down with Whatever https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

@eevee I used LLM to translate into czech and get summary. Should I feel bad? :-). There are good uses for LLM, and yes, that includes "startrek", but someone will have to do that. And yes, I tried to start (but did not get far, so far).

@eevee "There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job."
This goes hard.

@eevee

> This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

Yes! Argh! I sooo feel this!

@eevee finally made the time to sit down and read ALL of this.

Thank you for writing it, it's a fine addition to my personal bibliography of "what the fuck are we even doing here"

@eevee excellent, thanks for putting it into words

@eevee @pavel yes, please do feel bad, you contributed to the death of the environment

@mirabilos @eevee Yeah, because LLM clearly use more resources than human doing same job would.

@eevee @pavel you’ll be surprised

@mirabilos @eevee Actually, you'd be surprised. I ran the modem locally on a cellphone, so I know the power consumption.

@pavel @eevee a part of it, anyway, not the part where they stole works to feed it

@pavel @eevee @mirabilos This kind of ignores the bit where the human would be existing anyway.

@eevee the devaluing of creation really is the crux of it, because that also stops adoption of these things for whatever stuff there actually is they could be useful for by saying "they can do everything for you". we'll likely not see actual uses for these things until the entire current cycle dies down, and at that point they will likely be so constrained that they're not recognisable as 'ai' tools.

like, i sometimes do single-pass image-to-image runs on digital paste-up artworks i try to do, so i have something to paint over without having to repeatedly hunt for the right colour combinations for shadows and such, which i'm really bad at. in that case it acts like a photoshop filter. that's where i see this entire thing going once the hype dies.

@lime image-to-image still seems pretty weird since aiui it's going through /two/ massive generalist databases so you have basically no idea what will come out the other side (or, of course, how much it will resemble someone else's extant artwork, which seems to be a much bigger problem with imagegen.)

@eevee
The fact that you have no idea what will come out the other side actually seems to be part of the appeal − as @davidgerard recently wrote, it's like playing a slot machine: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/
@lime