#Am I Just Being A Vegan About It

If I'm not killing them myself, I don't need to feel bad about it.

I've been thinking about this for a while now. If you're someone who follows me on social media, you've probably noticed I'm pretty outspoken about my dislike for "AI" as it is developed and presented to us now. I'm also glad that the reception to things like image and video generation has been mostly negative. DLSS 5 caused massive backlash, and even made Nvidia CEO cry about how it's the children who are wrong, actually. Sora recently closed down to widespread cheering.

What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this is disappointing.

Come on, now, we know this isn't true. Nothing was created, nothing was lost.

These things seem to me like the cracks are starting to show, and this industry might crumble before our very eyes, buckling under its own weight. I want this to happen. It has to happen. These companies must go down in flames. Is this too much wishful thinking?

The chat bot era feels worse, more insidious, more destructive than the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of the decade. Much like COVID, these chatbots might be causing permanent damage to us, our capacity to think, to reason, to create, but here, the participants are willing, they're submitting to the disease, accepting it as the future unquestionably. Maybe it's not as good at killing as COVID was, but we know it tries its best.

Well, I still see AI use everywhere around me, despite the AI industry being in a state of "actively imploding" as we speak. A brief scan of my classmates' monitors reveal many browsers open into ChatGPT, too many to inspire confidence any of them have a future. I keep being shown AI generated videos and images against my will by my peers, people I usually trust, and I don't want any of it. Even when I tell them I don't want any of it, I'm still shown the same breed of garbage the very next day.

...Am I the weird one?

If you know me, you know I like computers. I'd say I'm pretty good at using them, and I don't say that about a lot of things! I like helping people use the computer, I like to solve problems, I like to program.

Well, while animosity towards AI seems to have been on an upwards trend when it comes to image and video generation models, and even general-purpose chat bots, as people begin to realize that the outputs are awful, soulless garbage which tries to appeal to everyone and thus appeals to no one, things have been going the opposite way when it comes to programming.

You don't actually need to know anything anymore. Even if you do, the chat bot can make a product faster than you could by hand. Of course, there's no joy or pride to be derived from getting Claude to do everything for you¹, but when has any of this been about doing good work? Software development is primarily about coming up with solutions that work, a product, an artefact, something your user can run and have it work. And, well, the chat bot can do that just fine.

People who respect their craft, hone their skills, value the ability to explain how their system works? Those are the weird ones.

Sure, the bot can make mistakes, but humans can too. Why get worked up about it?

Everyone is doing it. Projects older than me, and developers who could be seen as role models and important figures in the space are adopting LLMs into their development workflow more readily than anything I'd ever seen. Vim, VLC, gstreamer, Kitty, the Linux Kernel, these are all already actively integrating the lying machine into their workflows.

Am I just being a vegan about it?

I oppose the use of LLMs on moral grounds. They're not trained responsibly, they devalue labor, they drive people insane, they consume ungodly amounts of power, they are prohibitive to run locally, they are being used to generate propaganda to unprecedented levels, these companies are actively killing the open web with their scrapers, and AI is also being used to generate really ugly ads that I don't like. I think that any one of these reasons should be enough for any reasonable person to give them up, so it's bizarre that these brilliant people don't just go back to doing what they were always doing before LLMs hit the scene, they have the skills, so why not just opt out of being evil?

But... then I started thinking.

People are really bad at making moral choices when there's any amount of indirection to the harm that is being caused. So long as they don't feel like they're actively causing harm themselves, why should they give something up? It feels nice. It helps them. It's not their fault. It's not their fault. It's not their fault. They're not hurting anyone. They have nothing to do with this.

I am not vegan, but I can't argue that their stance is incorrect. It's not. They are right. They're causing less harm than any meat eater by refusing to eat any animal products. They can't take down industrial animal farming by not eating meat, but they can disconnect themselves from the cycle, and they can try to convince their peers to do the same.

"I'm not killing them myself, I don't need to feel bad about it."

This is something I've told myself many times, years ago. It's pretty flimsy, isn't it? It's not a very smart statement. Just because I'm not doing the deed, means I am detached from it? Means I'm not perpetuating the cycle? That's wrong. It's nonsense. It's a coping mechanism. A thought-terminating cliché.

Things are tough for everyone. I am starting to collect myself. The people and projects who have turned to using chat bots are not evil². They're meat eaters. They might not realize the extent of the moral failings needed to get them their shiny tool that does everything, much as someone might not realize the amount of pain and suffering needed to bring a roast chicken to their table.

I think that the best course of action might be to be gentle and educate our peers, but much like a vegan, you may not be listened to, you may be dismissed, you may be considered crazy for suggesting there's any evil attached to what they're doing. They can't see it's a failing on their part, because they're not doing it themselves.

I'm still holding up hope that this AI industry will crumble onto itself, but the reality is that things have changed forever, and they've changed for the worse. This is not a very hopeful conclusion, unfortunately, but thinking about this made me realize a lot of things, and I hope you can see where I'm coming from and can learn from it too.