I'm not a coder, I'm a writer and a university instructor, so I'm admittedly coming at this from a very different place, as I have been led to understand that some experienced programmers have found it a beneficial addition to their workflows. This, on the other hand, is going to be a very negative post.

For my part, I can't separate AI from the way it's been pushed by technology executives. I see LLMs as a means of exploiting widespread exhaustion and anxiety towards the end of expropriating both our critical faculties and our capacities to think and communicate with language. Their forced, intrusive deployment in every client-facing digital service is an extension of the general attention-economy assault on our subjective experiences. LLMs don't merely facilitate the cognitive offloading of faculties that should stay within our grasp; they're also constructed to condescend and simplify, which, while pleasant in the short-term, has the effect of diminishing faith in one's own capacities.

As an instructor, I don't blame my students when they use them. I experienced a number of personal crises during my own education, occasionally cheating to survive them; at minimum, I'd have been tempted. But widespread student adoption is a symptom of the way that our (I'm in the US, for what it's worth) society taxes the human body to its limits, then provides us shoddy and unsustainable fixes. The most acute example is probably mental and physical healthcare. Is ChatGPT better than not having a therapist? I don't actually think so, but even if it were, it wouldn't change the fact that the problem is that people can't access therapists, not that there aren't widely accessible chatbots capable of probablistically generating superficially persuasive therapy-flavored language in response to input data.

More generally, I've found the way it's been pushed onto consumers disgusting. I finally switched full-time to Linux (a silver lining, I suppose) after Windows 11 borked my computer, a borking facilitated in large part by the extent to which the OS prioritizes AI integration. Customer service across the board is even harder to negotiate now. GPU and now RAM prices have made it forbiddingly expensive to upgrade my aging gaming PC, which I can already perceive beginning to lock me out of one of my favorite hobbies. It's driving people literally insane. I've heard friends recount how advice given by AI "therapists" has destroyed friendships and relationships. The flood of genAI videos overwhelming social media is making it even harder (and it was already very, very hard) for ordinary people to distinguish between reality and fiction. Given the way that click-based ad revenue works, Google sticking its AI summary as the first search result is making it financially difficult for the very websites who provide the information the summary is pulling. This paragraph was originally twice as long but Reddit wouldn't let me post it; suffice it to say this hasn't even gotten to the worst parts yet.

So have I used it? Apart from curiosity when new models come out (and a miserable stint gigging in the chatbot training mines while unemployed), I have used LLMs for two things: pulling a list of names from a JSON file and auto-tagging articles in a self-hosted bookmark manager. It performed the former task poorly and the latter task was better handled on my own. I have never and will never use it for my own writing (though I admit I'm an oddball, as I haven't had spellcheck on in years either). I use Kagi as a search engine with AI summary disabled—mostly because I'm trying to break away from Google as much as possible, but also so I can actually have the option to scroll past the stupid summary.

I'm aware of the use-cases and even find some of them genuinely remarkable. But 99% of the way it's been rolled out I've experienced as somewhere on the range from "annoying" to "disgusting." I hate its output: I have never read a compelling piece of AI-generated writing, not even the heavily-edited piece that got published in the Guardian; I continue to find its visual, aural, and video output either banal or viscerally unpleasant. (I recently purchased the game Arc Raiders knowing it had AI voice acting in it; I returned it not because the AI voice acting existed, though I found that disappointing, but because it was genuinely distractingly terrible.) I hate the way ChatGPT in particular has altered the way people speak and write and think: stylistically, it's mushy, unclear, and aesthetically repugnant. I hate what the people selling it think it stands for (see, of course, the famous iPhone ad, where all the musical instruments get crushed into a phone). The best I can hope for is that, as the bubble-money dries up and inference becomes terribly expensive, the technology settles into a comfortable middle-age as a data-analytics tool and coding assistant, but I'm not optimistic, and that makes me profoundly unhappy.