Fuck AI

If you read the scientist's original article (linked to from this article), he seems to have learned very little from the experience, except to be more careful while continuing to use the LLM. He compares it to alchemy, which he dubs "pre-science".

He says:

But the story doesn’t end with my humiliation. Alchemy was already on my mind, and the more I read about it, the more I realized the alchemists’ work wasn’t an embarrassment to science, it was the road that led to it. They never found the philosopher’s stone. But they found something else, something we need really badly right now.

(though he doesn't tell us what the 'something else' was). Then later,

But dang it, LLMs are so undeniably useful. I have been writing code since I was 5 years old. I haven’t written a line of it since January. And for 20 years I did my own research, which is to say I read the papers, chased the citations down their rabbit holes, and built every argument myself. AI agents do all that now.

These were not lazy trades. They were correct trades, and I’d make them again tomorrow. Somewhere in the past year an LLM became my thinking partner, and I say that without embarrassment. I’m not the only one. Hundreds of millions of people reach for these tools every day, and they are not idiots.