One day, none of this will exist. Do you want to grab a coffee?

There was a coffee shop in Cambridge with a basement. I think it was like, a Starbucks. Something mainstream. I was definitely not worried about going to small local cafes when I was 17. Who gives a shit when it all has caffeine in it.

We were preparing for our A-Level exams, at a time when I frankly could not give less of a shit. My time somehow felt better spent playing Team Fortress 2 and drinking Coca Cola.

One day, a friend of mine in sixth form asked if I wanted to revise in the schools library during a free period. Probably something to do with Biology, our one shared subject. I said yeah. We went. I revised. It was fucking boring. But ultimately, I was glad I said yes.

A week later, he asked if I wanted to meet up in town at the Starbucks and revise there. I got a latte, and we sat in the basement seating area. I performatively revised my Philosophy books, flipping through the pages and writing 3 lines of notes (Descartes is boring sorry to say). All while I thought about playing video games and drinking soda. We didn’t revise together again. He works in recruitment or something now.

I don’t think that coffee shop exists anymore. I looked it up on Google maps, I am pretty sure it's a Five Guys now. It’s weird that, the Starbucks or whatever, at that time only really exists in my head. And I guess the heads of others who were there. And I guess also this blog post. And maybe Google images.

But those other things will probably miss the things that I remember. The dark walls with the awful spotlights. The spotty wifi which made using my HTC Desire nearly impossible. The well used cracked leather seating. The way the round table wasn’t quite what I would call sticky, but definitely sticky adjacent.

Those things, memories, only exist in my head. One day that won’t exist either. None of this will. At least, I hope it won't.

Last year I wrote a blog post about AI. Like lots of random writing I do, it was to record my feelings about it at the time. This post incorporates some of that post. I didn’t publish it because I foresaw the company I work for heading more in the direction of AI generation, and it felt important to not be overly critical publicly of AI. Ultimately I do still live under capitalism and want to advance in my job. I must believe those on LinkedIn trying to sell shovels in a gold rush, or how will I continue in my career?

My feelings around AI have not really changed. I can theoretically see a lot of potential use for an LLM in day to day life. As a translator you can run on a small device like your phone without internet connection, so you can translate text wherever you are in the world. As a parser of random inputted data, trying to produce something cohesive for another program. It has genuine, useful applications. Is it ethical? Fuck no. But it is kind of cool sometimes.

But I think it’s been long enough that we should start just being honest about it. We need to stop listening to the shovel sellers. And the shovel manufacturers. And the people who have purchased $10 billion in shovels who tell us how good the shovels are and that you need to also buy shovels. And the people making the wood handles. We should stop listening to every liar who has sold themselves out and can no longer see the top of the hole they have dug. We should let them rot in their holes.

Almost every word I see from people who are peddling these LLMs are lies. And they are scrambling and coping because if what they were promised isn’t true, then they have also been sold a lie, and who would want to admit that? “In 5 years, 50% of gold miners will be out of their jobs because of these shovels” no they won’t. And even if they do, then what? What happens when you make 50% of workers redundant, and also made it so we are no longer supposed to read and write. Or no longer make art because hey these machine can make Goku smoking a cigarette in Van Gogh’s art style. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that what you wanted when you went to University and got that degree in that thing you loved?

I recently travelled to Cork in Ireland for a Super Smash Bros Melee event. Yeah, I know. I timed the trip door to door, with a rule of no flying, from where I live in Sheffield to the hotel in Cork. It took 19 hours straight of travelling, using trams trains and a ferry. It's a long time, but that experience was great. I truly believe it is almost always about the journey, not the destination. And the journey can feel easy if that’s why you’re on it. It also helps that the event was good. I love going to new places, talking to new people.

The journey home was split across 3 days instead of doing just another 19 hour day. It was a lot less exhausting, and Dublin is also pretty nice. I would love if I could spend my life travelling. Maybe when AI replaces my job I can.

AI feels like it’s exclusively about the destination. We want to skip the journey bit as quickly as possible. CEO’s froth at the mouth thinking about making even more money for even less work than they already do. And we can have less employees along the way? Sign me up! The Anthropic CEO said so. Almost all coding will be done with AI by the end of 2025! Stop, don’t look at the calendar. I meant 2026. Or 2027.

And it generates meaningless cycles of slop which do nothing to actually advance us. Do you remember when like, in 2022 they were speaking about how ChatGPT is going to usher in a new era of knowledge and understanding. A new enlightenment, as we reach brand new science and medical breakthroughs all the time because of this cool technology?

Brother, at work it is being used to make Jira tickets, and then have another LLM agent read those Jira tickets and reply to them. It is being used to reply to AI generated emails. Why the fuck are we doing any of that? Have we so totally lost the plot that we no longer understand the need for real human people to be involved in the things we do? If you are using these tools like this, stop! When it goes wrong, Claude will not get the blame. You will! And you will be part of the 50% of laid off workers, and won’t be because your job was replaced by AI.

That’s what they want. Devices made of lies, theft and hype. Please stop thinking. Switch off your brain and press that little generate button, read our generated summaries so you don't ever have to engage again! Why read a book when an LLM can give you a summary of it! These companies need you to need all this for their self fulfilling cycle they have produced to continue. From them forcing it into our day to day life, or into the tools you use at work, right up to government policy and infrastructure. If they don’t win right now with all of this, we all lose, right?!

ChatGPT and Claude, they are ultimately tools which were created by capitalists, but will be exploited by fascists. From the silicon it is generated on to the people running the companies, it at some point needs to be stopped.

I hope that it comes crashing down, those that played a hand in getting to where we are today, we let them rot. I hope that one day, like my memories and me, they will also not exist.

I worry that we are too late. In saying no, in creating policy to prevent these mathematical demon boxes from being used. That everything we are will eventually be distilled into one of these horrible machines. After we're gone, it can pretend to be me, or you. I am not important enough to be scraped into Claude automatically, thank god. But because I write candidly and about myself someone could just point one of these machines here, wrap it in human skin and pretend it was me. It’s not enough to make you redundant in your workplace. Strip you of your creativity. Your soul. I don't think they will be happy until your death is just as meaningless. Who gets to say no as they steal all of us?

Do you want to grab a coffee?

My original post was called “The ProbLLM with Popplers” after the Futurama episode. It’s a bit of an on the nose comparison, but I’d recommend giving the episode a watch. It was a lot angrier than this post, and I have written this in an evening as a re-write.

No AI tools were used in making this post.