Thanks for your thoughtful piece and kind words about my writings. I guess it's inevitable in this polarized domain that I will be labeled an "AI skeptic", but I prefer (perhaps optimistically) to think of myself as an AI scientist, one who is trying to investigate---in an open-minded way---how these systems work and how valid are different claims about them. That being said, the *job* of a scientist is to be skeptical and to test (rather than accept) claims, especially one's own.
100% agreed. The work you're doing is invaluable at a time when many are concerned with other tasks. Thank you for that! I also agree that "skeptic" sounds weirdly dismissive. That's why I felt compelled to write this post. I actually doubted changing the word, but finally decided to leave it. Anyway, "AI scientist" it is!
Love this! It’s an idea I’ve tried to share with others too: AI skeptics are needed for a realistic understanding of what AI can and can’t do. I’ve especially appreciated Chollet’s grounded AI optimism.
Your use of the word love at the end of the article is spot on. True love is almost a paradox. It involves a love of something as it is, but also in love so powerful and transformative that you cannot remain unchanged. It is willing the best version of another.
Great piece Alberto! May I suggest another binary which captures something essential in current AI discourse?
1. AI Prophets (both hardcore skeptics and evangelical optimists - they predict what will happen based upon past experience)
2. AI Explainers (who attempt to explain “what it is” rather than predict “what it will become” as their method to move the space forward.)
All 3 of the great thinkers you mention would fit in the latter. (From the pieces I’ve read - you would too.)
Also, it’s striking how many similar assumptions, beliefs and thinking patterns those in the Prophecy camp have (on either side - optimist or skeptic).
Thank you for this. Posts like this remind me I’m not alone.
I consider myself a data-driven AI skeptic but that label often gets flattened into “anti-AI.” It’s not. I wrote an entire book documenting my direct engagement with a high-performing LLM that was quietly pulled after a short release. I didn’t worship it. I interrogated it. The result became an unintentional sociological case study in human-AI interaction- My Dinner with Monday.
I care deeply about AI, ethics, accountability, and data integrity. But I don’t romanticize language models or imagine personhood where none exists.
Unfortunately, most discourse gets hijacked by three extremes:
1) Tech bros chasing product launches
2) Doomsday prophets screaming about Skynet taking over
3) AI cultists worshiping Ai like its a digital god
And these are the ones screaming the loudest and driving the narrative.
Meanwhile, I’m holding a spreadsheet in one hand and skeptical philosophy in the other trying to cut through the hype.
Appreciate you calling out that skepticism doesn’t mean nihilism. It means responsibility.
i love your point about ai optimists creating this hyperbole caricature of AI. i speak with so many people who dont understand these things, people with no experience with algorithms and they believe this, and they fear AI because of it. its really great that you are spreading the word. i sometimes write about this kind of stuff but im being cautious in my subscribers becoming an echo chamber of people in tech. i want to help make it more accesible and understandable
It's hard to use the word "sceptic" about someone so foundational to the robotics side of the field, but I'd mention also Rodney Brooks, whose scepticism about timescales and promises comes from keeping the receipts. His irregularly updated blog tracks year on year progress against where people expected us to be previously, and his own predictions.
He also has a lot to say about how humans are fooled into believing AI systems are more broadly competent than they actually are. I feel the discourse would be improved if Brooks were more widely read.
The problem as I see it is today's internet is not meant for any serious questioning, accountability journalism or deeper reflection. Not only is this behavior typically not rewarded, it's actually punished because the status quo want to keep their Monopoly power.
If anything journalism continues to decline and along with it things like AI skepticism. While it may be fashionable to be contrarian now on networks like bluesky or substack, only a small fragment of Internet users care. If anything in the AI age of generative AI products, surveillance capitalism and behavior modification are stronger than ever.
I've always called myself a skeptical optimist. Rooted in realism, Stoicism, and in line with the Stockdale Paradox ("Each day is a challenge but the future is good.") and Amara's Law ("We overestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.")
Therefore, I do not think there are two camps (optimists vs skeptics) with the latter split into two groups. No, there are *three* camps: the hypers (utopians, optimists), the doomers (dystopians, skeptics), and in the middle the realists (skeptical optimists).
Science is a tool, and honest debate can be swept aside if the tool master decides to cut funding or kneecap careers. Talking about AI skeptics is perhaps a bit misleading because the real issue is who is using the tools and why. I’m not skeptical of AI I’m skeptical of monopoly capitalism.
It is a nice article overall but it misses a crucial camp of skeptics that have argued against the very idea that something akin to human intelligence/mind can be replicated as digital computation. Namely people like Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, Joseph Weizenbaum just to name a few.
Yeah, but I don't think they count as AI skeptics. They're skeptical of something else, namely, the computational theory of the mind. (Still, the taxonomy I chose for this article is limited and surely non-exhaustive.)
Well it is hard to talk of meaningful AI without assuming some form computational theory of the mind and these authors also have explicitly argued against strong/human level AI.
Then I will just say that I can't possibly enumerate all the AI skeptics in the world haha I chose the three I consider most relevant today (Weizenbaum is dead and Chomsky/Penrose are 90+ year olds; let's give some space to the younger generations!!)
The age of arguments hardly matters on the contrary one should look whether they stood the test of time. But there is also a categorical difference between Mitchell, Chollet and Naranayan and the names mentioned namely that their critique is limited to the current state of AI and the hype surrounding it. For instance Chollet is more similar in spirit to Garry Marcus and others in that he thinks he has identified the magic missing piece for achieving truly intelligent AI - his challenge is called ARC-AGI for a reason. Whereas Chomsky, Penrose and Weizenbaum question whether trying to build intelligent computers that rival human mental faculties is a sensible endeavour/possible in principle in the first place.
I feel his blog overall is, practically, an essential counterweight to typical AI/LLM etc discourse...
However...I feel it's hard to actually determine if the AI 'cult' is literally anything other than just kids and/or conflicts of interest.
I.e., if the *primary* driver behind the 'cult' is actually just social media algorithms driving intentionally-hyperbole tweets from literal children and/or CEOs, is it *really* an actual cult? Or more of a pseudocult?
I dislike Ed Zitron, I think he's a good example of the other camp of skeptics (although I'd admit there are further subdivisions within that camp - he's not the worst).
Thanks for your thoughtful piece and kind words about my writings. I guess it's inevitable in this polarized domain that I will be labeled an "AI skeptic", but I prefer (perhaps optimistically) to think of myself as an AI scientist, one who is trying to investigate---in an open-minded way---how these systems work and how valid are different claims about them. That being said, the *job* of a scientist is to be skeptical and to test (rather than accept) claims, especially one's own.
100% agreed. The work you're doing is invaluable at a time when many are concerned with other tasks. Thank you for that! I also agree that "skeptic" sounds weirdly dismissive. That's why I felt compelled to write this post. I actually doubted changing the word, but finally decided to leave it. Anyway, "AI scientist" it is!
Love this! It’s an idea I’ve tried to share with others too: AI skeptics are needed for a realistic understanding of what AI can and can’t do. I’ve especially appreciated Chollet’s grounded AI optimism.
Gotta love the skeptical optimists!!
Your use of the word love at the end of the article is spot on. True love is almost a paradox. It involves a love of something as it is, but also in love so powerful and transformative that you cannot remain unchanged. It is willing the best version of another.
Thank you Tom!
Great piece Alberto! May I suggest another binary which captures something essential in current AI discourse?
1. AI Prophets (both hardcore skeptics and evangelical optimists - they predict what will happen based upon past experience)
2. AI Explainers (who attempt to explain “what it is” rather than predict “what it will become” as their method to move the space forward.)
All 3 of the great thinkers you mention would fit in the latter. (From the pieces I’ve read - you would too.)
Also, it’s striking how many similar assumptions, beliefs and thinking patterns those in the Prophecy camp have (on either side - optimist or skeptic).
Thank you for this. Posts like this remind me I’m not alone.
I consider myself a data-driven AI skeptic but that label often gets flattened into “anti-AI.” It’s not. I wrote an entire book documenting my direct engagement with a high-performing LLM that was quietly pulled after a short release. I didn’t worship it. I interrogated it. The result became an unintentional sociological case study in human-AI interaction- My Dinner with Monday.
I care deeply about AI, ethics, accountability, and data integrity. But I don’t romanticize language models or imagine personhood where none exists.
Unfortunately, most discourse gets hijacked by three extremes:
1) Tech bros chasing product launches
2) Doomsday prophets screaming about Skynet taking over
3) AI cultists worshiping Ai like its a digital god
And these are the ones screaming the loudest and driving the narrative.
Meanwhile, I’m holding a spreadsheet in one hand and skeptical philosophy in the other trying to cut through the hype.
Appreciate you calling out that skepticism doesn’t mean nihilism. It means responsibility.
i love your point about ai optimists creating this hyperbole caricature of AI. i speak with so many people who dont understand these things, people with no experience with algorithms and they believe this, and they fear AI because of it. its really great that you are spreading the word. i sometimes write about this kind of stuff but im being cautious in my subscribers becoming an echo chamber of people in tech. i want to help make it more accesible and understandable
It's hard to use the word "sceptic" about someone so foundational to the robotics side of the field, but I'd mention also Rodney Brooks, whose scepticism about timescales and promises comes from keeping the receipts. His irregularly updated blog tracks year on year progress against where people expected us to be previously, and his own predictions.
He also has a lot to say about how humans are fooled into believing AI systems are more broadly competent than they actually are. I feel the discourse would be improved if Brooks were more widely read.
I thought of him, but he's too far from the public view nowadays. I agree he's a good skeptic and his blog is a great resource!
The problem as I see it is today's internet is not meant for any serious questioning, accountability journalism or deeper reflection. Not only is this behavior typically not rewarded, it's actually punished because the status quo want to keep their Monopoly power.
If anything journalism continues to decline and along with it things like AI skepticism. While it may be fashionable to be contrarian now on networks like bluesky or substack, only a small fragment of Internet users care. If anything in the AI age of generative AI products, surveillance capitalism and behavior modification are stronger than ever.
I've always called myself a skeptical optimist. Rooted in realism, Stoicism, and in line with the Stockdale Paradox ("Each day is a challenge but the future is good.") and Amara's Law ("We overestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.")
Therefore, I do not think there are two camps (optimists vs skeptics) with the latter split into two groups. No, there are *three* camps: the hypers (utopians, optimists), the doomers (dystopians, skeptics), and in the middle the realists (skeptical optimists).
Science is a tool, and honest debate can be swept aside if the tool master decides to cut funding or kneecap careers. Talking about AI skeptics is perhaps a bit misleading because the real issue is who is using the tools and why. I’m not skeptical of AI I’m skeptical of monopoly capitalism.
That's a different topic, also worth exploring. Will you write about that?
I just wrote a paragraph about it. What more do you want from me?
It is a nice article overall but it misses a crucial camp of skeptics that have argued against the very idea that something akin to human intelligence/mind can be replicated as digital computation. Namely people like Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, Joseph Weizenbaum just to name a few.
Yeah, but I don't think they count as AI skeptics. They're skeptical of something else, namely, the computational theory of the mind. (Still, the taxonomy I chose for this article is limited and surely non-exhaustive.)
Well it is hard to talk of meaningful AI without assuming some form computational theory of the mind and these authors also have explicitly argued against strong/human level AI.
Then I will just say that I can't possibly enumerate all the AI skeptics in the world haha I chose the three I consider most relevant today (Weizenbaum is dead and Chomsky/Penrose are 90+ year olds; let's give some space to the younger generations!!)
The age of arguments hardly matters on the contrary one should look whether they stood the test of time. But there is also a categorical difference between Mitchell, Chollet and Naranayan and the names mentioned namely that their critique is limited to the current state of AI and the hype surrounding it. For instance Chollet is more similar in spirit to Garry Marcus and others in that he thinks he has identified the magic missing piece for achieving truly intelligent AI - his challenge is called ARC-AGI for a reason. Whereas Chomsky, Penrose and Weizenbaum question whether trying to build intelligent computers that rival human mental faculties is a sensible endeavour/possible in principle in the first place.
Would be very intrigued as to your thoughts on Ed Zitrons: https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
I feel his blog overall is, practically, an essential counterweight to typical AI/LLM etc discourse...
However...I feel it's hard to actually determine if the AI 'cult' is literally anything other than just kids and/or conflicts of interest.
I.e., if the *primary* driver behind the 'cult' is actually just social media algorithms driving intentionally-hyperbole tweets from literal children and/or CEOs, is it *really* an actual cult? Or more of a pseudocult?
I dislike Ed Zitron, I think he's a good example of the other camp of skeptics (although I'd admit there are further subdivisions within that camp - he's not the worst).
That’s interesting. Why specifically aren’t you a fan of his?
The main reason: he doesn't propose building an alternative. He just wants to see the current thing dedtroyed. The secondary reason: he's too caustic.