Two things are important to me:

1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic. They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts. Their manner of operation is also problematic: disadvantaged communities are being exploited at a rapidly increasing disproportionate rate in the name of "more compute".

2. I am fundamentally disinterested in the productivity mindset that LLMs lean into. I don't care to "produce more"; the value of my work does not lie in the amount of money that can be gotten in exchange for it. This is an easier position to hold as someone who does not hold a typical corporate job, but even if I did I would still resist because an increase in my output would not correlate to an increase in my salary.

At the root of it all is people. I care about people (their existence, their happiness, my connections to them, their connections to each other), and any use of LLMs is (in my mind) anti-people, so I want no part of it.

> ai use is completely and thoroughly normalized

I think this is a certainty. Future generations will be born into a world where education, technology, and jobs have corrected for AI's existence. They will never know a world without it or have the experience of the current growing pains.

We've seen this plenty of times with new tech in the past, and as disruptive as AI is, I can't imagine the cat going back in the bag.

I am sympathetic to their cause, as I understand why one may be against what AI represents (in multiple dimensions).

But I believe that the anti-ai crowd will end up with contributions by people who pretend they don't use AI. Which may be fine if what you want is that "contributors own their work to some extent" (i.e. they need to understand something in order to pretend they didn't use an AI), but for those who don't want AI because of the inequalities it creates or the carbon footprint, then... well it doesn't work.

In my circle engineers are more anti-proprietary-ai (openai/anthropic). Open weights are fine.

Why don’t we care being at the mercy (again) of 2-3 companies?

A lot of this comes and goes like fashion styles, I expect most of them to be doing the same bit about some other topic in a couple years.

Do you believe that we're in an AI bubble? If so what do you think will happen if & when it pops? What happens if Anthropic and OpenAI go under? Will Microsoft and Google continue investing? Or will local/open-weight LLMs be viable alternatives? In the latter case will there be new ones trained, and if so who's gonna build the AI data centers that turned to be unprofitable in absence of a frontier model to distill cheaply? Or do you think we can run current models and point them at the Internet and be done with it?

Give it a few years and nobody will want to run software that hasn't been debugged and hardened by AIs. It's going to be much more thorough than human auditors - it already is, to some extent, and faster anyway, but I'm talking about the future. So it's going to be the latter, complete normalization of AI. You can still write the program by hand, but you'll need AI to make it trustworthy and secure enough, if only because the attackers will also be mostly AI.