I’ve really struggled finding topics for this blog recently. As someone who is motivated by novelty, sometimes to a detrimental degree, the centralisation of all technology discussion around LLMs and “AI” has made it a much less interesting field to learn and talk about. Much like the AIs themselves struggle to produce distinct or interesting content, I can’t motivate myself to have an interesting opinion on them. Yes, they’re a scam, but it’s a scam so in your face and transparent that there’s nothing insightful left to be said about it

The world keeps spinning of course, interesting things never stop happening, but it doesn’t feel like anyone wants to discuss them. Even people who share my opinions about AI seem to get stuck in a tedious cycle of endlessly debunking a phenomenon that was strip-mined of all its bunks years ago. The choice right now seems to be between being uninspired and unheard, and neither feels great.

My mother recently confided in me that AI has also taken the joy out of designing cakes for her business. Her job is safe, as physical tasks like cake decoration are too complex for modern AI to grasp, but increasingly her customers want her to simply reproduce AI-generated images. Apart from the physical impossibility of a lot of these “cakes”, this takes a lot of the fun out of creating a design. I’m lucky that I don’t have to interact with AI if I don’t want to, but I hear similar stories from almost everyone I know now. From confectionery to code, everyone’s job seems to have become correcting the malformed creations of various algorithms. Employers and clients just don’t seem to trust the people they hire to have ideas or make decisions any more, and all I can feel about it is a vague ennui.

I wish I had a takeaway from this beyond “hang on and hope it gets better”, but sometimes that is all you can do. No fad lasts forever, and in the meantime we all just have to do what we can to stay sane. But man, I wish it would happen faster.