Angela Collier, while ripping through billionaire AI vibe physics bullshit like a tornado, also touches upon the AI crowd’s rampant anti-intellectualism:
So, I think an overlooked component of AI discourse is how little respect AI enthusiasts have for people who create things and do stuff. It’s most obvious in the art space, I think. Like, they spent the 2000s, just, “you deserve to live in poverty because you wanted to make art. Why did you get that underwater basket weaving degree? You should have went into tech. Like, how dare you think that you deserve to be paid for your drawings. Boo.” Right. But now suddenly there’s a tool that can make art and now they want to get involved. Now they want to make art. [S]uddenly there’s a thing that they can use to make art without any effort, without any time having to, like, study the classics, to learn, to hone their skills, and now they want to do it.
And it’s the same thing with physics. Do they want to spend eight years doing math and problem sets? […] No, they don’t. But now there’s a little chat box they can talk to that gives them compliments and tells them how smart and beautiful and wonderful they are. And suddenly, suddenly, they want to do physics. It’s just, there’s this underlying hostility that AI enthusiasts have for people who, you know, practice and hone their skills and get training to do things. […] Like, they have trained, they have worked hard, they have practiced to refine their skills so that they can do tasks in an amazing way that the average person cannot. They get respect for that, right? Because they worked hard.
And there is a certain group of people who are always pissed about that. Like, “what do you mean I can’t be a famous theoretical physicist unless I go and learn math? That’s not fair.”
I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but, like, now those people can use a chat box and they think it gives them the same skills and now they are demanding the same respect.
Spot-on.
Addendum JUL 26
Everybody is going to be augmented by AI. Everybody’s an artist now. Everybody’s an author now. Everybody’s a programmer now. That is all true.
There’s useful automation, and then there’s this broader lie they’re telling: error-prone, environmentally problematic software built and managed by terrible people is a perfectly symmetrical replacement for talent, education, age, and experience.
I’m so tired of people telling me that companies are “making tons of money on AI.” Nobody is making a profit on generative AI other than NVIDIA.