Post

this is the really ineffective head-in-the-sand reaction a lot of folks on Bluesky tend to have if you talk about any harm reduction-based approach to the reality that millions of people are using AI tools today. The current approach to critiquing AI is obviously not working, but they don't care.

Bluesky itself *exists* because people broadly understood that social media then, as with AI now, was having a wide variety of negative effects on society. So teaching people about less damaging approaches had a lot of value and has been effective in giving millions of people better alternatives.

By contrast, scolding people with moralizing about their choices, especially when *all of us are using tech from companies that have already carried out harms as serious as genocide* is ineffective, and pushes them to the welcoming arms of fascist tech companies who will be nice to them instead.

I agree with the intellectual substance of virtually every common critique of AI. And it's very clear that turning those critiques into a competition about who can frame them in the most scathing way online has done *zero* to slow down adoption, even if much of that is due to default bundling.

At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants? Does it matter that LLM apps are at the top of virtually every app store nearly every day because individual people are choosing to download them, and the criticism hasn't been effective in slowing that?

What the hell are we supposed to do, then? You keep saying we should try some other tactic. There is no other tactic available to us! Most of us aren’t friend with power brokers in Silicon Valley. We do not have the levers that you have. What should we do?

By doing the thing I suggested in the post that is literally how this entire conversation began — engaging with the people in your life who are using these tools today, and talking to them about digital literacy.

Man, I have been trying that. It’s painful and fruitless and it does not move the needle. And the people who are the absolute WORST about LLMs are people in tech, like me. They understand it less than anybody! Which is maddening. I’m sorry - I really respect you. And I agree, you’re right…

… the condescending rants get us nowhere. But talking to people in my life has been absolutely pointless and gotten nowhere. This is a poison that can’t be stopped. There is no containing it, no making it better. I’m just trying to get used to that, I guess. It’s sad. But all this is over.