But, compared to LLMs, that’s good ol’ fashioned, wholesome machine learning: the user gets a useful functionality, potentially running locally.
It is unfortunate that these days, “AI” means “a bot I can talk to” for most people, while machine learning has a lot of areas, some of them are very robust and useful. In fact, some of them are so robust that they can be hidden entirely from the user.
Eliza reminds me of how everyday people use “AI” chat gpt gemini cortanapilot; Artificial Intelligence then means reliance on a synthetic oracle (oracle as in throwing random I Ching sticks). It’s a limited view on what the bots can do actually, and it’s the area at which the bots are not exactly doing great.
As a comment somewhere said - “I miss when AI meant the computer-controlled characters in video games”
@HIRAM Not sure if you meant to reply to me.
I don’t buy it either. I do all the thinking, studying and design. I use “AI” as a sparing partner because it is incredibly dim-witted and weird. 
It is a time-sink, but sometimes, I end up with something better than if I were to go about it alone. No, I do not have friends to do that with. 
There was original thought in your post and what I assume to be LLM output in an image. So, there is differentiation, though crawlers/bots might be able to read it.
Our primary concern is slop and irresponsible writing that would lower our standards and dis- or mis-inform the readership.
‘If Claude Code and its like become a generally used “super-Excel”, though, that might have quite unpredictable results. It’s a productivity boost at some points, but we might be forced to reconsider the aphorism that “speeding up output behind a bottleneck cannot increase overall productivity, although it can reduce it”.
I guess that the prediction problem then switches to something like – if the IT world of the future involves something like “trying to stuff 200 end user apps into a trenchcoat so they can pretend to be a system”, can other LLMs help with that? And the answer is … maybe?’
Brad DeLong’s take on Davies’s take:
‘Dan Davies has his finger on something important here. It is not, at root, about “AI”. It is about work. The spreadsheet first escaped from the finance department and colonised the world. “Serious” professionals had a simple rule: you could tinker in Excel for your own use, but anything real and public had to be rebuilt, checked, and owned by somebody. To transgress this was to make trouble for yourself: cf. Reinhart and Rogoff. “Excel-slop”—the undocumented workbook on a shared drive, with circular references, brittle links, and magic numbers—was what you produced if you did not expect to be accountable when things went wrong. People who wanted to do good work learned not to live that way. Davies’s point is that we are now replaying that history at higher speed and greater scale’