AI-infused

Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 1, 2025 at 08:48 AM

@eastgate, just to come back to what you were saying earlier. I tend to agree that you’re missing the point. Speaking personally, I am not “against” AI as such, but I am very wary, for very specific reasons.

First, AI is a brand-new, emergent technology, for which such absurdly overblown claims have been made that the various AI companies are promising to invest a trillion dollars on data centres, further development etc. over the next few years. That’s more money than is currently managed by the world’s largest wealth/asset fund managers. See also “Fifth” below.

Second, the impacts of AI on all kinds of things – ecological, social, commercial, mental – are only just now being assessed, usually based on pitifully inadequate samples, even as AI is rapidly being incorporated into every possible software niche. This too is ridiculous. Just to give a simple example: AI-focused data centres already running in the USA at this very moment have boosted electricity costs to the local populations by up to 300%.

Third, the issues plaguing the modern LLM – systematic inconsistency, poor/non-existent reasoning, untruths (sorry, hallucinations), failure to follow prompts accurately (including an amazing tendency to argue that the LLM has indeed followed the prompt even when it obviously hasn’t) – are serious issues, not just minor side-effects. These are issues we’ve observed in our own testing of current LLMs, both online and on-device.

Fourth, people are basing corporate strategies on this stuff, for goodness’ sake, often with very little more reason than because “Sam Altman says AGI is nearly here!” This has already resulted in job losses, shrinkage and the growing ubiquity of AI slop (a.k.a. workslop) because AI makes it so easy to generate convincing-sounding stuff that’s actually shallow and poorly reasoned.

Fifth, the hype about AI means that investment in AI currently accounts for a very significant percentage of U.S. economic growth – it appears that the USA would currently be in or near recession were it not for the vast sums being spent by speculators on investments in companies that have not yet presented convincing models for how they’re actually going to monetise these developments.

Many of your posts sound much too sensible and intelligent for me to believe that you haven’t considered these things. And yet you accuse us of being luddites for raising them. Like others, I’m surprised.

Please note, incidentally, that I keep continuous track of developments in the AI field – they are directly relevant to my work in copywriting, translation and communications – and can adduce sources for all of the above, including our own extensive (and ongoing) investigations of generative AI.

Please note, also, that my criticisms of MCP have nothing to do with AI as such, but with the architecture of this vital intermediate layer. This is simply basic due diligence, not some kind of luddite rejection.