Deep dive into the comments of this LinkedIn post and you’ll see a comment that we should stop yelling at the tools. I strongly disagree!

As per a previous post, until the space is ready to admit that

• Gen-AI/LLMs are not the be-all and end-all, having very limited uses
• real progress still requires real blood, sweat, elbow grease, and tears
• you can’t replace people as this tech is NOT intelligent

and, more importantly

• that these tools are not what people need and
• these tools cannot be used as the foundation for suitable solutions (although they can be [a small] part of those solutions if care is taken)

We need to keep yelling, and do so rather loudly.

Because, to build on the metaphor, it’s not a shiny new hammer. If it was just a shiny new hammer, we could depend on one of three things happening when we use the hammer to hit the nail:

1. the nail goes some distance into the wood, depending on how hard we swing,
2. the nail doesn’t go, because the hammer is too light, or
3. if the handle is weak or the head not securely attached and we hit really hard and the nail doesn’t go in, in the absolute worst case the handle will crack or the head will fall off.

However, with the fancy new hammer equivalent of Gen-AI, we also have to worry about the possibility that:

1. the hammer is super magnetized and pulls the nail out on the backswing,
2. the hammer splits the nail in half,
3. the hammer super heats the nail and melts it, or
4. the hammer is packed with C4 and explodes, ripping our arm off our body!

Because, when you use Gen-AI, you accept the possible side effects of hallucinations, decreased code/application security, bad math, fraud, lawsuits, deadly diets, extremist views, sleeper behaviour, dependency and cognitive reduction, suicide, blackmail, hit lists, and murder, with many links summarized in this LinkedIn post.

And the worst part is this technology is being shoved into every nook and cranny, even those where we have technology that has worked great for over a decade (because the new generation of college-dropout script kiddies who believe that they can prompt engineer a solution to anything don’t even know the basics anymore).

It’s not just not solving our problems, it’s creating new ones, and they are often worse than the problems we have. We need to yell about this!