AI usage
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
— Frank Herbert. Dune (1965).
In short, I don’t use GenAI for anything. This includes Large Language Models, chat bots, “AI” overviews in search engines, and coding agents. I don’t see this changing any time soon. The contents of this website are made entirely by human hands.
I’m very interested in neural networks and machine learning from an academic and software point of view. I’m not opposed to the technology itself, just the current crop of commercially available models commonly called GenAI or Large Language Models (LLMs). They are being sold as way more than they actually deliver and are built on exploitation of human labor. Added to that is the huge environmental cost and risk of severely crippling the intellectual capabilities of future generations. So I cannot in good conscience use any of these tools.
I usually try to view most tasks as opportunities to learn and perfect what I do. That’s how I approach writing, programming, teaching, cooking, and even doing the dishes (though I’ll gladly delegate that to a machine, there’s still the task of finding the optimum way to load it). This means that I am constantly improving through time and I can notice the improvement when I look back. Using GenAI would rob me of this.
That said, I don’t judge anyone who finds these tools useful and opts to use them. To each their own. Though I may opt out of engaging with the things produced in this way.
This website implements the human.json protocol to assert that authorship of its contents is made by a human. See my human.json file.
About: I created this page after reading The
/ai“manifesto” by Damola Morenikeji and thought it would complement nicely thehuman.jsonprotocol.