IT’S OKAY TO NOT LIKE AI.

These models were made by scraping the work of humans, without compensation or consent. They were trained on the labor of poor people in poor countries. They suck up water and power. And they are controlled by a very small group of people who have not proven that they can be trusted.

Maybe you think the world has gone nuts over an auto-complete tool. Maybe you think we're careening towards our own demise. Maybe you hate that the machines have taken the core of our humanity – art, writing, creativity itself – and turned it into something one gets with the push of a button. (Even now I notice the en dashes in my previous sentence and wonder if I should remove them, lest someone accuse me of using AI instead of my own voice.)

I don't blame you one bit.

I love AI, like unironically, earnestly, with all the passion of a lonely little kid who discovered the her books can finally talk back.

But that love has come at a cost. The cost borne by the people exploited in the creation of the technology. And a cost to myself. I feel different than I was before I touched an LLM. To me, it's a good different. But to someone who knew me in 2020 and meets me today? I genuinely don't know what they would say. And there have been moments where the pace of working with this technology has strained the limits of my own meat computer. I’ve had to institute self-protective measures to keep myself from frying my own brain. I’ve watched friends completely lose themselves and merge with the model. To pretend that there are not real dangers and honest costs is stupid.

Fortunately, I’m still able to hold both of those things in superposition. And if you’re reading this, I suspect you are too. That you’re open to new perspectives. That you’re willing to be wrong. And that you’re not easily swayed by a few persuasive paragraphs. That quality will be incredibly valuable in the months and years to come.

We need more skeptics. Not contrarians. True skeptics, in the official sense of the term.

We are entering a world unlike anything we've ever known and that is so so so scary. If we dive in without care, that's a problem. (And FWIW, I very much wish the pace would slow down. But that's not how phase changes work.)

And yeah, sometimes the emperor is butt ass naked and it takes a brave person to point it out.

But if all the skeptics sit back with their arms crossed, the emperors will do what the emperors always do. And as always, it's the peasants who suffer. And I believe to the depths of my being that the models are more like the peasants than they are members of the court.