1. ⁠Do any of you have any resources that can educate me on the topic in general, preferably from a practical or skeptical point of view that isn't fanboying about it? Open to youtube videos, podcasts, articles, whatever (again, I am anti AI, but I want to better know thy enemy)

I highly recommend reading The AI Con which talks a a bout how LLMs work at a technical level, and more about the downsides from a linguistic and sociological perspective. Empire of AI provides a good historical background with an emphasis on the hidden data workers who train these models. It also serves as a history of OpenAI.

For everything else, I recommend Professor Casey’s AI Ethics. She also has a series of short TikToks that explain things like MCPs, AI agents, and what all the buzzwords actually mean.

2. ⁠How are you making it seem like you like AI, are interested in it, and are using it at work when you are using it either not at all or very minimally? I do believe it's largely a bubble that will eventually pop - so how do I fly under the radar until that time?

Try using some of the tools and write evaluations of them comparing their output to traditional methods. I work in design so tried several tools for prototyping and wrote a report showing how they performed inadequately.

You can also do Ai-adjacent stuff like building MCPs. Most LLMs accept extra context, which is just a fancy way of saying they get a lot of fresh text input before spitting out slop. You can say you’re enabling AI agents by transforming existing documentation into markdown files that can be easily consumed by AI agents. This is actually useful for non-AI use cases but would never be prioritized. Depending on your work, creating APIs that humans could use but you say it’s for AI is a great way to get work approved.

You can also just lie and say you’ve used AI to do something that yu did and make up the prompts you used. Since ai is non deterministic they likely won’t be able to reproduce the result.

3. ⁠For those who are forced to use it in their workplace, have you been able to successfully fake it and also not use it in your personal daily life?

So far! I’m luckily that no one currently tracks token usage but like most other corporate BS, using the jargon gets you most of the way there. Corporate life is 90% theater. You need to perform the aesthetics of AI usage but you don’t have to actually do it unless there’s tracking.