ai thought dump #1

hello blog. i was wondering if anyone was doing this, where they track their thoughts on ai as time goes by and the technology advances and the richer get richer, blah blah blah. it's october 8, 2026. i've not moved politically or ethically on much, but ai has definitely been a test for me when it comes to being an active listener, researcher, and experimenter while also wanting to reduce harm in the world - not create it for the sake of invention. i'm not perfect, but i want the best for everyone. i'm a systems thinker and i love talking to people - including strangers - off and online.

currently, and since the beginning of me ever thinking about it really, i've not felt positively about generative ai - far from it. the way training materials were stolen, peoples consent gone against and livelihoods harmed - and i'm confident we'll see many lives lost because of the environmental and economic impacts - and just overall how plain, ugly and weird in a bad way it's made the internet and our physical spaces look. like, companies stole (and continue to steal) all that - and it's gotten us, what, worse content being created far more quickly than human-made work can be made and shared? all your pumpkin spiced claude sites look the same and do the same artsy scrollbar animations and effects. it's not ugly, but it's so basic and its style will absolutely become synonymous with "scam" in like 3 months - it takes one local nyc restaurateur to fall for one scam site that claude designed like every other site for a screenshot to show on cable news across the nation to millions of people, more when they upload clips to youtube and facebook. what i'm saying is, maybe brush up on some css - you can actually have a lot of fun, it's such a fun and sophisticated language, far more than it was 10 years ago.

i think my least popular take may be that i am not as negative about ai when it comes to generating code, but this is with a lot of caveats! for one, i have a hard time understanding the jargon of an ai discussion because it changes depending on the energy (can't use "vibes" anymore, ugh). like, when someone says vibe coding, surely there's a difference between dan abramov vibe coding and someone who's never coded on a collaborative codebase carrying the responsibility of a large or rich userbase? right? i name check dan because i respect him and i trust he'd use the tools responsibly. if you truly care about software like i'd bet he does (if i weren't vehemently anti-prediction markets and anti-gambling), you'd understand why i would extend far more trust to him than, for example, someone who couldn't fathom why making an ai bot open a ton of pull requests on an open source community repo that has no issues related to said prs would piss a maintainer off - or worse, burn them out to the point of abandoning the project or just letting claude do everything with no quality control or conversation with the community of contributors and users. those of you who swear by ai really need to start policing each other on the flagrant DDOS'ing of human open source maintainers.

i know some will tell me i should give code equal weight and at this moment i disagree but i totally understand your perspective. i should expand my thoughts about this in future post - actually i can include the story of the time i went to google during graduate school and the trip scared me straight. anyway, i think it's been fairly easy for me to avoid generative ai art by people i respect, most of them who have been using ai have been using it in a more tasteful way. i've learned a lot about running local models, which i think can be really good and necessary actually to combat the tech companies exploiting all of us. while i do not use ai to write my code, that's because i don't have a job that requires me to so. that's not the case for a lot of my peers, and if they are expected to use ai to be seen as productive in the workplace, it shouldn't be a surprise that they'd want that rush of productivity during the life part of their so-called "work/life balance".

i was wondering if i should even post this, those who get it will get it and those who don't probably won't. i have always shared my point of view on things but a lot gets lost in the format of short-form posting. and i think you should read my point of view because of the following:

i treat ai like animal-based products; i try to avoid them if at all possible. often times when i use it, it's because it's forced upon me somehow, hidden from me or necessary for my health. ending that analogy, i've never paid for ai - and i am kind of embarrassed to admit that i haven't followed the function or economics of tokens. ai is something i don't think could ever work positively for society under capitalism, if any society. i think a lot of people underestimate how reliant on ai most of our economy and infrastructure is dependent on. i only recently realized that i've underestimated how many people will download and run an executable on the internet with absolutely no due diligence on the source. if there's one thing ai has taught me is that things have changed so much and kind of so little in the last 20 years since i graduated college into the great recession.

there are plenty more knowledgeable people than me on ai who you can be reading right now, nonetheless thank you for being here and please don't call me names. i'm not a policy maker, i am an artist who studied computer science in college and grad school, went into professional web development and then pivoted into community and product marketing until i left corporate. my biggest regret about quitting my corporate tech job is that i let it get into my head that my opinions about tech no longer mattered if i wasn't employed within the industry. i'm going to give some of my colleagues a little of the blame there, but it was for sure some kind of weird delayed onset confidence of identity issue. my name is jenn and i hope you enjoyed me negotiating out loud to myself on why i should post an ai thoughts dump on a thursday night with 4% laptop battery juice left.

"Birthday Candles" by Cade Buchanan is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.