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Anil Dash
@anildash.com

I don’t think there’s a single serious critic who says AI’s not useful? The concerns I see are about content rights, worker impacts, environmental effects, epistemological threats, or media manipulation. But that’s all predicated on the idea that it *does* work, often too well for people to manage…

Kevin Roose@kevinroose.com

The NYT Magazine asked me and @caseynewton.bsky.social to open their AI issue by talking about how we use AI, why it's not going away, and how you can't be a serious critic if you're in denial about how useful it is. Bluesky's gonna love this one! www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/m...

Anil Dash
@anildash.com

I'm familiar. And there are also plenty of examples in the real world of people doing things like having an LLM explain a confusing medical diagnosis in plain English language, which they found reassuring. (And yes, they can be inaccurate, but they don't find that worse than no explanation at all.)

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Klep
@klep.bsky.social

Then why would you say there are no serious critics saying AI is not useful? Are you questioning the integrity of those studies? And if an authoritative-sounding source I've been told I could trust told me something wrong, I might be reassured as well and think I'm better off. But I'd be wrong.

Klep
@klep.bsky.social

Quite frankly the idea that people are having complicated medical diagnoses incorrectly explained to them in ways that could lead them to do things that would further harm their health is abhorrent.

Anil Dash
@anildash.com

Oh, it's worse than that. Big AI has made tools that are actively telling kids to self-harm, increasingly often leading to deaths. And *despite this*, hundreds of millions of people find these tools useful. It's like cars, they kill countless people, and yet millions of people choose them every day.

Anil Dash
@anildash.com

So, yelling at people "cars bad!" isn't going to work. We are going to have to build mass transit, or make less environmentally-damaging cars, or build bike lanes, or let them telecommute. Scolding people for using LLMs is not goin to work. The proof: it's not working.

Klep
@klep.bsky.social

Ok but there's a difference between "People think they're useful" and "They are actually useful." In fact there has been at least one study showing exactly that - that people who use these tools vastly overestimate any benefits they provide to the point that the tools actually hindered them.