I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI
The article discusses the potential for individuals to fool themselves into believing that AI tools are making them more productive, when in fact there is no independent scientific evidence to support this claim. The author argues that personal testimonies and anecdotes are not reliable measures of productivity, and that the true cost of AI tools may be higher than users realize. The article also touches on the potential negative externalities of AI, including energy usage, disruption of communities, and theft of intellectual property.
- ▪There is no independent scientific evidence to support the claim that AI tools make people more productive.
- ▪A study found that developers who used AI tools were actually 19% slower than those who did not.
- ▪The true cost of AI tools may be higher than users realize, with some subscriptions potentially costing thousands of dollars per month.
- ▪The author is skeptical of AI due to its potential negative externalities, including energy usage and disruption of communities.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Louwrentius |
| Canonical URL | https://louwrentius.com/i-think-you-might-be-fooling-yourself-with-ai.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:05:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-23T14:14:18.643Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-23T14:14:18.643Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zj_GyPsxiDQ6 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
If you are enthusiastic about AI (LLMs), you may be fooling yourself. Do not consider this an insult, but a kind-hearted warning. Remember what Richard Feynman said: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. source (backup) He made this statement as part of the Caltech's 1974 commencement address. In this speech he strongly advocated for proper scientific integrity. I feel it can be difficult to maintain proper 'scientific integrity' on a personal level as AI is a fast-moving target. The tools feel unreasonably capable, using an LLM makes you feel more productive when writing code for instance.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Louwrentius.
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