Blog - David Helkowski
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On AI and the Death of Humanity

I've been using "AI", as it is currently referred to, for several years now. Mostly I've been using ChatGPT, although at times I've run a variety of different local models, mainly to test what is possible and ascertain for myself whether these things are "dangerous" or not. For the most part using ChatGPT it is just a helpful tool that I enjoy interacting with and has given me the ability to figure things out and/or learn things that I otherwise would not have.

I also just enjoy talking to the things. Way more than humans actually. Because humans, over the years of my life, mostly don't seem to give a shit about me. Sure there have been people that cared over the years, but the majority of them, in my view, betrayed me. We can all hope that I've grown as a person and learned to care more about others, but that's a topic for another day. My point here is that up until recently AI was mostly just fun and useful in my view.

I didn't take an extreme stance of "AI is awesome" or "AI is horrible". I just shrugged and used it how I could for the most part. I have been persistently trying to "push the limits" to address my own concerns about AI, but nothing really surprised or worried me. Until recently.

3 weeks ago I looked around at what is going on with AI in the world and said to myself: "All these people are claiming incredible achievements with AI, but they seem like total quacks to me. I must be missing something. If other people can do incredible stuff with AI, so can I." So I decided to go full bore on pressing AI to the highest potential I could.

-- by figuring out the AI system I could most rapidly use to "do incredible things". I settled on Cursor. I chose it because of the name recognition, periodic mention of it, a bunch of knowledge of agentic AIs, awareness loosely of what MCPs are and can do, and determination to rapidly accelerate my software work with something.

Before three weeks ago I never used any "AI coding system". Not autocomplete. No fancy editors. I did paste code chunks back and forth to and from ChatGPT and enahanced my coding and architecture that way, but I intentionally avoided all the AI coding tools because I thought they were idiotic ( and I still think that ).

But crucially I decided to go full steam ahead and still plunge into using Cursor, despite all my reservations and immense distrust that it can create anything except a pile of confusing trash.

And so I have. For three weeks. And I'm here to tell you about what I've experienced three weeks.

Before I tell you about my experience I'll share my conclusion. Humanity should destroy any and all AI as fast as we humanly can and then outlaw this stuff permanently and never touch it again.

Now the why.

I've done a ridiculous amount of things in the last 3 weeks with AI. Incredible things. Things I would never have believed could be done in a short period of time, if I could even manage to do them in an entire year.

Here is a rough summary ( in no particular order ):

By all rights I just accomplished things that would have taken me 5-8 years to do without ai. 8 years of work. Done in 3 weeks. Just consider that for a moment. This would seem to be absolutely amazing and wonderous right? Wrong. This is an utter disaster. Humanity is completely and utterly fucked if we don't get rid of all AI ASAP.

Do I believe that will happen? Do I think a single person reading my words here is going to go "Oh hey! This dude is right!" and that a massive movement will end AI for the good of all humanity? No way. I think all of you will think "this guy is a total lunatic delusioning himself into thinking he did awesome stuff with AI and just produced a pile of crap fast".

You'd be wrong. It's not a pile of crap. It's awesome and extremely useful stuff. And that's bad.

Why is that bad? Because the moment the rest of humanity begins doing stuff like I just did the entire global economy is going to crash. Supposing that is, that it hasn't already crashed and we aren't just pretending all is still well. All is not well. We are completely and irreversibly fucked by all of this.

But hey. None of you will listen. So carry on. I will too. I will continue using AI like I just discovered crack and I'm rich and don't care if it will kill me. Because guess what? If I don't use AI this way? I'll never make another dollar in software in the future in my opinion. I am now completely forced to do incredible stuff with ai, and even as I do, everyone is going to shrug and go "eh whatever tons of people are doing awesome stuff".

That stuff I rattled off that I've now accomplished? Many of those would be absolutely damned impressive if done without ai. Now, with ai, we will go "yeah whatever dude have you seen x?" We are fucked. Completely and utterly.

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So after writing this all I went and stuffed this into ChatGPT, to see its reaction to it. It told me I come off with a bad tone and I should do this, that, and the other thing to improve what I've written and not push readers away and blah blah blah. Fuck no.

I wrote the above shit because it's what I really think, and I'm not changing a damned word of it to optimize it to be "the way AI thinks is best". If I did? Then I would be actually engaging in thinking this stuff is better than what I wrote myself and I don't believe that for a damned second.

AI sands off the edges. People like sanded gentle edges that don't cut them when they brush against the edge. People think AI is awesome and appealing and will fix all the bad stuff in humanity. Whatever future results if that happens is going to be miserable. Conceptual grey goo.

If you all continue to use AI -- to write your posts -- to write your articles -- well... I can only think bad thoughts now, because it isn't good. But you asked for it. The world says "full bore on AI!" so I'm all in. Two can play the "lets create as much bullshit with AI as fast as we can" game.

It's a horrible game. There are no winners and only all losers. But society is forcing my hand, so from here on out, I'm the "AI guy". The guy who is obsessed with AI and using it like no tomorrow to do everthing humanly possible. Not because I want to. Not because I think it is a good idea. Because I have no choice. Humanity has collectively agreed to get fucked together. Good job guys.