The obligatory AI post

I’ve written very little on my blog about so-called Artificial Intelligence, an old term applied to a relatively new technology, Large Language Models (LLM). I don’t think I have anything new to say about the subject, and my first-hand experience with LLMs is negligible, since I eschew them. Fortunately, my employer does not force me to use AI. (I’m self-employed!) The benefit of writing a blog post expressing my opinion about AI is that I can refer to it in the future when someone—some idiot—inevitably, unjustly accuses me of writing “AI slop” based on dubious evidence such as my careful proofreading or my punctuation—the em dashes. I honed my writing skills decades ago in academia, an unwitting source of LLM training materials. The only significant previous discussion of LLMs on my blog was the last paragraph of one post: If computers are the future, why are computer users expected to be permanently illiterate? The latest front in the war against power users is Artificial…