Large Chainsaw Model

As I write this article, a mélange of artificial intelligence companies provide language models to produce and consume written content: OpenAI’s GPT/ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, Meta AI’s Llama, Google DeepMind’s Gemini, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen, Mistral AI’s series of “’tral” models, and even IBM Watson is still kicking. The industry is booming to such an extent that the revenue from registrations under the .ai top-level domain constitutes 10% of the gross domestic product of the territory of Anguilla.

However, I’m not writing about AI companies. Not directly, anyway. Today we’re talking about chainsaws.

The idea of a saw constructed from a flexible series of links dates back to at least the 1780s, where such contraptions were used to cut through bone and cartilage during surgical procedures. It took another hundred years for somebody to have the idea that maybe this kind of saw should be patented for wood-cutting purposes. By the late 1920s, gasoline power saws resembling the modern chainsaw began mass-production, and by the end of World War II their engines were small and reliable enough to be handled comfortably by a solo operator. This was the real beginning of the chainsaw’s rise.

In the 80 years since its introduction, the modern chainsaw has become the tool of choice for anyone working with trees. From landscapers and arborists doing tree trimming or surgery, to loggers and foresters cutting down forests to cultivate land or mitigate wildfires, it would be difficult if not impossible to find a worker who feels that their job would be done better, faster, or cheaper by switching back to hand-operated tools.

The chainsaw takes seconds to perform a cut that would take minutes (or longer) with a hand saw or an axe. Material can be cut in a tenth—perhaps even a hundredth—of the amount of time a traditional hand saw would take. A well-maintained and sensibly-operated chainsaw does not get tired or require extensive recuperation periods after exertion. It’s compact, relatively lightweight, can be operated effectively in cramped situations, and it produces a remarkably smooth cut considering how quickly it knocks the material away. Chainsaws can fell a towering redwood or trim a single diseased limb from the oak in somebody’s front yard. It is, in all sincerity, I mean this. If we ever uncover the remains of some ancient alien civilization and find their equivalent of a chainsaw, we’ll know just how advanced they were. an elegant manifestation of humankind’s ingenuity and a testament to what we as a species are capable of.

There’s a thesis in here, I promise

With all that said, I personally would not trust 90% of the general population to operate a chainsaw safely.

To be absolutely clear, I am not suggesting that huge swaths of people lack the intelligence to wield a chainsaw. I believe that most adults are capable of using a chainsaw well as long as they are given adequate training with some amount of supervised experience. The STIHL Chain Saw Safety Manual is a 38-page PDF which, by my count, has “warning” triangles on 27 of the pages. At one point it even states flatly, “If you are inexperienced with a chain saw, plunge-cutting should not be attempted. Seek the help of a professional.” Most people, however, do not possess this knowledge by default simply because they never needed to. If a person doesn’t have a yard with difficult trees they must maintain themselves, why would they own a chainsaw? And since that person doesn’t own chainsaw or have ready access to one, why would they learn anything about the subject?

And yet plenty of people do have some task that needs doing, acquire a chainsaw, and never bother reading the instructions. Sealed in a plastic bag along with the warranty card and the California Proposition 65 statement and the mini-brochure of other exciting accessories available from their local dealer, there sits a cache of warnings that will go unheeded. Somehow these users have succeeded in not becoming immediately disfigured or dead. This is partially due to another property of the chainsaw: As dangerous as it is capable of being, it’s actually fairly intuitive.

To use a dog metaphor, a chainsaw tends to growl before it bites. It lets the operator know that they are pressing too hard, cutting through unsuitable material, using a damaged/dull chain, or pinching the blade in the kerf. This is one of those concepts that you probably ought to know if you’re using a chainsaw. By remaining observant of the saw’s signals and reacting accordingly, an operator can keep themselves out of many potentially hazardous situations. With the possible exception of accidents that occur due to lightning-fast reactive kickback, most misuse gives at least some amount of warning before catastrophe strikes.

As thorough as the warnings in the chainsaw safety manual are, they still assume a baseline amount of common sense on the operator’s part. The instructions don’t specifically state that a chainsaw should not be used to prune gardenias or cut grass, Of course, this being the internet, it’s not hard to find examples of people who have. nor would a reasonable person think it would be the best tool for either of those jobs.

There exists no tool that is perfect for all tasks. There are always some tools that are better suited to a particular job than others, and it is the mark of a true professional to know the time and place for each. The chainsaw is a poor fit for, say, ripping down a sheet of plywood for that new shed dormer you’re trying to add onto the house. A chainsaw shouldn’t be used to dig a trench for an irrigation line. It will not satisfactorily trim mustaches, beards, or sideburns.

Cuts both ways

While extremely valuable to the folks who rely on them, chainsaws do have some pretty stark drawbacks. As alluded to earlier, they can be extremely dangerous if not treated with care and respect. Most of them use gasoline for fuel and have engines that are not nearly as clean-burning as their automotive cousins, resulting in very real environmental and pollution concerns. While there have been electric varieties available for some time, gasoline chainsaws maintain their market share dominance in professional settings due to their higher power and ease of refueling in remote locations. They’re also noisy as hell, to the point where—if you listen hard enough to the sounds carried on the afternoon breeze through an American suburb—it seems like one can always detect the faint drone of some jerkass who fancies himself a lumberjack cutting down all the trees on his property. Second perhaps only to the leaf blower, the chainsaw is the bane of anybody who appreciates nature’s quiet serenity.

The chainsaw is a rather conspicuous thing. It’s hard to conceal the fact that you’re operating one. Strangers and passers-by tend to pick up on that. It’s one thing to have a road crew roll through to trim tree branches away from the utility poles, but it’s quite another to have a neighbor who’s toiling in the yard, weekend after weekend, chainsawing some damn thing or another. That kind of oblivious behavior can lead to some unflattering nicknames from the neighbors. A fair number of them coined by my parents during my childhood, now that I think about it. You probably don’t want your reputation or public image to be tied principally to chainsaws—unless you were some kind of professional arborist or small engine mechanic, in those cases you’d call that a brand strategy!

If you dabble in chainsaws, then you dabble. There is no need to do anything more to justify owning something that you only use occasionally and for specific situations. It is not your identity, and you don’t have to feel guilty that you haven’t perfected a technique for opening envelopes using your chainsaw. It’s perfectly fine to only pull it out when it’s time to cut some firewood, and maybe once a year to carve the Thanksgiving turkey.

Oh, right. AI.

Most of us are not arborists, lumberjacks, foresters, landscapers, or DIYers that would need to cut trees with enough frequency that owning a chainsaw makes any rational sense. If you handed a chainsaw to most of us, we’d either immediately hurt ourselves or go searching for some problem to invent that we could solve using the chainsaw, eventually hurting ourselves in the process. I’d like to think most of us would have the good sense to refuse to accept one in the first place, but maybe that’s wishful thinking.

As it turns out, this is an article about AI.

Language models are capable of producing and digesting substantial volumes of text. More text than any single person should ever be expected to handle in the course of a lifetime. Compared to the speed at which a human can read and write, these models are the linguistic equivalent of a chainsaw. It’s much the same with computer vision, and generative algorithms producing videos and images of events that never occurred and things that don’t exist.

It’s my belief that, in our current artificial intelligence boom’s haste to grab as much business as possible, we are essentially handing out chainsaws to unqualified and inexperienced people who don’t appreciate the responsibility entrusted to them, and who probably don’t require such power in the first place. And that is not the consumers’ fault—this is all on the companies that are pushing it into their laps.

Some would say that, compared to the tangible hazards of losing a bodily extremity or dropping a pine trunk through the bedroom ceiling, misuse of AI by irresponsible or malicious actors sounds downright genteel. But think about how quickly memes and misinformation flow through social media and the larger internet. Whoever first used the word “viral” to describe such spread, they hit that nail right on the head. Social media craves that stuff, and AI provides the almost effortless ability to produce unlimited quantities of exactly what it desires. And the reward for the creator, as much as the users of an AI product can be called the “creator” of that content, is a shower of likes, reposts, updoots, badges, and the tiny dribble of dopamine brought by those things. Thus the system perpetuates itself.

Unlike the venerable chainsaw, AI doesn’t give any indication that it is being misused. It doesn’t growl, shake, kick, or protest. It doesn’t even give a useful indication that “hey this result might be completely useless hogwash, I dunno.” The user doesn’t get to see what happens inside, or know precisely where the information originally came from, or evaluate how the model may have compromised reality to produce an output that looked plausibly like something a human would accept. It just hums along quietly, churning out line after line of approximately whatever it believed was asked of it.

From an interpersonal perspective, some folks are still not exactly enamored by the unavoidable intrusion of AI into daily life. These skeptics encounter content that was quite obviously generated by AI and immediately dismiss it (and everything accompanying it) as something not worth consuming. Much like Chainsaw Charlie ruining the atmosphere of an entire cul-de-sac with his two-stroke concerto, these AI “creators” are viewed as polluters who fill their shared communities with nonsense that nobody aside from them wants to see or engage with. This is similar to the so-called “ugly baby syndrome”—the tendency for parents of a newborn to think their child is beautiful even though most strangers would very much disagree. It might not be an easy pill to swallow, but proudly showcasing something that you “created” with AI is not viewed favorably by certain people—perhaps a great many people.

And here’s something else: Public goodwill is not some limitless resource that can be infinitely replenished. If we all keep pushing AI services that aren’t very smart, producing content that isn’t very good, conditioning people that AI is some dumb party trick that is going to clutter their screen and waste their time, eventually they will lose their willingness to engage any further with a future version of the technology. And that could be a real shame, because a future version of the technology might actually be good at helping an average person effectively do average-person things.

Imagine you had never seen a chainsaw in operation, and were only vaguely aware of what they were used for. One day your coworker Shannon comes in and proclaims that her brand new chainsaw will revolutionize the Human Resources department’s workflow. She then spends the next four months running it at wide-open throttle, trying fruitlessly to shred decades of old HR forms. Day after day, week after week, in the middle of your reverberant open floor plan office. I doubt you’d ever want to be anywhere near a chainsaw again after that. And that is unfortunate, because a chainsaw is an incredibly useful tool in the right hands. It just happens that Shannon used it like an idiot and turned others off to the concept.

As absurd as that allegory might be, this is actually what is happening right now in the public sphere. Search engines attempt to answer queries using AI before presenting the real results, social sites are trying to summarize the content of threads, Do the social sites not realize that they’re stripping away all the jokes and A-game trolling when they do that? That’s half the reason why I read the threads! and every day it seems like there’s another text input field on a website that desperately wants to try to express some thought or opinion on our behalf. I have known people who, over the course of the year in which an AI tool was made available to them, seemed to completely lose the ability to write anything without the tool’s involvement. Another former acquaintance of mine would use services to summarize the content of practically every web page he opened, which is a nifty way to lose a whole bunch of nuance. And also a way to lose reading comprehension skills, I would have to think. Anyway, I’m sure whichever document summarizer he’s using to read this page has stripped this margin note out. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da I suppose.

And back to the central premise: Why? We’re all mostly just regular people interacting with other regular people, trying to go about our business and get through our days. Nobody’s asking us to index and catalog entire libraries of information. Nobody really cares if we reuse a stock photo that somebody else might have used somewhere else at some point. We’re not so busy that we need everything predigested before it’s presented to us. We’re still clever enough to work our way through unfamiliar problems. Some of us, I would have to think, still possess the ability and the desire to produce some sort of output in our chosen medium without relinquishing creative control to AI.

The vast majority of us do not spend our days cutting down trees. For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many of us are going through life swinging chainsaws at each other.

An epilogue

I don’t usually write about my writing process, as I never really thought it was interesting or relevant to anybody. I feel that, in this case, it’s worthwhile on at least a high level. This article started as so many often do, with me muttering to myself during a brisk morning walk. I thought maybe I had something worth running with, so I stubbed out an outline. Over the course of a few walks, I narrowed down the major beats I wanted to hit, revising the outline each morning. Finally I sat down and knocked the bulk of the text out over the course of an afternoon.

There were parts I certainly didn’t enjoy. That opening paragraph, containing all the company links and product names, was a slog. Upon completing it, I found a certain perverse joy in the realization that I would never have to research that again. Perhaps that is the exact sort of thing that would’ve been suitable to farm out to AI—the part that dragged me down and made me unhappy.

The thing is, forcing myself to write that led me across dozens of web pages and a couple of Wikipedia articles. I read some background about Watson’s win on Jeopardy! in 2011, pondered the Chinese room argument, saw a thumbnail of a surgical procedure that I rather wish I could unsee, and overall spent a disproportionate amount of time putting off writing a two-sentence paragraph. And you know, I really wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, because taking the AI road would’ve kept me from tugging on those threads and wandering off on those tangents. I’m glad that doing this gave me a reason to be curious about something, if only for a little while.

Like everything else on this site, this article was produced without involving any AI. I bucked this log the old fashioned way. Maybe the job has left me a little worn out, but I’m sure I’ll be fine again tomorrow.