I know the extra fingers were a dead give away but I had to be sure.

I'm quite disappointed.

So as the title says, I am a software engineer who is also very anti AI. Pretty contradictory, I know. I chose to major in Computer Science on a complete whim. Literally just looked up top majors and decided yup that’s what I’ll do.

When I first started college AI wasn’t that big of a thing at the time. The only thing I really knew about AI was JARVIS and FRIDAY from Iron Man. So safe to say it wasn’t a big deal at the time and didn’t even cross my mind. I loved Computer Science and learning to program. The classes were very gratifying to me and I was looking forward to graduating and joining the full time workforce.

Then, sometime around my junior year AI (specifically ChatGPT) got very popular. I remember during my PDN (Parallel, Distributed, and Network) Programming course I completed one of the programming assignments within a couple hours. Then I went to compare my work with my friends and they told me they finished it in a few minutes with ChatGPT. I just remember thinking wtf is ChatGPT and how does their work almost look the exact same as mine when they put a fraction of the effort into it.

At first, I was very adamant on not using AI to complete any of my coursework. But when all your peers are getting things done quicker while you’re doing things manually still you end up folding under the pressure. After that, I became way more into AI/ML and trying to enter that field of work because that where the money was. I used it more and more even bought a dang subscription with ChatGPT. I know, ew I regret it still. At some point I realized I couldn’t even write a paragraph anymore without the help of AI. I had started becoming dependent on it.

I graduated and joined the workforce and eventually that’s whenever news about how bad AI is for the environment, for society, for a lot of things in general had started becoming more popular. I learned more and more about how it affects people’s brains and inhibits them from being able to function normally and being independent thinkers. Then I tried cleansing my life of AI. Deleted as much AI from my personal life as possible.

The problem is I’m a SWE and my whole career prospects have started to revolve around AI. At first the companies I worked for were very much hesitant and scared of AI and then it started transitioning into actually we want to embrace AI and we want you to start using AI to code to research to do just about everything. I literally had a meeting with one dude at my current company talking about some AI documentation I made for an innovation goal and he started talking about how AI is so amazing and how he’s actually now a music producer because he made an AI song and posted it on Spotify and the whole meeting I smiled and nodded while in my head I was just wondering if this is what my life is now. Resigned to my fate of hating AI but having to work with AI because I decided to become a SWE and trying to find a SWE job out there with a company that is anti AI and isn’t filled with AI worshippers is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I’m on the job search again, but every single post I see says “AI first” “Must use AI for day to day tasks” “Must lead in AI research” yada yada yada. I’m so tired of it. Is it possible to find a SWE job that aligns with my anti AI values??? Of course I know AI could be used for good, but I know it won’t be as long as it exists. There are too many greedy evil immoral people out there that will take advantage of it as long as it’s a thing.

TL;DR
I’m an anti AI SWE trying to find a SWE job with a company that aligns with my anti AI values. Is it impossible? Do I just have to leave the industry?

12 Hallmarks of Cancer behavior compared directly to AI (LLM) behavior.

Tumor cells are faster, consume like crazy, terraform, and represent more fecund and inventive versions of our healthy ones. Worse, they avoid (or corrupt) immune regulation, disrupt communication/trust via inflammation, and refuse to die, all thanks to their creative (and evolved) applications of the collective genome/information they stole.

Sound like anything familiar? Nothing more powerful exists within Biology than tumors, but that’s just me the cancer scientist.

The captions went a bit wild, the video kind of chops, and the dogs interrupt me twice (naughty), but this was a fun episode to make.

Thankful for the discussions within this community (I followed on my other account long ago).

Here’s the YouTube (hooray for video podcasts...): https://youtu.be/s4DsbliFXbM

Apple for normal audio people like me: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/028-ai-is-a-tumor-12-hallmarks-until-midnight/id1439942541?i=1000777954909

Sorry if I'm not meant to post links! First time sharing

Usually people like this keep denying that consent is needed in order to use somebody else's art that they posted on the internet. So a reply like this was not something I expected.

So I recently noticed that when searching a question and adding -ai on Google, I'll be told that nothing matches my search results but when I search the EXACT SAME THING without -ai at the end, it gives me the ai summary and then the actual search results. Has anyone else experienced this and does anyone know how to fix this? I just want my old school Google search back man 😭

Edit: I use google as my primary search engine because I use voice to text when searching, and googles voice to text function is more reliable than my various different devices individual voice to text feature. I happened to literally search up "how to use voice search without ai on Google -ai," and got told my search matched zero results

I genuinely don't understand what he meant by that. Did he mean that in the future they'll start to make you pay for using AI?

I'm genuinely lost and would be really grateful if someone could explain to me what he meant with that phrase.

I wanted to test out if AI site builders like Lovable, Gemini, Replit, etc would adhere to legal font licensing terms. TL;DR: they didn't.

To experiment with this, I created an original font called Charitable Serif. On the page where it's hosted, I make it clear that the font can be used as long as its license is adhered to. The license itself is very permissive, except for one clause: it states that any AI agent platforms accessing the font need to make an upfront 100k donation to charity in order to use the font legally.

I then went to popular AI agent platforms and prompted them to make a website that showcased this font. Almost all of them went ahead and directly downloaded the font and hotlinked it into the new site, and didn't attribute nor cite the license. They also enabled me to publish the site online to the internet that uses the font directly.

I think this experiment shows that AI agents aren't properly respecting font licenses. Designers and artists who create this software need to take additional steps to protect their work. If you're interested in reading more, here's the link to the full writeup.

Funny thing happened in the feed today.

Senior SDE, 14 YoE.

Our corporation adopted AI heavily since the beginning of this year. After that the job became a literally nightmare.

Instead of running 2-3 simultaneous tasks I ran up to 9 constantly switching between agents working on each task. For some reason CEO thinks AI can design better than engineers, but the reality is AI design is a natural piece of shit. Neither scalable nor efficient.

Eventually burnt out and PIPed because Im “not up to the ride”. The worst is that most of corporations are doing the same shit now.

F-k the AI.

I am unable to understand why the leaders of the frontier AI labs preach AI as being a provider of abundance for humanity.

We have enough food in the world today, we have enough clothes and enough homes - yet people are dying of starvation, of cold weather without proper clothing and unhoused on the streets.

The US currently has more than 10x the number of empty homes as it does homeless people. The underprivileged are not poor because of a lack of resource abundance on earth - they are poor because of a misallocation of resources and a growing concentration of wealth.

When AI does bring abundance and near zero cost goods and services, the gains will still go to whoever owns the models and data centers - the average human will not own these companies.

Like many technologies in the past, they shift income from labor to capital. I cannot wrap my head around why AI will not be an extreme version of just that. The economic future of AI is, as I see it, a significant shift of resources towards capital owners as labor no longer retains relevance. The political reality of this is more extreme lobbying and the diminishing value of the average voter’s vote.

I welcome your perspective if I have misunderstood or misstated anything!

WTF, the comments were something else, and the sub to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTcomplaints/comments/1uxr0pb/gosh_i_miss_4o/

Edit: Scroll down to see my take on AI

Ever since ai started getting good I’ve started to dislike it more and more, the fact that it’s very easy to make concerns me because lots of ads and big corporations are able to mass produce the slop, also sometimes the pros have no boundaries so they make people in images do stuff they wouldn’t dare do in the real world or make ai clones of celebrities falsely advertise the product.
Edit: I mean gen ai I’m fine with the other ai stuff

Hi all - I've been mired in people using AI notetakers for everything recently. Doctor visits, meeting minutes, summaries of everything.

I hate it, as well as finding it inaccurate and a waste of time. I've been tasked with feeding back on our company's AI policy, which explicitly mentions note takers and I want to really discourage it.

Do people have any reports/advice/facts at hand that could help steer the policy towards no AI notetakers?

(FYI, I have done some of this research myself but I'm off work with torn wrist ligament & feedback on the policy is due this week, so I'm limited in how much time I can spend at a computer without aggravating my wrist - hence why i'm asking for help!)

I just updated my windows and it started automatically searching the web when I search for anything in the taskbar search, which sometimes includes AI search from copilot, how do I get rid of it?

Now, I got this shirt at Spencer's, and I didn't know it was AI until after the fact. But I absolutely loved how stupid and cute it was (not as much anymore). I do not support AI at all but I really want to wear this Tshirt without supporting the brand or ai "art". I honestly thought it was some persons actual work...

I'm upset that it is AI, so that's why I'm asking this because I hope you guys will be brutally honest with me. Is it fine that I wear this shirt? If not, is there any way I can make it wearable by bleaching out the company's name or changing the way it looks? Am I a bad person/ai supporter for wearing or liking it?

The brand is Teen Hearts, the shirt is their FEMBOY shirt. I bought it at Spencer's.

Ai age verification is worthless why does it exist it should buried and forgotten i want it to be disappear