When I first started hearing about the modern suite1 of ‘AI’ systems, I had a reaction. Now, I’m a computer programmer, and a science-fiction fan, so you might imagine my reaction being one of interest, intrigue, fascination; a desire to explore these new tools, toys, entities, whatever they may be.

No. Not so much.

My reaction was something I’ve been trying to understand and explain to myself ever since. It was an emotional reaction, not a rational one. I’m not talking about concerns over environmental issues, power and water consumption, or even the copyright violations of training the things. Those came later. My initial reaction was a visceral rejection. The closest I can come to a one word expression of it:

Revulsion.

Why would I feel that way? Why such a strong reaction, why such disgust? I don’t know. I’ve been struggling with it all this time, which is why I haven’t written about the subject.

I mentioned this at work2 one time, and one of my colleagues said maybe my reaction was to some extent provoked by SF’s history of AIs gone evil. It was an interesting thought, but didn’t feel quite right. After all, my favourite SF novels, Iain Banks’s Culture books, have machine intelligences that are thoroughly good. Or devious, cunning, scheming, and all sorts of other things humans can also be. Chat GPT is not Skaffen-Amtiskaw. But what is?

I sometimes wonder if it’s just age. Maybe if I were twenty years younger I’d be diving headfirst into the afore foot linked pileup. But I don’t know. Which is going to remain a common theme of these pieces.

  1. Tranche? Cluster? Pile? What is the collective noun for LLM systems? ↩︎

  2. As you might imagine, there’s a certain amount of pro-AI talk at my work, though from what I’ve seen, mainly from management. I’ll have more to say about that as I write more of these pieces, I should think. ↩︎