Pennywise's red balloon

It's certainly not easy to speak and write uncritically about a tool one uses, especially when this use goes beyond the everyday and becomes an active part of your work and private life.

I also believe that reflecting, every now and then, on what one is doing and how it is necessary, especially in a professional context. Over time, I'd say over months, this has led me to solidify a thought that I would say was born almost like an epiphany, at a moment completely unrelated and far from the context it was intended for.

The thought is simple, direct, a bit pop and certainly very nerdy, but I believe it summarizes in a few words a multitude of doubts and fears that accompany the quintessential technological tool of the moment: AI primarily in its forms most accessible to many, such as chatbots, LLMs, agents, etc.

AIs are Pennywise's red balloon.

Without delving too much into Stephen King's story, I believe that balloon vividly and simply represents what modern Artificial Intelligence systems are, especially in their most direct and accessible form, namely LLM (Large Language Model)-based chatbots, particularly when used and applied in specific IT-related fields such as system design and administration (SysOps and SysAdmins) or software design and development (DevOps).

We are faced with a versatile, powerful, and lightning-fast tool in providing us with answers; increasingly widely used, as well as almost compulsively queried to provide us with answers we already know but for which we desire confirmation and validation.