They will not break me.

The more they want to force me to offload my work to an LLM, the more I'll grab my pen and paper to take notes, take my time to think, to plan my work, to do my work; slowly and thoroughly.

The more they want to de-skill me, the more I'll study my craft and care about doing my craft well.

The more they want me to offload responsibilities onto a machine that doesn't care, doesn't feel, doesn't think, the more I'll search for humans around me who care and want to do good work as well.

They will not break me.

Who is "they", Maaike?

This is where you either agree with me, or think I'm a nutter.

For me, the LLM craze ("AI") is an ideology, not a technology (read this brilliant article by Mandy Brown to learn more). Big Tech has decided what intelligence is, and is now on a mission to force this ideology on all of us. This then permeats everything in society: education (gotta start when the kids are young!), government, work, personal life. There's no way for us normal people to give consent, there's no way to fully avoid it. Their goal is to de-skill us, make us into dumb, poor slaves. Fearmongering is a very well-known tactic to make you feel like you "have to learn how to use LLM's, or you'll be left behind!!!"

Needless to say, I hate it.

So yeah, one "they" is Big Tech, the ultra rich awful men at Silicon Valley (and I guess, to a certain extent, the US government too. Seems like the two are pretty interwoven at this point).

Surprisingly, there's also a large managerial class "they", who are happily parrotting whatever it is Big Tech claims that "AI" is able to do. They are just getting a hard-on for this "technology" because it means they'll be able to fire people, and make the shareholders happy with a full focus on short-term profit.

The dumbest class of "they" is the average idiot on LinkedIn, who is spouting nonsense about what they were able to do with Lovable or Claude. Most of these morons don't realise that they have more in common with a beggar than with a billionaire. They think they're staying relevant because they use this "technology", but they shouldn't be surprised to get fired as well. I have zero sympathy for these people, and I'm so disappointed that so many of my peers seem to have very little capacity for critical thinking. Posts by these kinds of people are of course written by an LLM, so you can already assume their brain cells are in the process of dying anyway.

I'm so disappointed by the amount of people who seem to think they can now avoid work like thinking, writing, crafting, creating. If you're not good at something, you have to practice it. I'm learning to play the trumpet now, and it's incredibly hard. I can ask ChatGPT to blow me a trumpet melody, I guess, and then say that I learned to play the trumpet? That's how dumb these LLM users seem to me.

Bonus thought about the current hype vs the Industrial Revolution so far

One of the things proponents of the seemingly unstoppable cycle of modernisation say is that "well, now things can be done at scale, and that was needed". This is surely true when it came to the creation of clothing at scale, food production at scale. There's no way we could have the current world population without it (whether this is a good thing, is another matter!).

One thing has always happened in these modernisation cycles: some people have paid the price of being the victim of de-skilling, loss of labor, loss of income. Overall, the earth has surely paid a price. We lost so much nature and wildlife thanks to this snowball effect.

But okay, let's say the scaling was necessary. The current LLM craze, in my view, is then not necessary. Software (automation) already scaled very well, it was a solved problem in that sense. There's no need to pour extra crap on top of that. I'd say that this LLM craze rather makes things worse because it removes responsiblity. It's scary how excited people are to no longer make software in a responsible manner, we already sucked at doing it well.

But this is how this hype seems a different kind of beast compared to the modernisation changes since the start of the Industrial Revolution. It breaks the pattern of "scaling was missing here and it is really needed". This seems like "we'll add more scaling because it makes us money because data centers have to be built (sorry Earth), chips produced, stock markets rallied."

It's all just so dumb and infuriating. I do not give my consent to be de-skilled, to be forced to use an LLM. I do not want to, I prefer to work at my normal pace and use my brain. If that is no longer accepted in my work as Test Consultant, then I'll find other work to do. That is how I use my autonomy and agency, even though it comes at a risk of my money earning ability.