Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites desire Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

One week after deleting my LLM accounts

I deleted my ChatGPT and Claude accounts last week. It’s vanishingly unlikely this will be a permanent state of affairs but I did think it was a useful exercise to prepare myself for a future of enshittified chatbots. These systems are going to get more expensive to use and less reliable in the short to medium term. Therefore I’d like to establish where they are actually adding value to my existence and where I have fallen into using them out of habit. A few observations after week one:

  • There are interesting topics which occur to me that I default to exploring with a chatbot. In some cases I use other means to explore this but mostly I just let them drop. For example I found myself wondering yesterday about the economics of escape rooms which I think would have previously led to a half hour conversation with ChatGPT or Claude. The level of interest just isn’t high enough to lead me to explore this without immediate access to a chatbot to satisfy my curiosity.
  • The first time I had a practical question I slipped into a conversation with Google Search before I realised “hey wait I’m supposed to not be doing this”. This illustrates how ubiquitous models have become in our digital lives. It also made me realise that I do think for many practical order questions it really is a more effective means of finding good enough answers than searching. I’m fairly certain ChatGPT could have told me how to turn off the faulty ‘replace filter’ light in my air filter in one shot, whereas I still haven’t got round to looking up the instruction book to get the manufacturer’s advice on troubleshooting.
  • There was a health and fitness question I would have defaulted to discussing with a chatbot. In the absence of it I found myself thinking “hey wait I know this stuff” and actually thinking it through myself based on my existing knowledge. This was the only sign I saw this week of a kind of outsourcing that troubled me where defaulting to a chatbot was something I was deriving confidence from rather than using a purely neutral tool.
  • There are practical machinic tasks which I’ve started to rely on them for. I thought I might re-organise my blog at some point before I restart work (as the kind of thing I’d intended to do for months but never got round to with usual routines). But then I remembered I don’t have a Claude account anymore. The WordPress MCP is so powerful I just couldn’t imagine doing this kind of tedious work directly any more even when the outcome matters to me.
  • I feel notably less digitally distracted. I’m off work and not on e-mail so that’s almost certainly the major factor but I suspect this is a meaningful contributing factor nonetheless. I spend a lot of time each week reading text and writing text through interacting with chatbots so the intensivity and extent of my screentime is significantly reduced.
  • I’m surprised how strong my instinct is to share this blog post with a chatbot while writing it. I suddenly realise how much I’d slipped into sharing pretty much everything I write with Claude Opus. Not because I want its input on the content but rather because it so reliably offers “here are some more things to think about on this theme”. I also don’t think I’d realised how frequently I was using it as a light touch copy editor. The stream of consciousness way in which I write blog posts feels ever so slightly exposing to me now in a way it didn’t.

My plan is to wait until August at least before setting up new accounts. Ideally I’ll hold off until the absence of models is materially impacting on my life in an obviously negative way. I suspect there’s some deeper psychological aspects to daily use of models which haven’t really shown up in my experience yet, which might after a few weeks or months.

, ,