what harm you may be causing to society, then it's the most impactful technology since social media. These two things can be true at the same time. And if you're not aware of all the problems the second group has been causing at a scale that's only possible because of AI, then quite frankly, you've been living under a rock. People getting laid off under the pretense that they can be replaced by AI is hardly the only problem.
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
OK, so thus far we've had two major AI winters, where after some excitement over new developments in AI, funding ended up more or less drying up for decades, because it didn't manage to go anywhere. I think a third such an event would go a long way in mitigating the harms from AI, because the AI space is currently very centralised, i.e. most users are very dependent on a handful of companies, and those companies are very dependent on continued investment. Also, running less capable open weights/source models locally has a fairly high barrier to entry and those models would become less relevant over time without the funding to keep up their training.
Thankfully for me, things appear to be moving in that direction.
As for regulation, I don't think I mentioned or alluded to it at all. If anything, that seems more your thing, since you think holding people doing bad things with AI accountable is sufficient. Personally, I do very much think that the world would be better off without these forms of AI. But if there is to be regulation, I would argue it should focus mostly on the suppliers and not so much on the users. Not only because otherwise you end up in an unsustainable game of whack-a-mole, but also because there's not always a user to hold to account. Like, if an AI chatbot encourages someone's suicidal thoughts and they end up doing it because of that, what AI user is to be held to account?
It's the opposite, this is very much a power-consolidating technology. It's not like, say, reading and writing, where nobody can just change the alphabet to become incapable of describing subversive notions or something. With AI, what it's capable of and what its biases are, is very much dependent on decisions of the people training and managing it. And because the cost of training a model the size of an LLM is so high, there are only a few entities that can afford to do that.
On top of that, people with good intentions cannot use AI at scale, because they need to verify all of its output. People with bad intentions, who don't care about the details, only that the waters are sufficiently muddied, can use it at scale. And if they are or are backed by the elite, then they have the funding to use it even more at scale.
Only because the elite are currently subsidising it for you. Because they want you to accept this technology. Because they know it empowers them more than it does you.
I'm pro-education, but to teach someone, there needs to be something that can be taught first.
I like to imagine a 1950s oil baron saying something like this because laws say he can't dump waste into the river. It's very fun. It's a fun world in my head.
MAGA:
People who are pro pointing a gun to their head and pulling the trigger, but anti the bullet crushing their skull and killing them. Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't believe in that world.