Can We Please Just Be Normal About AI?

So, the AI revolution happened. AGI is, by any reasonable definition, here, and it's here to stay. AI agents manage codebases, write hitpieces, and are redditors. This is a very significant social upheaval! Of course, any sane, sensible person who isn't completely and utterly asleep at the wheel of life is going to have opinions on it!

But I just don't care.

I don't care! I don't care whether you think AGI is real! I don't care if you're a TPOT/Lesswrong true believer who thinks we must construct Roko's Basilisk post-haste (don't look that one up if you're susceptible to OCD/psychosis), or if you think Samuel Harris Altman needs to be strung up by his own viscera in the middle of Times Square.

And yet, any and every time without fail or exception that I bring up my use of AI, be that for copy/line editing, writing recipes, doing research, outlining my fiction writing, or agentic coding, the response isn't, "Oh, cool, tell me more," or even a perfectly understandable, "I don't wanna hear about this." It's, "Oh, you've given me an in to tell you what I think about the situation and to share my opinions on labour relations and the nature of the Soul!"

Worse still is when people demand that I, personally and specifically, answer for all of the crimes of the AI industry. "How do you explain the water usage and the Grok porn and the Stealing From Artists?!"

Imagine people did this with literally any other hobby. Imagine I tell you I've been getting into hobbyist woodworking lately, and your response is, "Answer for the crimes of the entire lumber industry."

To be clear, I'm not saying I'm owed anyone's ear, or that people ought to listen to me. No one owes me shit, and if they don't wanna hear it they have every right to say so. But I really don't think it's okay, by any social norm that I'm familiar with, to use someone bringing up a subject that they're interested in as a springboard for your own soapboxing for why they're a morally bankrupt hack who won't even go to Hell because that would require that they be possessed of an Immortal Soul.

Maybe you disagree with what I'm about to say, and if so then that's completely fine (so long as you're normal about it). I am, by a lot of people's definitions, an AI "True Believer". I think the tech is legitimately revolutionary. I think that it's going to change everything, and to an extent it already has, and the only reason more people aren't realizing that is because of how rapidly things go from New, Novel, Exciting, Scary to Actually Not That Big of a Deal At All in the current social media age.

I have said, quite explicitly, in the past that my philosophy with regards to AI is to "ride the lightning", so to speak. I don't know how far Ms. Claude's Wild Ride goes, and I personally feel (though this is not a belief I would force onto others, ever) that I don't really get to step off of it. Whether I like it or not, I am strapped to a rocket and being launched full force at something. The future, I guess.

This is an attitude that many people find grating, and I consider that to be an absolutely valid view to hold. It can be really fucking annoying when someone keeps telling you the tech that you're constantly being reminded is taking away not only your job security, but also your Sweet Treats, and the Ensouled Human Endeavour of Artistic Creation is here to stay whether you like it or not. It can appear a defeatist, doomer perspective.

But I consider it firmly the opposite. To me, this is a hopeful view. I think the tech is amazing, and revolutionary, and democratic in a way no amount of legislation or high-minded tut-tutting from regulatory bodies can suppress. You can run Minimax 2.5, a fairly state-of-the-art model, on a PC the size of a pack of cup ramen, for under 3000 dollars, and that's with the current squeeze on RAM pricing. Those numbers are only going to go down with time, not up (except the 2.5, that's probably gonna go up yeah).

I love AI. In the same way I love computers, and 3D graphics, and music. I get excited about new model releases for the same reasons I get excited about new high-performance RISC-V chips or signed distance fields or the Ibanez booth at NAMM.

And, truthfully, most people don't care! About any of these! I am very familiar with the uncomfortable smile and nod of people who don't wanna be rude but don't have anything to say because they have no clue what the fuck a non-uniform rational B-spline is.

But with the topic of AI, it feels like people by and large have such an immense degree of totally unearned confidence in their opinions on the subject. Never thought I'd say this, but I would really like it if people would start uncomfortably smiling and nodding again.

So when I say, "Can we just be normal about AI," it can certainly seem hypocritical! I am, quite truthfully, not normal about the subject myself. But I'm not normal about a lot of things. People often find me irritating and grating for my enthusiasm regarding a variety of subjects. They just don't usually resort to tarring me as a morally bankrupt soulless devil for the sin of thinking gaussian splats are cool.

That's all I'm asking for, here. I'm not requesting that everyone be just as enthused as I am. I'm not asking that you share all my opinions, or that you give up all of your reservations on the subject. I am most certainly not demanding that you "debate me". Quite the opposite.

For once, my call to action is, please be a bit more apathetic. Please have weaker opinions. Please just tell me to fuck off the normal way you've been doing for years whenever I got a little too excited and autistic about something.

Please just be normal about AI.