I don't disagree about the massive costs necessarily associated with thia industry. Even the smaller and lighter models she mentions only exist because of the massive fuckers. At the same time, I think those arguments are for the realm of public policy more than individual choice to use chatbots or not. We've talked at length here over the last year or so about how the economics of the bubble are driven largely by a broken B2B SaaS pipeline that separates purchasing decisions from actually having to use the products and by an investment capital sector desperately trying to recapture the glory days of the pre-2008 omnibubble and throwing obscene amounts of money at anything with the right narrative regardless of the numbers. I feel like that keeps happening regardless of how many individual users fall for the hype and make it part of their normal workflows.

I feel like the analogy to the drug trade is still pretty relevant given the violence and predation that the black market pretty much inevitably attracts and sustains. Like, maybe you know a guy who has his own grow op or whatever, but cocaine and heroin money is going through the cartels at some point in the chain and they're going to use some portion of it for bullets that end up in some journalist's kids or something. The downstream harms are massive even if the drug industry could theoretically avoid them in ways the AI industry can't, but any given individual user's contribution to them is incredibly minor and given the addictive and self-destructive nature of the product it's both more humane and more effective to treat them as a victim of a broken world that (falsely) offered this as a step up. While I don't think we should allow slop to invest every forum any more than addicts should be allowed to shoot up on every corner, I think that if shaming makes people less likely to acknowledge that they're going down a dead-end road and reach out to their communities and support networks for help addressing the root of what drove them to these maladaptive antisolutions in the first place then shaming is making things worse, not better.

Also as the father of a small child I can unfortunately say from recent personal experience that shaming, be it public or private, is far less effective as a means of motivating behavioral change than we want it to be, even for things as basic as not shitting on the goddamn lawn.