Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

And you don't have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the "largest theft of labor in human history".

Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point... Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

Who benefits from this supposedly increased "productivity"? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

Now don't get me wrong... it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn't ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

"Open weights" is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

I can see how that's at least preferable to using some company's subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else's corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it's very much not as "open" or "local" as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it's not a whole lot different either way.

I think an ethical alternative to today's generative AI could exist--if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture--but I'm not seeing people invest any time in making that.

There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.

Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.

Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.

We've been using AI for decades and while generative AI is widely despised and mostly deserving of that despite, lumping all AI together while calling out the harms is doing a disservice to a lot of useful AI techniques and tools.

"Rapid Evolution" = recursing the same algorithm to juice ever diminishing returns out of the parlor trick at ever greater costs.

"Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions."

In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.

The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren't) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.

Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a "truth machine". A speaker I heard put it simply: "AI cheats." It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.

Its shit and I'll be glad when it gets flushed.

Currently, it's a skill amplifier. You can't code for shit and rely solely on it, it will give a shit product. You know how the whole codebase works and use it as needed? It will speed you up drastically while maintaining the quality you want.

Agents are a nightmare. They introduce a variable completely uncontrollable by you to your project, which will make you lose track of how everything works, resulting in a shit product.

I see its future on more optimized models that can run well locally on lower hardware, not those that use entire datacenters to power it. The big AI companies still do not generate profit and are doomed to fail in long term, but AI itself isn't going away.

The small help it gives does not equal the vast evil done to the environment, communities, and actual makers and creators.

Before asking what AI can do for you,

Ask how many kidneys do I need to sell, when my SSD fails?

Are humans, 3rd degree citizens on the internet now?

How many proof of work rounds do I need to keep my website from getting eaten by scrapers?

Are you a bot or am I?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but, IMHO, most of the problems I see being voiced by anti-AI (actually, anti-LLM) people, seem to have less (if anything) to do with the tech per se and more to do with capitalism's and corporations' usurpation of it.

I mean, if LLMs were something exclusively made and maintained by, say, a not-for-profit academia (as in a "Libre and Open Science" kind of academia where scientists are working for the entire Earth rather than working for profit/egoistic goals), like the Machine Learning field kind of already was back in the dawn of perceptrons, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be experiencing this whole dystopia, no?

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

It’s going to destroy human culture via homogenizing our arts and entertainment into a formless unappealing landscape of generic and easily digested slop.

People will stop bothering to learn music, writing, etc, because the idiot hacks in their school are able to create entire albums with absolutely no skill.

I mean… the data centers are already paying dividends to the lawmakers that enable their existence, and we’re rushing full-speed toward a computer industrialization of our environment that it cannot sustain.

Everything about it is going to be disastrous in the long run.

Broadly speaking, fuck AI

AI itself is not bad.

But the unregulated industry, breaking laws all the time, people in charge are literal super villains, mass surveillance, producing even more idiots that I have to depend and interact with, ....

Take it away, it is not doing anything we want it to actually do. I only want robots/computers for one thing, and that is to do chores around the house. It doesn't do that, so I am out.

it's sort of mixed.

overall i hate how it's being made, advertised, brainwashing people, used for fake images/propaganda, reducing signal to noise ratio with meaningless slop, environmental concerns etc.

OTOH there's some genuinely great things (imo) being made because of it. like people making drivers for long obsolete hardwares, reverse engineering proprietary blobs. maybe it isn't something very advanced technically but it's still something i find very interesting. most recently i saw someone got iOS 7 running on a HTC HD2 (leo), 17 years after that phone first released.

i still don't use llms yet other than short testing back a few years ago, but i might start using them soon. i really want to get volte working on my phone, i don't know how to reverse engineer the vendor's IMS implementation, and i've seen people with not much knowledge get it working on their phones with llm help.

maybe i'm justifying immoral things.. idk. something to think about.

I feel like it's making people dumber. I keep getting screenshots of Google ai summary from people as if that's the answer and they're confident in it. I keep finding those are not correct. For me, ai has created more work because I can no longer trust my colleagues statements.

First of all, it isn't going away. Stop telling yourself that lie. If you hate it, then compare it to herpes or mosquitoes. Not going away. People love to talk about sensational things like bubbles or how it will end humanity. Stop being hysterical. It is software. You don't have to use it, you don't have to like it, but be informed. Saying it will go away is about as ignorant as saying the internet is a fad and smartphones are on the edge of failing out of the market. You just sound like a Luddite.

In the end, it is a tool. It can be used for stupidity, waste and nonsense, or it can be used for something good.

You can use a hammer to build something or you can murder someone with it. Any tool can be misused.

It is terribly inefficient in its current form. It needs to be refined just like any other technology. We used to have cars that got single digit mpg. Now you can buy a cheap car that gets 30+, a hybrid that can crack 50 or straight electric. Like anything, it will improve over time.

Society did not revert to riding horses, we did not give up mobile phones for land lines and ai isn't going away. There is solid historical precedent to demonstrate this. You can be the old man yelling at the clouds, but it won't do anything but make you look silly.

On one side…

On the other…

I’m a shameless local LLM shill. I have one loaded right now, experimenting with it.

I also thought Sam Altman was a psychopath before that was the popular opinion, and have never subscribed to OpenAI or even used their free UIs. Not once. Not even the “original” GPT 3.5.

I don’t plan on ever doing it. I will rail against them.

In other words, the sides aren’t mutually exclusive.

One can hate “AI” with a burning passion, using the term AI pejoratively. And be passionate about local ML.

Let me try to use an analogy.

We're farmers in ancient times. A shaman tells us that we can increase our crop yields by taking a bunch of kittens and dismembering them alive in the fields. You try it and it actually works. I don't want to do it and I'm disappointed by your choice.

It works for basic tasks like correcting grammar, sorting lists, etc, but it makes too many mistakes when you try to use it for a complex task.

I think LLMs are going to cause massive change, not all of it good.

Ultimately, I'm an optimist. I think in the long run, LLMs are going to enable us to do amazing things that we wouldn't have been able to do without them. In the short term... I dunno. It's going to be a rough transition.

I do think the people who think LLMs are going to keep getting better, leading to either some sort of techno-utopia, or kill us all off maybe don't really understand how they work and what the implications are.

I also think the people who are categorically against AI are making a mistake out of fear, but that's pretty understandable.

everyone i work with that uses it to generate text has lost the ability or patience to read anything, even very light text written by a human.

at best they skim, but mostly they demand in-person conversations so they can be spoon fed the contents of the documentation.

gone are the days of "this meeting could've been an email" because they won't (or can't) read the email.

so yeah, i hate it but am required to use it for work. which makes me hate it more.

Currently? Frank Herbert

My opinion is well... I'm sure it may have some use, but I see it pushed in the dumbest and least useful ways. It is fundamentally incapable of creating art in any shape or form. Use it to summarise things? I don't trust it enough to correctly summarise the text. Use it to write/reply to emails? I'd myself just feel insulted if someone sent me a generated email. Why should I expect someone to read a text I didn't even bother to write?

It's like a calculator.

• it costs more than doing it yourself
• it seems faster
• it's accurate but you have to do it right and check the shit after
• it makes you stupid for the basics
• it robs kids of important fundamentals.
• it's pervasive. Soon it may be ubiquitous.

My niece can't make change for a dollar, nor multiply numbers above 12. She struggles with writing and reading, and I wonder at her reasoning skills. She's 27.

She's fine with a calculator and hard facts. But the "two trains leave on coursetl to pass each other" kind of "make math from description" part that exercises the brain's ability to select the right equation and use it? Not great.

We'll be like this, but with building digital things. Our BEST hope is to become the fat and lazy pampered pets of the robots like in WALL-E. The alternative is a little too Matrix for me.

Well, some dude on youtube said the future is Cyberpunk 2077, and I'm inclined to believe him because he had a lot of likes.

I don't really use it personally (other than times I log in on a work computer, look something up, and Google's AI search defaults). But I also don't really condemn it as strongly as others seem to, I guess. It depends on how it's used.

When it's used to take work done by humans, then regurgitate its own version of that work to replace those jobs, that's a problem. If actual artists, writers, designers, engineers, coders, etc. can no longer earn a living after being replaced by AI, we run the risk of complete cultural and developmental stagnation.

But I think my main point of disagreement with a lot of the AI conversations happening here revolves around how we look at waste and environmental impact. Not in the sense that AI isn't still a problem in those aspects, but that it seems like a very convenient boogeyman for people to blame while ignoring the myriad other wasteful aspects of the world we live in.

Basically, with the environmental impact of data centers and energy costs of hardware in general, why do we focus so much on what that compute is used for, as opposed to addressing those issues in a more comprehensive sense? Does it matter if a data center is built for AI or for any other hosting provider? Or if someone runs a local AI model on their PC, is that any more detrimental to the environment than someone who plays video games for several hours each day?

I feel like there are lines that people who claim to primarily care about the environment are afraid to draw, when it's easier to pin the blame wholly on AI. So if someone says that they used AI to help make their spreadsheets cleaner, to translate a website, or to summarize the content of a book, I don't really jump straight to blanket criticism. Otherwise I'd have to take the same criticism towards people who host a plex server, who play MMOs, or who run Lemmy instances.

My take: Run what you want on your own damn hardware. If you feel the need to make it a 'service' in order to run it, think very carefully about WAY more than just the money it will cost you to do so. If you feel the need to take a massive IOU to buy the hardware or LAND to put that hardware, go die in a hole. If you feel the need to reserve the world's entire manufacturing supply for hardware to put on the land you put out an IOU for, I sincerely hope that you get a pineapple up the ass as you're getting beheaded in whatever town square.

If we're really, really lucky, the crash might take a few more industries with it, which could buy us a bit more time with regards to the climate collapse. If we're rather unlucky, it's just mindlessly accelerating suffering.

When you realize it's just a big average sentence machine starts to make a lot more sense when and where to use it. I think it should be used as an exact problem solver not a general one. Government regulations can't come soon enough because unlike previous tech this one has the ability to deceive and if it gets access to resources we will be in direct competition with the AI.

Sources for a good chunk of my view points: Spanish prime Minister wondering why AI not treated like nuclear tech at a global level interview with him https://youtu.be/p6XvTconhwQ

AI panel debate, Nate soares and Roman Yampolskiy stand out on this discussion about the inevitable risks we are walking towards with very little action. https://youtu.be/OhOmLqR5nN4

It has its uses. Generative stuff is ok **as long as ** you keep it to yourself. Its sometimes easier to ask llm for explanation on some obscure thing / to take a look at what information on system logs could mean. Its neat gatget. Kind of on par with some kind of useful tool but too unreliable to be of real use. And even if its useful to some, the cost and looming threats are not worth getting on the bandwagon (environment, if its successfull you wont be able to afford it, if its not capabilities will be reduced greatly if not completely and its not much use for you then). And most of all, if its as successfull as they want to sell to investors; have fun being unemployed and looking for job with other couple billion people as once the rich get theirs you wont get yours.

Other people who lose their minds because of it are the problem imo, though ones that do shouldnt have been on anykind of position that matters in the first place.

I can see that there is some value in using AI in the workplace, but I am hestitant to use it myself until someone can show that it is not damaging the environment, we have a plan for how to ensure people can use it in a healthy way, and that the content which was used to train it was ethically sourced and/or those content makers were appropriately compensated.

Because I just can't shake the sense that the tool is fundamentally unethical to use currently.

I have bigger things to worry about. Like affording food and all my bills.

LLMs were fascinating and I very rarely use one if I can't find information online for the life of me.

I hate what OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok etc are doing to get the training data. Whatever I put only is likely scanned and gobbled up by some AI Agent. I am an Artist. Uploading art has always been uncomfortable to me, now with scraping I truly hate it. i am glad there are services like Glaze and Nightshade, but there are some shitheads working on cracking these. I worry about missing legislation. I worry about the security breaches. I am not sure if they are mere marketing, but regardless, it shows how capable AI Agents are, and how much damage they can cause.

It has uses but not to the extent its hawked for. Its overused which is using to much power and driving up computer component prices. I would like to see more work with an os flavor that comes with a os optimized to assist with the os and allow for os addons. I envision specialized ais so like you would have a butler type os that is mainly about communicating with the user and then there would be various specialized ais the butler would speak with and you add them as needed. I hope these can be massively optimized and hardware can be made to more efficiently use them such that typical computer use uses no more power than what a typical laptop does that can do gaming.

AGI doesn't exist and is not being developed, but the idiots with all the money and power believe it is. Their stupidity and insistence on feeding all our resources to this stuff is gonna kill us all.

I refuse to use AI as a tool for anything other than making tools.

I can't write LISP but I use AutoCAD. I use an LLM to write LISP routines.

I spent MONTHS looking for a way to catalog my plant collection. Tried a dozen open source projects and none did what I wanted it to do. So I used Claude to make a simple database website....and it was able to add a ton of pipe dream features.

Nothing I make is for sale and I don't claim it as my own. They're tools for ME to use. And the important part is that once the tool is done, the LLM gets closed.

I've been doing scientific software development for 20 years, and here's my personal experience:

• Software development as it had been is already over due to AI. There's no reason to write code yourself anymore in 99% of cases. Even highly technical stuff (GPU algorithms, for example) are no problem for the AI.

• Scientific work is very different than it used to be. The AI doesn't have the initiative to just do it for you yet the way it can with writing software, but it's an expert in every field so it provides an excellent foundation for your own novel ideas and it can often suggest new ideas from fields you aren't personally knowledgeable about.

• Socializing is going to be very different soon. Right now the AI is already more interesting to talk to than most humans, but talking to it doesn't feel like talking to a human and doesn't satisfy the need for interpersonal interaction. I expect that to change. (I suspect that the current absence of a human-like AI is more because developing it is not good business than because it's technically difficult.)

• A lot of AI critics have objectively false ideas of how well AI works. I think they either haven't tried cutting-edge models recently or they have deliberately tried to make those models fail. You can break most things if you try; that doesn't mean they don't work well.

As I type this, an AI is working on a tricky problem in molecular dynamics for me. It has already found and fixed issues with the algorithm that my co-worker spent a month on, but it thinks that a different algorithm it came up with can do even better. After coming up with the idea, it's independently implementing it, unit testing it, running simulations with it, and doing statistical analysis of those simulation results. If it gets errors, it can debug them on its own. If the results aren't as good as it expected, it can iterate over different variants on its own. If the algorithm ends up not working, it can reason about why, from a scientific perspective. What the AI does in hours would have taken me weeks if I came up with the idea, which I didn't.

Right now human experts can still do what AI does, just slower. I expect that in less than 5 years, that will probably no longer be true. Predicting the future after that point is nearly impossible. Will we all die? Maybe.

I think that LLMs are very useful for specific tasks, but they're being pushed as if they're useful for almost everything.

I also have huge ethical concerns over LLM-peddlers' treatment of the environment.

I'm alarmed by some people's susceptibility to falling for obvious slop and worried about what will happen if and when the slop gets less obvious.

I'm frustrated with many people who share those concerns conflating LLMs with the general concept of intelligence that is artificial.

We have it at work.

I'm not going to lie, it has made my job a lot easier. My fear is it'll make me stupid so I do most of my work myself and then get the LLM to tweak it.

As an example, I've had to create a number of policies and procedures.

I've done the content, the LLM has done all the formatting etc. Something that would have taken me several hours to do. I'd prefer an assistant to do it for me but thats not gonna happen.

I spent my life as a researcher in the ML space (now called AI) because I didn't want people to have to deal with the same hardships I did. I saw the incredible strides we made in search and creative tooling. Nobody else will have to spend days rotoscoping a character. We will be able to find any picture just by searching for a blurry, low resolution one.

But it's turning into a system that is used to funnel money from the most vulnerable population into the coffers of the wealthy. Instead of equalizing, it's exacerbating inequality.

As I see it, a model trained on pubic data should be a public good. You can charge people at cost for inference and training, but unless you provided the data you're obligated to give the weights back.

There's a lot of hostility to AI and I think a lot of it is ill informed or ignorant. People are opposed to data centers, but they're focused on the "AI" part, when in reality said data centers use less water than laws and serve more than just AI. They give you Nerflix and search results and YouTube. (Not to say it's never an issue, just that there's more nuance. Water constrained areas are not a good place for data centers.) I'm personally more opposed to data centers because it prevents me from owning my own hardware. I want to buy a thing and use it as I desire. I don't want to pay a subscription fee to use my own computer.

There are a host of other objections, but I'll leave it here for now. There are a lot of good reasons for hating LLMs, but mostly people jump on the bandwagon and hate them for stupid or inaccurate reasons, preventing us from having productive conversations.

I think LLMs are useful for some things, but not as useful as people think overall.

I suspect the major LLMs will follow the enshittification trend, prices will go up, and people will abandon them for smaller open weight models

If you locally host it, I think it's fine.

It's a tool, much like when Google Search first started. LLMs can find things standard ways of doing research cannot. AlphaFold is a useful tool for protein modelling and experimental design, but everything it generates needs validation.

If you have a large dataset you can train to predict things not in the database. But again, everything generated needs to be validated.

"Generative AI" is a bullshit scam with no future. The sooner it dies, the better. And to call the bubble "unsustainable" is to understate.

"AI" is way too vague a term to give a "take" on.

Just like the damage to our environment, AI is out of control and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I’ve used it to great effect on personal projects so, also like the environment, I’m part of the problem.

• How come the most memory-inefficient ML model we have ended up being the most powerful one. Can we rewrite the universe so modern advanced AI is based on network inference or ensemble models or sth
• How come AI has taken over the economy, and it doesn't seem like a bubble (or at least not the crypto type of bubble)
• I'm a bit surprised that the most predominant use of AI/LLM seem to be... as a search engine wrapper. Thankfully ChatGPT is getting better at it, their default model has a built-in search engine integration now. This is kind of important since the company is getting big enough that their model bears social responsibilities...
• I have an asshole-ish work environment where the head honchos only cares about professionalism and efficiency... so I have no shame using AI for work. They don't deserve my best tbh
• In terms of actual usage for my work, AI outputs can be anywhere from very good to very bad in an instant, and sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart...
• It's surprisingly helpful as a primer to help me with things I'm not good at; researching niche information, finding resources
• For personal usage, I'm still hoping that there is a way to work AI into some type of a home automation loop... I haven't found that sweet spot yet. Maybe it's just my lack of skill at the moment. Hopefully I can hook together some shitty models with search engine skills (on my own SearXNG) as a semi-useful agent

Despite the apparent speed of advances, AI is a technology that is still in its childhood. It's as if tech companies found a way to create a 6-year-old out of GPUs and way too goddamn much electricity. If you can overlook the resource usage required, that's kind of cool.

The problem is that those same tech companies (and some governments) have decided that they all need their own synthetically created 6-year-old and that they should give it unlimited funding and the ability to make life-changing decisions for everyone else, and anyone who isn't jumping at the chance to have their life overseen by a machine-generated child with poor impulse control and a propensity to hallucinate is just "getting in the way of progress".

I didn't start using AI (the LLM kind) until this year.

I use AltTexty.org sometimes for making alt-text of images that are text dense.

Aside from that, I use a chatbot (copilot at work, Kagi at home) for some information retrieval, mostly on things related to programming, but I don't use it to "vibe" code. Like I'll ask it for general programming examples, and to compile reference manuals on the basics of this or that programming language that I'm learning, and to help out with error messages that have me stumped, but I don't have it generate whole programs for me (I did that once, felt gross, then asked it to teach me how it works in the form of a tutorial; I didn't use the program until I felt like I understood it).

Edit: Regarding my view of AI, I'm pretty conflicted. I'm trying to use it just as a reference tool to help me learn, and not a replacement for thinking and creativity. I think that's what I'm doing with it? But maybe I'm deluding myself.

I hate the environmental impacts though from what I've read it's image and video generation which are the energy hogs and I never use it for those. In any case I intend to try local LLM for my narrow use cases once I learn how.

You are not going to get a general pulse here. This is a fuck ai echo chamber. I am not saying that the sentiment is wrong, but it isn’t representative of the general public.