They Didn’t Ask…

Everything we know about the LLMs that are out there right now grabbing all of the attention (Ha! Get it?! Attention!!!) points to them being trained on, well, The Internet. What’s interesting about that is that the internet leaves itself open in many ways to things like spiders and search engines that crawl sites and pick up patterns and keywords so that it makes it easier to find those things. That’s kind of an incentivized behavior. Most people who put things on the web want them to be found. But do they want their words to be taken and used to feed a language model? Do they want their words used to drive profit for those companies without any compensation to the author? Even in a Creative Commons license setting where there’s Share And Share Alike, there’s not really any callout that would grant permission for someone to aggregate the work for training a language model, right?

Doesn’t matter. OpenAI didn’t ask. They didn’t ask because it was easier not to ask. It was far easier to say that the entire internet was fair game for training because if people could read it, why not a machine?

So then, how did it get access to copyrighted literature? Sure are a lot of settlements out there that might lead one to believe that authors had their works stolen and used as a part of a training corpus. Sounds kind of like it runs against copyright law and a lot of intellectual property legislation that the folks at large corporations have worked hard to incentivize legislators to pass. That’s…awkward.

But set that aside.

They didn’t ask. They took. They extracted value from something that didn’t belong to them. That’s not something we generally accept in our culture. That’s the beginning of the pushback against “AI”. It was created unethically.

Crank Up The Juice!

I’m not going to say with a straight face that “AI” data centers are The Problem. The truth is something closer to all of the data centers that have popped up in small communities and caused all kinds of havok for local residents by pushing up electricity prices because their demand requires infrastructure updates that, well, all users end up paying for because The Market Says So. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been putting data centers in cornfields for a long time now. We’re just starting to pay attention. This is a problem with or without “AI” and it needs to be addressed. It’s yet another case of a business that is likely given a tax break to drop a data center into a small community and ends up abusing the neighbors because of its piggish energy consumption.

The worst part? Some county or city official pushed the zoning and tax breaks through on the promise of Jobs! I’ve been in a few data centers. There are usually about 8 people who work there. They make sure switches stay in the ON position and that the doors are locked and the floors swept. The highly paid technical positions? They sit on the other side of the world. There are no system administrators in the Facebook data center in Iowa. There’s a dude who locks and unlocks the door when servers come in or are retired. The person servicing those? That dude flies in from another state.

So to review: “AI” or not, data centers chew up more power than they should and don’t impact the local community in a positive fashion.

Anyone Else Seen This Show Before?

Maybe you weren’t in a meeting with muckity-mucks who put you on the spot and said, “How do we leverage the blockchain in our products?” Maybe you didn’t have to take a deep breath, look out your office window for a second, find that centering place inside of you and reply with a very dry, “I’m not sure that our audience and products need the blockchain. Did something occur to you that I’ve missed?”

Are there uses for a massive, overly-complicated audit trail based on an incredible amount of compute? Sure. Can 99.999% of all applications in the world survive and thrive without it? Also yes.

I was in a call where I was asked what our plan was for “Gen AI” which was very hip for the moment. I felt deja vu. Not all applications need a chatbot. Not all applications can make use of a LLM.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t places for it. There absolutely are! The speed at which these things work make the thought of configuring things by point-and-click seem silly. With the right training and application wrapped around it, LLMs can do some wild and crazy stuff that could radically improve performance of workflows and create powerful levers for smart people to do more smart stuff faster. But that’s not what they’re pimping, is it?

No. It’s not.

We’re being told that all knowledge worker jobs will be destroyed by robots and we’d better learn to work with them or we’re going to be left behind. OK. That’s the claim? I’m going to ask “How?” Five times. I bet we run out of answers before I get to three. It’s all claims and nothing to back it up. There are some very specialized people in highly specialized roles seeing ways that these things could do great work. Cool! It’s just a shame that it’s being over-sold as something that will touch every part of your life.

The Hype Cycle is exhausting and no one wants to play that anymore. The fact is, this stuff is so expensive that they have to go into overdrive before LLMs and The Blockchain end up in the same pile because frankly there’s too much money swinging around in a circle for them to “fail”.

Fear Does Not Drive Engagement

Fear creates rage. As a tech worker from the 90s through today, I can say that there has never been a time that we weren’t under the impression that the next shift would cost us our jobs. Software got easier to develop. Microsoft created platforms that “anyone” could use to create software, systems, workflows, or content. That would surely be the end of all software developers! Not quite.

This latest round of “AI WILL EAT YOUR JOB” is just more of the same. The difference is that it’s hitting young people who don’t have anything to lose and are watching their planet burn around them. Their grandparents have long abandoned the path of reason. They’ve never known anything but social media and the abuses of capitalism. Watching the gap between the 1% and these kids grow by the second is crazy-making. But sure, let’s all sit down and learn how to use a chatbot because the next round of HR software will reject your resume if it can tell that a LLM didn’t generate it.

You can’t scare these younger people into submission. If you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to fear.

It Isn’t About AI

It really isn’t. ChatGPT? Claude? Nah. That’s not what this is about. It’s about the extractive class sitting behind them taking things for themselves (again) and crushing people on their way up the money mountain. This isn’t a Fuck You to Claude. It’s a Fuck You to billionaires who have enough cash in their couches to start their own personal space programs. It’s about burning down a system that has created inequity that hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years - if ever.

This is some serious shit.

Now What?

Now? Me? I get out of the way. I’m a GenXer who clawed and scraped in the bit mines for a few decades and made a decent enough living at it. I will get out of the way and let these kids drive the bus. It’s their turn. The stakes are high and very real. If you have more years behind you than in front of you, then I suggest you do the same.