Myths of labor reduction compared against supposed productivity increases was ALWAYS going to equal 'forever work'

Reminder that I'm a highly visual creature so I've littered photos of a cat namted Trout in the blog post that has nothing to do with cats, please understand

As the AI craze continues to plague the world, I stumbled on a blog post entitled AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it - the title drew me in because like, well, obviously, but sadly the conclusions about how AI has inherently made the author's work life worse are right there in the blog, but they still plan to use it. It more or less reads like the people who praise their Tesla car while it sets their children on fire.

However a part that stuck out to me was this:

The paradox nobody warned us about

Here's the thing that broke my brain for a while: AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

The reason is simple once you see it, but it took me months to figure out. When each task takes less time, you don't do fewer tasks. You do more tasks. Your capacity appears to expand, so the work expands to fill it. And then some. Your manager sees you shipping faster, so the expectations adjust. You see yourself shipping faster, so your own expectations adjust. The baseline moves.

I couldn't believe what I was reading tbh. I get that the whole gift of prophecy dodgeball has been done to death but it's absolutely bonkers to see people who somehow missed everyone shouting "AI ADDED TO WORKFLOWS WILL NOT REDUCE WORK, IT WILL INCREASE PRODUCITIVY EXPECTATIONS FROM BOSSES".

Different social circles, etc, etc - I get it, and I feel bad for people like the author of the blog finally being lead to the water because everyone I know in the arts and software development space could smell right the fuck away that "AI" in this capitalist paradigm would inherently lead to "forever work" as a foregone conclusion.

And like, to be fucking crystal pepsi clear, this is all an aside on top of the whole "literally killing the planet to power the technology in the first place" angle. The technology is abhorrent and environmentally disastrous, and THEN it makes your life worse in non-environmental ways.

The promise of AI is not going to reduce your workload so you're freed up to do non-work tasks, it's going to make it so you're "productive" until you burn out and can be replaced...or the AI coding you've implemented breaks the codebase to the point of no return and you get fired as the AI obviously can't take the blame because management is too far invested to admit it was a bad idea in the first place.

The bubble is going to burst. It's going to be bad for everyone who bought in (how are NFTs doing these days lol) and the best thing you can do is just not participate.

On Saturday I mused about how fucked it was that every time I see a post online complaining about the use of AI in a project, there are comments full of "yea we just have to live with it" and that post has taken off in an encouraging way that usually only a shitpost joke or cat photo would. The people long for pushback against AI.

That's why it's incredibly encouraging when companies, tools, platforms etc take a vocal stand against this poisoned pill. I'm sure someone has started collating a list of companies who aren't capitulating in advance but I don't have it if it does exist - I do want to shout out two though:

Procreate is the most obvious one, but also fellow Tasmanian company Yarn Spinner (they're the creator of incredible interactive fiction and game development narrative tools that powered things like Night in the Woods, etc) has taken a stand.

It fucken rules when people put their money where their mouth is and say "This is bad, actually and we won't do it."

More people should look to examples like this rather than chase a dangerous tech trend that will at BEST cause codebase headaches down the road and lead to more layoffs, but more likely do that while also cooking the environment to increase the shareholder value of tech oligarchs.

Anyway, I get I'm being a downer. Hope you enjoyed the cats at least.