Generative AI on rkempe’s blog

I'm becoming increasingly concerned by this trend

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:46:26 -0400

I’m becoming increasingly concerned by this trend where we’re letting these AI companies convince us that we can use these systems to streamline our lives by flattening the complexity out of them, as if our problems are a standard dataset we can summarize our way out of instead of this massive nightmare jumble of causes and effects we don’t always see and that we definitely do not understand.

And I find it paradoxical how the word “context” has become so associated with the use of LLMs when context is precisely the thing that they are stripping out of our lives. Knowledge isn’t supposed to exist in a vacuum; it’s supposed to be developed through being in conversation with other people and their needs and with the real world and with other knowledge, and it is through the specificity gained through that kind of conversation that information becomes more meaningful. We act as if this act of seeking and internalizing context is grunt work that should be offloaded toa machine in order to make room for the real work, when it is, in fact, the real work.

Thoughts on writing with generative AI

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:19:20 -0400

I’ve been attempting to use generative AI to help me write documentation because there’s so much pressure to be able to say you’re using it right now, and I honestly think the outputs are unusable without essentially rewriting the whole thing.

I find the outputs are:

Excessively verbose (please get to the point)
Subtly incorrect, and I’d rather just research and write correct information than spend time fact checking AI
Not quite what I want, because the machine can’t read my mind, and I feel like prompting it correctly and then fact checking and editing the output would be more time consuming than just writing the damn thing
Just like, tonally weird

I don’t know, it’s a weird experience. I will give it this:

We need more cross-disciplinary interaction than ever

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 17:53:56 -0400

In this day and age, we need more cross-disciplinary interaction than ever, because technology has rapidly become everyone’s problem in a way it wasn’t before, and we all need to have common language to discuss what is happening.

I was listening to an English grad student talk about the environmental impact of “algorithms” during an academic panel today, and while I know that what he was talking about was really generative AI, technical people aren’t going to take you seriously if while critiquing them, you start conflating generative AI with algorithms in general.

Generative AI devalues process work

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:10:54 -0400

Part of why Generative AI is bad is because it devalues process work. It devalues actually using your brain to think through problems, it devalues conversations, it devalues expertise, and in losing process work you also lose all of the other interesting directions/ideas/work that would have come out of it. Generally speaking I am quite concerned about this.