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.

Here's a link to the exact same post on Cory Doctorow's (tracker-free) blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

Work keeps insisting we use it and I keep telling them to fuck off.

I get more done than my colleagues BECAUSE i don't use the not-actually-AI "AI" tool.

I can't say AI hasn't changed how I work, it has. Instead of going to Google, vendor docs, or the manpage for whatever code or system I am working on I will ask Claude or Gemini to take a stab at building the initial pass of the code or to look up what some cryptic error code means for me. Or even a better way to write some code that I think can be more concise.

The key I think is I never let it make the final decisions for me. The workflow is always look up information > shows it to me > ask for permission to do the thing > do the thing.

But none of that is "changing everything" in the way executives and the Sam Altman's of the world want to profess. It is just a sometimes more efficient for me way of doing the same thing I was doing before.

A lot of people I have seen that crow about how they are using AI to change their work lives are just doing really fancy Github workflows and actions to automate something they used to still do manually for some reason. They rarely are doing anything that couldn't be done with the time to research and test without AI.

AI would be great if(currently its mixed for me,and whats the best thing you can do ATM ):

• The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid(or used solar energy + air cooling only,the only way to solve this is Local LLMs currently or specific AI solutions that isnt ChatGPT or Gemini and so on. )
• the LLM is not trained on copyrighted data(non-public domain) and not Paying the artists or not ask the original creator to train on their work.(Local LLMS partially solve this,and this requires specific LLMS too.)
• People did not use AI mindlessly to write Code for you(well i think this requires the user to use their brain)

and so on...
and AI should stay as a "TOOL", not a full replacement for human work like most sane people do.
edit 1:
i forgot to mention AI is a big contributer to the AI crisis.

I've seen nothing that AI can do that justifies the economic or ecological cost.

@floofloof

I can only speak to my own area of expertise, biotechnology

and it appears that AI is in fact changing everything and doing so fast eg

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aej8512

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657

Honestly, I didn't jump on the AI hate train like everyone else did. And I was wrong. I literally only use it to make profile pictures on steam to make a sekiro photo. Other than I literally can live without it.

And at this point all of the damage it is doing to our communities; I am angry at this point that people in positions of power are blatantly ignoring the people they represent who say they don't want this. This is almost as bad as the epstein corruption. Just blatantly lying to our faces and ignoring frustration.

Not just ignoring it but trying to grift to their supporters that these 'contrarians' aren't Americans and flew in. I'm so unbelievably sick of conservative influence in my home country just using lies as a real mantra. Because everyone around me values money over anything else and it seems like they genuinely are dissonant and don't understand this is a bubble waiting to burst unlike anything we have ever seen.

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), likely coined in the late 1950's is just as relevant today.

You need to know how and understand to operate a handsaw to use a bandsaw or a mill. You need to understand variables, loops, strings before writing an "app" (and then you need to understand user models, security models, databases, UI / UX).

You can't "trust" AI / LLMs without first giving it fresh and relevant content -or it will make information up. You need to give it the important information for it to synthesize correctly -and that relevant info needs to be in the current context. You can't just ask a question and expect it to "do the research". You need domain expertise to be able to validate the response.

AI is just a tool to make it easier to use your existing tools.

AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.

The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.

AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.

In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It's very simple.

I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.

Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.

AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI's at once and they've consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.

Meh, he’s one to talk. He admits to regularly using AI in his writing—maybe this very piece you’re reading—so it has clearly changed something in his workflow.

Nikhil Suresh’s opinion piece stands up on its own without Cory Doctorow’s platitudes.

I typed into Google "potatoes pressure cooker" to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn't touch them.

I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.

I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you're right on all counts. Don't salt the water.

What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.

That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.