How I Feel About AI

This post has been a draft in my Ghost Admin for about 3 months. I came back to it several times. Started writing, felt there was something inconsistent, took a break, felt that it didn't make sense.

I wanted to explain how I feel about AI.

While I use LLMs for my work, I also see the flip side. Training data full of stolen art being the main issue I see.

And I feel that contradiction personally. I run my models locally, on my own hardware, specifically because I care about where my data goes and who profits from it. But the weights I'm running were likely trained on content scraped without consent. The infrastructure is mine, but the foundation isn't.

I haven't resolved that. I'm not sure if it is resolvable. But I think it's worth saying out loud rather than picking a side that lets me ignore it.

For months, I couldn't find the right way to say it.

But today I woke up and saw a new post by Justin Cox through Ghost's ActivityPub reader. And I felt very, very seen and understood.

People are multifaceted and can hold opposing views. Yet, instead of discussing these contradictions openly from a place of mutual respect, we often make assumptions: this person is not like me and is therefore on the wrong side of the argument.

I let that sink in for a minute.

Whenever I showed up online recently, I felt that tension. AI bad. AI good. Every second post in my Social Web timeline is discussing AI. But nobody ever said "AI neutral".

"Yes, the technology is out. We cannot undo it. But we need to openly talk about the issues at hand."

That's the discussion I want to have.

So, instead of writing a lengthy article myself, I want to encourage you to read Justin's post, linked above.

And if you have thoughts on either spectrum of the debate, I'd love to hear them. They can be opposing and conflicting – because, as Justin put it – people are multifaceted.