Technology

Corey Doctorow isn't speaking to you, he's speaking to the many, many people who have been fooled by the ai craze.

To the average person (and this includes politicians, basically anyone not a software engineer developing the tools )who Cory generally writes to try and inform, they are the same.

Should they be? No. But that's a whole different thing and trying to change that in the general public mind doesn't change his current point about AI as the public thinks of it right now.

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

That's a questionable statement that may reflect on your main argument. After all, when was the Internet "switched on"? Sounds very binary to me.

I generally respect this guy's opinion (I probably use the term "enshitification" multiple times a week

A lot of people don't use it the way he used it though. He used it specifically for two sided markets (eg a service that has both business and personal users) where the focus shifts to the business customers, but people have started using it to mean anything that used to be good but isn't good any more.

I think you're making a strawman argument here. He isn't arguing that it's a binary switch that has failed to throw, he's arguing that we don't have compelling evidence that the ends justify the means:

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.

And this is completely true! Supposedly "data informed" organizations are trying to find a yardstick that shows actual, meaningful improvement in business outcomes from AI. In my own organization we have people touting LOC yet again because "big number", but anyone who's ever worked in software can tell you it's an asinine metric to use as a KPI.

It's inherently unscientific to start with the answer and work backwards to a satisfactory question. His point that this push is coming from the least knowledgeable of real processes- and more closely resembles religious fervor than business acumen- seems to at least warrant consideration.

"Chatbot" style AI is wildly good and bad at varying kinds of tasks, and a lot of that has to do with how it has been prepared.

Some LLMs have been trained to make images - I've not been too impressed with them, but that's what they're "good" at - and better than the LLMs that have been trained to write computer code when you ask the coding LLMs to draw a picture.

The code writing LLMs have actually improved the most at reviewing code over the past 8-9 months, and that ability to review their own code makes them dramatically better at writing code as well.

I find Google Gemini to be pretty impressive at scanning laws and regulations and finding, not creative, but functional solutions to stated problems within the constraints of (often frustratingly bizarre) legal structures.

And all of them will lie to you, tell you what a great idea you have, etc. They're not really lying, they're mostly just taking what they read at face value without checking corroborating sources enough to find the obvious (to you) blunders. If you want the LLM to be sure, ask it to go on the RAG (Research Augmented Generation) - check everything before saying it, they can do that, especially "paid mode" engines, but it reduces their capacity for analysis of complex problems by 3-10x, because they're spending so much context window "being sure" - you can alternatively spend 3-10x as long solving complex problems / accomplishing complex tasks if you have them do their homework, verify everything from "the best" available sources 3x and build up a local document set of "trusted information" which is used in preference to whatever it might find at random on the internet. This isn't as sexy as "Hey Claude, code me up a database that does X Y Z" and getting the result in 30 seconds, but it is how professionals have been doing their jobs for centuries: learn reliable information first, then act on it.

“AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable

In the same way that most people if you say you'll take them to their destination with your vehicle, they assume in your car and not on the back of your bicycle, although both are technically correct.

I think it's a worthy simplification that sums up the current state of things well. We have AI that broadly has different uses and then we have the ChatBot/ChatBot derived AI applications. The market is not going insane over the broader AI category. Executives are not tripping over themselves to say things like machine vision is going to replace all labor, or at least all white collar labor. The chatbot is the only thing in the conversation of consequence.

All the "everyone says AI is the reality, so everyone feels like they must say AI is the reality" refers to this specific category. It might be veering towards being oversimplified, but it's trying to balance a perspective that is also oversimplified. Generally, we aren't good at weighing simple straightforward takes against complex nuanced takes, so you have to "net it out" to have any hope of the point landing.

Pretending AI and Chatbot are interchangeable is a marketing strategy by the companies who make these advanced chat bots. "They are artificially intelligent bro".

Oh look it's arbitrary-narrow-definition-that-fits-the-argument-I-want-to-make man!