AI Disclaimer

I’ve been posting a fair bit about AI tools on this site - since early 2025 I’ve gone from quite skeptical to finding them extremely useful in software engineering and in many other areas.

HOWEVER we need to be aware of the ethical problems and risky nature of AI as well.

I want to include a disclaimer in every AI post; because it’s not as simple as “this is useful so we should use it” - IT doesn’t exist in a bubble, we need to consider the impact on the world, on the climate, on other people, the ethical side of what we do.

First - the tools are largely built and owned by giant tech companies that are pushing these hard into every corner of our lives, and every penny we spend on these tools goes to these companies. They are run by horrible tech broligarchs¹ whose interests are personal power and destabilising democracy, not helping the world.

Second, they consume vast amounts of power, which due to our failure to charge for externalities, mean they are burning fossil fuels, in some locations consuming scarce water², and accelerating the climate crisis.

And thirdly, there are many signs that the funding for this is an unsustainable bubble, fueled by hype and grift and dubious practices. Cory Doctorow has a great coverage of this.

Note I used to link to Ed Zitron here but his tech knowledge was confidently wrong back then, and a lot of his predictions just didn’t happen - this debunking of his predictions is pretty damning.

It still feels like a lot of hype and circular investments and wild speculation - it seems quite likely that the companies building these tools may collapse, or start charging significantly more and/or enshittifying the experience of users.

I’m still finding AI extremely useful - especially in the limited area of boosting Software Engineering, where there is less of the “plagiarism machine” and more ways to compensate for hallucinations and other LLM limitations. But we can’t work in AI without keeping all these risks in mind, especially “what would we do if all the commercial tools suddenly became unavailable?”

1. Thanks Carole Cadwalla for introducing me to the very useful term Broligarchy! ↩

2. this is contentious - a friend shared me this article Andy Masley - the AI water issue is fake - I haven’t done a lot of digging myself, but it’s worth taking this one with a grain of salt. ↩