Technology

Be me

Early adopter of LLMs ever since a random tryout of Replika blew my mind and I set out to figure what the hell was generating its responses

Learn to fine-tune GPT-2 models and have a blast running 30+ subreddit parody bots on r/SubSimGPT2Interactive, including some that generate weird surreal imagery from post titles using VQGAN+CLIP

Have nagging concerns about the industry that produced these toys, start following Timnit Gebru

Begin to sense that something is going wrong when DALLE-2 comes out, clearly targeted at eliminating creative jobs in the bland corporate illustration market. Later, become more disturbed by Stable Diffusion making this, and many much worse things, possible, at massive scale

Try to do something about it by developing one of the first "AI Art" detection tools, intended for use by moderators of subreddits where such content is unwelcome. Get all of my accounts banned from Reddit immediately thereafter

Am dismayed by the viral release of ChatGPT, essentially the same thing as DALLE-2 but text

Grudgingly attempt to see what the fuss is about and install Github Copilot in VSCode. Waste hours of my time debugging code suggestions that turn out to be wrong in subtle, hard-to-spot ways. Switch to using Bing Copilot for "how-to" questions because at least it cites sources and lets me click through to the StackExchange post where the human provided the explanation I need. Admit the thing can be moderately useful and not just a fun dadaist shitposting machine. Have major FOMO about never capitalizing on my early adopter status in any money-making way

Get pissed off by Microsoft's plans to shove Copilot into every nook and cranny of Windows and Office; casually turn on the Opympics and get bombarded by ads for Gemini and whatever the fuck it is Meta is selling

Start looking for an alternative to Edge despite it being the best-performing web browser by many metrics, as well as despite my history with "AI" and OK-ish experience with Copilot. Horrified to find that Mozilla and Brave are doing the exact same thing

Install Vivaldi, then realize that the Internet it provides access to is dead and enshittified anyway

Daydream about never touching a computer again despite my livelihood depending on it