For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender@twtxt.net’s opinion):

curl -s gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-11/2025-11-05--my-current-reasons-against-ai.txt

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

1. The User Perspective (Untrustworthiness)

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

2. The Moral/Political Perspective (Skill Erosion)

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

And, one last missed:

• AI is Forcing Legal Modernization: The copyright double standard is a failure of outdated law. AI provides the necessary impetus for legal reform to either create fair compensation frameworks for creators or establish a clear new definition of fair use for data-driven models.

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for this illustration, it completely “misunderstood” everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. 👌

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Great writeup! It’s just missing a section on burning down the planet.