The nature of AI discourse has changed

I recently made a post in which I complained about AI and said I wouldn’t be posting about it again. That was a lie. I’m back. But this time instead of dumping my own thoughts on the subject I’m just going to be linking other blogs and articles. These aren’t all strictly about AI – some related topics are included here. Hopefully you can infer why.

Why am I doing this? A couple months ago, I felt myself under attack by a constant barrage of AI hype and blind optimism. Over the past month or two, the negative press seems to have overtaken it. This feels like a historic moment to me and I want to document it.

This is a merely collection of articles I have read or intend to read in the near future – that’s right, I have not read all of them yet. However, I have skimmed them enough to create a coarse taxonomy so I could group related topics here. I am excluding articles that may seem relevant to the thesis if I already linked to them in my previous blog.

For the purposes of this post, note that “AI” refers to generative AI, particularly LLMs.

AI Is Breaking Shit, Making Us Dumb, or Otherwise Contributing to Shit Being Broken

• Vibe code is legacy code

• AI vs Technical Debt: Is This A Race to the Bottom?

• AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study

• What CTOs Really Think About Vibe Coding

AI Is Evil, Hellbent on Destroying Our Careers and Lives

• Developers, not operators

• The enshittification of tech jobs

• How to not build the Torment Nexus

• The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil.

AI Is Stupid, Expensive, and Useless

• AI coding assistants aren’t really making devs feel more productive

• No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

• Google’s Gemini AI tells a Redditor it’s ‘cautiously optimistic’ about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to ‘all possible and impossible universes’ before repeating ‘I am a disgrace’ 86 times in succession

• AI looks increasingly useless in telecom and anywhere else

• The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble

• MIT says AI isn’t replacing you… it’s just wasting your boss’s money

AI Outright Sucks

n.b.: These authors have provided comprehensive lists of reasons why AI sucks. In a way, it therefore it spans all of the categories above, and then some.

• Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

• I Am An AI Hater