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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.
I have tons of random receipts that come in every month that need to be captured, memoed, categorized and sent off to finance.
I made python to read image/pdf/whatever to text, easy.
I regex the value out, hard and fragile
I try to pull the vendors name out, just not reliable
Category... nearly impossible so i need to make some form of memory system to remember once I do it.
Python renames the file with input if it needs it and provides the meta
OR
python to text because it's effciient
api call to Ollama and let my old 2070 work it out. (highly reliable)
python renames the file and provides the meta
It's small, low power, hard to do with code, basically the perfect use case. This is a good use of AI
Go Rewrite FFMPEG in Rust.... that's a bad use of AI.
There's a lot of people out there using it in ways that cost a lot more than human eyes and have horrible societal and environmental impacts.
There's a lot of people using it for dictation, document triage and basic scripting where it has great advantages and isn't making the world a worse place.
His article is at odds with a great deal of his book. I wonder if this isn't just a grab to get hardcore anti-ai to buy it.
Nothing is helpful until you need help. The fact that you think AI is helpful for you don't have to force me to use AI. If you pay me $100k+ per year and you force me to use your tools to do my job why you even hired me ? To force this cult on me or to do the job ?
It's pretty normal for an employer to dictate what tools and applications an employee uses. If you prefer gitlab but your employer requires teamcity, you don't really get a say, right?
However, if you think you can meet your deadlines without using a code generating AI tool, then don't use it. Ideally, if they are as useless as you imply, no one will be able to tell whether you're using it. The conflict should only really appear if they do increase productivity, and you refuse to use them, resulting in less productivity than your peers.
Company will be able to tell if you're using it because companies behind sota models come with monitoring. You will have meeting with hr and your manager when you will be forced to use it even if you meet quotas. They will argument it that maybe you can do more and increase your normal quota with expected ai usage increase in productivity even if you had best productivity in team without ai and your productivity stays the same. Suddenly you will be under performing because you are refusing to use ai so you will be first to fire even if you are best employee. That's how corporations work. They are monitoring usage because it costs them money. For big corporations they pay upfront to get discounts. Company also make many trainings and meetings to encourage everyone use AI models they pay for but nobody wanted.
Honestly if they hired someone who refuses to use AI in 2026 it’s on them.
LLMs are like a dishwashers. You could wash all the dishes yourself and probably get them cleaner in less time, but it’s useful to let a machine do the work, even I though it’s mandatory inspect every single dish to make sure the machine got them clean enough and re-wash a certain percentage of them. Dishwashers are useful, but the world wouldn't end if we didn’t have them. They also have the benefit of using less water than when do them yourself, which certainly isn’t the case with LLMs.
In the same line of thinking, this is why I hand wash my car, because the automatic car wash either does a bad job (touchless) or will scratch the paint up all over (brushes). Many people don't care very much about their cars though, so why put in the effort?
I find unreliable tools to be one of the most infuriating parts of my job, and unfortunately my entire job has effectively pivoted to spending all day babysitting an AI that frequently ignores instructions and can't learn without a ton of expensive fine-tuning training.
I don't let AI touch any of my personal code I care about, and with how much of the code at work is written by AI, it's pretty demoralizing. Why put in any effort designing something if it's just going to get blown away by a coworker's agent the next day?
Arguing with the AI over why its code review is wrong is also a whole other part of my day now...
I'm not necessarily suggesting Doctorow is correct with this assertion, but on a macro scale what productivity gains will generate AI provide?
Yes there's a few skills it's good at coding, medical research, and image recognition being a few.
The genuine question is: has this improved everyone's quality of life?
I work at a sales-first (read: no accountability) software company, ran by inept nepo-babies and a hostile VC. I frequently have to completely re-do all of the sales engineering work when a new project starts, because they refuse to standardize or talk to each other.
After enough time doing this shit by hand, I took my best examples from previous projects and had an agent "fix the errors based on the conventions I established over here". Instead of going line by line on these big serialized data formats now, I do about 10min of checking the results and editing down the change log.
It's wack that I have to re-do someone else's job still, but at least I can force some version of standardization without killing myself on the tedious bits.
That doesn't really answer my question. It's changed your job, but has it improved your customers quality of life?
You're getting direct examples of people its helped, and you keep brushing it off and asking what about everybody else. You're obviously not going to get a single answer that affects everybody, and why do small successes not matter?
Because they're not really successes.
No one here is saying AI has reduce their workload so now they spend half their time catching butterflies.
The answers are all saying that AI has automated some mundane task that wasn't particularly important, and now they can spend their time doing something more interesting.
Is the changes to their role, multiplied by millions of employees, actually better for humanity or society?
In a way, this is what Doctorow is arguing: where is the data showing the productivity gains.
My follow up question is, how are these productivity gains being used, if they exist.
That absolutely sounds like a win to me. Why is productivity gains the only thing that's important? QoL is what matters. Unless you're a capitalist overlord.
100%! I don't understand how this is a hard concept to grasp. I've been able to make productivity gains, sure, but who gives a fuck? Even if my productivity is the same, my QoL is still much improved when I'm not buried in mundanity.
Aren't you assuming productivity gains will lead to free time? Why? It never has. Most of us work a fixed amount of time and get paid for that time. Not the amount of tasks we finish if that can even be measured.
Salaries have also not increased with increased productivity long before chatbots came online. So they won't suddenly increase now.
AI is much more just like a new laptop you get from work. The new device is faster, has more RAM and allows you to do more, potentially.
The big question is, if the purchase was worth it. Unlike a new laptop, LLMs are an ongoing cost to users and providers. Nobody except for GPU producers are actually making money right now. Hyperscalers make some of the money back they themselves invested into the companies using their services, but in the end the ROI looks pretty dim for anyone.
So even if there are real productivity gains, you won't see people relax with their kids more. And even if these gains are significant they may not prevent a huge economic collapse so we all will have plenty of time with our kids in the end anyway.
It's improved mine. I save hours (that I didn't really have anyhow) on meaningless tedium. I thought that was pretty obviously implied though?
Maybe it helps to say that this was in no way forced on me. The stuff my employer has done to "adapt AI" is laughable and seemed to be nothing more than lip service to the execs who want to slap that sticker on the product.
The gains for me personally have been strictly using it as a tool in niche situations. I prefer to do things the hard way when it's for me but I'm not breaking my back for a corporation.
But how do you spend the time you saved?
Either you're arguing in bad faith by nitpicking for some reason, or you are incredibly dense. Do I need to send you my calendar dude? I just freed up some time, maybe we can hop on a call and I can spell it out for you?
I dont understand. That seems like a perfectly reasonable question.
If gen AI has saved you a heap of time, how do you now use that time that was saved?
However they like, are you their mum?
Hah. ooh good one. What a clever snarky joke you have made. An epic burn if you will. well done.
I see Doctorow's post has summoned an army of AI dweebs, so I will leave you to your witticisms.
I work in government and part of my job is writing memos or documents that nobody will ever read but that some congressional mandate requires me to have on file. I absolutely offload that to AI so I can do my real job.
This is another answer that misunderstands my question. It's changed your job but has it improved the quality of life of the public served by your office ?
What a grotesque job this is.
With ownership being as concentrated as it is now (more concentrated than during the guilded robber baron age), naturaly, most of the benefit flows to the biggest owners, and AI seems poised to deepen the wealth inequality further.
In a scenario without the insane wealth concentration, and with a dignified and decent economic floor being guaranteed universally, I would be in favor of any AI that does not burn our planet to a crisp and stink up the neighborhood with the gas turbine exhaust.
So in our world as it is, I have to be agaisnt the AI for the foreseeable future.
Not yet because people are still learning how to use it, but im literally ten times more organized than i was before i started using AI to automate notetaking planning calendaring all that.
I'm happy for you but isn't really an answer.
The later section addresses this
OK, but the point still stands if you allow that: It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are often not, in fact, helpful.
Sure, although I would phrase it I think a bit more pointedly: "it has become impossible to tell managers mesmerized by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, capable of what they imagine they are capable of."
This points, rightly, at it being a failure on the part of the managers - not artificial intelligence. And God knows that's spot fucking on.
Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.
This quote is quite funny in this context, because it's literally what people do with AI. Half of the frontpage of lemmy is AI. The other half is people saying AI is bad with no realization of the irony, because they don't see good AI. It's like CGI. Everybody hates CGI, except they don't. CGI is everywhere. They just hate bad CGI.
What is AI? Explain as if i just woke up from a coma. We don’t have flying cars, we have dumpster deloreans, but everyone is talking about AI. What is it?
AI is a vague term used colloquially to describe a variety of dissimilar and unrelated technologies each carrying a unique mixture of pros and cons.