While a large amount of my life feelings like a blazing dumpster fire inside a burning apartment at the center of a city that was recently transported into hell (specifically the firey kind of hell), there are a few things I can take some amount of comfort in. Like being able to afford living my life, even if sometimes that feels less true than it used to. Or having enough food to eat. Friends to play games with. Final Fantasy 14. All kinds of stuff, really. A lot of which is just finding the silver lining in my current moment, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Better to appreciate what I’ve got when I’ve got it rather than find myself wishing for when times were better and cursing myself for not appreciating them when I had the chance. Plus, I can still recognize that all of the products marketed as “AI” are absolute garbage and that all these LLMs are just really powerful and confident autocomplete algorithms with no ability to truly “understand” anything. It’s very comforting to know that, especially as more and more news reports come out about people having breaks with reality as a result of the tripe they’ve been fed by their emotional support “AI.” It’s not great that they’re an increasingly huge part of daily life and that more and more corporations are starting to move from “please use our garbage generator” to “you HAVE to use our garbage generator,” but at least I haven’t fallen for this spiel yet.

I don’t know anyone (personally, I mean) who has fallen down this particular void of sensibility, to be honest. At least to the degree that I’ve outlined above. I’m still surrounded by coworkers who think “AI” tools are great and that these LLMs are an unavoidable part of our future. Additionally, these same tools have been forced on people so much that they’re starting to show up as just a thing people talk about and reference now, like they’d reference journaling or googling things, but none of them are losing touch with reality as a result of Clippy-generated delusions of grandeur (yet). It would almost be easier if they did, because then I could write them off entirely. Let their support network deal with all that instead of spending any of my time or energy on it. Instead, since they’re at least nominally still within the bonds of rationality despite having fallen for the scammy “promise of AI” so many tech companies are peddling, I still have to hear these conversations quietly bubbling into my awareness or conspicuous in their absence as my coworkers (and boss) try to avoid me any time they want to talk about “AI” stuff. This is doing me a huge favor, to be sure, but it is frustrating to see conversations pause or grow more quiet when I pass by even if I know that the reason is because they don’t want to get me riled up or arguing about all of the harms these massive server banks cause locally, nationally, and globally.

I wish I got more out of being uninvolved with all of this. Or anything at all, to be honest. I’m not one to feel much in the way of schadenfreude, nor am I one to engage in “I told you so” style recriminations. I also don’t really get much in the way of vindication or satisfaction from eventually being proven right, so there’s no reward for this. I get no benefit as a result of staying uninvolved with all of it, only a greater sense of isolation and separation from my culture as a whole (and some significant stumbling blocks in the growing relationships I’ve been forming with a couple of my Final Fantasy 14 guild associates). So all I can really do is comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ve managed to avoid deluding myself into thinking that I’m so kind of visionary, prophet, up-coming leader, big inventor, or master craftsperson just because I put the right words into an auto-complete program to get it to spit out an arrangement of words telling me that I’ve surpassed humanity or something. It’s so bleak out there that it genuinely feels nice sometimes to know that at least I’m not one of those people. Not because they’re going to have a bad time or because “they’ll get theirs eventually” or whatever, but because I’ve got a robust enough sense of self to not be warped by the plagiarizing praise machine.

I wish it was easier to teach people the kind of critical thinking skills they need to avoid those pitfalls. Or to see the holes in political propaganda. If there were easy ways to do that, though, I suspect that propaganda and “AI” would be less of a problem. We wouldn’t have even gotten here in the first place or, at the very least, we wouldn’t have spent so much time further ruining the environment, poisoning mostly minority neighborhoods with toxic fumes or noise, and wasting a staggering amount of money on creating an industry, an industry bubble, and an impending stock market crash in a single move. Too bad critical thinking is one of the lessons of a well-rounded education that includes the arts, a thing that my country has been doing its best to destroy access to for the last fifty years. Really would have been a useful thing to have around these days. Might have even stopped a whole bunch of people from acting against their own best interest because they fell for a sexual abuser’s pile of lies in a shitty haircut and spray tan. Which, you know, come to think of it, it feels incredibly connected that so many people would fall for the gaslighting of trump and the republicans given how the huge turn towards LLMs as a “source” of information has been turning people’s brains off in more and more horribile ways. At least I can take comfort in knowing I’m not a complete fool while I live through the end of the world. Such that this knowledge could be comforting, anyway.