I have to admit: I hate AI. Oh, no, not AI per se, but the overwhelming flow of AI-generated and AI-related content (that’s why I’m writing another piece of it, obviously).

I use AI every day, and it started a couple of months ago: I almost couldn’t use it anymore, because every word generated by it was extremely annoying. The way it structures answers, the way it admits mistakes, all these patterns it uses - I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

There were articles about how people who use AI a lot are very good at recognizing AI-generated text, and I am one of these people. And once I recognize a text as AI-generated, I can’t read it anymore, even if I want to.

What I don’t want to read from the start is another article about building a second brain with AI, or building your own agent, or rewriting something from one programming language to another. I want to scream: Why? Why are you doing all this? What’s the point? Where are all the great things we should have because of AI - it’s just more AI! In some sense we are already paperclips!

Well, calm down.

It’s not uncommon to use this old pic to describe AI hype, and it makes sense:

I use AI every day and it’s really helpful, and I don’t think we should stop using it. I think we just need to stop throwing obviously AI-generated things unprocessed into other people’s faces. It feels like you don’t care about these people, and you don’t care about the results of your work. It’s not only generative, it’s generic - it feels not worth reading, watching, trusting. (To be honest, I do the same: if I don’t care about results, I use raw AI output.)

I think we should learn to use it among other tools and means, and it’s just a part of what we create - but there still needs to be meaning, and meaning is the main thing. Can we outsource meaning to AI? Do we want to?

That’s the meaning, the motivation, the goal that makes AI useful for individuals and not organizations (there are articles about that too). It’s very naive to think that a bunch of AI-empowered individuals would form great, super-effective organizations without great effort from their management system to align all these empowered people. And from my experience, that’s the hardest part of building effective organizations.

But what I think is the most important here is empowered individuals. And I don’t mean solopreneurs and serial vibe-coders. I mean people who create individual tools they couldn’t afford earlier, who can express themselves, who can understand languages they couldn’t understand before, who can build things without permission from companies or states. I know, I know - you have to pay money to the evil corporations to do this, but let’s be honest: you pay money for everything, but not everything empowers you.

So, on the other hand - it turns out I love AI? Maybe a bit.