AI is invading every space and it’s annoying the heck out of me.

Google gives me AI-generated slop instead of search results. Recipe searches result in AI-generated nonsense. Discussion threads get AI-generated replies. Customer support queries get useless AI-generated replies.

The administrator at my knitting club uses AI-generated banner images for the group’s Facebook events. Workshop participants turn to ChatGPT for generating creative ideas.

The other day I was co-interviewing a candidate for a role as a software developer in our team. Part of the interview was a pair coding exercise. We had turned off AI assistance in the code editor, and the candidate was completely helpless without it. Before diving into live coding, he had told us about all the problems he had solved and projects he had architected and completed. And yet, when given a keyboard and a text editor, he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t initialize an array. Couldn’t loop through one, either. Couldn’t explain any of the choices he had made in past projects – everything ended in “I’d have to ask Google or ChatGPT about that”. We concluded that we need to update the job requirements to clearly specify that candidates are expected to be able to code without AI assistance.

Some people are literally losing their ability for thinking. They’re outsourcing not just the boring tasks, but even the fun and creative stuff. And they even seem proud of it.