The Blog of Bob Rubbens

Blog - Academia - Projects - About me

AI Skepticism Link Collection

Over the past month I’ve been collecting AI-skeptic articles of various kinds, such as actual scientific articles and regular blog posts. Here I use AI in the ChatGPT sense. I’ve been collecting these links because negative AI articles seem somewhat rare, and they soothe my AI anxiety. Here’s the list so far. If you end up using it for something nice, mention my name if you can, and do let me now :-).

(Sorry for the messy format - this file has mostly been a dumping ground for links, and I’m publishing this with as little effort as possible.)

Some articles are explicitly skeptic of the entirety of AI, some provide nuance about one or more aspects of AI, and some just provide an example of AI messing up something easy or unexpected. This third category is the most fleeting and useless, as each new generation of AIs usually fixes these types of issues. They’re interesting nonetheless and give you a good sense of what types of issues you’ll need to consider if you’re planning on using AI yourself. The other two categories are more timeless, and will be especially nice to review in 6 month or a year or so.

• https://www.danmcquillan.org/cpct_seminar.html
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
• https://agentultra.com/blog/why-i-wont-use-ai/index.html
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563224002541
• https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt5536
• https://zed.dev/blog/dialing-back-my-llm-usage-with-alberto-fortin
  • Links to: https://albertofortin.com/writing/coding-with-ai
• https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/07/06/AI-Manifesto
• https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/
• https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
• https://pivot-to-ai.com/
• https://lifehacky.net/prompt-0b953c089b44
• https://blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre-putting-blue-food-coloring-in-everything/
• https://andrewkelley.me/post/renting-is-for-suckers.html
  • This one is more about AI as a mechanism for vendor lock-in, and less about the use of AI.
  • There is some discussion on lobste.rs which makes the view this blog post argues for seem somewhat simplistic.
• https://chrisdone.com/posts/llms/
• https://pdelboca.me/writings/2025/08/01/vibe-coding-fast-fashion.html
• https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/08/01/does-the-bitter-lesson-have-limits.html
  • Not entirely skeptic, but also not proclaiming that AI will eat everyone’s lunch, always.
• https://colton.dev/blog/curing-your-ai-10x-engineer-imposter-syndrome/
• https://www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-words-have-mercy-on-us#_
• https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/all-the-cool-kids-are-doing-it/
• https://blog.charliemeyer.co/the-gpt-5-launch-was-concerning/
• https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/08/06/gpts-and-feeling-left-behind/
• https://thomasorus.com/i-tried-coding-with-ai-i-became-lazy-and-stupid
• https://gist.github.com/izabera/91f44d29bb9da9a703514e815f71cf8c
• https://leaddev.com/velocity/writing-code-was-never-the-bottleneck
  • Via Tom.

View as: md (raw), txt.

Generated with BYOB. License: CC-BY-SA. This page is designed to last.