A little while ago, which turns out to have been June 2024, I microposted saying I ought to write about my thoughts on the current state of what people like to call AI. LLM-based prediction machines, some might say. Then about a year later I briefly wrote again about my negative reaction to the whole idea.

But I didn’t go into detail. And I’m still not going to; at least not today. I have several thousand words of attempted essays, if that’s not a tautology¹, wherein I try to understand my own thoughts and feelings.

And time passes. And the development of the things is lightning fast. It’s a moving target that annoys me.

Still, I do have thoughts. And feelings. And the best way to understand them is to write about them. And the best way to write about them is publicly. Maybe. So I’m going to try writing about them here. A series of short posts around that theme. This is the first.

Maybe I’ll give them their own category, though I have too many categories as it is. I discovered it’s hard to search my blog for ‘AI’. Micro.blog’s search is good, but that’s just such a common set of letters. Weirdly, it brought up all my Crucial Tracks entries, as if it was also finding the ‘IA’ in ‘crucial’.

I still don’t understand why AI gives me such a visceral negative reaction.

The intellectual reasons for concern are well known.

But right now, I just wish apps would stop adding AI and trying to tell me it’s great. I’m looking at you Raycast, but you’re just the most recent culprit.

I keep thinking I should write about the current state of what we are calling AI. Trouble is, I still can’t quite decide what I think about it. Or why it makes me feel the way it does. Or even what, exactly, that way is.