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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
1130 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
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Work keeps insisting we use it and I keep telling them to fuck off.
I get more done than my colleagues BECAUSE i don't use the not-actually-AI "AI" tool.
Just use it for pointless reasons. Burn tokens the way they want you to. Money is the only language they speak, and models are getting expensive.
What tf are tokens?
When you send a message to a chatbot, it cuts it up to little pieces made up of a few letters, assigns numbers to them, does math, and gives you back a bunch of other numbers that it translates back to pieces and puts together into a sentence.
You pay for the chatbot by the amount of little pieces in and little pieces out. The little pieces are the tokens.
I wonder if they make a fortune off engagement padding.
Oh definitely. The whole "reasoning" thing was just sending the answer back as a prompt a few times in different structures, and it was of course all billed
It's about 4 letters
It’s how AI usage is measured and charged.