AI Makes Me Sad
Am I allowed to say that? Because it does.
Maybe it’s because I’m writing this at 2:00 AM, which is about the only time I let myself experience sadness for a prolonged period of time, but every time I see a post on Twitter or LinkedIn about a new development in AI, I feel a sense of hopelessness.
And I’m saying this as someone who is absolutely in a position to benefit from AI. If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me. Just the other day, I sat near a table of my fellow TAs as they discussed their plans to work at OpenAI after graduation, eyeing $500k salaries.
But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter. Maybe it’s because I don’t even really know what that looks like. As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity. It sounds like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, the scene where he’s so enthusiastic about screwing hex nuts in a factory that he screws the buttons on people’s shirts, and then he goes and gets himself caught in the conveyor belt, snaking through the gears and screwing in the hex nuts inside the machine. It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete for $500k a year. If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
It makes me sad that I missed the boat on startups. I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier. I’m good at web stuff, I’m good at Rust, I can even do OS stuff. I watched all the YC Stanford lectures this summer while translating tests from one language to another as an intern. Now there’s no such thing as a startup, there are only “AI startups”, where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds. And if they can’t write a prompt for it now, they’ll be able to next year with GPT-7, or whenever AI hardware fabrication gets better.
It makes me sad that AI evangelists are so quick to adopt the language of online incels, and that AI-generated art and music have become the defining aesthetic of fascism in the 2020s while AI-generated writing went from risible to a mark of stupidity to something reluctantly accepted since it sits at the fringes of everything useful on the Internet like a kind of digital mold.
The overwhelming weight of it all feels so stifling. It feels like there’s no way to stop it. I can’t imagine a Twitter (sorry, an X) where every post isn’t filled with verified bots spewing LLM nonsense in the replies. I can’t imagine an article about some random topic on some random webpage, designed to maximize SEO for some banner ad I won’t see because I block ads, being written by a human. We would have to rebuild all our institutions.
Honestly, though, it doesn’t sound that hard to rebuild all our institutions. Twitter is only 20 years old, LinkedIn is only 23. Most of these were in need of a refresh anyway. I don’t know much about the Dark Ages, but I know that Muslims and Irish monks kept the candle of knowledge burning while everyone else ran around crusading. In a similar way, I know that there are a lot of people who feel a lot of the same sadness that I do, even if they don’t express it as sadness. I like to think even a lot of AI evangelists feel at least a little sad, like Paul Graham, because he’s a Lisp man from way back, and programming language fanatics usually care about humans writing programs.
Another point of hope: the technology industry moves at unfathomable speeds, so we’ll start to see a way out of our “dark age” within only a few years as our institutions start to mature and improve. In fact, I suspect that AI will have a fixed role in our society before the end of my natural life. Whether that role is a small one or a major one, I’m not sure. But I know I will feel at least a little happier to have some finality about the whole thing.
I think this will require some painful shifts in our industry, but I also think that this will be a satisfying kind of pain, at least for people like me, like the burn you feel when working out. It feels extremely strange to be looking forward to a bubble bursting. It makes me feel like the AI evangelists who look forward to artists filling out McDonald’s applications. But I do. It makes me very hopeful. When I imagine that scenario, I can conjure no emotion besides glee. I desperately want to work in an industry that makes sense, even if a lot of people right now would rather work in an industry that sells nothing to nobody for untold sums of money.
I’m sorry. I want to go back to the Twitter thing because I use Twitter a lot. And, seriously, there are so many verified accounts that just post AI-generated replies to popular posts, and we all just ignore them. It’s the most insane, Kafkaesque thing. Absolutely nobody likes it. It’s an eyesore. And we’re supposed to be living in the most powerful age for AI. You’re telling me that nobody at SpaceX/Xai/Grok/SuperGrok/whatever can write a classifier to ban these accounts? I can press a button on any post and be given a full explanation by Grok, a button which I’ve pressed 2 dozen times on accident and never on purpose. You can’t run a decision model for $0.0000001 cents whenever someone hits “Post” and realize that a reply makes no sense?
Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people point out the fact that billions (trillions?) in AI spend has translated to absolutely no benefit for most consumers of everyday apps. Obviously, people who use ChatGPT get the benefit of having their question answered. But in the world where development is getting faster and cheaper, I can’t think of a single piece of software I use that has gotten better. Everything is exactly the same, just with a button to ask a chatbot. Somebody has to notice this eventually.
I want an industry that makes sense. Right now, we have (most of) my undergrad classmates’ dream industry. They drink constantly [1], skip lectures, scrape by on their homework with AI, complain about classes, grind Leetcode to get internships, and eventually get their diploma. It must feel like walking around in a literal dream, where your footsteps have no weight, like Wile E. Coyote near a ledge. They commiserate with their friends, “That class is so hard. I just asked Chat.” I know because I hear them two seats away from me. Now they get to work a job where they commiserate to an coding agent, “this task is so hard. Do this for me.” How come they get to look forward to relief while I feel dread? And that just makes me feel selfish. They’re only human too. They is how they’ve been told to navigate life. For some reason, somebody forgot to tell me. I want an industry that makes sense.
I guess I’ve been talking a lot about sense. It’s 4 AM now, so I guess I’m not making a lot of sense myself. If I wake up tomorrow and the president has signed an injunction on all AI inference, including local models, would I be sadder than I was going to sleep? I don’t know. Just ignore me. I’m the homeless guy. I have no home in this industry. Codex, make me a home by the time I wake up.
[1] Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn’t drink, look no further than Georgia Tech. I’m in multiple group chats and Discord servers where the subject discussed most often is the date, location, and intensity of the next planned drinking session.