Technology

I mean, I'm glad he said it but anyone who's been paying attention already knows this. The entire country is collectively waiting for the bubble to burst as it is. You also have to separate things like Machine Learning from LLMs. Two totally different use cases. They've not even clearly articulated any end goals. Even NASA had 'put a man on the moon', not just 'more space'. From what I can tell their goals boil down to either 'make money' or 'make God'. The former works great for individuals but not a whole class of technology and the latter would surely not garner trillions in investment dollars. LLMs are certainly great productivity tools but what is their goal really for a CEO to be able to fire their entire staff so they can sit down at a computer and type in 'make my business better' and they think that'll work?

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.

I typed into Google "potatoes pressure cooker" to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn't touch them.

I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.

I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you're right on all counts. Don't salt the water.

What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.

That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.

I don’t think they’re all lying; most are just misinformed or using the term differently than Cory.

It’s like saying “global warming is changing everything.” Technically, not true, but the knock on effects of specific aspects of it recently hit an inflection point that causes it to affect the lives of everyone.

This has also happened in the field of artificial intelligence; LLM chatbots are only the visible mushroom fruits of the vast mycelium network that has been silently growing underground for years.

What has AI changed so far?

• Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
• we have AI child porn now, awesome
• we have AI undressing apps, cool
• we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
• we have AI, the great misinformation tool
• we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
• there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay

And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis...

I'm not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I'm definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering

In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It's very simple.

I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.

Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.

AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI's at once and they've consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.

AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.

I generally respect this guy's opinion (I probably use the term "enshitification" multiple times a week!), but pretending that "AI" and "Chabot" are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.

If the internet was "turned off" after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.

This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.

I was talking about roof sheathing with the latest chat gpt.

It was confident the joists should go above the sheathing.

I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren't gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.

I need a new line of work

AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.

The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.

Honestly, I didn't jump on the AI hate train like everyone else did. And I was wrong. I literally only use it to make profile pictures on steam to make a sekiro photo. Other than I literally can live without it.

And at this point all of the damage it is doing to our communities; I am angry at this point that people in positions of power are blatantly ignoring the people they represent who say they don't want this. This is almost as bad as the epstein corruption. Just blatantly lying to our faces and ignoring frustration.

Not just ignoring it but trying to grift to their supporters that these 'contrarians' aren't Americans and flew in. I'm so unbelievably sick of conservative influence in my home country just using lies as a real mantra. Because everyone around me values money over anything else and it seems like they genuinely are dissonant and don't understand this is a bubble waiting to burst unlike anything we have ever seen.

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.

If AI data centers drastically accelerate us towards a point of no return for climate change, then they will in fact have “changed everything”.

Here's a link to the exact same post on Cory Doctorow's (tracker-free) blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

It's also notable that MBAs tend to be people who are into the networking versus the work and they will follow the trends wherever they leave because that's what good monkeys do.