Let me put it in tech bro speak: most of my AI usage has been suitability evaluation.

In layman terms: does this shit even do what it's supposed to be doing.

It doesn't. There are few limited tasks where LLMs can be genuinely used as a tool (my favourite example is image captioning) but it still needs hand holding and can't work fully automatically. It'll fuck up, and I'll need my expertise to unfuck it.

They marketed AIs as "don't worry, you can just use it as a tool". It's a tool that is sometimes useful. This is not a high endorsement.

Now: it's my humble opinion one of the greatest tragedies of this AI boom is that it never should have been pushed to the mainstream. If LLMs had been left to the stage where they blatantly are now, they'd been left as marginal nerd toys. And all would have been well. But no, the Bros had to ruin it all and let us all discover myriad societal ills unfathomed by scifi authors. Thanks guys.

I could even get through a workday without my smartphone, even tho those things have become a requirement in today's society.

I find these tech-bro dickheads hilarious

They look down on everyone else, genuinely believing themselves to be innately superior

I work with my hands.

I have an education, including a science degree, but I choose to do something that I enjoy and that I think contributes to this world

When the chips are down, guys like this are lost, useless, and little more than a hindrance

And of course, they're utterly unable to see that they aren't people of value

You know how some people have imposter syndrome? More people should have it.

Corey Doctorow has a good article about this.

If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country’s chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country’s ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country’s Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist.

Sure, tons of people are using AI, but that isn't because they need AI to get their jobs done or even that AI makes their jobs easier. It's because their bosses are convinced that they need to be using AI because it will change everything.

Work paid for ChatGPT and asked us to all use it. Not a hard requirement but they were insisting we try to use it to see if it could speed up work.

I'm in a Nordic country. I haven't had an email longer than a single paragraph. Documents are already as concise with good organization. The documentation is optimized so AI "summaries" only translates it into longer form tech bro speak. Just looking it up directly is faster.

I needed to do batch operations on database files without providing admin access. The same database we all work on. It suggested i could do so with a script. This was a flat out lie, with multiple responses hitting the same block. I felt sick about using it so i dropped it for fear of them attempting to try it with admin access.

Haven't used it since those few prompts. Yet i get monthly emails talking about how we're running out of credits every month. I'm guessing one of my coworkers has an AI romance...

I love this implication that they really can't comprehend that those of us who oppose it largely don't use it.

Why is it so hard for these idiots to grasp that the process of actually making something yourself IS THE FULFILLING PART.

It's not the end result that is where the fulfillment comes in when I'm programming something or writing something; it's the knowledge that I MADE IT and as a result I have now accomplished something. If you tell an LLM what to do and they do it, you haven't accomplished anything. You haven't earned it and you have no right to be proud of it.

Hell, if an LLM came about that could mow my damn lawn so that I could spend more time writing and programming and 3D modelling and video editing, etc... than hot damn...THAT would be something I would pay for.

At what point did the adage "It's not the destination, it's the journey" cease being meaningful to these morons?

I write code without AI. And I like it that way.

I write stories, I draw, I animate, I DM my D&D games, all without AI.

Because, funny enough, the intellectual and creative labor is highly rewarding, and handing that to a robot seems ridiculous. Especially when it can't even do it right. This isn't like using power tools to make furniture. This is like using power tools to sculpt a very delicate statue.

Have fun spending hours fixing shit the bot broke.

"Would you actually be willing to give it up?"

Way ahead of you bud. Or behind, however you want to look at it. Personally I don't think not choosing AI makes me backward, but then again I probably am a bit of a Luddite.

I work in tech and I've never used AI for any reason ever. Never a question. Never code. My coworkers don't understand. I'm even required to use it in new and unique ways, and I'm not going to use something I'm going to learn to rely on, especially when my critical thinking is precious to me.

I just started a job as a manufacturing engineer. One of my main tasks thus far has been to make work instructions describing how to assemble product in assembly areas.

Recently one of my coworkers found a new job and left behind some paper copies of work instructions when he left. Unfortunately we couldn't find the digital copies of these work instructions on his computer. So I had to take the paper copies and make editible Visio documents that looked the same as the physical ones.

I hadn't used AI for work stuff before so I decided to try it.

So I scanned the paper copies and gave the resulting PDF's to copilot to see if it could just automatically make a Visio copy for me.

Suffice to say I ended up wasting an hour watching it create documents that were just a jumbled mess. After that I just gave up and did it on my own.

It took me 20 minutes to make copies of the 2 documents because all I needed to do was open a PDF viewer, highlight text, then ctrl-c ctrl-v.

So we are wasting all of our RAM on this shit?

I worked for 30 years before it existed, and the first 10 of those there were barely an internet. Never had a problem. We had these things called books and libraries.

I've been testing the chat bots for about a year. What kind of idiot would trust any of their answers for their work?

One of the first questions i asked them for was the IRMAA Medicare Income Brackets. They got them wrong.

Just asked again. This time they got them right. I'd never trust them with anything important.

I've not intentionally used it. I shall continue on happily.

Holy lack of self-awareness

AI isn't awesome like meth though

Uh yeah. Fuckin easy. I've tried AI. It was briefly kind of impressive, but added absolutely nothing to my life except the frustration of checking the answers for factual accuracy, which took even longer. I can't even think of a good use case.

I have a brain. I've put a lifetime of work into training it. I'll fight like hell anyone who tries to make me use it less.

I think I've used Google Lens at work once, to identify an electrical component. I want to see if it can read resistor values at some point.

But, I likely wouldn't even notice if AI stopped working.

Bro I never started.

I look at my ai use the same way I look at streaming services: cheap entertainment of middling quality and if it stops existing then nothing of value will be lost. Worst case scenario I have to actually write coherent notes, but I'm trying to drink less so that's already part of the plan anyway.

I genuinely don't understand how people get through their day WITH ai, I've experimented with integrating it, and it's absolutely terrible. It sucks at everything beyond NLUI applications.

people forget that books exist

A day in 2026 without being forced into using AI wouls be divine. Searching for a thing and getting a thing (yes i use duckduckgo no ai). Paying my rent without my "landlord" "" jack"" asking me what im on the website to do. Writing a line of code without AI autocomplete. Oh man.

I work in plane manufacturing, the use of ai is prohibited except for looking up simple information regarding the company, majority of the employees won't be affected except for maybe the higher ups writing a report or some other shit.

I work with Jira and they replaced the search with an AI. I have no choice but to use it to search through previous tickets, and it sucks.

Sometimes I try to use it to help me solve tickets, but most of its suggestions are wrong.

So I could very well do my work without AI. I could before being forced to use it.