{Mis/Dis}information; Maintenance Debt

1st up, Gary Marcus links to 2 articles, the 2nd a piece in The Atlantic which he co-wrote, excerpt below.

The (possibly) coming AI backlash and information warfare

Current AI] systems are patient, amoral, and fantastic at mimicry, making them among the greatest tools in history for generating mis- and disinformation—the latter of which is a tremendous weapon, not necessarily for its ability to persuade and convince, but for its ability to sow chaos. This, rather than some intelligence breakthrough, may well be the legacy of generative AI.

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Cory Doctorow's post today is so spot on. Is there anything this guy doesn't get?

Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026)

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

...

Code is a liability. Code's capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running.

I ran software development shops for decades.

1. Writing code fast is great. But, the most important things about code are readability & maintainability. Doctorow mentions that it's maybe OK to cut corners for a 1-off (throw-away code), but, you'd be surprised how often you come back to something like that - and it is really nice if you can read the code.

2. Whenever we were discussing a new product, module, feature, etc., we always talked about the "Maintenance Debt". Doctorow nails this, code is indeed a liability. When you ship code, there is an implicit commitment to the people you ship it to that it will stay running, despite the world changing around & under it. This is the Maintenance Debt.

LLM-generated code is just another modality of AI slop. Maybe OK for prototypes or demos, but nothing you want underpinning a real world software product.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #80.