Written Without Generative AI

I wrote this draft of my blogpost "by hand", then ran it through my usual blog reviewer AI prompt and: IT SUCKED. So I'm writing this one fully by hand again, without the use of GenAI, not even for spelling and grammar. Deal with it. It's not gonna be as polished as it used to be, it's gonna be gritty and rough. And it's gonna be awesome as it's gonna be mine! My train of thought. Oh boy, you better hold on to something as my brain is all over the place. Here goes:

Seems like AI is a very dividing thing. There's (mostly) tech people, like me, who are like: new models, longer context, more tokens, better reasoning, use it for everything and work and automation and, and, and...

And then there are the creative people, who are like: it's destroying the planet because water for datacenters, and it doesn't have a soul, and it's destroying craftsmanship.

And I'm like, yea, both make sense... Every new tech thing goes trough the same pattern when it comes to adoption:

And we're somewhere just past the peak, I'd say the peak was early this year with the release of GPT5 and Opus4.6, that was the time when everything was possible, and AI would solve everything!

Then news like: AI budgets overblown, memory prices surging as demand is rising and datacenter expansion can't follow. And AI was supposed to get cheaper, but it didn't. in fact on June 1 new pricing came into effect for Github Copilot and the entire corp world who was/is using it is now saying IEEK what is going on such expensive!!! I blew 10$ out of my 19$ of AI credits the first day of the new pricing model...

Now yesterday Mythos/Fable dropped/was released: the latest frontier model that scares even its creators as they've put so many safeguards on it that it drops down to 'regular' opus4.8 when you ask it something about cybersecurity/biology/chemistry that could be weaponized in the hands of the wrong people. And in the past (february) that would strike fear in me. Now I'm thinking: meh, seen that hype cycle before, and the current models are good enough for my work anyway... and that mythos is too expensive anyway.

And then there's artists and writers saying it doesn't have a soul, it writes and creates slop. And for creative work, I absolutely agree there. But when it comes to writing code, it doesn't matter that it's creative or has heart. It just has to work, and the current models are crazy good at writing and debugging code.

So I'm thinking the evolution is gonna be something similar to when photography came out: hyperrealistic art is not special anymore as a photo is more realistic, but abstract art is now very much a thing.

Pull that comparison through: hyper factual text is not gonna be written by humans anymore (code, docs, legal forms, ...). That stuff never had a soul to begin with... But books, poetry: that will very much remain a human thing. And maybe soon/eventually AI can do this as well, there'll always be a market for human generated prose, such as there still is a market for a human drawn picture.

Written without the use of generative AI.

And that's saying something... Me, the AI guru of the team, the enthusiast who uses it for everything and everywhere, is saying: no, I'm tired of this... Let me write it manually. I don't care that it's not LinkedIn polished, this is my personal blog, I can do whatever I want here. This is a place where I share my thoughts, not AI's thoughts...

I still stand by my older articles that were written with the use of AI: the ideas were very much mine, the process of creating it was me learning how to use the AI tools. I stand by them, I won't retract them.

But for this post? I ran it through AI and it butchered the soul, it added meaning that wasn't what I wrote, and it completely missed the point I was trying to make. Probably as my mind is rambling on and on and on.

Anyway, Patrick out.