Thus my dissonance

I posted this to Mastodon on 15 October:

Some cognitive dissonance I’m experiencing. I absolutely love Claude Code: it really is a product that is a delight to use, while Opus 5.5 excels across a variety of domains. But at the same time, I abhor Big Tech’s walled garden approach, keeping us locked inside an enshittification treadmill, squeezing us for every dollar during an age of unparalleled inequality. I fear what Anthropic might become. Am I alone in this conundrum?

The love and the fear

I’ve been feeling this for a long time. I am aware of the arguments against the use of LLMs. My fear is that Anthropic is just like Meta, in that they are promising something that seems, at first, beneficial (network with all your old friends) but instead becomes a data-harvesting machine that sells your information to the highest bidder.

But I’ve also become aware of business fundamentals that look insane inside what seems like the AI bubble. What if this turns out to be another bait-and-switch, like the one I discovered with Facebook? Or worse yet, what if all LLMs get unplugged due to poor economics?

What I discovered with Facebook

I remember how fascinating it was to set up my social media profile for the first time, naming bands and books that I loved, reconnecting with old friends (especially since at that time I moved from Canada to the US and missed a lot of friends from university). Then, a few years later, I read about the messages Mark Zuckerberg sent when he was 19, about the people signing up: they “just submitted it”, they “trust me”, “dumb f*cks” (The Register). Then I learned about the various scandals at Facebook: Cambridge Analytica, the 2016 election, harm to teens, and on and on… just unrelenting greed. It took something that was a mode of self-expression and turned it into a soulless data-harvesting machine held up by addictive dopamine loops.

The pattern

Training data, price hikes, ads, lock-in: all of the above. The very pattern of enshittification that Silicon Valley startups seem to be based upon these days. I hope that Anthropic is less like this than others. They seem more aligned to my values than OpenAI. So did Google, before it dropped its mantra of “Don’t be evil” and started handicapping Google Search on purpose to serve more ads and juice profits.

I feel like Meta was a bait-and-switch from the start. It went viral, then decided that targeted marketing would pay for it all. Now everyone knows it will harvest every bit of data it can, and that is why it can offer its AI for free.

The wave

Technology is hard to predict. The coming financial contraction, less so. But here’s my thought: AI as it stands today will be completely different in a few years’ time. I have never seen a technology evolve this quickly, and that is the part most who resist it are missing. The economics might not make sense today, but some more efficient, scaled-down or focused version of it will exist tomorrow.

What I fear is my attachment to this particular tool. For now I feel like I understand the depth and breadth of this well of knowledge, but it may evolve in a way I can no longer understand, and soon I will become obsolete. So the choice is to fight the oncoming twenty-foot wave, or learn to ride it.

The anger

The replies weren’t conflicted. One called LLMs a stochastic parrot that mostly rearranges your own writing, and said the chips, datacentres, water and energy make using them unethical. A day later pixelcluster published LLM Thoughts (mine), which ends: “If you use them, kindly go away.”

I used to think the pushback was about disclosure: anything an LLM had a hand in, however minor, got called AI slop, and being transparent upfront would fix that. More arguments on social media, and some of the studies Claude brought up, have since changed my mind.

I still think transparency is important, and it aligns with my values. But I think the pushback is broader than that. Perhaps others see it as cheating: a shortcut around critical thinking. My hope is that the pattern I’m building here can show that LLMs and sharper thinking can coexist.

The middle

On the spectrum from AI booster to outspoken skeptic, I would find myself in the middle, leaning slightly towards the AI booster camp. The fact that you can have machines operate via natural language, with fuzzy logic and varied context, is powerful. Yes, it goes awry once in a while, as all stochastic algorithms can, but the way it just understands (or at least can mimic understanding) whatever corpus or mode or language you throw at it is mesmerizing.

On the other hand, the business side of this technology is insane. Not to mention the very reasonable objections from the skeptic camp, which I agree with in principle: the environment factor, the authoritarian applications, the attack on labour from capital, the market distortion and oncoming financial crises.

But in my experience, the ones with the most moderate view, with a foot in both camps, are the most silent when the shouting starts. So perhaps that is what I am encountering. And of course, what do I do? Turn the argument inward. Am I wrong here? Or am I still trying to find some good in this tool?

Thus my dissonance.