Ha, got that right! Relieved of all that troublesome time spent writing, we'd be free to do... what? There's a real failure of imagination at the top of the tech bro chain to understand that the time and struggle spent creating is not a bad thing.
And, much as I could say I'd like a chatbot to learn how to fold the damn laundry, I'd be just as creeped out having some autonomous weirdo machine rummaging around in my delicates.
I hope I've been part of this community long enough that people will assume I'm coming at this issue in good faith, because I truly am! As an IT professional, the thing that's frustrating for me is that "using the plagiarism machine to do your homework" and "using AI to help you troubleshoot technical issues in a fraction of the amount of time it would have taken before" are put in the same context. I can serve my clients better by being able to feed a string of error messages into AI and getting a workable solution back almost immediately rather than spending a bunch of time flailing around and trying different things. (Here I will note that my years of experience help me solve a lot of problems on my own, and I'm grateful I had the opportunity to learn how to do lots of stuff myself!) I try to be judicious in my use of it (I use claude.ai) and I even have my Google searches set to NOT show AI results (thanks to https://tenbluelinks.org/). I just feel like there's a little nuance that goes missing when you just declare "AI=bad, full stop." I hope this admission doesn't get me kicked out of the White Pages club!
Sue, I'll always assume good faith with you, and I also know that there's no perfect way to make the distinction here between clear professional uses of AI in the IT world (or, for instance, in the biomedical world-- I hear that it's great tech for gene sequencing) and the consumer facing uses, which are the ones I'm particularly urging people to resist. I try to talk about generative AI or consumer facing AI, but I'm sure that my language isn't super perfect. You'll never get kicked out of the White Pages club and loved that you still wrote in.
Although I would lovingly push as to whether you truly need to be using Claude. I'm sure it does useful things for you in your personal life, but also... well, as per my essay... maybe that's a line of thought worth playing with.
Just for "fun," here's one of my sample queries from earlier in the week. Being able to paste something like this into a prompt and get a clear response has made a big difference in my work life. (Fear not, my personal life is blissfully AI-free!)
These messages were in my error log. How can I fix them?
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 92
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 93
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant WP_POST_REVISIONS already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 94
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 95
It's really just me asking a machine to interpret what another machine is saying, which it does very well. Meanwhile, the very same machine gets a lot more press for outputting slop images of a muscular Donald Trump riding on a unicorn while his enemies bow before him, so I guess I can't blame people for focusing on the bad parts.
I'm in the engineering space and I see lots of good, interesting applications for AI and machine learning. The AI vendors have not helped themselves by framing the technology at inevitible, emphasizing that it will take jobs away (is that really good marketing?) and that we need to immediately build gigantic data centers outside every small town and in every economically distressed part of a city that will drive up your water and electric bills, while also looking very ugly. When I talk to non-tech people about these topics, they always ask "Why?" Why do we need this? What are the data centers actually for, how will they improve my life? Why do we suddenly need all this massive compute right this second, and have it built next to the Hardees on State Route 56? And the most publicly promoted answers seems to be self-directing murder drones/robots for the military, better state capacity for surveillance, and completely removing people from already frustrating processes (like applying for a job and getting any kind of response that makes sense). My teenage son got an AI-generated rejection after applying for a summer job at a car wash. Is that an improvement?
I know Gartner has their own tech hype cycle model, but having been in a number of different tech industries over the years, my own theory of tech hype is: 1. Create an interesting new technology; 2. It will immediately be put to use by some combination of criminals and pornographers; 3. Egged on by vendors, companies will attempt to throw the technology at every application they can think of; 4. Everyone will be annoyed while burning through billions of dollars; 5. Eventually, we will find out the tech is really just great for something like automated library book check out or DNA analysis or accelerating crash simulations or whatever; 6. We will all feel embarrassed for a minute and then memory hole the entire thing.
What has struck me about AI is the absolute urgency with which the industry is trying to just ram this down everyone's throat - from first graders to software developers. It almost feels like an assault. My life has not been improved by the fact that some really smart tech developer flipped a switch and now my teenagers can just have Claude do their Algebra homework and neither I nor their school seems to have any power to do anything about it.
Sue, another Sue here! I am pretty much a Luddite when it comes to using technology. Barely adequate is about it, but I get resentful when AI tries to tell me how to respond to a comment. I may read their offerings and they sound wonderful, but they aren’t my words. Good grief it takes so long to even find one’s own voice sometimes using the heart and brain that go with it, that that AI suggestions often feel a little bit like corrections . I do think there are probably really wonderful uses for some of the things that AI can do and already does in the world of medicine and information gathering, I just think it bears, remembering that it is a technology that has been designed and implemented by humans as imperfect as we always are…
I appreciate your comment, Sue. I read a lot about AI and talk to a lot of people who do use it frequently (mainly in IT). One thing I’ve read recently said (paraphrased), “AI is mis-named. Its most useful function is massively scaled computing power allowing it to crunch through unheard of amounts of data in seconds, however, it’s not intelligent.”
I've dealt with lots of human tech support people over the years, and always try to be as polite to them as possible. I sometimes have to remind myself NOT to thank the AI!
I wrote this on another newsletter about AI yesterday, but it's so apt that I will write it again:
"I heard someone say recently that the way that tech bros talk about AI is not unlike how rapists talk about rape: "It's inevitable", "There's nothing you can do to stop it", and my personal favorite, "It'll go easier if you just submit.""
That creepy feeling that many of us get in the face of AI? It's the same feeling you get when you're walking alone on a dark street and some guy appears to be following you. The part we have to remember is that we're not alone on this street. There are more of us than the AI trying to follow us, and we should all turn on him and tell him to screw off.
I will ditto Asha's nudge of that essay because Mike Sowden is an excellent, funny, and intelligent writer (he's also a longtime friend), and the way he approaches the idea that Everything Is Amazing consistently surprises and delights me!
I am heartened by seeing so many more conversations about folks rejecting AI (or at least the idea of it). It is so incredibly pervasive and time consuming to disable - there are no fewer than a dozen things to click to disable it on Zoom. Getting rid of it on my email server is so far impossible. I had to switch browsers in order to find one that will let me completely cancel the use of AI for search features, etc.
But, I love seeing that folks are changing their minds and starting to talk about it more and more. One friend I have who is a college professor explained it to her students like this: using AI in school is like going to the gym with a robot, putting the robot on the treadmill, and telling it to strengthen your muscles and increase your cardio fitness. You aren't actually doing the work. Your muscles won't get any stronger, you won't learn anything, you're not practicing the thing. What makes you think AI will make you any smarter/stronger/more capable?
You know I have so much to say about this topic that I do not know where to begin, Garrett. My students (undergrad and grad) on the whole hate AI. In addition to all of the environmental and ethical and economic concerns, they are now engaged in a kind of AI arms race in which they have not only to learn how to write but how to write in a way that is just human enough not to get flagged as AI. I find it heartening to talk to my students about it, though there are of course exceptions. I recently encountered some excellent anti-AI graffiti in the student bathroom across the hall from where I usually teach. You can see the photo here: https://mas.to/@svhaag/116574228111672068
I may have said out loud today, to your daughter during carpool, "your mom might be the only person I know who hates AI more than I do!" I can't believe I haven't seen that graffiti yet. Makes me proud of your students.
I keep thinking about how much I love the process of learning. That includes the phase where you fail more than succeed, but by keeping at it, you reverse that ratio and the sense of accomplishment that comes from that is powerful. I love the feeling of catharsis that comes from pouring our my jumble of ideas and hypotheses into a written work. I love how much my friends and I laugh when we attempt a paint-and-sip or a pottery workshop and our attempt is nothing like the professional version and no one would pay money for it but the end result is imbued with that joy and feels priceless. Why would I want to outsource any of those experiences to a technology that gives me nothing in return?
Garrett I respect your emphasis on positive and constructive solutions and empathetic dialogue but I need to tell you how much I LOVE booing things. When I go to the movies I love to boo the ads for the army or for resource extraction. When I am at protests I love the part where the speaker names something bad and we all get to yell "SHAME". The only time anyone has been unwise enough to bring me to stand up comedy nights I yell at anyone who makes a misogynistic or racist joke or whatever. I love to boo things and I loved the videos of the AI dipshits getting booed. And I think someone needs to speak up for committed Quakers who are also huge haters. 😤
I was so proud of myself for resisting Gemini and Chat Bot and Open Chat and a whole host of others. It was my grandchild who gently asked: Grandma, do you ever use Google search? How do you get your car to a place you've never been to before? Do you ever shop on-line? His list went on way beyond my ability to focus, and he was right on every count. Even though he was a preteen at the time, I asked him about what he thought would happen when AI took over his parents' jobs. He was quick to reply: not in my lifetime, cuz their jobs need interactive people skills, creativity and higher-order problem-solving. I challenged him on the latter, but had to respect his understanding both of his parent's jobs and of the (at least current) limitations of AI in the first 2. As much as anything, I'm worried about the current level of sophistication of AI at misusing the information we so trustingly put out there when it's in the wrong hands, and it's increasingly skillful imitation of aspects of what make us recognizable to those closest to us, with the hacking that follows in seriously destructive ways. Most recently, I was pretty proud of immediately identifying an email hack, but got caught anyhow, with all the ensuing damage, because I didn't realize that it was an AI generated hack set to respond to my query in my friend's "voice" assuring me that I was wrong and to PLEASE open that evite.
And yet I'm still the one who has to clean out the shower drain while LLMs supposedly "do my job for me." Brave new world indeed!
Ha, got that right! Relieved of all that troublesome time spent writing, we'd be free to do... what? There's a real failure of imagination at the top of the tech bro chain to understand that the time and struggle spent creating is not a bad thing.
And, much as I could say I'd like a chatbot to learn how to fold the damn laundry, I'd be just as creeped out having some autonomous weirdo machine rummaging around in my delicates.
This is what a life is, isn't it? The non mundane rituals that are maddening sometimes, and the mundanities that, no matter how annoying, are ours.
It's true. Mundanities amidst the exciting and extraordinary — and the very human choice to forego folding the laundry — make for a life.
I hope I've been part of this community long enough that people will assume I'm coming at this issue in good faith, because I truly am! As an IT professional, the thing that's frustrating for me is that "using the plagiarism machine to do your homework" and "using AI to help you troubleshoot technical issues in a fraction of the amount of time it would have taken before" are put in the same context. I can serve my clients better by being able to feed a string of error messages into AI and getting a workable solution back almost immediately rather than spending a bunch of time flailing around and trying different things. (Here I will note that my years of experience help me solve a lot of problems on my own, and I'm grateful I had the opportunity to learn how to do lots of stuff myself!) I try to be judicious in my use of it (I use claude.ai) and I even have my Google searches set to NOT show AI results (thanks to https://tenbluelinks.org/). I just feel like there's a little nuance that goes missing when you just declare "AI=bad, full stop." I hope this admission doesn't get me kicked out of the White Pages club!
Sue, I'll always assume good faith with you, and I also know that there's no perfect way to make the distinction here between clear professional uses of AI in the IT world (or, for instance, in the biomedical world-- I hear that it's great tech for gene sequencing) and the consumer facing uses, which are the ones I'm particularly urging people to resist. I try to talk about generative AI or consumer facing AI, but I'm sure that my language isn't super perfect. You'll never get kicked out of the White Pages club and loved that you still wrote in.
Although I would lovingly push as to whether you truly need to be using Claude. I'm sure it does useful things for you in your personal life, but also... well, as per my essay... maybe that's a line of thought worth playing with.
Just for "fun," here's one of my sample queries from earlier in the week. Being able to paste something like this into a prompt and get a clear response has made a big difference in my work life. (Fear not, my personal life is blissfully AI-free!)
These messages were in my error log. How can I fix them?
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 92
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 93
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant WP_POST_REVISIONS already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 94
[08-Jun-2026 18:00:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Constant EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS already defined in /home3/maryverm/public_html/wp-config.php on line 95
Got it- I misunderstood your note on Claude as a personal use one!
It's really just me asking a machine to interpret what another machine is saying, which it does very well. Meanwhile, the very same machine gets a lot more press for outputting slop images of a muscular Donald Trump riding on a unicorn while his enemies bow before him, so I guess I can't blame people for focusing on the bad parts.
I'm in the engineering space and I see lots of good, interesting applications for AI and machine learning. The AI vendors have not helped themselves by framing the technology at inevitible, emphasizing that it will take jobs away (is that really good marketing?) and that we need to immediately build gigantic data centers outside every small town and in every economically distressed part of a city that will drive up your water and electric bills, while also looking very ugly. When I talk to non-tech people about these topics, they always ask "Why?" Why do we need this? What are the data centers actually for, how will they improve my life? Why do we suddenly need all this massive compute right this second, and have it built next to the Hardees on State Route 56? And the most publicly promoted answers seems to be self-directing murder drones/robots for the military, better state capacity for surveillance, and completely removing people from already frustrating processes (like applying for a job and getting any kind of response that makes sense). My teenage son got an AI-generated rejection after applying for a summer job at a car wash. Is that an improvement?
I know Gartner has their own tech hype cycle model, but having been in a number of different tech industries over the years, my own theory of tech hype is: 1. Create an interesting new technology; 2. It will immediately be put to use by some combination of criminals and pornographers; 3. Egged on by vendors, companies will attempt to throw the technology at every application they can think of; 4. Everyone will be annoyed while burning through billions of dollars; 5. Eventually, we will find out the tech is really just great for something like automated library book check out or DNA analysis or accelerating crash simulations or whatever; 6. We will all feel embarrassed for a minute and then memory hole the entire thing.
What has struck me about AI is the absolute urgency with which the industry is trying to just ram this down everyone's throat - from first graders to software developers. It almost feels like an assault. My life has not been improved by the fact that some really smart tech developer flipped a switch and now my teenagers can just have Claude do their Algebra homework and neither I nor their school seems to have any power to do anything about it.
Sue, another Sue here! I am pretty much a Luddite when it comes to using technology. Barely adequate is about it, but I get resentful when AI tries to tell me how to respond to a comment. I may read their offerings and they sound wonderful, but they aren’t my words. Good grief it takes so long to even find one’s own voice sometimes using the heart and brain that go with it, that that AI suggestions often feel a little bit like corrections . I do think there are probably really wonderful uses for some of the things that AI can do and already does in the world of medicine and information gathering, I just think it bears, remembering that it is a technology that has been designed and implemented by humans as imperfect as we always are…
I appreciate your comment, Sue. I read a lot about AI and talk to a lot of people who do use it frequently (mainly in IT). One thing I’ve read recently said (paraphrased), “AI is mis-named. Its most useful function is massively scaled computing power allowing it to crunch through unheard of amounts of data in seconds, however, it’s not intelligent.”
I've dealt with lots of human tech support people over the years, and always try to be as polite to them as possible. I sometimes have to remind myself NOT to thank the AI!
I wrote this on another newsletter about AI yesterday, but it's so apt that I will write it again:
"I heard someone say recently that the way that tech bros talk about AI is not unlike how rapists talk about rape: "It's inevitable", "There's nothing you can do to stop it", and my personal favorite, "It'll go easier if you just submit.""
That creepy feeling that many of us get in the face of AI? It's the same feeling you get when you're walking alone on a dark street and some guy appears to be following you. The part we have to remember is that we're not alone on this street. There are more of us than the AI trying to follow us, and we should all turn on him and tell him to screw off.
This is such an apt analogy, Asha. The whole discourse is designed to make us believe we have no agency.
Really well put!
Is the other piece worth reading?
I think so.
https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/shields-up-stupid
I will ditto Asha's nudge of that essay because Mike Sowden is an excellent, funny, and intelligent writer (he's also a longtime friend), and the way he approaches the idea that Everything Is Amazing consistently surprises and delights me!
I am heartened by seeing so many more conversations about folks rejecting AI (or at least the idea of it). It is so incredibly pervasive and time consuming to disable - there are no fewer than a dozen things to click to disable it on Zoom. Getting rid of it on my email server is so far impossible. I had to switch browsers in order to find one that will let me completely cancel the use of AI for search features, etc.
But, I love seeing that folks are changing their minds and starting to talk about it more and more. One friend I have who is a college professor explained it to her students like this: using AI in school is like going to the gym with a robot, putting the robot on the treadmill, and telling it to strengthen your muscles and increase your cardio fitness. You aren't actually doing the work. Your muscles won't get any stronger, you won't learn anything, you're not practicing the thing. What makes you think AI will make you any smarter/stronger/more capable?
Another great metaphor there.
You know I have so much to say about this topic that I do not know where to begin, Garrett. My students (undergrad and grad) on the whole hate AI. In addition to all of the environmental and ethical and economic concerns, they are now engaged in a kind of AI arms race in which they have not only to learn how to write but how to write in a way that is just human enough not to get flagged as AI. I find it heartening to talk to my students about it, though there are of course exceptions. I recently encountered some excellent anti-AI graffiti in the student bathroom across the hall from where I usually teach. You can see the photo here: https://mas.to/@svhaag/116574228111672068
I may have said out loud today, to your daughter during carpool, "your mom might be the only person I know who hates AI more than I do!" I can't believe I haven't seen that graffiti yet. Makes me proud of your students.
I keep thinking about how much I love the process of learning. That includes the phase where you fail more than succeed, but by keeping at it, you reverse that ratio and the sense of accomplishment that comes from that is powerful. I love the feeling of catharsis that comes from pouring our my jumble of ideas and hypotheses into a written work. I love how much my friends and I laugh when we attempt a paint-and-sip or a pottery workshop and our attempt is nothing like the professional version and no one would pay money for it but the end result is imbued with that joy and feels priceless. Why would I want to outsource any of those experiences to a technology that gives me nothing in return?
oh this is so beautifully put.
Garrett I respect your emphasis on positive and constructive solutions and empathetic dialogue but I need to tell you how much I LOVE booing things. When I go to the movies I love to boo the ads for the army or for resource extraction. When I am at protests I love the part where the speaker names something bad and we all get to yell "SHAME". The only time anyone has been unwise enough to bring me to stand up comedy nights I yell at anyone who makes a misogynistic or racist joke or whatever. I love to boo things and I loved the videos of the AI dipshits getting booed. And I think someone needs to speak up for committed Quakers who are also huge haters. 😤
You are and always will be one of my top three Quaker haters
I was so proud of myself for resisting Gemini and Chat Bot and Open Chat and a whole host of others. It was my grandchild who gently asked: Grandma, do you ever use Google search? How do you get your car to a place you've never been to before? Do you ever shop on-line? His list went on way beyond my ability to focus, and he was right on every count. Even though he was a preteen at the time, I asked him about what he thought would happen when AI took over his parents' jobs. He was quick to reply: not in my lifetime, cuz their jobs need interactive people skills, creativity and higher-order problem-solving. I challenged him on the latter, but had to respect his understanding both of his parent's jobs and of the (at least current) limitations of AI in the first 2. As much as anything, I'm worried about the current level of sophistication of AI at misusing the information we so trustingly put out there when it's in the wrong hands, and it's increasingly skillful imitation of aspects of what make us recognizable to those closest to us, with the hacking that follows in seriously destructive ways. Most recently, I was pretty proud of immediately identifying an email hack, but got caught anyhow, with all the ensuing damage, because I didn't realize that it was an AI generated hack set to respond to my query in my friend's "voice" assuring me that I was wrong and to PLEASE open that evite.