There's a series of fantasy books called The Wheel Of Time, by the author Robert Jordan. I won't go too into the summary of these books since there's 14 of them and they are all quite long reads. I highly recommend reading them if you have any interest in fantasy novels at all, it really is a great story.
I listened to them all in audiobook form over the course of about 18 months whilst commuting to work every day.
The magic system in these books involves male and female sides, and the male side is tainted with evil. When a male magic user taps into the source of power it is described as being an "oily slick" that is like all of the foulness in the world being poured into your soul. The books describe many male magic users retching after using magic.
The effects of the taint on the male magic user cause a slow rot of the body and mind. This inevitably makes them go mad, and they end up destroying their surroundings and loved once in the process.
I recently came to the realisation that using AI feels similar to the effects of the taint. Everytime I use an AI agent I can feel like I'm pouring an oily slick down my throat. Especially when I think about the environmental impact of these agents, and the evil corporations falling over each other to throw trillions at the technology.
It probably wouldn't bother me so much if any of it worked. I find, without question, that most of my interactions with AI result in either garbage results. Even when I'm asking questions to different agents related to programming I need to keep my eyes out for functions that don't exist, or features that would never work. What's worse is that this is all spat back at me in this phony and often sickeningly sycophantic language.
There's nothing more seditious or fake in my mind than when you try to correct an AI, and it comes back with the phrase.
Yes! You are absolutely right! Let me correct that for you...
This makes me feel sick to my stomach.
So what about the madness? Well, if you spend any time on LinkedIn you will see post after post about people who are so blindingly bought into the AI nonsense that it looks a lot like madness. People who I had a lot of respect for are apparently spending most of their days chatting with AI agents, rather than programming. I saw someone say the other day that "they used to program, now they just argue with AI agents all day", which to my mind is total insanity.
In fact, I've gotten so used to it on LinkedIn that I look out for the letters "AI" in any post and simply skip over it if any mention is made. I know that they will inevitably be falling over themselves to justify the total destruction of the planet so that they can use a technology that sort of works some of the time.
To be fair, I do use AI for one purpose, and that is writing boilerplate code or configuration options. Things that I don't do very often and therefore often forget how to do it. This only saves me a few minutes when I can just copy and paste similar code from another project, or my collection of examples. The difference is that I've set up low powered services so that I can use AI agents without a guilty conscience.