I just focus on the parts of what I do know that AI can help me with, not try to say AI can replace other people, but not me. That's some dumb shit.
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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This actually relates, in a weird but interesting way, to how people get broken out of conspiracy theories.
One very common theme that's reported by people who get themselves out of a conspiracy theory is that their breaking point is when the conspiracy asserts a fact that they know - based on real expertise of their own - to be false. So, like, you get a flat-earther who is a photography expert and their breaking point is when a bunch of the evidence relies on things about photography that they know aren't true. Or you get some MAGA person who hits their breaking point over the tariffs because they work in import/export and they actually know a bunch of stuff about how tariffs work.
Basically, whenever you're trying to disabuse people of false notions, the best way to start is always the same; figure out what they know (in the sense of things that they actually have true, well founded, factual knowledge of) and work from there. People enjoy misinformation when it affirms their beliefs and builds up their ego. But when misinformation runs counter to their own expertise, they are forced to either accept that they are not actually an expert, or reject the misinformation, and generally they'll reject the misinformation, because accepting they're not an expert means giving up on a huge part of their identity and their self-esteem.
It's also not always strictly necessary for the expertise to actually be well founded. This is why the Epstein files are such a huge danger to the Trump admin. A huge portion of MAGA spent the last decade basically becoming "experts" in "the evil pedophile conspiracy that has taken over the government", and they cannot figure out how to reconcile their "expertise" with Trump and his admin constantly backpedalling on releasing the files. Basically they've got a tiny piece of the truth - there really is a conspiracy of powerful elite pedophiles out there, they're just not hanging out in non-existent pizza parlour basements and dosing on adrenochrone - and they've built a massive fiction around that, but that piece of the truth is still enough to conflict with the false reality that Trump wants them to buy into.
You get a flat-earther who is a photography expert and their breaking point is when a bunch of the evidence relies on things about photography
Or you get a demolitions expert to watch a video of WTC7
AI only seems good when you don't know enough about any given topic to notice that it is wrong 70% of the time.
This is concerning when CEOs and other people in charge seem to think it is good at everything, as this means they don't know a god damn thing about fuck all.
That's the whole point of the bubble: convincing investors and CEOs that AI will replace all workers. You don't need to convince the workers: they don't make decisions and an awful lot of CEOs have such a high opinion of themselves that they assume any feedback from below is worthless.
Not just a high opinion of themselves, they think everyone is as self-centered as they are, and any claims about needing human workers for the task by human workers is just self-serving and not caring about the work.
I remember an article back in 2011 that predicted that we would be able to automate all middle and most upper management jobs by 2015. My immediate thought was, "Well these people must not do much, if a glorified script can replace them."
Yeah, other than CFO and most* CTOs, anyone in the C-suite is easily replaceable by an LLM. Hell, the CEO could be replaced by a robot arm holding a magic 8-ball with no noticeable difference in performance.
* Probably not the majority, but I'll be generous.
So the only real business model here is for people to be able to produce things they are not qualified to work on, with an acceptable risk of generating crap. I don't see how that won't be a multi-trillions dollars market.
Investors are rarely experts in the particular niches that the companies they hold shares in are applying AI to.
produce things they are not qualified to work on, with an acceptable risk of generating crap
You just described the C-suite at most major companies.
The breadth of knowledge demonstrated by Al gives a false impression of its depth.
Generalists can be really good at getting stuff done. They can quickly identify the experts needed when it's beyond thier scope. Unfortunately over confident generalists tend not to get the experts in to help.
This makes a lot of sense. A good lesson even outside the context of AI.
AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement.
Don't become as delusional as the grifters. Generated content is already a suitable replacement for lots of things. It's not so much about the quality of generated content (which continues to improve) as much about easily replacing the worthless bullshit that we're forced to produce (eg. cover letters, "art" serving capitalism, etc). The system is already built on fake nonsense. Generated content has always been a great fit for this system. The punishment of workers is just another bonus.
Hot take: it's reasonable for a comics student to use AI for script-writing and for a screenwriting student to use AI for concept art, not because machine can generate meaningful artistic work at these fields but because these are not the fields they are trying to learn.
In a way, this can be used to level the field. The comics professor can use the same LLM to generate scripts for all their students. It'll be slop script, but the slop will be of uniform quality so no student will have the advantage of better writing and it'd be easier to judge their work based on the drawing alone.
And even if AI could generate true art in some field - why would it be acceptable for a student to use it for the very field they are studying and need to polish their own skills at?
Yeah, the comics professor is to grade the visuals, and the text is filler, could be lorem ipsum for all they care. Simlarly a screenwriter using AI to storyboard seems fine as it's not the core product.
The ideal would be cross-discipline projects bringing students together similar to how they would be expected to deal in the real world, but when individual assignments call for 'filler' content to stand in for one of those other disciplines, I think I could accept LLM as a reasonable compromise. I would expect some assignments to ask the students to go beyond their core discipline for some perspective and LLM be bad for that, but I could see a place for skipping the irrelevant complementary pieces of a good chunk of assignments.
let's not confuse LLMs, AI, and automation.
AI flies planes when the pilots are unconscious.
automation does menial repetitive tasks.
LLMs support fascism and destroy economies, ecologies, and societies.
My favourite 'will one day be pub trivia' snippet from this whole LLM mess, is that society had to create a new term for AI (AGI), because LLMs muddied the once accurate term.
accountants rage silently intensifies
Just wait until they create artificial people and autonomous robots.
No accounting acronym is safe from their tyranny.
I have AGI every year...
To be fair, AI was still underwhelming compared to what people imagined AI to be, it's just that LLM essentially swore up and down that this is the AI they had been waiting for, and that moved the goalposts to have to classifiy 'AGI' specifically.
I'd even go a step further and say your last point is about generative LLMs, since text classification and sentiment analysis are also pretty benign.
It's tricky because we're having a social conversation about something that's been mislabeled, and the label has been misused dozens of times as well.
It's like trying to talk about knife safety when you only have the word "pointy".
It's like trying to talk about knife safety when you only have the word "pointy".
holy shit yes! it's almost like the corpos did it that way so they can just move the goalposts when the bubble pops.
It's why managers fucking love GenAI.
My personal take is that GenAI is ok for personal entertainment and for things that are ultimately meaningless. Making wallpapers for your phone, maps for your RPG campaign, personal RP, that sort of thing.
'I'll just use it for meaningless stuff that nobody was going to get paid for either way' is at the surface-level a reasonable attitude; personal songs generated for friends as in-jokes, artwork for home labels, birthday parties, and your examples.. All fair because nobody was gonna pay for it anyway, so no harm to makers.
But I don't personally use them for any of those things myself though, some of my reasons: I figure it's just investor-subsidized CPU cycles burning power somewhere (environmental), and ultimately that use-case won't be a business model that makes any money (propping the bubble), it dulls and avoids my own art-making skills which I think everyone should work on (personal development atrophy), building reliance on proprietary platforms... so I'd rather just not, and hopefully see the whole AI techbro bubble crash sooner than later.
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AI has been excellent at teaching me to program in new languages. It knows everything about all languages - except the ones I'm already familiar with. It's terrible at those.
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