https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html

AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

And someone commented on that with:

I’m fascinated by the take about the resource usage being an advantage to the AI bros.

They’ve created software that cannot (practically) be replicated as open source software / free software, because there is no community of people with sufficient hardware / data sets. It will inherently always be a centralized technology.

Fascinating and scary.

Not a day goes by at work, where I’m not either infuriated or frustrated by this wave of AI garbage. In my private life, I can avoid it. But not at work. And they’re pushing hard for it.

Something has to change in 2026.

I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

• Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence …
  
• … I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.
  

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

@bender@twtxt.net All good. ✌️ It’s just that I’ve been through several iterations of this (on other platforms), AI output back and forth, pointing out what’s wrong, but in the end people were just trolling (not saying that’s what you had in mind), because apparently that’s “fun”.

… and now I just read @bender@twtxt.net’s other post that said the Gemini text was a shortened version, so I might have criticized things that weren’t true for the full version. Okay, sorry, I’m out. (And I won’t play that game, either. Don’t send me another AI output, possibly tweaked to address my criticism. That is besides the point and not worth my time.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net when I first “fed” the text to Gemini, I asked for a three paragraphs summary. It provided it. Then I asked to “elaborate on three areas: user experience, moral/political impact, and technical/legal concerns”. The reply to that is too long for a twtxt.

I then asked to counter the OP opinions—as in “how would you counter the author’s opinion?”. The reply was very long, but started like this:

“That’s an excellent question, as the post lays out some very strong, well-reasoned criticisms. Countering these points requires acknowledging the valid concerns while presenting a perspective focused on mitigation, responsible integration, and the unique benefits of AI.”

What followed was extensive, so I asked for a summary, which didn’t do justice to the wall of text that preceded it.

And, one last missed:

• AI is Forcing Legal Modernization: The copyright double standard is a failure of outdated law. AI provides the necessary impetus for legal reform to either create fair compensation frameworks for creators or establish a clear new definition of fair use for data-driven models.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender@twtxt.net’s opinion):

curl -s gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-11/2025-11-05--my-current-reasons-against-ai.txt

@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. There’s probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are – truthfully – very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.

There are going to be many discussions about this …

This is completely against the “spirit” of this company, btw. We used to say: “It’s the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.” That’s why I’m allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.

It happened.

Management asked me if I’m using enough AI and what I’m doing to learn more about it.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They’re seriously telling us at work: “Can it be AI’d? Do it, don’t waste time!” Shit like that is the result. (What’s this weird gray triangle in the bottom right corner?)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I see. Yeah, you might be right. (Still a fragile process due to the general AI wonkiness, but it can help to some degree, yes.)

Hmmm 🧐 I’m annectodaly not convinced so-called “AI”(s) really save time™. – I have no proof though, I would need to do some concrete studies / numbers… – But, there is one benefit… It can save you from typing and from worsening RSI / Carpal Tunnel.

Triad Prague, is perhaps the only mainstream “Contemporary advertising” company, who fucking AI generates “pixelart” and everyone there is either too blind, dumb, or lazy, to at the very least, align the pixels, to a grid (or even check they’re square, the same size,…anything really).

I guess they must have some remains of shame and self preservation instinct, that made them sweep these off their portfolio website and set the video ads with them, to “Private” on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/s7GZK8FGRvA

But sadly not enough shame, to stop putting these on billboards, I have to see on daily basis and making new versions of them, with different inconsistent styles, of badly AI generated “pixelart”!

I checked their website, this is their footer, with the text that always overlaps - maybe they also never heard about CSS, can’t blame them, it’s only been a thing, since 1996.

It happened.

“Can you help me debug this program? I vibe coded it and I have no idea what’s going on. I had no choice – learning this new language and frameworks would have taken ages, and I have severe time constraints.”

Did I say “no”? Of course not, I’m a “nice guy”. So I’m at fault as well, because I endorsed this whole thing. The other guy is also guilty, because he didn’t communicate clearly to his boss what can be done and how much time it takes. And the boss and his bosses are guilty a lot, because they’re all pushing for “AI”.

The end result is garbage software.

This particular project is still relatively small, so it might be okay at the moment. But normalizing this will yield nothing but garbage. And actually, especially if this small project works out fine, this contributes to the shittiness because management will interpret this as “hey, AI works”, so they will keep asking for it in future projects.

How utterly frustrating. This is not what I want to do every day from now on.

Since Google announced their intentions to heavily limit sideloading on Android, starting end of 2026, I’ve been looking for potential solutions, for this policy change, that threatens the majority of projects I maintain, in some way. Google already killed my browser project years ago, but I have no other choice, than to fight this, any way I can.

The best choice to deal with this, will probably be the Android Debug Bridge, which can be used not only to install apps unrestricted, but also to uninstall, or remove, almost any unnecessary part of the OS. Shizuku, combined with Canta Debloater, is the winning combination for now.

I’ve already removed most Google apps from my device: the annoying AI assistant, the stupid Google app adding the annoying articles, left of your homes screen, Google One, Gboard, Safety app… it’s amazing, no distracting Google slopware, like in the good old Android 2 days! And I absolutely intend to keep it this way, from now on, no new Google apps or services on my devices, unless Google can give me a good enough reason, to allow them there and whenever the app that verifies signatures, to block installing apps not approved by Google, I’ll just remove it from my device and advocate others do so too.

How about no longer using in-browser Git repo viewers? Make the AI bots do the work and actually clone the repo.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting, yes. I didn’t know that.

No AI being used is really great. However, the same clips shown over and over again and some images being mirrored was quite annoying to me. Also, there were some quite terrible computer animations and sometimes the narration and picture didn’t match at all. Talking about the medieval period and then showing an image from the 18th hundred or so. What the heck?

These production issues made me sceptical pretty much early on. So I quickly crosschecked Wikipedia. But it seems spot on from what I’ve read. Very good. Also, the narrator’s voice was really nice to listen to.

Eels are fascinating creatures. :-)

Hmm, gnu.org is slow as heck. Shorter HTML pages load in about ten seconds. This complete AWK manual all in one large HTML page took a full minute: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html Is there maybe some anti AI shenanigans going on?

In any case, I find the user guide super interesting. My AWK skills are basically non-existent, so I finally decided to change that. This document is incredibly well written and makes it really fun to keep reading and learning. I’m very impressed. So far, I made it to section 1.6, happy to continue.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

Hahaha, how funny is that!? The Dunning-Kruger effect research was sparked off by two bank robbers who rubbed lemon juice in their faces as this makes them invisible, just like invisible ink. :‘-D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Greater_Pittsburgh_bank_robberies

I now imagine all these AI wankers with lemon juice in their faces.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

Why do I care about this?

1. The load will become a problem at some point.
   
2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
   
3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

@thecanine@twtxt.net We don’t use Microsoft at work – but similar products of other big companies. They’re all doing the same. The core product gets worse and worse, because they focus so much on vomiting “AI” over everything.

It will die down eventually. I hope.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I hate it when businesses do this. As well as being annoying and unreliable, Microsoft software is known to have a hell of a lot of security vulnerabilities, and the AI features increase the attack surface. One can use a client like Thunderbird for the email, but Teams doesn’t really have an alternative. Awful stuff.

We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

Another wave of tens of thousands of hints by the same bot on the same file:

https://movq.de/v/61f8d39d2f/s.png

There’s probably a simple explanation for this: Maybe this bot was written with “AI” and it’s simply complete garbage.

This isn’t a serious threat for my low-profile website – yet. Can’t wait for this to get worse …

Bloody AI clowns:

https://movq.de/v/34ccfc125c/s.png

How many IPs am I supposed to block, eh?

Nuke it from orbit: https://www.aaron.ai/

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, the doctors have started using AI voice agents and they understand jack shit. 😭😭😭

AI this, AI that.

Tech is no longer interesting. I need to find a new field.

@prologic@twtxt.net

I’ve been playing around with AI at home over the past few months and building my own neural networks from scratch (in Go) with genetic algorithms

Oh, is that all 🤣

That sounds like some intensive ‘playing around’ haha

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Yeah for sure! The thing that annoys me about a lot of this, is the sheer fact you can’t really self-host let alone self-train these things I’ve been playing around with AI at home over the past few months and building my own neural networks from scratch (in Go) with genetic algorithms on a few tasks and training sets, but man it’s hard™ 🤣 I feel like we’re doing something wrong here…

How you can tell a “review post” on some random website was written by AI?

Ergonomically nicer than its binocular counterpart

How exactly is this a reason to avoid?! 🤦‍♂️

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think it’s here on MIT’s website: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com i’m so sick of AI summaries they piss me tf off

FFS! Can’t I just get results, accurate no BS results? No erroneous/misleading AI-Slop of a summary I’ve never asked for ? I get it, there is plenty of people who LOooove (if not worship) that shit, Good for them! But at least make it opt-in or add in some kind of “Do Not Slop” browser option (as if the “Do Not Track” one made a difference, but I digress). Shit’s only going down-hill from here, I might as well as just spin up my own Searx instance and call it a day.

Soooo very very close! 😅

Of Pointlessware and CEOs
Had a moment, to check up on some of the companies, I stopped following, get to The Browser Company and see their newest product - it’s just Chrome, with an AI chat window pop-up and that’s it. Something Canary Chrome, come with already.
I see Theo from T3.gg, making fun of it on YouTube and promoting “his” product - an AI chat app, where you can choose from multiple models, by all the popular AI companies. Something I already have a worse version of, at work and I don’t even use it.
There’s also an interview, about the future of virtual keyboards, surely this is at least actually a real thing and not more pointless horse shit. I check the website of the keyboard SDK, and it’s around 20 identical apps, that just copy the same keyboard SDK/api and slap chatgpt features on top - in the App Store, these are surrounded by chatgpt clones, that just feed the users prompts, into the real thing and put ads, next to the answers.

just read about it, i was strongly agaisnt AI since the benninging and have also moved from GH to self-hosted Gitea.

thanks for sharing and thanks for making this!

@prologic@twtxt.net What I meant, is that I will not say that someone is not really a writer, if they choose to have what they wrote, ran through some spelling and sentence structure checker, like the one included in MS Word, the average phone keyboard, or on reverso.net - given that they look over the output and make sure the corrections make sense.

Similarly, I won’t complain much, if someone uses AI, to remove backgrounds from images, where the AI can preform this task, as well as a human would and makes sure to check it afterwards, or use ai as a way to sort large quantities of images - usually done for science. An example of this, would be having terabytes of plant photos, from some cities camera system and having an AI analyse them, in an attempt to detect notable changes, like mold, parasites, or the plants needing more water.

Again, I was simply pointing out that, if he used AI to correct misspellings, and improve grammar, then this isn’t true:

“This post was written entirely by a human, with no assistance from AI. (Other than spell- and grammar-checking.)”

@thecanine@twtxt.net right. Spell checkers are not AI. Full grammar checking, and correction? That one I have not seeing, but on AI. So, what I meant was, let the grammar gaffes show; we type as we speak (most of the time). About spelling mistakes, well, let them be corrected as we have done since 1971(?).

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Jokes aside, I don’t think that’s the right approach either. We had spell checkers, since I can remember, as well as other tools, like the smart image select, used mostly to remove backgrounds. These are tools, that just simplify the process of either opening up a dictionary and looking up a word, you can’t remember the spelling of, or the process of placing a billion little dots around the part of an image you want to select - none of these are creative or enjoyable tasks, we already had tools for them, decades before AI. I don’t think we need to go back to cave paintings, to be free of AIs influence on our creative work.

@prologic@twtxt.net to err is human, to forgive is divine, right? I say let us err, and forgive. My grammatical errors make me me. Misspellings? Well, we need no stinky AI for that!

@prologic@twtxt.net Dustin’s last sentence on that post:

“This post was written entirely by a human, with no assistance from AI. (Other than spell- and grammar-checking.)”

Is it true that it was written “entirely by a human” then? Pfff.

@thecanine@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de So I actually agree with you! I think Dustin is taking a bit of a “deep and dark” path here (depression), and there are many parallels to other types of activities that we can all talk to. “AI” or “LLM”(s) here should be no different. Use them, Don’t use them. I don’t really see how it takes away our creativity or critical thinking.

To follow up what I said minutes ago, they don’t even want you to think of the initial idea, they want you to be a mindless organism, the AI algorithm analyses and tells what you should make, down to the script, so that you get the highest number of people possible to click it and see some AI generated advertisement, blended seemly into what’s no lonher even your work.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/netflix-will-show-generative-ai-ads-midway-through-streams-in-2026/
https://youtu.be/dGA6sVaGveU