AI's chicken sandwich problem

I’ve written before about being between two communities with very different attitudes toward our current generative AI moment: Artists, writers, and other (non-tech) creators mostly loathe it with every fiber of their being, to the point where they’ll vociferously argue that so much as asking Claude for a list of good curry places in London is a betrayal of the Enlightenment. Tech people often embrace it even when they admit the downsides. There’s a lot of “the energy costs are horrible, stolen works are used in training, the economics are irrational, also here’s the five apps I vibe-coded yesterday afternoon” happening. So, it’s not surprising that my own attitude remains conflicted. I’ve been chewing on this article for over two weeks now; I suspect I’ve written five or six thousand words, most of which ended up on the cutting room floor (the Emacs scratch buffer). Full disclosure: I’ve used LLMs, lightly, in non-creative tasks. I’ve had Claude spit out a few Emacs Lisp functions…