June 7, 2025, 12:43 p.m.

What if AI were good?

Koos Looijesteijn's design newsletter

Until yesterday, I felt LLMs were getting enough hype already and the best thing for me was to experiment, see what it can do rather than what people say it can do.

Then I read that I am disappointed in the AI discourse article. Although I don’t agree with all the author’s views, I agree that the discourse around AI is disappointing. Nearly everything that reaches me falls into one of these categories:

  1. AI is the biggest invention since the iPhone, no, the printing press, and if you don’t use it, you’ll be out of a job/out of business next year.

  2. AI is destructive and you’re a bad person for using it.

  3. AI has no real use beyond being a pump and dump scheme for investors.

  4. Look, I have no skills, but I made me a cute looking self-portrait.

The funny thing is that the people who have no creative skills are usually those who ones claiming generative AI is going to change everything, while the creative people are, like “this is rubbish”.

As a creative person, I find the output of LLMs mostly rubbish. But, not surprisingly, I sometimes find it useful for things I’m not good at. I’m bad at writing German and at writing code in TypeScript. Sometimes I let an LLM check my writing or prompt it to write TypeScript for me.

But knowing that I lack the skills to assess the quality of the output, I know I can’t really trust the results. Especially with the coding stuff, the results are more often bad than good. The worst is when it’s not obviously bad. The code runs without errors, but it doesn’t do everything it's supposed to do. Or the German is correct, but awkward to native speakers.

I can see there’s use for LLMs for some applications. Lots of people are using them successfully. I believe some of them even for benevolent purposes beyond slop and lazy work e-mails.

At the same time, LLMs consume so much electricity and the associated CO₂ emissions are so big, that I’m convinced that some of you, dear readers, will actually die as a result of the climate disasters that this hype is causing. Not a hyperbole. We’re very close to reaching climate tipping points. The next 2–6 years are decisive. We should be putting all of our effort in reducing emissions.

So. What if AI were good? What if these LLMs worked slightly better, what would I need to actually be excited about them?

That's what my latest blog post is about!


From my blog

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You just read issue #25 of Koos Looijesteijn's design newsletter. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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