Below's a rant I typed up on my phone shortly after talking to my parents about various LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc.) and the differences in how their models respond to you. They, to me, are very optimistic on the ability of AI (if that's what you want to call fancy autocomplete) to automate tons of things like image generation, lesson planning and building profitable software.
This pissed me off mainly because of how commoditised content generation is becoming. The hours I (and many, many others) put into mindmapping, thinking out loud and considering different ideas before putting something together. The time I put into trying to write sentences that get my message across, and drawing pictures that get a feeling across as intended. The long afternoons I spend reading textbooks, on top of other books and webpages, so that I can learn something well. The self-explanation and hundreds of flashcards that come after it. All of that, ALL of my living, losing its value as the days go on and the slop becomes easier to churn out.
I'm not even doing anything crazy, just living ordinary student life. What about the people who wrote the textbooks I'm reading, and animated the YouTube videos I watch? Maybe I'm being a bit too negative here. I probably am. But, when I do tell someone how I do things, and the effort I put in, way too many times am I met with a response involving AI.
"Why don't you put your diary entries into Claude? You could easily search and get opinions on your ideas then."
"Why don't you tell Gemini to make flashcards instead? Wouldn't that save you so much time?"
"Why don't you just ask ChatGPT to draw that birthday card, or even make a video? Your cousin would like it a lot more."
Is it really wrong to want things to be done well, and to have that care and effort be appreciated? Sometimes?
Mad at AI. It's just so annoying how sloppy everything's becoming. What happened to human effort? Where is it going? I'm fine with boring admin/repetitive work going away, but don't make lesson plans and attempt to build a business on it.
Not only is that extremely fucking lazy and shows appauling disregard and lack of care for your children's education and future customers (not that you'll get any), but it's just bad. It can't do things well yet, and you letting it go through without significant modification or proper thought is advocating for an even sloppier, enshittified, apathetic future where all of us check boxes on our todo lists without caring for how well the work was done.
Edit: Just because it looks, on a very thin surface level, like a finished product does not mean it is one. That doesn't mean you can avoid careful thought and consideration about the ideal way to do things. "Good enough" isn't always good enough.
It's lazy and ignorant. Where did hard work, perseverance and aspiration go? Bring it back. AI should propel us forward, and let us produce out high quality material without the drudgery. All we're doing is churning out slop at an unimaginably fast pace.
We're using it to attempt to cut out the human effort instead. WHY??? At least double-check that it's not bullshitting.
Anyways, there's my rant. I guess one could say that not much has really changed. The floor for content generation has just become much lower. People who wouldn't have put in the work anyway assume false competency and think they're doing something meaningful. Maybe AI can actually enable that for them. Maybe.
At the end of the day, what matters is that I do my best and exert responsible control over what I can. No matter what slop seeps through my doors.