AI Makes Me Sad

AI Makes Me Sad October 2nd, 2026 Am I allowed to say that? Because it does. Maybe it’s because I’m writing this at 2:00 AM, which is about the only time I let myself experience sadness for a prolonged period of time, but every time I see a post on Twitter or LinkedIn about a new development in AI, I feel a sense of hopelessness.

AI 让我感到悲伤。2026 年 10 月 2 日，我能这么说吗？因为事实确实如此。也许是因为我是在凌晨两点写下这些文字的，这大概是我唯一允许自己长时间沉浸在悲伤中的时间，但每当我在 Twitter 或 LinkedIn 上看到关于 AI 新进展的帖子时，我都会感到一种绝望。

And I’m saying this as someone who is absolutely in a position to benefit from AI. If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me. Just the other day, I sat near a table of my fellow TAs as they discussed their plans to work at OpenAI after graduation, eyeing $500k salaries. But I don’t want to do that.

而且，我是在一个绝对能从 AI 中获益的位置上说这番话的。如果我在简历上加几个“氛围感”项目，每一家初创公司、大型企业和 FAANG 巨头都会向我敞开大门。就在前几天，我坐在几位助教同事旁边，听他们讨论毕业后去 OpenAI 工作的计划，盯着那 50 万美元的年薪。但我不想那样做。

I don’t want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter. Maybe it’s because I don’t even really know what that looks like. As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity. It sounds like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, the scene where he’s so enthusiastic about screwing hex nuts in a factory that he screws the buttons on people’s shirts, and then he goes and gets himself caught in the conveyor belt, snaking through the gears and screwing in the hex nuts inside the machine.

我不想靠给 Codex 写提示词为生，Claude 也是一样。也许是因为我甚至不知道那样的生活是什么样子。但我非常确定它听起来是什么样的：它听起来像是技艺的丧失、控制权的丧失和创造力的丧失。它听起来就像查理·卓别林在《摩登时代》里的场景：他因为在工厂里拧六角螺母太投入，以至于去拧别人衬衫上的扣子，然后被卷进传送带，在齿轮间穿梭，在机器内部拧着螺母。

It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete for $500k a year. If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?

这听起来就像我周围的人正把自己投向机器，为了每年 50 万美元的薪水，自愿让自己变得过时。如果你真的、真的相信人工智能即将到来，为什么你会想去那家最有可能取代其员工的公司工作呢？

It makes me sad that I missed the boat on startups. I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier. I’m good at web stuff, I’m good at Rust, I can even do OS stuff. I watched all the YC Stanford lectures this summer while translating tests from one language to another as an intern. Now there’s no such thing as a startup, there are only “AI startups”, where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.

我感到悲伤的是，我错过了初创公司的黄金时代。我想如果我早出生五到十年，我本可以成为一名相当厉害的初创公司创始人。我擅长 Web 开发，擅长 Rust，甚至能搞定操作系统。今年夏天，我在实习期间一边把测试代码从一种语言翻译成另一种语言，一边看完了所有的 YC 斯坦福讲座。现在已经没有所谓的“初创公司”了，只有“AI 初创公司”——你建立了一家公司，而别人只需 30 秒就能写个提示词将其取代。

And if they can’t write a prompt for it now, they’ll be able to next year with GPT-7, or whenever AI hardware fabrication gets better. It makes me sad that AI evangelists are so quick to adopt the language of online incels, and that AI-generated art and music have become the defining aesthetic of fascism in the 2020s while AI-generated writing went from risible to a mark of stupidity to something reluctantly accepted since it sits at the fringes of everything useful on the Internet like a kind of digital mold.

如果他们现在还写不出提示词，明年有了 GPT-7，或者等 AI 硬件制造技术进步后，他们就能做到了。让我感到悲伤的是，AI 布道者们如此迅速地采用了网络“非自愿独身者”（incels）的语言；AI 生成的艺术和音乐已成为 20 世纪 20 年代的法西斯主义美学标志；而 AI 生成的写作从最初的可笑、愚蠢的代名词，变成了某种被勉强接受的东西，像一种数字霉菌一样附着在互联网所有有用事物的边缘。

The overwhelming weight of it all feels so stifling. It feels like there’s no way to stop it. I can’t imagine a Twitter (sorry, an X) where every post isn’t filled with verified bots spewing LLM nonsense in the replies. I can’t imagine an article about some random topic on some random webpage, designed to maximize SEO for some banner ad I won’t see because I block ads, being written by a human. We would have to rebuild all our institutions.

这一切带来的沉重感让人窒息。感觉似乎无法阻止它。我无法想象一个 Twitter（抱歉，是 X）——每一条帖子的回复里不充斥着喷吐 LLM 废话的认证机器人。我无法想象一个关于某个随机网页上随机主题的文章——那些为了最大化 SEO 以展示我根本看不到（因为我屏蔽了广告）的横幅广告而设计的文章——是由人类撰写的。我们必须重建我们所有的机构。

The part where I’m not (that) sad anymore. Honestly, though, it doesn’t sound that hard to rebuild all our institutions. Twitter is only 20 years old, LinkedIn is only 23. Most of these were in need of a refresh anyway. I don’t know much about the Dark Ages, but I know that Muslims and Irish monks kept the candle of knowledge burning while everyone else ran around crusading.

关于我不再（那么）悲伤的部分。说实话，重建我们所有的机构听起来并不难。Twitter 才 20 岁，LinkedIn 才 23 岁。它们大多数本来就需要更新换代。我对黑暗时代了解不多，但我知道，当其他人忙于十字军东征时，穆斯林和爱尔兰僧侣们守护着知识的火种。

In a similar way, I know that there are a lot of people who feel a lot of the same sadness that I do, even if they don’t express it as sadness. I like to think even a lot of AI evangelists feel at least a little sad, like Paul Graham, because he’s a Lisp man from way back, and programming language fanatics usually care about humans writing programs.

同样地，我知道有很多人和我有着同样的悲伤，即使他们没有将其表达为悲伤。我愿意相信，即使是许多 AI 布道者也感到一丝悲伤，比如 Paul Graham，因为他是一位资深的 Lisp 拥趸，而编程语言狂热者通常都很在意人类编写程序这件事。

Another point of hope: the technology industry moves at unfathomable speeds, so we’ll start to see a way out of our “dark age” within only a few years as our institutions start to mature and improve. In fact, I suspect that AI will have a fixed role in our society before the end of my natural life. Whether that role is a small one or a major one, I’m not sure. But I know I will feel at least a little happier to have some finality about the whole thing.

另一个希望点在于：科技行业以不可思议的速度发展，因此随着我们的机构开始成熟和改善，我们将在短短几年内看到走出“黑暗时代”的出路。事实上，我怀疑在我的有生之年，AI 将在我们的社会中拥有一个固定的角色。这个角色是小还是大，我不确定。但我知道，当这一切最终尘埃落定时，我会感到至少有一点点快乐。

I think this will require some painful shifts in our industry, but I also think that this will be a satisfying kind of pain, at least for people like me, like the burn you feel when working out. It feels extremely strange to be looking forward to a bubble bursting. It makes me feel like the AI evangelists who look forward to artists filling out McDonald’s applications. But I do. It makes me very hopeful. When I imagine that scenario, I can conjure no emotion besides glee.

我认为这将需要我们行业经历一些痛苦的转变，但我也认为这会是一种令人满足的痛苦，至少对于像我这样的人来说，就像健身时感受到的肌肉灼烧感。期待泡沫破裂的感觉非常奇怪。这让我觉得自己就像那些期待艺术家去填麦当劳求职表的 AI 布道者。但我确实期待。这让我充满希望。当我想象那个场景时，除了欣喜，我无法产生任何其他情绪。

I desperately want to work in an industry that makes sense, even if a lot of people right now would rather work in an industry that sells nothing to nobody for untold sums of money. I’m sorry. I want to go back to the Twitter thing because I use Twitter a lot. And, seriously, there are so many verified accounts that just post AI-generated replies to popular posts, and we all just ignore them. It’s the most insane, Kafkaesque thing. Absolutely nobody likes it. It’s an eyesore.

我迫切地想在一个有意义的行业工作，即使现在很多人宁愿在一个向任何人兜售虚无、换取巨额资金的行业工作。抱歉。我想回到 Twitter 的话题，因为我经常使用 Twitter。说真的，有太多认证账号只是在热门帖子里发布 AI 生成的回复，而我们大家都选择无视。这是最疯狂、最卡夫卡式的现象。绝对没有人喜欢它。这简直是眼中钉。

And we’re supposed to be living in the most powerful age for AI. You’re telling me that nobody at SpaceX/Xai/Grok/SuperGrok/whatever can write a classifier to ban these accounts? I can press a button on any post and be given a full explanation by Grok, a button which I’ve pressed 2 dozen times on accident and never on purpose. You can’t run a decision model for $0.0000001 cents whenever someone hits “Post” and realize that a reply makes no sense? Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people point out the fact that billions (trillions?) in AI spend has translated to absolutely no benefit for most consumers of everyday apps. Obviously, people who use ChatGPT get the benefit of having their question answered. But in the world where development is getting faster and cheaper, I can’t think o

我们本应生活在 AI 最强大的时代。你是想告诉我，SpaceX/Xai/Grok/SuperGrok 或随便什么地方，没人能写出一个分类器来封禁这些账号吗？我可以在任何帖子上按一个按钮，就能得到 Grok 的完整解释——这个按钮我误触过二十多次，却从未主动按过。难道就不能在有人点击“发布”时，花 0.0000001 美分运行一个决策模型，来判断回复是否毫无意义吗？最近，我看到很多人指出一个事实：数十亿（甚至数万亿？）的 AI 投入，对于大多数日常应用的用户来说，完全没有带来任何好处。显然，使用 ChatGPT 的人确实得到了回答问题的便利。但在开发变得越来越快、越来越便宜的世界里，我无法想象……