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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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I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.
But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It's just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.
That's good. It also means that a real job can't be "done by AI".
It's another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.
It accelerates the most things that shouldn't be done at all. Boilerplate code that's written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.
That's useful, one can't do everything by hand.
Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one's own life for like 20 years - that they can't do. And that's what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn't matter.
I have a few examples of people replaced by AI.
Photoshop slop cheap ads on the streets and TV are mostly AI slop now.
Content creators, publishers, media, music industries are all heavily affected.
The company I know paid $2K for wireframe UX design instead of standard $10K UX + UI. UI part was done by AI ($8K in human labor was replaced by AI)
I know a few companies stuck with ancient software that have been paying salaries to generations of programmers, this software is being replaced by AI, quite fast too.
I know positions which are in essence “receive a fax and type it into the system” right now being replaced by AI.
This is neither pro- nor anti- AI stance. Saying that a chatbot will ultimately replace humans is lying — they need to justify trillions in valuations.
Saying that AI is not severely changing our society is ignorance and head in the sand tactics.
The majority of Internet traffic are bots. I’m terrified of the upcoming elections with all the deepfakes and bot campaigns.