AI everything everywhere all at once (2025)
Showing everywhere, on a screen near you.
There is more than enough anti-AI rhetoric floating around. I am categorically not anti-AI. I find it rather useful, and use it occasionally like a super-fast Google search. It is not sentient (yet), but it is getting very close, and that scares me. Perhaps that is what scares and upsets people.
Having cut my teeth on Automate the boring stuff with Python by Al Sweigart, I suppose AI tools make a great deal of sense to me. They are a shortcut to achieving something quickly, making things more efficient and saving time, freeing up the human to go find something better to do with their precious time instead of slaving away. I have audited code in AI tools and caught errors that way. I have also had it proofread for grammatical errors and chain-of-thought flow, and caught errors that way, too. Additionally, I use a local installation of Whisper AI for voice-to-text transcribing.
These are all merely timesaving tools, efficiency boosters and productivity hacks to me.
AI, as we have come to know it, does not upset me; what does upset me is having it shoved into everything — and mostly unnecessarily so. It is the hype around it which drives me to distraction; the hype which spurs on corporations and devs to keep finding more and more inventive ways to literally jam it down our throats.
AI summaries on Google and Bing, and Copilot on Github. Siri and Gemini. Students cheating by having their homework produced by ChatGPT. “Artists” creating convincing images with a prompt that can fool us all. News articles generated by AI journalists. Social media and Youtube flooded with AI-generated content. The list goes on and on.
It is omnipresent, and always very eager to assist. From reading and summarising your e-mails to auto-enhancing and tagging your photos, and all the way through to CV (resume, if you’re American) screening for employers. The working groups have been formed at organisations like mine, hungry for some AI action. It’s gimmicky to the same extent that Bitcoin and blockchain was once gimmicky. I do still wonder where our blockchain working group disappeared to…
It has become utterly exhausting. I’m mostly exhausted by watching all these twats running around looking for things to stick the “Contains AI” sticker on. I personally cannot wait for this phase to pass. I might have to wait some time though, as I don’t quite think that we have peaked just yet with the hype cycle.
For now, I s’pose I’ll just sit back, munch some popcorn and enjoy the show. There is nothing else on worth watching.