Technology

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.

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.

I don’t think they’re all lying; most are just misinformed or using the term differently than Cory.

It’s like saying “global warming is changing everything.” Technically, not true, but the knock on effects of specific aspects of it recently hit an inflection point that causes it to affect the lives of everyone.

This has also happened in the field of artificial intelligence; LLM chatbots are only the visible mushroom fruits of the vast mycelium network that has been silently growing underground for years.

What has AI changed so far?

• Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
• we have AI child porn now, awesome
• we have AI undressing apps, cool
• we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
• we have AI, the great misinformation tool
• we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
• there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay

And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis...

I'm not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I'm definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering

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.

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.

I generally respect this guy's opinion (I probably use the term "enshitification" multiple times a week!), but pretending that "AI" and "Chabot" are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.

If the internet was "turned off" after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.

This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.

I was talking about roof sheathing with the latest chat gpt.

It was confident the joists should go above the sheathing.

I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren't gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.

I need a new line of work

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

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

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.

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.

If AI data centers drastically accelerate us towards a point of no return for climate change, then they will in fact have “changed everything”.

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

It's also notable that MBAs tend to be people who are into the networking versus the work and they will follow the trends wherever they leave because that's what good monkeys do.

AI is changing everything... Mostly to bad, that's the part they keep.

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.

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

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.

But it IS changing everything, and not in a good way

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.

This is me right now