(Image courtesy of Johns Hopkins University)

Let’s get this out of the way first: What everyone is currently calling “AI” is not artificial intelligence. It’s impressive software; it can do some amazing things; but it’s not artificial intelligence. It has no sentience. It can’t think. It doesn’t recognize selfhood. While it could regurgitate Decartes’ famous phrase, “I think therefore I am,” it has no concept of the philosophical underpinning behind that declaration.

“AI” is a marketing term. “Machine Learning” wasn’t sexy; “large language model” also wasn’t sexy. “AI” is very sexy. So corporate marketing people went with it. It is misleading, in much the same way “Cloud Computing” is sexier than “distributed computing”, and just as misleading. (Your content isn’t stored up in the stratosphere, at risk every time they launch a rocket; it’s on some hard disk or SSD somewhere, in a vast network server farm, being looked over by other software that balances the load across the servers by moving data around. No cloud. Nope.)

To say this annoys me is to understate it profoundly. But that’s where we are these days, and I have to use those terms to be understood. But I adamantly refuse, as a long-time science fiction consumer, to use the term “AI” without scare quotes. It is not artificial intelligence. Period.

Okay.

It’s probably also important to point out up front that I love tech. I have since I were a wee lad watching Star Trek: TOS, wishing I had a real Tricorder and Communicator. (Now of course I have the latter. If you want to get me the former as a gift my birthday is in June. It’s 400 bucks, though!) My disdain for “AI” has nothing to do with being a Luddite. Nope.

CEOs everywhere are doing three things right now: Putting massive investment into “AI”; trying to force “AI” tools into everything and onto everyone despite massive protests to the contrary; and laying off tens of thousands of workers they think they can replace with this software.

I’m a tech writer, and CEOs definitely want to replace us with “AI”. Here’s the thing (and all modesty aside): Can an “AI” tech writer, in addition to writing the content:

• also restructure the information architecture of your Confluence system to make it easier to use
• AND find corner cases in your product software that cause system errors that regular testing doesn’t turn up AND project manage a “tiger team” (a descriptor I hate, but there we are) to revise your corporate user community’s blogging approach
• AND find inconsistencies in your GitHub folder and file naming conventions that will cause problems with the original programmer moves on
• AND make sure the wording on those little “nudges” at the bottom of the page are both short enough to read quickly and make sense
• AND take over for the manager when she goes on vacation because you happen to have 7-8 years of people management experience in your past
• AND mentor new team members
• AND write internal training materials for employees new to the software?

“AI” can do some of that stuff, and some it can’t. It can help with some of that stuff, but not all of it. The fact is that I can do all that and more for salary and health benefits with a much smaller impact on the environment than a giant data center. Cuz human brains be flexible. Hell’s bells, I’ve had to correct “predictive text” at least a dozen times while creating this post, and that’s been around for what, 15 years? If we haven’t gotten that right, why are we trusting “AI”, again?

My point here is not to brag—or not much—but to point out that actual human beings can do their own job AND bring extra stuff to the table that “AI” simply can’t. And at a lower cost to the company and the environment. Plus humans with money actually buy stuff; “AI”’s don’t. 

I don’t know what end state these CEOs imagine, with them taking more and more money from the economy and laying off more and more people. If we don’t have jobs, we don’t have money; if we don’t have money, we can’t buy their products. This seems pretty obvious to me. But not to the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sam Altmans and Jeff Bezoses of the world, apparently. (They really need to watch the Netflix series “Love, Death, and Robots” Volume 3, episode, “Three Robots: Exit Strategies”.)

(“AI” in the Netflix episode telling the rich billionaires just what they can do with themselves.)

So okay, I think that’s enough ranting for one day. I probably just made myself completely unemployable.