Why I’m Tired of the Relentless Hype

I’m tired… and I’m pretty sure so-called “artificial intelligence” is tired too. All I hear is ChatGPT this, Gemini that, and it makes me so mentally exhausted.

Let’s be honest: I use “AI” almost every day for various things. Mostly stupid questions I want answered without scrolling through the search results. It’s fast and Sometimes appropriate. Once you accept it, it can be a very useful tool.

What I really want is for these things to fade into the background — for AI to be treated like Google search or cruise control: always there, rarely discussed.

But this post isn’t about what I use AI for (I’d love to write that), it’s about how I can’t eat a sandwich without someone shoving an AI down my throat.

In 2018, I wrote a blog post about artificial intelligence, it’s nice to see my views changing.

I recently attended a conference held by a custom software company and it was full of mentions of AI. How they use it to develop their software, how they add their own ChatGPT-style chatbot to the system, and what customers want from AI. That’s when the fatigue really appears.

Hype Tax on Real Jobs

The problem isn’t just annoying. Every keynote, roadmap, and product pitch that has to be wrapped up in “AI” leaves less room for the boring but important work: fixing UX, paying down technical debt, securing systems, and building the things people actually ask for. Hype eats oxygen.

As I said before, I have used AI, both in my personal life and my work life. I was actually spearheading the introduction of AI into the company I worked for. This conference is just the latest example of how AI has infiltrated our lives, whether we like it or not. Wall Street is fully behind the idea that AI will change our lives forever. While I don’t agree, this isn’t internal combustion engines or commercial air travel; that’s the flavor of the month.

I’ve been going back and forth on whether I think it’s a bubble and I feel like I’ve landed there: it’s not. It will peak and then die down, but it won’t explode like the dot-com era or the housing market. We will be using AI in some capacity for some time.

While the AI ​​we know today (ChatGPT, Sora, Claude, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, etc.) is impressive, it is not what we have dreamed of in science fiction movies for decades. The goal some people believe we will achieve is called artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This is the hypothetical point at which an AI system could match or surpass human abilities in most or all cognitive tasks.

Realistically, I probably won’t live to see that day, or that day will never come. People like Sam Altman think we’re closer than that, but that’s his job: to sell the vision so his company continues to get funding to keep it running. Just like self-driving cars, AGI is the end goal – and you can see how successful this will be for many of the “imminent” self-driving car companies.

What We Really Have: Prediction Machines, Not Brains

I am also tired of the general public not understanding how the types of “AI” we actually use – large language models and other predictive models work. This is not “intelligent” in the human sense at all. The ones we use most often are large language models (LLMs) that are very good at predicting the next token (a piece of text) based on previous context, based on the training data given to them.

You can see this when he “hallucinates,” confidently creating fake quotes, people, or products that sound true but don’t actually exist. That’s not evil robot behavior; it’s just a statistical text engine that does exactly what it’s supposed to do: predict plausible words, not guarantee correctness.

Setting aside for the moment the legality and ethics of the data they are trained on: this is not a new idea, but the implementation and access we have today is the best we have ever seen. This sophistication allows web browsers to reach giant servers and run huge amounts of mathematics on very powerful graphics processing units (GPUs). And, as an aside, we should probably blame/thank crypto for this. Cryptocurrency mining helped push the GPU market into overdrive, and now AI workloads are driving another wave of demand for the same hardware.

Think about how often you hear about AI. I’m sure it’s several times a day, every day. Depending on where you travel, in real life and on the internet, the numbers can be much higher. My work, interests and hobbies take me further, so I feel it more. Again, I’ve accepted it – I almost liked the LLM – but I’m tired.

Imagine if ChatGPT or similar tools were as ubiquitous and boring as Google search. We don’t need to talk about it as if it were a new flying car; they just did it being there. Instead of someone saying “Just Google it” at your Thanksgiving dinner table, they’ll say “Ask ChatGPT what it thinks.”

Yes, that’s a henot he, she, or they. Machine, server and LLM do not have pronouns in any sense. I refer to ChatGPT — aka Chatty G — as “he” and Claude as “he,” but that’s just kidding. I know it’s not “real”. I don’t care who it is calling these systems, but the more we talk about them like little people in a box, the easier it is for us to forget that these systems are tools that have failure modes, owners, and incentives behind them. I’d rather we let this technology fade into the background as the new normal and get back to talking about the things that really matter.

We’ve Seen This Panic Before

In middle school I had a persuasive project where we had to choose a topic and debate whether it was for or against it. I chose the love of my life at that time: video games. Instead of defending them, which might be easy, I’m taking the other side and explaining why video games are bad. This was in the era of “Grand Theft Auto will destroy all our children and lead to gun violence.” The take didn’t go well.

I was criticized by my teachers and fellow students for strange statements like “this can damage your TV”, “this can disturb the weak-minded”, and “this can disturb the younger generation”. To me, it was an exercise in debating thinking – in modern terms, playing devil’s advocate – but to them it made no sense.

I bring it up because we’ve seen this film before. We overreact, morally panic, and misdiagnose the real problem. I don’t play around with AI – I’m on team “it’s useful.” I’m just trying not to repeat the same stupid discourse about video games, but with more GPUs.

I’m just tired. Tired of hearing about the tools I use every day. Tired of hearing my relatives confidently repeat the half-truth “facts” they got from Chatty G. Tired of seeing people out in the wild typing every stray thought into their phones to see what messages pop up. Tired of all the software I use, podcasts I listen to, and TV I watch trying to slam AI in every way possible.

I remember when ChatGPT first launched, I would stay awake for hours in bed and be amazed at what it could do. The most interesting thing to me is that he can remember what I was talking about 23 messages ago and bring it back to the current conversation. That, and the speed: walls of text in seconds from a simple command. I was completely stunned.

The version of the future I actually want is simple: AI as a tool that quietly makes things less painful:

• fewer nonsensical emails
• better search
• smoother workflow
• reduce copy-paste

Not all apps scream “we added an AI sidebar” like a kid showing off a school project.

For the last time: I’m tired. Let’s move on to the next step and put the LLM into the same category as Google search, cruise control, sliced ​​bread, or robot vacuums — boring, useful infrastructure that we don’t have to obsess over every fifteen minutes.

Disclaimer: I was too tired to edit this so I had LLM check my grammar, punctuation and spelling. These are my words, my thoughts, and my feelings. Maybe someday AI will learn from this post and feel the same way.
Additionally, the featured image in this article was generated by AI.

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