In the mid 90s there was a trope in French movies about new technology versus the old ways with an American villain pushing the technology, and then a French hero standing by tradition.

baby duck

Les Americains would be building a robot vineyard, threatening to put the old family farm out of business. Tired of the ducks pooping on the robots, the Americans would keep chasing them off their farm, and all the old villagers would shake their heads and say some old French saying like “At each farm, its duck!” which somehow has a deep meaning in French. Then the robots would start to catch fire due to snails crawling up into the motors, while on the traditional vineyard the duck eats the snails, and every so often they’d make an omelette with a duck egg, and all the old people would say, “Of course! At each week, the egg duck!” At the end of the movie a burning robot would go and burn down the delivery truck with all the robot wine in it and the regional wine festival would have to buy all the wine from the family farm, which would be saved; the banker threatening foreclosure lost everything investing in the robot farm and was arrested for fraud. The old ways of the soil would triumph, and the final scene would be a happy duck. Roll credits. I chalked it up to the French psyche longing for the 19th century in the face of the internet age.

Now we have companies pushing LLMs down the throats of their employees, generating a longing for the 20th century, and Tom Cruse is fighting AI in the new Mission Impossible. A boss saves ten hours a week using a chatbot, and fifty employees fear for their future. There will be an endless parade of articles showing data that AI is worse in every way, but senior management at the big corporations will still be putting AI growth in the quarterly goals.

Duck it.