In the morning, I usually check in on Bluesky, and whenever AI comes up on there, many people go out of their way to post about how much it sucks, how much it is stealing from content creators, and how it is a tool created by fascists, for fascists. Then I check my news feeds, which include stories about huge AI company funding rounds—billions of dollars sloshing around. I head to work, and as the West Coast wakes up, the AI newsletters start coming in—I’ve subscribed to too many of them—and they all want to talk about how amazing and brilliant everything AI is, how Artificial General Intelligence will be here any day, and how there are trillions of dollars to be made with this new wondertech. Every day, the cycle repeats.

Over the years, I’ve watched every kind of tech fight play out. Python vs. Perl, Web vs. Gopher, iOS vs. Android, Windows vs. Mac, Windows vs. Linux, SuSE Linux vs. RedHat Linux, microkernels vs monolithic kernels. Decades of argument over markup languages, ePub standards, security protocols, and more. I’ve felt all of the emotions. I used to get very angry about Microsoft. I’ve seen people fight over semicolons for days.

“This one is different!” But they all were. Yes, this one is louder and the stakes are high. But in other ways, the power being wielded is just more legible. For a long time, no one knew how powerful Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg were outside of the tech industry. Now we all know, and we all get to react to that power in our own ways. That said, every issue raised about AI is one we’ve seen before: The absorption of culture without recompense, ecological costs, unregulated change. AGI? We’ve been discussing it, and AI ethics, for the better part of a century. Just with different jargon and acronyms.

In the past, perhaps I would have picked a side—but this time, I’ve decided not to. Instead, I want to practice as much empathy as I can. I have even started wearing soft sweaters. So:

• The lefty writer who insists that AI is fascism is reacting to the same set of cultural changes that I am, in his own way. He’s frustrated to see things he values—individual human voices, care and craftsmanship in prose—regarded as valueless in an age where a database program can string together sentences, and he’s angry about the way that AI leadership is trotting around Trump’s White House.

• The startup founder in Palo Alto who believes every word Sam Altman says, and is waiting by the door for AGI, is enraptured by the promise of technology, teasing out the connections between their own brains and the functioning of a microprocessor. One fundamental question of his life is: Where does the computer end, and where do I begin? He would also like to get rich. Didn’t I spend my 20s thinking the same kinds of thoughts?

• The illustrator who sees traces of their own work in AI-generated content is already in a precarious field, and unlike the YouTubers or TikTokers, there is no opportunity to get paid even a little. This tool steals their work, and then steals their audience, and takes away their future. They feel exploited by shadowy forces, there is no recourse, and it makes them feel even more vulnerable than before. Telling them that it’s “good at code” is no comfort at all.

• The people who email us asking for “AI solutions” to problems that often require absolutely no AI—they’re not slow. They’re being shown a million marketing messages about miracle cures. Technology is not their native language. They’re confused. Could this new technology save them money, help them get things done, give them relief? These are utterly sensible questions. It’s not their fault that they are being fed marketing instead of knowledge.

• The leaders of giant AI companies—they’ve decided to take up this mission, and are convinced that they have a moral responsibility to build this technology. Haven’t I felt that way, too, as I built some tool, some system? They are in a world of infinite resources and excitement, seeing hundreds of millions of people connect to their tools, as money pours in. Wouldn’t I be just as excited, just as driven, if I was in their place?

I could keep going—“The spammer sending me emails that are badly personalized using AI is someone trying to get a paycheck and keep going in life.”; “The person making AI images of Elon Musk as a superhero is looking for some way to externalize their own fantasies of power and success.”—but it’s okay to have limits to one’s empathy, too.

Why think this way? Why not pick a side? Because it’s too soon. A huge amount of change has been jammed into the world in the last few years, a lot of it is really grim, and individuals are going to react to change in complex, individual ways. They’re going to be absolutely sure they’re right, and unexcited about anything else.

I guess it’s only fair to tell you what I believe, too, and ask you for empathy as well. It’s going to disappoint you. I believe LLMs are software. Vector databases queried with tokens. “Reasoning?” More of the same. And that’s all I believe about AI. It’s an artifact of humans, perceived by humans.

Of course when people talk about AI, they’re not talking about vector database-backed chat-style APIs that take tokenized text and produce a stream of tokens in response. They’re talking about the content that was ingested without permission, the political propaganda and bots generated by ChatGPT, the students who turn in AI-generated essays, or the surprisingly good code that Claude is writing. “AI” is not just one big thing, but a set of intense, wild, overlapping reactions to a technology that humans created. As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to realize that I, too, can only see my little corner of the weird new world.

That said—the fact that so much culture, so much debate, and so many different, passionately held beliefs can spin out of a single vector database technology is why I love technology in the first place. No matter where people are on the spectrum of beliefs, most of them seem to agree: This matters. One day a team at Google is messing with neural networks and the next, we’re facing total societal collapse or nöospheric renewal, depending on whether you live in Brooklyn or Mountain View. I don’t know who’s right; I just have a hunch that we have to keep exploring this thing. If you think that’s a cop-out, that’s totally fair—and I empathize.