ploum.net
I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots
# I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots
> My AI policy is "I don’t want any kind of interaction with that thing." And this should be all you need to know.
>
I don’t care if you call it AI, LLM, chatbot, or whateverGPT. I simply don’t want to interact with it in any form. If you interact with me, make sure to never send me any output from those nor to use it as a "source" to justify one of your arguments.
I’m one of those people deeply interested in all the extraordinary stuff other humans have to say. Unfortunately, life is already too short to hear them all. I need to make a lot of choices. That’s why I will not tolerate any attempt to steal the little time I’ve on this planet by making me interact with stochastic algorithms trained to produce tons of "average," non-human content.
The direct consequence of my choice is that I will refuse to interact with humans who take pride in making themselves a meat interface between me and the algorithm they’ve chosen to replace their free will.
I will not read your website, I will ignore your emails and I will happily walk away from real-life conversations as soon as it is clear that I’m not talking to a fully sentient Homo sapiens sapiens but to an empty shell who has happily delegated their cognitive abilities to an external proprietary tool designed to be some sort of "random average garbage."
## I will not read the text
The very essence of writing is what makes you think. When you write, even something as mundane as a short email, you transform a bunch of contradictory neural stimuli into an ordered thought.
If you don’t care to write it, there’s no reason I should waste one single second reading it. The effort should be on your side first.
I don’t mind mistakes, typos, or badly formed sentences. In fact, I subtly appreciate them when we interact because they are part of you, they tell a lot about yourself. I’m not a literary agent, I will not judge your way of writing: I’m there to exchange ideas, knowledge, and experiences.
If you find yourself typing a prompt to express your idea, then just send me that prompt. I’m not interested in what an algorithm would do with your prompt, I want to know what you asked in the first place. I care about you, the human.
You may find it hard to express yourself, to write what you think: remember that the less you practice, the worse it will be. Prompting might feel easier. It does not make it right.
If it is from an algorithm, it is not you. Only you can write what’s inside yourself.
## I will not look at the pictures
Generated images. Seriously. They all look hideous.
When I spot one in a given context, I immediately have a feeling of cheapness, bad taste, and poor culture. Like this fancy restaurant of a luxury hotel I saw in a big European city. It had a huge AI generated picture on its main building: a kid eating malformed fries with his six-fingered hand and putting them in his skull through his cheek. Or this other restaurant which had a very nice menu, full of pictures of Italian cities. Until the kid’s menu which, was shockingly out of place and totally unnecessary. It also showed a kid awkwardly eating a pizza even though there was no pizza on the kid’s menu.
If you don’t have the resources to pay for an artist, you probably don’t need a picture at all. If you are making a poster, write what is important to know instead of burying it in a gloomy generated picture. If you write a blog post, I will not read if it is illustrated by generated pictures.
A website illustration, if any, conveys an emotion, a feeling. I sometimes spend more time finding a good illustration for a post than writing it. If I don’t find a satisfying picture, I don’t put any.
The first feeling conveyed to me by a generated picture is an uncanny unease, an obnoxious emotion that immediately makes me want to leave. It also tells me enough about the author not to want to know more. It might be a kind of overreaction. But as I said, there’s too much to read anyway so it’s a good first filter.
No, that picture is not pretty. No, it is not funny. It doesn’t share any human feeling, any artistic expression. You like it because you had fun generating it. But it is wasting my time.
## I will not run the code
I don’t want to run generated code on my computer.
Good code is knowledge. Even in a purely productivity-oriented business, every line of code should reflect the choice of an employee knowing the business and choosing a way to solve a business problem.
Reality is, of course, different. I’ve worked with enough different codebases to know that proprietary software is simply badly coded. Each line is written assuming "I will not be there anymore to deal with it in a few years." But at least we know that each line, as bad as it can be, was added by a human for a reason. LLMs move the needle from "no need to care in a few years" to "no need to care right now." You cannot assume anything about generated code. Maybe it was simply hallucinated and, by chance, it compiled.
Which means that, as soon as generated code is added to a project, the whole project becomes unmaintainable by humans. You can’t understand the code because there’s nothing to understand in the first place!
It follows that the whole project now needs LLMs for any change which, will make it even worse from a human perspective. We end up adding more and more lines of code nobody understand where the problem has always been "There are too many lines of code and too few people understand them."
I’m convinced that accepting generated code will lead most projects to become broken beyond all hope of repair in only a few years. "Carefully reviewing" will soon not be enough. Unfathomable code will eventually slip in and gradually destroy the whole project. I predict that the projects too important to be left to rot and die will take decades to recover from those couple years of "assisted productivity."
We need to remember that what we call "code" is merely a specification of the software we want. Those specifications will be given to the compiler to make the real software. The role of a coder is to take vague, imprecise, and contradictory specifications from a manager or customer and then make sure to remove any ambiguity. This could be done by clarifying with the customer or by silently making choices. History and mathematics have demonstrated that humans cannot make unambiguous and non-contradictory specifications without using a formal language designed expressly for that purpose. Natural languages simply cannot remove ambiguities and this may be an evolutionary feature.
Removing the coder and replacing them with a tool designed to pretend to agree to anything said could never produce good, maintainable software. It may produce a small throwaway script. It may find security holes more efficiently than fuzzing. But it will never be able to build something useful and reliable for the long term.
Which is what I expect from software.
I want to be able to trust software enough to invest time in learning it. That has always been one of my main arguments for using open source: if a free software is good enough, I trust that there will always be people to maintain it or to fork it if needed. If I have a problem with a free software, I can always look at the code to understand what the humans who designed it wanted to do. I may also modify it. This is not theoretical: I’ve done that with countless pieces of software in the last 20 years. I rely on it!
For that reason, I will carefully avoid running any openly "vibecoded" tool, and I’m trying to focus my efforts on projects that actively try to distance themselves from the current bubble.
## I will not listen to the discussion
"I’ve asked ChatGPT and…"
That’s it. No need to say more. All those years speaking about "fake news" and "checking your sources" just to blindly repeat a random series of letters assembled by a stochastic algorithm? Seriously?
I don’t care about your credentials, I don’t care about your experience. With a couple of words, you gladly announced that you are obliterating them and refusing all forms of free will. Goodbye!
That’s not very friendly, I know. I never pretended to be. And I didn’t start it.
## I will not grade the student report
Across the last years, I’ve not managed to find one single student who astonished me with their use of a chatbot. In every single case I’ve met, the use of a chatbot made my student perform worse. Sometimes spectacularly like, this student who contributed to a project on Github but, when asked, could not even tell me what the project was about.
On the opposite, forcing the student not to use any AI makes them better every single time. No exception. It also vastly improved their self-confidence.
* Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots (ploum.net)
It is not a matter of "learning to use the tool". You cannot learn to use a proprietary stochastic tool which can be changed at any time. You don’t need to "learn to chat" (and if you do, not in my course). What the "tool" is really doing is making you lose the essential ability to learn, making you lose your self-confidence. As John Scalzi points out: playing Guitar Hero is fun. But even thousands of hours of playing Guitar Hero will not enable you to play "Happy Birthday" on a real guitar.
* Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity (whatever.scalzi.com)
I consider that my students are in my class to learn. Chatbots are actively preventing any kind of learning. That’s why, from now on, I make it a strict policy that anything my students are submitting should be entirely produced by them.
It can be short. It will be imperfect. It will be full of mistakes. It may even be wrong. The report will have fewer bullet points and emojis. But it will be yours, and that’s what I want to see.
I will not technologically "enforce" this rule. Cheating has always been part of university. If you are smart enough not to be caught, you probably deserve to pass. But it will probably require a lot more effort on your side than simply writing your own goddamn report with your bloody fingers on a keyboard.
## I will not judge what you do in private
AI/chatbots/LLMs are known to have a terrible impact on your brain. They are bad for you, for the whole economy, for the political atmosphere, and for the environment. They consume huge resources, destroy the whole Internet and our ecosystem.
But they are addictive, I get it. They make you feel productive (which, studies have demonstrated, is largely a feeling). I consider them a kind of drug.
* AI Isn’t Breaking Work. It’s Already Broken. (calnewport.com)
They may also be useful when you are forced to accomplish a stupid one-time task you don’t want to do but is required. We all have to deal with our share of bullshit jobs, I get it.
Using AI is like a shameful drug addiction or a weird sex fetish. If you want to use it privately or between consenting adults, it’s up to you. As long as you don’t brag about it, I will not judge.
Just make sure that I don’t have to interact with it.
* Human made logo by Matt Kindt (commons.wikimedia.org)
### About the author
I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.
I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!
