I think I'm the type of person who gets into things after everyone. To that regard AI is no different, and for a long time I considered LLMs a toy - this was truer of older models, such as the original chatGPT models that came out in 2022-2023.
The discourse has understandably evolved over time and it's clear that AI is not going anywhere. It's like quadcopters in warfare, or so many other new techs before. As much as we'd like them not to be used or exist, they will still be. To refuse to adopt new advancements means to be left behind and giving oneself a disadvantage on purpose.
Ultimately the problems around AI stem from capitalism. Yes, there are excesses. But this is true of humans too.
AI - especially LLMs, which I have more experience with - are great at some tasks and absolutely abysmal at others. Just like some people are good at their job and others don't know the first thing about it. I used to get an ad on Twitter about some guy's weird messianic book, and in it he showed two pages. It was the most meaningless AI bullshit, just faffing on and on while saying nothing, written in the most eye-rolling way.
That's because LLMs currently aren't great at writing prose for you. Maybe if you prompt them just right they might, but that's also a skill in itself. So we see that there is bottom-of-the-barrel quality, and better quality, and that exists with or without AI. I think the over-reliance on AI to do everything for them regardless of output will eventually be pushed out, and people who do it will stop finding success (if they even found it in the first place, don't readily believe people when they boast about their own success).
I use AI to code, for example. It's mostly simpler stuff, but:
1- I would have to learn entire coding languages to do it myself, which takes years. AI can do it in 30 minutes and better than I could in years, because it knows things I don't. We can talk about security for example, but would a hobbyist programmer know to write secure web code? I don't think so.
2- You don't always have a coder friend available. In fact, the reason I started using AI to code my solutions is because try as we might to find coders to help, we just never could. So it was either don't implement cool features that people will like, or do it with AI.
And it works great! I'm not saying it's the top-tier quality I mentioned, but it's a task that AI is very good at. Recently I even gave deepseek all the JS code it previously wrote for me (or even handwritten code) and asked it to refactor the entire file, and it did. We went from a 40kb file to 20 after refactoring, and 10kb after minifying. It's not a huge file of course, but it's something AI can do for you.
There is of course the environmental cost. To that I want to say that everything has an environmental cost. I don't necessarily deny AI is a water-hog, just that the way we go about it in capitalism, everything is contributing to climate change and droughts. Moreover to be honest I've never seen actual numbers and studies, everyone just says "generating this image emptied a whole bottle of water". It's just things people repeat idly like so many other things; and without facts, we cannot find truth.
Therefore the problem is not so much with AI but with the mode of production, as expected.
Nowadays it's possible to run models on consumer hardware that doesn't need to cost 10,000 dollars (though you might have seen that post of the 2000$ rig that can run the full deepseek model). Deepseek itself is very efficient, and there are even more efficient models being made to the point that soon it will be more costly (and resource-intensive) to meter API usage than give it out for free.
I think the place you have as a user is finding where AI can help you individually. People also like to say AI fries your brain, that it incentivizes you to shut your brain off and just accept the output. I think that's a mistake, and it's up to you not to do that. I've learned a lot about how linux works, how to manage a VPS, and how to work on mediawiki with AI help. Just like you should eat your vegetables and not so many sweets, you should be able to say "this is wrong for me" and stop yourself from doing it.
If you're a professional coder and work better with handwritten code, then continue with that! When it comes to students relying on AI for everything, then schools need to find other methods. Right now they're going backwards to doing pen and paper tests. Maybe we should rethink the entire testing method? When I was in school, years before AI, my schoolmates and I already could tell that rote memorization was torture and a 19th century way of teaching. I think AI is just the nail in the coffin for a very, very outdated method of teaching. Why do kids use AI to do their homework for them? That is a much more important question than how are they using AI.
As a designer I've used AI to help get me started on some projects, because this is my weakness. Once I get the ball rolling it becomes very easy for me, but getting it moving in the first place is the hard part. If you're able to prompt it right (which is definitely something I lament, it feels like you have to say the right magic words and they don't work), it can help with that, and then I can do my thing.
Personally part of my unwillingness to get into AI initially was from the evangelists who like to say literally every new tech thing is the future. Segways were the future, crypto was the future, VR was the future, NFTs were the future, google glasses were the future... They make money on saying these things so of course they have an incentive to say it. It still bothers me that they exist, if you were wondering (if they bother you too lol), but ultimately you have to ignore them and focus on your own thing.
Another part of it I think is how much mysticism there is around it, with companies and let's say AI power users who are so unwilling to share their methods or how LLMs actually work. They retain information for themselves, or lead people to think this is magic and does everything.
Is AI coming for your job? Yes, probably. But burying our heads in the sand won't help. I see a lot of translators talking about the soul of their art - everything has a soul and is art now (even saw a programmer call it that to explain why they don't use AI in their work), we've gone full circle back to base idealism to "explain" how human work is different from AI work. AI already handles some translation work very well, and professionals are already losing work to it. Saying "refuse to use AI" is not materially sound, it is not going to save their client base. In socialism getting your job automated is desirable, but not in capitalism of course. But this is not new either, machines have replaced human workers for centuries now, as far back as the printing press to name just one. Yet nobody today is saying "return to scribing monks".
I think it would be very useful to have an AI guide written for communists by communists. Something that everyone can understand, written from a proletarian perspective - not the philosophy of it but more like how the tech works, how to use it, etc. I can put it up on the ProleWiki essays space if someone wants to write it, we've put up guides before, e.g. if you want to see a nutrition and fitness guide written from a communist perspective.
"Miscegenation? In MY idealist image of China? Oh heavens no! Uyghurs should only go out with Uyghurs, that's how the good lord intended it."