I use AI for some things. I’m putting that out there right from the start because it will get rid of those people who are so unreasonable that they can’t even be arsed to hear me out.

I get most of the arguments against “Artificial Intelligence”. In fact, I agree with a lot of them. From the environmental and human costs to the apocalyptic possibilities, the arguments make a lot of sense. There are a lot of dangers when it comes to this “AI” revolution, and the corporations who are in charge of this revolution cannot be trusted to do anything but try to pad their bottom line.

I have talked about AI before on my podcast and on my YouTube channel, but my primary use case is using AI for tech support. Right now I’m trying Emacs again, and that means I’m having to do a lot of new things. AI, in my case, is a very chatty version of Google. I ask it how I can set a keybinding for dashboard and it tells me how to do it. I copy the code, put it in my init.el and move on with my day.

I don’t vibe code. I’m pretty proud of that fact. I like to create my own code, even though I’m painfully aware of how bad at it I am. I’m not a developer and I never will be. I can put out the simplest of things and be happy about that. It’s more than some people can do, so there’s no real need to feel bad about it.

Because I’m not a great coder, I have to constantly look things up online. I’m a long time user of the Google-it-always method of coding. The issue is, I’m doing that less and less and going to AI instead. And it is a serious problem. I can feel myself getting dumber every time I use “AI” for some menial task or question. Things I would usually go figure out myself by reading through other’s solutions on random forum 133, I now copy and paste from ChatGPT. Sure the AI bot will tell me what the code does and how it should work, but I don’t read that shit. I just take the code and if it works, GREAT! If it doesn’t work, I go back to AI, tell it that it didn’t work and ask it to try again.