{"id":4165,"date":"2025-08-08T02:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T10:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4165"},"modified":"2025-08-07T20:22:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T04:22:38","slug":"becoming-an-ai-vegan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/08\/08\/becoming-an-ai-vegan\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming an &#8220;AI Vegan&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2025\/aug\/06\/meet-the-ai-vegans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Arwa Mahdawi introduced me to a new term<\/a>, or maybe a new concept: \u201cAI vegans,\u201d which is to say, people whose attitude and actions in relationship to so-called \u201cAI\u201d parallels the way vegans deal with animal products.<\/p>\n<p>Mahdawi <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/ai-veganism-some-peoples-issues-with-ai-parallel-vegans-concerns-about-diet-260277\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cited an article by a professor<\/a> who directs online education at Georgia Tech\u2019s College of Computing, David Joyner \u2013 someone who\u2019s clearly not a tech-phobe.<\/p>\n<p>I like this concept quite a lot. While I am not vegan, I respect the vegan approach, and often think that they\u2019re likely right on all points, especially with respect to the effect on the environment.<\/p>\n<p>The criticisms by the \u201cAI vegans\u201d go like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">\u201cAI\u201d is immoral and unethical \u2013 particularly because the materials used to develop it were stolen from people (including me and others here in the Treehouse).<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">Using \u201cAI\u201d is bad for your health \u2013 recent studies have shown harm to the critical thinking faculties of those who use a lot of chatbots to do their intellectual work for them.<\/li>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">The \u201cAI\u201d industry is very destructive to the environment, requiring massive amounts of water and electricity \u2013 which includes building new coal and other fossil fuel powered power plants despite the fact that we\u2019re at the tipping point for renewables.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those ideas directly parallel the vegan attitude toward animal products. I\u2019d add a fourth one: Most \u201cAI\u201d products being sold don\u2019t work very well. This is particularly true of writing programs, but also true of many of the ones aimed at employers who want to fire their workers.<\/p>\n<p>I do my damnedest to avoid any use of \u201cAI.\u201d I try to disable it in writing programs \u2013 it gets in my way \u2013 and I\u2019ve reached the point where I assume any feel-good story on social media is \u201cAI\u201d generated. I suspect it\u2019s in the spell-check programs now, because they don\u2019t work as well as they used to. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s in the grammar programs, but since I don\u2019t use that crap \u2013 my command of grammar is certainly better than any fucking programmer\u2019s, much less \u201cAI&#8217;s\u201d \u2013 I don\u2019t worry about those.<\/p>\n<p>I hope the \u201cAI vegan\u201d movement catches on, because this slop is out of control.<\/p>\n<p>We keep being told that some chatbot can pass the multiple guess part of the bar exam with flying colors. As someone who has taken that exam, I don\u2019t find that difficult to believe. A bot that has incorporated previous tests and other prep materials for that exam or any similar exam can probably do a great job on it, especially since the bots can\u2019t think and are only making the statistical best guess in any situation.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, the biggest problem with multiple guess exams \u2013 yeah, I know they\u2019re technically called multiple choice and probably have some fancy new name these days that I\u2019m not familiar with since thank all that\u2019s holy I haven\u2019t had to take one in years, but you know what I mean by multiple guess \u2013 is that they don\u2019t reward thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the fact that every time I\u2019m faced with four choices for an answer I always want to go with a fifth one, I used to be pretty good at those tests. I had a gut understanding of them. I do not think this is one of my best traits, though it was useful. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The thing is, the same chatbots that do great on those tests are the ones that make up citations for legal briefs. They know the form and the way people word arguments, but they don\u2019t grasp the idea that the arguments have to be based on actually existing legal precedent, much less what that precedent actually says.<\/p>\n<p>The best \u201cAI\u201d products are the ones that help people do the tedious parts of their job, so long as they can be double-checked. The ones intended to replace people are pretty useless. But of course, it\u2019s the ones intended to replace people that are being sold everywhere, because that\u2019s where the money would be.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/pluralistic.net\/2025\/08\/04\/bad-vibe-coding\/#maximally-codelike-bugs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cory Doctorow distinguishes between centaurs (people assisted by machines) and reverse-centaurs (people forced to assist machines)<\/a>. Centaurs find using \u201cAI\u201d for tedious tasks useful; reverse-centaurs are miserable in their jobs, especially if their employers are firing people and piling more work on them based on the myth that the \u201cAI\u201d can do it. He\u2019s writing a short book about that, out next year.<\/p>\n<p>Like Doctorow, I don\u2019t have any objections to \u201cAI\u201d as software used to help people do their work better, but it\u2019s pretty clear to me that it can\u2019t replace people.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s something else that scared me about this tech recently: <a href=\"https:\/\/paulkrugman.substack.com\/p\/about-that-stock-market\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Paul Krugman<\/a> says that the surge in investment in \u201cAI\u201d is why the markets haven\u2019t fallen despite the disastrous economic \u201cpolicy\u201d from the current regime.<\/p>\n<p>If you read <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wheresyoured.at\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ed Zitron\u2019s many rants<\/a> about what\u2019s wrong with the finances behind \u201cAI\u201d, you probably expect a crash at some point. Given what Krugman has to say, I can see that crash bleeding over into the lives of those of us who have nothing to do with \u201cAI.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So I\u2019m an \u201cAI vegan\u201d despite being someone who has always thought digital tech was great. I love having the internet in my pocket, love being able to keep in touch with people, love being able to read reports from all over, love blogging (even if it\u2019s now old school). I got my first computer in 1983 and I\u2019ve been online since the mid-90s.<\/p>\n<p>But I hate the enshittification and all the damage done to tech by capitalism, of which the overblown promotion of \u201cAI\u201d is just the most extreme example. I want to see it reined in.<\/p>\n<p>I hope more people join the \u201cAI vegan\u201d movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Arwa Mahdawi introduced me to a new term, or maybe a new concept: \u201cAI vegans,\u201d which is to say, people whose attitude and actions in relationship to so-called \u201cAI\u201d parallels the way vegans deal with animal products. Mahdawi cited an article by a professor who directs online education at Georgia Tech\u2019s College of Computing, David [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,363],"tags":[681,1110],"class_list":["post-4165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-ai-vegans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4166,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165\/revisions\/4166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}