APPLYING THE '/AI MANIFESTO'

Recently, Antoine Caron published a blog post about his AI usage. Thanks to him, I’ve discovered the /ai ‘manifesto’ and I want to do the same here. Maybe you’ve reached this post by typing /ai in the URL.

MY POSTS

All the posts in this blog are written by myself, I don’t use any generative AI to produce content.

Creating a blog post is an interesting activity, it requires me to challenge and organize my thoughts before trying to write on a topic. Today, I use this blog as a place to put thoughts that I think are worth writing about and sharing.

TOOLS

For a complete transparency, when I write a blog post I use tools that can be associated with AI:

Antidote to help me spot and fix typo and grammar mistakes
Reverso because I chose to publish in English even if I am still not as comfortable as I would like to be

Both tools provide some rephrasing capabilities, I occasionally accept some suggestions when I’m not happy with my own phrasing and I cannot manage to find something better by myself. However, I’m always making sure that these suggestions remains in line with the point I am developing.

MY OPINION ABOUT GENERATIVE AI

This is where I’m about to sound like a grumpy man. You may disagree with me and that’s OK, but I’m not looking for contradictors here so please don’t waste your time trying to argue with me.

I am not a techno-solutionist, I didn’t jump on the AI hype train.

I’m not convinced such a thing as “AI will replace you!” will happen, at least not for the developers. But what I’m sure of: in the long run it will convince some people that they’re disposable resources, just by simple exposure bias.

Even though I think there are good use cases for generative AI, I also believe that many new services based on these technologies are complete bullsh**. Those are mostly branded on misconceptions from the public about AI, their true goal is to replace humans with a cheaper solution, and they will eventually collapse over time due to the lower overall quality and the additional costs (more incidents, loss of customers, etc.).

Yes, IT is highly political, and I’m not even arguing about ethics, mass disinformation or environmental concerns here.

MY OPINION ABOUT GENERATED CONTENT

If we focus on tech content (blogs, talks), I’m looking for resources with real experiences and real thinking processes. I’m not interested in generated content, it even sends me a wrong signal: if the author believes his topic is not worth spending time thinking and writing about it, why should I spend mine reading it?

Mathias Verraes wrote about this before me and in a much better way (original post on the devil’s social media, sorry):

“Writing is thinking, and if they outsource their thinking to a machine, I’m not interested in what they have to say 🤷”

The same goes for conferences. If you ever applied to a CFP, you know the competition to be part of the selected talks can be really tough. CFP committees seems to face more and more generated abstracts, and they tend to reject them: Why your AI generated talk abstract was rejected for NDC Oslo - Einar Høst - NDC Oslo 2024

COMMENTS

Wish to comment? Please, add your comment by sending me a pull request.