It’s 2023 and the buzz word (abbreviation?) of the year is “AI”. Every company is wanting to build something related or wanting you to use their AI product to “enhance” your work or your life. The rise of ChatGPT is the biggest culprit of this AI explosion and really demonstrated the next generation of capabilities. Along with Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, there has also been a huge advancement in photo and audio generation models that can create realistic photos and audio clips.
While this new technology can certainly be helpful, there are many reasons why someone may choose to stray away from it. There are copyright concerns, privacy concerns, and ethical concerns to name a few reasons. You may also not be happy about big companies looking for more ways to automate out jobs or pay people less. Goldman Sachs has claimed that up to 18% of the global workforce may be automated out of a job by some form of AI1.
I share all of these concerns but there is another reason equally as important to me. I enjoy what I do, which is primarily software development and writing. I do not want an LLM or any other form of AI to suck the fun out of my job. With programming in particular, sometimes solving trivial problems gives me a bit of encouragement when I am having trouble with larger problems. Sometimes I just want to solve the smaller problems for myself.
Writing is an area that has become particularly under fire from LLMs as they have largely become a nuisance in a lot of ways. For example, many publishing companies have been forced to stop accepting entries due to the flood of AI written submissions. 2 Almost all publishing companies have had to put up some kind of safeguard against this by checking entries for potentially being AI content.
As I said before, I enjoy writing even if some of the writing I produce isn’t fantastic. I like writing short stories, articles such as this one, and even have a few novels that I am working on. The thought of some model writing in a few seconds what it takes me a lot of thought and effort to write is scary and annoying. The annoying part is that it is not coming up with anything on its own, it is simply regurgitating what it has been fed which is content written by real human authors. In essence, an LLM is a really fast plagiarism machine, which is exactly why publishing companies are not accepting.
There are a million articles out there about how you have to use AI or get left behind. That you have to use this new technology and evolve or someone else will and gain an advantage over you. While that has some truth to it (someone who uses these new tools may be ahead of you in many ways), it also is not entirely the case. At least not in every industry and not yet. This new technology is not mature enough to replace my job as a software architect nor is it enough to automate my engineering hobbies. In fact, many times I have spent more time fighting with the AI trying to get it to produce what I want it to than if I had just done it myself without AI assistance. Particularly in software development where often I am writing logic and the best way to express this is in code and not in plain English and hoping some LLM can understand it.
I suppose that is the point of this article. You do not have to use AI if you don’t want to. For now, I refuse to use it in my hobby projects because I enjoy them too much and love every part, even some of the mundane parts that I could automate. I do not want AI to write my emails – I can do that myself and prefer to. I do not want it to read something and summarize it for me because I want to read it myself and form my own conclusions. I do not want it to write my applications that I create. I do not want it to write my articles or help me with my novels (that I will probably never finish). All of these things take time but it is time that is worth it to me.
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