Tag Archives: writing

You can’t vibe code a garden

AI is everywhere. It feels like I can’t go a week without someone telling me I must use it: it will save me time; it will make my work easier, and my writing better; it will help me think through problems, and act as a free therapist; it will create posters and images and flyers in a flash; it will help me find information and learn faster; it will save me having to think so much or remember things. This is not particularly appealing: I like thinking and designing, and writing for myself. And what I see of AI is that it is ruining everything. It is destroying institutions, destabilising economies, erasing job opportunities, creating a permanent underclass, eroding societal trust, strip mining the planet, pushing some people into psychosis, and making us all more stupid and less able to think critically.

A recent experience illustrated the problem perfectly.

Bart Fish & Power Tools of AI / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Hopeless/ful

It’s been a year since I wrote anything. Writing is an act of faith. It requires belief that engaging and interacting has meaning; that it serves a purpose. It requires hope. Hope is something I’ve struggled to hold onto over the last year; crowded out by violence, division, hate, and a pervasive feeling that everything has gone wrong.

But here I am. Writing again.

The world is arguably an even bleaker place than it was a year ago. The genocidal actions of the IDF continue; the wealth gap grows ever larger; fossil fuel companies continue to make eye watering profits, further enhanced by war; biodiversity is falling as we live through the sixth mass extinction; the chance of staying below 1.5C of warming gets ever smaller; health and social care are failing people everywhere; the basics of life are more expensive and more children are living in poverty; fascism is on the rise; and every week brings a new reason to fear an apocalypse.

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