"Fuck AI" includes Endstep

Look, I don’t blame you for being excited by the prospect of not having to use MTGO anymore. Magic: the Gathering Online is not exactly a quality program. But Endstep is slop.

Every output of generative AI is slop. It is not the product of human understanding, but of a statistical process that aims to produce something that’s likely to follow what what provided as a prompt.

Just about everyone agrees that generative AI sucks, at least when used in the fields that are traditionally considered artistic. The models are trained on stolen work, they are used to devalue the labor of real artists, and what they spit out generally looks like shit. But people don’t seem to recognize that all the well-documented harms of generative AI (environmental, psychological, social and political) apply just as much to the field of programming.

Computer programming is a social and creative endeavor, in the same way that other artistic practices are. Understanding not just what a program does, why is it written the way it is, and how it should be maintained and extended in the future -- this requires a human who is aware of the context in which they’re working, and who has a coherent theory of what the program should be. Stochastic models can only draw upon their training data to generate their output; they do not "understand" in any sense of the word, and cannot foresee problems and opportunities that human can.

It’s true enough that contemporary LLMs (large language models) can often produce more-or-less functional code (given enough prompting and tokens). But the use of LLMs in code generation exerts a consistent pressure towards an increasingly hands-off development approach, and a gradual slide towards software that cannot be understood by human reviewers, and which eventually becomes unmaintainable. The fact that LLM-produced code is difficult to understand and modify encourages the production of "single-use software" (generated to satisfy a particular want, then thrown away), which has become such a problem that Codeberg cited it as one of their reasons for restricting LLM-generated code. I don’t expect Endstep to be around for the long haul.

If the above all sounds a bit inside-baseball, then consider: by using software generated by LLMs, you are supporting and legitimizing the companies selling them. These companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, etc.):

• are accelerating climate change through their massive increase in data center construction;
• exploit workers to organize and label their (stolen) training data;
• are actual military contractors complicit in genocide and other war crimes;
• are literally killing people with their products

There’s no avoiding some complicity in cruelty and violence, simply by living in society. But that’s no reason to simply give up and uncritically adopt these technologies, which are both unnecessary and profoundly destructive.

MTGO sucks, but it could be a lot worse.

ty to Aria for comments on an earlier draft