The tl;dr here is: fuck AI writing and the people who have handled it in a generally terrible manner. But I have some more substantive stuff to say about it.
First, it’s important to actually understand the technology we’re talking about: Large Language Models that are most people’s access point to a larger subset of technologies developed through machine learning. The opening minutes of this video are a good overview if you like video; here are a couple of good essays on the technology if that’s more your speed.
There are, of course, ethical and legal issues with the ways these models have been developed. There is the concern about data centers. What bothers me more directly in my job is the way that the technology undercuts my students’ ability to learn and think deeply, not to mention the clear ways it erodes everybody’s ability to maintain important cognitive functions.
At the risk of emphasizing the scatological angle, I think the concepts of bullshit jobs and “enshittification” go some way toward helping us understand how these technologies have simply slotted into already-existing problems with the way we organize our world.
A different way to say the same thing: if you’re instinctively anti-AI, you should probably be generally anti-capitalism. And if you’re anti-capitalism, you should probably be specifically anti-AI. If you love both, I may not have much to say to you. ¯\_(‘~’)_/¯
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