You must log in or # to comment.
I mean, it is objectively bad for life. Throwing away millions to billions of gallons of water all so you can get some dubious coding advice.
The currently hot LLM technology is very interesting and I believe it has legitimate use cases. If we develop them into tools that help assist work. (For example, I’m very intrigued by the stuff that’s happening in the accessibility field.)
I mostly have problem with the AI business. Ludicruous use cases (shoving AI into places where it has no business in). Sheer arrogance about the sociopolitics in general. Environmental impact. LLMs aren’t good enough for “real” work, but snake oil salesmen keep saying they can do that, and uncritical people keep falling for it.
And of course, the social impact was just not what we were ready for. “Move fast and break things” may be a good mantra for developing tech, but not for releasing stuff that has vast social impact.
I believe the AI business and the tech hype cycle is ultimately harming the field. Usually, AI technologies just got gradually developed and integrated to software where they served purpose. Now, it’s marred with controversy for decades to come.
Do you really need to have a list of why people are sick of LLM and Ai slop?
Ai is literally making people dumber:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/is_ai_changing_our_brains/
They are a massive privacy risk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyH7zoP-JOg&t=3015s
Are being used to push fascist ideologies into every aspect of the internet:
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/
And they are a massive environmental disaster:
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
Stop being a corporate apologist and stop wreaking the environment with this shit technology.
Edit: thank you to every Ai apologist outing themselves in the comments. Thank you for making blocking you easy.
Do you really need to have a list of why people are sick of LLM and Ai slop?
We don’t need a collection of random ‘AI bad’ articles because your entire premise is flawed.
In general, people are not ‘sick of LLM and Ai slop’. Real people, who are not chronically online, have fairly positive views of AI and public sentiment about AI is actually becoming more positive over time.
Here is Stanford’s report on the public opinion regarding AI (https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2024-ai-index-report/public-opinion).
Stop being a corporate apologist and stop wreaking the environment with this shit technology.
My dude, it sounds like you need to go out into the environment a bit more.
We don’t need a collection of random ‘AI bad’ articles because your entire premise is flawed.
god forbid you have evidence to support your premise. huh.
My dude, it sounds like you need to go out into the environment a bit more.
oh you have a spare ecosystem in the closet for when this one is entirely fucked huh? https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/nx-s1-5088134/elon-musk-ai-xai-supercomputer-memphis-pollution
stop acting like it’s a rumor. the problem is real, it’s already here, they’re already crashing to build the data centers - so what, we can get taylor swift grok porn? nothing in that graph supports your premise either.
That’s stanford graph is based on queries from 2022 and 2023 - it’s 2025 here in reality. Wake up. Times change.
That’s stanford graph is based on queries from 2022 and 2023 - it’s 2025 here in reality. Wake up. Times change
Objective polling shows attitudes about AI were improving. Do you have any actual evidence to support your implication that this is no longer the case?
Being self-righteous, rude and abrasive doesn’t mean you’re correct.
You disregard everyone else’s evidence but expect us to embrace your two year old data.
you disregard what mental health experts are saying this is doing to actual people.
You callously disregard the wellbeing of others for the benefit of aibros. Just because you’re ignoring the evidence doesn’t mean you’re correct numpty. Being willfully ignorant of the harms caused to the environment from this just tells me you’re profiting off of it, or a fanboy.
Gish gallop
You’re repeating debunked claims that are being pushed by tech giants to lobby for laws to monopolize AI control.
I’d rather read AI crap than this idiocy.
Are being used to push fascist ideologies into every aspect of the internet:
Everything can be used for that. If anything, I believe AI models are too restricted and tend not to argue on controversial subjects, which prevents you from learning anything. Censorship sucks
They are a massive privacy risk:
I do agree on this, but at this point everyone uses instagram, snapchat, discord and whatever to share their DMs which are probably being sniffed by the NSA and used by companies for profiling. People are never going to change.
Ai is literally making people dumber: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
We surveyed 319 knowledge workers who use GenAI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot) at work at least once per week, to model how they enact critical thinking when using GenAI tools, and how GenAI affects their perceived effort of thinking critically. Analysing 936 real-world GenAI tool use examples our participants shared, we find that knowledge workers engage in critical thinking primarily to ensure the quality of their work, e.g. by verifying outputs against external sources. Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort. When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking shifts from information gathering to information verification; from problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task execution to task stewardship. Knowledge workers face new challenges in critical thinking as they incorporate GenAI into their knowledge workflows. To that end, our work suggests that GenAI tools need to be designed to support knowledge workers’ critical thinking by addressing their awareness, motivation, and ability barriers.
I would not say “can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving” equals to “literally making people dumber”. A sample size of 319 isn’t really representative anyways, and they mainly had a sample of a specific type of people. People switch from searching to verifying, which doesn’t sound too bad if done correctly. They associate critical thinking with verifying everything (“Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort”), not sure I agree on this.
This study is also only aimed at people working instead of regular use. I personally discovered so many things with GenAI, and know to always question what the model says when it comes to specific topics or questions, because they tend to hallucinate. You could also say internet made people dumber, but those who know how to use it will be smarter.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/is_ai_changing_our_brains/
They had to write an essay in 20 minutes… obviously most people would just generate the whole thing and fix little problems here and there, but if you have to think less because you’re just fixing stuff instead on inventing… well yea, you use your brain less. Doesn’t make you dumb? It’s a bit like saying paying by card makes you dumber because you use less of your brain compared to paying in cash because you have to count how much you need to give, and how much you need to get back.
Yes, if you get helped by a tool or someone, it will be less intensive for your brain. Who would have thought?!
Not clicking on a substack link. Fucking Nazi promoting shit website
Ai is literally making people dumber:
And books destroyed everyone’s memory. People used to have fantastic memories.
They are a massive privacy risk:
No different than the rest of cloud tech. Run your AI local like your other self hosting.
Are being used to push fascist ideologies into every aspect of the internet:
Hitler used radio to push fascism into every home. It’s not the medium, it’s the message.
And they are a massive environmental disaster:
AI uses a GPU just like gaming uses a GPU. Building a new AI model uses the same energy that Rockstar spent developing GTA5. But it’s easier to point at a centralized data center polluting the environment than thousands of game developers spread across multiple offices creating even more pollution.
Stop being a corporate apologist
Run your own AI! Complaining about “corporate AI” is like complaining about corporate email. Host it yourself.
Run your own AI!
Oh sure, let me just pull a couple billion out of the couch cushions to spin up a data center in the middle of the desert.
I linked it in this thread but here it is again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T17bpGItqXw
There is a huge open source community working on LLM’s.
Comments like this remind me of all the blockchain hate. People with no idea what they were talking about inventing justifications for hating something they were unwilling to understand. There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize both and people still make shit up on the fly.
Oh sure, let me just pull a couple billion out of the couch cushions to spin up a data center in the middle of the desert.
From my, very much not in a data center, desktop PC:
Lol I didn’t know that the anarchists over at lemmy.dbzer0.com are being corporate apologists. /sarcasm
Weird … It looks like there’s nothing stopping me from signing up for an account on dbzer0 even though I’m not actually an anarchist.
This can be called not a technology, but a weapon for killing in my opinion.
If you ever take a flight for holiday, or even drive long distance and cry about AI being bad for the environment then you’re a hypocrite.
Same goes for if you eat beef, or having a really powerful gaming rig that you use a lot.
There are plenty of valid reasons AI is bad, but the argument for the environment seems weak, and most people using it are probably hypocrites. It’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to other things
Texas has just asked residents to take less showers while datacenters made specifically for LLM training continue operating.
This is more like feeling bad for not using a paper straw while local factory dumps all their oil change into the community river.
your source about beef relies on poore-nemecek 2018, a paper with dubious methodology
Ahh so are you going to acknowledge the privacy invasion and brain rotting cause by Ai or are you just going to focus on dismissing the environmental concerns? Cause I linked more than just the environmental impacts.
Uh dismissing that concern seems like valid point? Do people have to comprehensively discredit the whole list to reply?
This echo chamber isn’t ready for this logical discussion yet unfortunately lol
When someone disagrees with me - echo chamber.
When someone agrees with me - logical discussion.
Then why are you guys avoiding a logical discussion around environmental impact instead of spouting misinformation?
The fact of the matter is eating a single steak or lb of ground beef will eclipse all most peoples AI usage. Obviously most can’t escape driving, but for those of us in cities biking will far eclipse your environmental impact than not using AI.
Serving AI models aren’t even as bad as watching Netflix, this counterculture to AI is largely misdirected anger that thrown towards unregulated capitalism. Unregulated data centers. Unregulated growth.
Training is bad but training is a small piece of the puzzle that happens infrequently, and again circles back to the unregulated problem.
It is easier to oppose a new thing than change ingrained habits.
If your house is on fire, it is reasonable to be mad at someone who throws a little torch onto it.
You’re getting downvoted for speaking the truth to an echo chamber my guy.
But he isn’t speaking the truth. AI itself is a massive strain on the environment, without any true benefit. You are being fed hype and lies by con men. Data centers being built to supply AIs are using water and electricity at alarming rates, taking away the resources from actual people living nearby, and raising the cost of those utilities at the same time.
https://www.realtor.com/advice/finance/ai-data-centers-homeowner-electric-bills-link/
AI itself is a massive strain on the environment, without any true benefit
Rockstar games developing GTA5: 6k employees 20 kwatt hours per square foot https://esource.bizenergyadvisor.com/article/large-offices 150 square feet per employee https://unspot.com/blog/how-much-office-space-do-we-need-per-employee/#%3A~%3Atext=The+needed+workspace+may+vary+in+accordance
18,000,000,000 watt hours
vs
10,000,000,000 watt hours for ChatGPT training
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/27/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use/
There are more 3d games developed each year than companies releasing new AI models.
You’re getting downvoted for providing a well founded argument that should facilitate a broader discussion. Jesus Christ what are we doing here, people?
It’s honestly rediculous, it weakens actual valid concerns with AI.
The same can be said for taking flights to go on holiday.
Flying emits way exponentially more CO2 and supports the oil industry
I just avoid both flights and AI in its current form.
Do you stream HD video, or Game or eat meat? Because those footprints are more than if you’d use AI a lot.
Not saying you should use AI, just pointing out a hypocrisy I see on here a lot
This is valid to all data centers serving all websites. Your take is a criticism of unregulated capitalism, not AI.
Beef farming is a far far far more impactful discussion, yet here we are.
Ai takes far more power to serve a single request than a website does though.
And remember, AI requires those websites too, for training data.
So it’s not just more power hungry, it also has thw initial power consumption added on top
A good chunk of the Internet usage is HD videos which is far more power hungry than AI. I agree it’s added on top…just like streaming did in 2010, and as things will continue to do.
Great, so why not oppose making things worse?
And your car or flight is a massive strain on the environment. I think you’re missing the point. There’s a way to use tools responsibly. We’ve taken the chains off and that’s obviously a problem but the AI hate here is irrational
The problem is the companies building the data centers; they would be just as happy to waste the water and resources mining crypto or hosting cloud gaming, if not for AI it would be something else.
In China they’re able to run DeepSeek without any water waste, because they cool the data centers with the ocean. DeepSeek also uses a fraction of the energy per query and is investing in solar and other renewables for energy.
AI is certainly an environmental issue, but it’s only the most recent head of the big tech hydra.
AI uses 1/1000 the power of a microwave.
Are you really sure you aren’t the one being fed lies by con men?
Hi. I’m in charge of an IT firm that is been contracted to carry out one of these data centers somewhat unwillingly in our city. We are currently in the groundbreaking phase but I am looking at papers and power requirements. You are absolutely wrong on the power requirements unless you mean per query on a light load on an easy plan, but these will be handling millions if not billions of queries per day. Keeping in mind that a single user query can also be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of separate queries… Generating a single image is dramatically more than you are stating.
Edit: I don’t think your statement addresses the amount of water it requires as well. There are serious concerns that our massive water reservoir and lake near where I live will not even be close to enough.
Edit 2: Also, we were told to spec for at least 10x growth within the next 5 years which, unless there are massive gains in efficiency, I don’t think there are any places on the planet capable of meeting the needs of, even if the models become substantially more efficient.
What? Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Tennessee (when fully expanded & operational) will need 2 GW of energy. That’s as much as some entire cities use in a year.
Rockstar games: 6k employees 20 kwatt hours per square foot https://esource.bizenergyadvisor.com/article/large-offices 150 square feet per employee https://unspot.com/blog/how-much-office-space-do-we-need-per-employee/#%3A~%3Atext=The+needed+workspace+may+vary+in+accordance
18,000,000,000 watt hours
vs
10,000,000,000 watt hours for ChatGPT training
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/27/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use/
Yet there’s no hand wringing over the environmental destruction caused by 3d gaming.
And then you have a trained model that requires vast amounts of energy per request, right? It doesn’t stop at training.
You need obscene amounts GPU power to run the ‘better’ models within reasonable response times.
In comparison, I could game on my modest rig just fine, but I can’t run a 22B model locally in any useful capacity while programming.
Sure, you could argue gaming is a waste of energy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t argue that it shouldn’t have to cost boiling a shitload of eggs to ask AI how long a single one should. Or each time I start typing a line of code for that matter.
Semi non sequitur argument aside, your math seems to be off.
I double checked my quick phone calculations and using figures provided, Rockstar games with their office space energy use is roughly 18,000,000 (18 million) kWh, not 18,000,000,000 (18 billion).
Do you really think those data centers wouldn’t have been built if AI didn’t exist? Do you really think those municipalities would have turned down the same amount of money if it was for something else but equally destructive?
What I’m hearing is you’re sick of municipal governance being in bed with big business. That you’re sick of big business being allowed to skirt environmental regulations.
But sure. Keep screaming at AI. I’m sure the inanimate machine will feel really bad about it.
Hypocrisy can be called the primitive nature of man who chooses what is easier because he is designed that way. Human is like a cancerous tumor for the planet.
Now see, I like the idea of AI.
What I don’t like are the implications, and the current reality of AI.
I see businesses embracing AI without fully understanding the limits. Stopping the hiring juniors developers, often firing large numbers of seniors because they think AI, a group of cheap post grad vibe programmers and a handful of seasoned seniors will equal the workforce they got rid of when AI, while very good is not ready to sustain this. It is destroying the career progression for the industry and even if/when they realise it was a mistake, it might already have devastated the industry by then.
I see the large tech companies tearing through the web illegally sucking up anything they can access to pull into their ever more costly models with zero regard to the effects on the economy, the cost to the servers they are hitting, or the environment from the huge power draw creating these models requires.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
And the whole AI industry is holding up the stock market, while AI has historically always ran the hype cycle and crashed into an AI winter. Stock markets do crash after billions pumped into a sector suddenly turn out to be not worth as much. Almost none of these AI companies run a profit and don’t have any prospect of becoming profitable. It’s when everybody starts yelling that this time it’s different that things really become dangerous.
Yep, exactly.
They knew the housing/real estate bubble would pop, as it currently is…
… So, they made one final last gambit on AI as the final bubble that would magically become super intelligent and solve literally all problems.
This would never, and is not working, because the underlying tech of LLM has no real actual mechanism by which it would or could develop complex, critical, logical analysis / theoretization / metacognition that isn’t just a schizophrenic mania episode.
LLMs are fancy, inefficient autocomplete algos.
Thats it.
They achieve a simulation of knowledge via consensus, not analytic review.
They can never be more intelligent than an average human with access to all the data they’ve … mostly illegally stolen.
The entire bet was ‘maybe superintelligence will somehow be an emergent property, just give 8t more data and compute power’.
And then they did that, and it didn’t work.
I agree with everything you said, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be very useful in many fields.
I mean, I also agree with that, lol.
There absolutely are valid use cases for this kind of ‘AI’.
But it is very, very far from the universal panacea that the capital class seems to think it is.
When all the hype dies down, we will see where it’s actually useful. But I can bet you it will have uses, it’s been very helpful in making certain aspects of my life a lot easier. And I know many who say the same.
That too is the classical hype cycle. After the trough of disillusionment, and that’s going to be a deep one from the look of things, people figure out where it can be used in a profitable way in its own niches.
… Unless its mass proliferation of shitty broken code and mis/disinformation and hyperparasocial relationships and waste of energy and water are actually such a net negative that it fundamentally undermines infrastructure and society, thus raising the necessary profit margin too high for such legit use cases to be workable in a now broken economic system.
The world revolves around the profit margin, so the current trend may even continue indefinitely… Sad.
Time will tell how much was just hype, and how much actually had merit. I think it will go the way of the
.combubble.LOTS of uses for the internet of things, but it’s still overhyped
The .com bubble had nothing to do with the Internet of Things.
Fair enough.
The dot-com bubble (late 1990s–2000) was when investors massively overvalued internet-related companies just because they had “.com” in their name, even if they had no profits or solid business plans. It burst in 2000, wiping out trillions in value.
The “Internet hype” bubble popped. But the Internet still has many valid uses.
and don’t have any prospect of becoming profitable
There’s a real twist here in regards to OpenAI.
They have some kind of weird corporate structure where OpenAI is a non-profit and it owns a for-profit arm. But, the deal they have with Softbank is that they have to transition to a for-profit by the end of the year or they lose out on the $40 billion Softbank invested. If they don’t manage to do that, Softbank can withhold something like $20B of the $40B which would be catastrophic for OpenAI. Transitioning to a For-Profit is not something that can realistically be done by the end of the year, even if everybody agreed on that transition, and key people don’t agree on it.
The whole bubble is going to pop soon, IMO.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
You’re right. It’s the business model driving technological advancement in the 21st century that’s flawed.
i see a silver lining.
i love IT but hate IT jobs, here’s hoping techbros just fucking destroy themselves…
I have to disagree that it’s even a nice idea. The “idea” behind AI appears to be wanting a machine that thinks or works for you with (at least) the intelligence of a human being and no will or desires of its own. At its root, this is the same drive behind chattel slavery, which leads to a pretty inescapable conundrum: either AI is illusory marketing BS or it’s the rebirth of one of the worst atrocities history has ever seen. Personally, hard pass on either one.
You nailed it, IMO. However, I would like a real artificial sentience of some sort just to add to the beautiful variety of the universe. It does seem that many of my fellow humans just want chattle slaves though. Which is saddening.
I 100% agree with you
tbf now I think AI is just a tool… in 3 years it will be a really impactfull problem
For those who know
Whether intentional or not, this is gaslighting. “Here’s the trendy reaction those wacky lemmings are currently upvoting!”
Getting to the core issue, of course we’re sick of AI, and have a negative opinion of it! It’s being forced into every product, whether it makes sense or not. It’s literally taking developer jobs, then doing worse. It’s burning fossil fuels and VC money and then hallucinating nonsense, but still it’s being jammed down our throats when the vast majority of us see no use-case or benefit from it. But feel free to roll your eyes at those acknowledging the truth…
The reason most web forum posters hate AI is because AI is ruining web forums by polluting it with inauthentic garbage. Don’t be treating it like it’s some sort of irrational bandwagon.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is Capitalism.
The problem is always Capitalism.
AI, Climate Change, rising fascism, all our problems are because of capitalism.
Wrong.
The problem are humans, the same things that happen under capitalism can (and would) happen under any other system because humans are the ones who make these things happen or allow them to happen.Problems would exist in any system, but not the same problems. Each system has its set of problems and challenges. Just look at history, problems change. Of course you can find analogies between problems, but their nature changes with our systems. Hunger, child mortality, pollution, having no free time, war, censorship, mass surveilence,… these are not constant through history. They happen more or less depending on the social systems in place, which vary constantly.
While you aren’t wrong about human nature. I’d say you’re wrong about systems. How would the same thing happen under an anarchist system? Or under an actual communist (not Marxist-Leninist) system? Which account for human nature and focus to use it against itself.
I’ll answer. Because some people see these systems as “good” regardless of political affiliation and want them furthered and see any cost as worth it. If an anarchist / communist sees these systems in a positive light, then they will absolutely try and use them at scale. These people absolutely exist and you could find many examples of them on Lemmy. Try DB0.
And the point of anarchist or actual communist systems is that such scale would be miniscule. Not massive national or unanswerable state scales.
And yes, I’m an anarchist. I know DB0 and their instance and generally agree with their stance - because it would allow any one of us to effectively advocate against it if we desired to.
There would be no tech broligarchy forcing things on anyone. They’d likely all be hanged long ago. And no one would miss them as they provide nothing of real value anyway.
And the point of anarchist or actual communist systems is that such scale would be miniscule.
Every community running their own AI would be even more wasteful than corporate centralization. It doesn’t matter what the system is if people want it.
The point is, most wouldn’t. It’s of little real use currently, especially the LLM bullshit. The communities would have infinitely better things to pit resources to.
The point is, most wouldn’t.
People currently want it despite it being stupid which is why corporations are in a frenzy to be the monopoly that provides it. People want all sorts of stupid things. A different system wouldn’t change that.
DB0 has a rather famous record of banning users who do not agree with AI. See !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com or others for many threads complaining about it.
You have no way of knowing what the scale would be as it’s all a thought experiment, however, so let’s play at that. if you see AI as a nearly universal good and want to encourage people to use it, why not incorporate it into things? Why not foist it into the state OS or whatever?
Buuuuut… keep in mind that in previous Communist regimes (even if you disagree that they were “real” Communists), what the state says will apply. If the state is actively pro-AI, then by default, you are using it. Are you too good to use what your brothers and sisters have said is good and will definitely 100% save labour? Are you wasteful, Comrade? Why do you hate your country?
Yes, I have seen posts on it. Sufficed to say, despite being an anarchist. I don’t have an account there for reasons. And don’t agree with everything they do.
The situation with those bans I might consider heavy handed and perhaps overreaching. But by the same token it’s a bit of a reflection of some of those that are banned. Overzealous and lacking nuance etc.
The funny thing is. They pretty much dislike the tech bros as much as anyone here does. You generally won’t ever find them defending their actions. They want AI etc that they can run from their home. Not snarfing up massive public resources, massively contributing to climate change, or stealing anyone’s livelihood. Hell many of them want to run off the grid from wind and solar. But, as always happens with the left. We can agree with eachother 90%, but will never tolerate or understand because of the 10%.
PS
We do know the scale. Your use of “the state” with reference to anarchism. Implies you’re unfamiliar with it. Anarchism and communism are against “the state” for the reasons you’re also warry of it. It’s too powerful and unanswerable.
It will happen regardless because we are not machines, we don’t follow theory, laws, instructions or whatever a system tells us to perfectly and without little changes here and there.
I think you are underestimating how adaptable humans are. We absolutely conform to the systems that govern us, and they are NOT equally likely to produce bad outcomes.
Every system eventually ends with someone corrupted with power and greed wanting more. Putin and his oligrachs, Trump and his oligarchs… Xi isn’t great, but at least I haven’t heard news about the Uyghurs situation for a couple of years now. Hope things are better there nowadays and people aren’t going missing anymore just for speaking out against their government.
I mean you’d have to be pretty smart to make the perfect system. Things failing isn’t proof that things can’t be better.
Time doesn’t end with corrupt power, those are just things that happen. Bad shit always happens, it’s the Why, How Often and How We Fix It that are more indicative of success. Every machine breaks down eventually.
I see, so you don’t understand. Or simply refuse to engage with what was asked.
Can, would… and did. The list of environmental disasters in the Soviet is long and intense.
Rather, our problem is that we live in a world where the strongest will survive, and the strongest does not mean the smart… So alas we will always be in complete shit until we disappear.
That’s a pathetic, defeatist world view. Yeah, we’re victims of our circumstances, but we can make the world a better place than what we were raised in.
You can try, and you should try. But some handful of generations ago, some assholes were in the right place at the right time and struck it rich. The ones that figured out generational wealth ended up with a disproportionate amount of power. The formula to use money to make more money was handed down, coddled, and protected to keep the rich and powerful in power. Even 100 Luigi’s wouldn’t even make the tiniest dent in the oligarch pyramid as others will just swoop in and consume their part.
Any lifelong pursuit you have to make the world a better place than you were raised in will be wiped out with a scribble of black Sharpie on Ministry of Truth letterhead.
Well, you can believe that there is a chance, but there is none. It can only be created with sweat and blood. There are no easy ways, you know, and sometimes there are none at all, and sometimes even creating one seems like a miracle.
The fittest survive. The problem is creating systems where the best fit are people who lack empathy and and a moral code.
A better solution would be selecting world leaders from the population at random.
Lots of AI is technologically interesting and has tons of potential, but this kind of chatbot and image/video generation stuff we got now is just dumb.
Its true. We can have a nuanced view. Im just so fucking sick of the paid off media hyping this shit, and normies thinking its the best thing ever when they know NOTHING about it. And the absolute blind trust and corpo worship make me physically ill.
Nuance is the thing.
Thinking AI is the devil, will kill your grandma and shit in your shoes is equally as dumb as thinking AI is the solution to any problem, will take over the world and become our overlord.
The truth is, like always, somewhere in between.
Distributed platform owned by no one founded by people who support individual control of data and content access
Majority of users are proponents of owning what one makes and supporting those who create art and entertainment
AI industry shits on above comments by harvesting private data and creative work without consent or compensation, along with being a money, energy, and attention tar pit
Buddy, do you know what you’re here for?
EDIT: removed bot accusation, forgot to check user history
Or are you yet another bot lost in the shuffle?
Yes, good job, anybody with opinions you don’t like is a bot.
It’s not like this was even a pro-AI post rather than just pointing out that even the most facile “ai bad, applause please” stuff will get massively upvoted
Yes, good job, anybody with opinions you don’t like is a bot.
I fucking knew it!
Yeah, I guess that was a bit too far, posted before I checked the user history or really gave it time to sit in my head.
Still, this kind of meme is usually used to imply that the comment is just a trend rather than a legitimate statement.
Maybe there’s some truth to it then. Have you considered that possibility?
HaVe YoU ConSiDeReD thE PoSSiBiLiTY that I’m not pro-AI and I understand the downsides, and can still point out that people flock like lemmings (*badum tss*) to any “AI bad” post regardless of whether it’s actually good or not?
Ok, so your point is: Look! People massively agree with an idea that makes sense and it’s true.
Color me surprised…
Why would a post need to be good? It just needs a good point. Like this post is good enough, even if I don’t agree that we have enough facile ai = posts.
Depends on the community, but for most of them pointing out ways that ai is bad is probably relevant, welcome, and typical.
deleted by creator
Why would you lend and credence to the weakest appeal to the masses presented on the site?
How people dare not like the automatic bullshit machine pushed down their troat…
Seriously, genrative AI acomplishment are :
- Making mass spam easier
- Burning the planet
- Making people lose their job and not even being a decent solution
- Make all search engine and information sources worse
- Creating an economic bubble that will fuckup the economy even harder
- Easing mass surveillance and weakening privacy everywhere
Yes. AI can be used for spam, job cuts, and creepy surveillance, no argument there, but pretending it’s nothing more than a corporate scam machine is just lazy cynicism. This same “automatic BS” is helping discover life-saving drugs, diagnosing cancers earlier than some doctors, giving deaf people real-time conversations through instant transcription, translating entire languages on the fly, mapping wildfire and flood zones so first responders know exactly where to go, accelerating scientific breakthroughs from climate modeling to space exploration, and cutting out the kind of tedious grunt work that wastes millions of human hours a day. The problem isn’t that AI exists, it’s that a lot of powerful people use it selfishly and irresponsibly. Blaming the tech instead of demanding better governance is like blaming the printing press for bad propaganda.
This same “automatic BS” is helping discover life-saving drugs, diagnosing cancers earlier than some doctors
Not the same kind of AI. At all. Generative AI vendors love this motte-and-bailey.
That’s not a motte-and-bailey.
Arent those different types of AI?
I dont think anyone hating AI is referring to the code that makes enemies move, or sort things into categories
LLMs aren’t artificial intelligence in any way.
They’re extremely complex and very smart prediction engines.
The term artificial intelligence has been co-opted in hijacked for marketing purposes a long time ago.
The kind of AI that in general people expect to see is a fully autonomous self-aware machine.
If anyone has used any llm for any extended period of time they will know immediately that they’re not that smart even chatgpt arguably the smartest of them all is still highly incapable.
What we do have to come to terms with is that these llms do have an application they have function and they are useful and they can be used in a deleterious way just like any technology at all.
If a program that can predict prices for video games based on reviews and how many people bought it can be called AI long before 2021, LLMs can too
One could have said many of the same thigs about a lot of new technologies.
The Internet, Nuclear, Rockets, Airplanes etc.
Any new disruptive technology comes with drawbacks and can be used for evil.
But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, or that it doesn’t have its uses.
Give me one real world use that is worth the downside.
As dev I can already tell you it’s not coding or around code. Project get spamed with low quality nonsensical bug repport, ai generated code rarely work and doesn’t integrate well ( on top on pushing all the work on the reviewer wich is already the hardest part of coding ) and ai written documentation is ridled with errors and is not legible.
And even if ai was remotly good at something it still the equivalent of a microwave trying to replace the entire restaurant kitchen.
I can run a small LLM locally which I can talk to using voice to turn certain lights on and off, set reminders for me, play music etc.
There are MANY examples of LLM’s being useful, it has its drawbacks just like any big technology, but saying it has no uses that aren’t worth it, is ridiculous.
That’s like saying “asbestos has some good uses, so we should just give every household a big pile of it without any training or PPE”
Or “we know leaded gas harms people, but we think it has some good uses so we’re going to let everyone access it for basically free until someone eventually figures out what those uses might be”
It doesn’t matter that it has some good uses and that later we went “oops, maybe let’s only give it to experts to use”. The harm has already been done by eager supporters, intentional or not.
No that is completely not what they are saying. Stop arguing strawmen.
It’s not a strawman, it’s hyperbole.
There are serious known harms and we suspect that there are more.
There are known ethical issues, and there may be more.
There are few known benefits, but we suspect that there are more.Do we just knowingly subject untrained people to harm just to see if there are a few more positive usecases, and to make shareholders a bit more money?
How does their argument differ from that?
But we could do vocal assistants well before LLMs (look at siri) and without setting everything on fire.
And seriously, I asked for something that’s worth all the down side and you bring up clippy 2.0 ???
Where are the MANY exemples ? why are LLMs/genAI company burning money ? where are the companies making use of of the suposedly many uses ?
I genuily want to understand.
You asked for one example, I gave you one.
It’s not just voice, I can ask it complex questions and it can understand context and put on lights or close blinds based on that context.
I find it very useful with no real drawbacks
I ask for an example making up for the downside everyone as to pay.
so, no ! A better shutter puller or a maybe marginally better vocal assitant is not gonna cut it. And again that’s stuff siri and domotic tools where able to do since 2014 at a minimum.
Siri has privacy issues, and only works when connected to the internet.
What are the downsides of me running my own local LLM? I’ve named many benefits privacy being one of them.
The fact that was the best you could come up with is far more damning than not even having one.
I’m keeping it simple, that’s a solid good use case, and what millions of people use ChatGPT for.
I can run a small LLM locally which I can talk to using voice to turn certain lights on and off, set reminders for me, play music etc.
Neat trick, but it’s not worth the headache of set up when you can do all that by getting off your chair and pushing buttons. Hell, you don’t even have to get off your chair! A cellphone can do all that already, and you don’t even need voice commands to do it.
Are you able to give any actual examples of a good use of an LLM?
Like it or not, that is an actual example.
I can lay in my bed and turn off the lights without touching my phone, or turn on certain muisic without touching my phone.
I could ask if I remembered to lock the front door etc.
But okay, I’ll play your game, let’s pretend that doesn’t count.
I can use my local AI to draft documents or emails speeding up the process a lot.
Or I can used it to translate.
If you want to live your life like that, go for that’s your choice. But I don’t think those applications are worth the cost of running an LLM. To be honest I find it frivolous.
I’m not against LLMs as a concept, but the way they get shoved into everything without thought and without an “AI” free option is absurd. There are good reasons why people have a knee-jerk anti-AI reaction, even if they can’t articulate it themselves.
It’s not expensive for me to run a local LLM, I just use the hardware I’m already using for gaming. Electricity is cheap and most people with a gaming PC probably use more electricity gaming than they would running their own LLM and asking it some questions.
I’m also against shoving AI in evening, and not making it Opt-In. I’m also worried about privacy and concentration of power etc.
But just outright saying LLMs are bad is rediculous.
And saying there is no good reason to use them is rediculous. Can we stop doing that.
Of those, only the internet was turned loose on an unsuspecting public, and they had decades of the faucet slowly being opened, to prepare.
Can you imagine if after WW2, Werner Von Braun came to the USA and then just like… Gave every man woman and child a rocket, with no training? Good and evil wouldn’t even come into, it’d be chaos and destruction.
Imagine if every household got a nuclear reactor to power it, but none of the people in the household got any training in how to care for it.
It’s not a matter of good and evil, it’s a matter of harm.
The Internet kind of was turned lose on an unsuspecting public. Social media has and still is causing a lot of harm.
Did you really compare every household having a nuclear reactor with people having access to AI?
How’s is that even remotely a fair comparison.
To me the Internet being released on people and AI being released on people is more of a fair comparison.
Both can do lots of harm and good, both will probably cost a lot of people their jobs etc.
You know that the public got trickle-fed the internet for decades before it was ubiquitous in everyone house, and then another decade before it was ubiquitous in everyone’s pocket. People had literal decades to learn how to protect themselves and for the job market to adjust. During that time, there was lots of research and information on how to protect yourself, and although regulation mostly failed to do anything, the learning material was adapted for all ages and was promoted.
Meanwhile LLMs are at least as impactful as the internet, and were released to the public almost without notice. Research on it’s affects is being done now that it’s already too late, and the public doesn’t have any tools to protect itself. What meager material in appropriate use exist hasn’t been well researched not adapted to all ages, when it isn’t being presented as “the insane thoughts of doomer Luddites, not to be taken seriously” by the AI supporters.
The point is that people are being handed this catastrophically dangerous tool, without any training or even research into what the training should be. And we expect everything to be fine just because the tool is easy to use and convenient?
These companies are being allowed to bulldoze not just the economy, and the mental resilience of entire generations, for the sake of a bit of shareholder profit.
Absolutely brain dead to compare the probability engine “AI” with no fundamental use beyond marketed value with a wide variety of truly useful innovations that did not involve marketing in their design.
We should ban computers since they are making mass surveillance easier. /s
we should allow lead in paint its easier to use /s
You are deliberatly missing my point which is : gen AI as an enormous amount of downside and no real world use.
Not all AI is bad. But there’s enough widespread AI that’s helping cut jobs, spreading misinformation (or in some cases, actual propaganda), creating deepfakes, etc, that in many people’s eyes, it paints a bad picture of AI overall. I also don’t trust AI because it’s almost exclusively owned by far right billionaires.
I personally think of AI as a tool, what matters is how you use it. I like to think of it like a hammer. You could use a hammer to build a house, or you could smash someone’s skull in with it. But no one’s putting the hammer in jail.
Yeah, except it’s a tool that most people don’t know how to use but everyone can use, leading to environmental harm, a rapid loss of media literacy, and a huge increase in wealth inequality due to turmoil in the job market.
So… It’s not a good tool for the average layperson to be using.
Stop drinking the cool aid bro. Think of these statements critically for a second. Environmental harm? Sure. I hope you’re a vegan as well.
Loss of media literacy: What does this even mean? People are doing things the easy way instead of the hard way? Yes, of course cutting corners is bad, but the problem is the conditions that lead to that person choosing to cut corners, the problem is the demand for maximum efficiency at any cost, for top numbers. AI is is making a problem evident, not causing it. If you’re home on a Friday after your second shift of the day, fuck yeah you want to do things easy and fast. Literacy what? Just let me watch something funny.
Do you feel you’ve become more stupid? Do you think it’s possible? Why wouild other people, who are just like you, be these puppets to be brain washed by the evil machine?
Ask yourself. How are people measuring intelligence? Creativity? How many people were in these studies and who funded them? If we had the measuring instrument needed to actually make categorizations like “People are losing intelligence.” Psychologists wouldn’t still be arguing over the exact definition of intelligence.
Stop thinking of AI as a boogieman inside people’s heads. It is a machine. People using the machine to achieve a mundane goal, it doesn’t mean the machine created the goal or is responsible for everything wrong with humanity.
Huge increase in inequality? What? Brother AI is a machine. It is the robber barons that are exploiting you and all of the working class to get obsenely rich. AI is the tool they’re using. AI can’t be held accountable. AI has no will. AI is a tool. It is people that are increasing inequality. It is the system held in place by these people that rewards exploitation and encourages to look at the evil machine instead. And don’t even use it, the less you know, the better. If you never engage with AI technology, you’ll believe everything I say about how evil it is.
Literacy what? Just let me watch something funny.
This is like the most pro-illiteracy thing I’ve ever read.
Do you feel you’ve become more stupid?
My muscles were weaker until I started training. As it turns out, the modern convenience that allows me to sit around all day doesn’t actually make me stronger by itself.
It is people that are increasing inequality.
Yes, what if the billionaires simply chose not to, hm? Have I ever thought of that? Probably not, I’m very stupid.
I’m very stupid.
Hard agree. Lmao.
That’s some real “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” apologist speak.
The only way to stop a bad robber Baron using AI is a good robber Baron using AI? C’mon.
I know that’s not exactly what you said, but it applicable.I work with these tools every day, both as a tool my employer wants me to use, and because I’m part of the problem: I integrate LLMs into my company’s products, to make them “smart”. I’m familiar with the tech. This isn’t coming from a place if ignorance where I’ve just been swayed by Luddites due to my lack of exposure.
When I use these tools I absolutely become temporarily stupider. I get into the rhythm of using it for everything instead of using it selectively.
But I’m middle aged; which means both that I’ll never be as good with it but also that it’s harder to affect me long term, I’ve already largely finished developing my brain. I only worry that it’ll be a brand new source of misinformation for my generation, but I worry that that (with the escalating attacks on our school system) it’ll result in generations of kids who grow up without having developed certain mental skills related to problem solving, because they’ll have always relied on it to solve their problems.I know it’s not the tool’s fault, but when a tool can do easily cause massive accidental harm, it’s easiest to just regulate the tool to curb the harm.
Seriously, the AI hate gets old fast. Like you said it’s a tool,
geyget over it people.gey over it
👁️👄👁️🤖 🏳️🌈
Edited. That’s what I get for trying to type fast while my dog is heading for the door after doing her business.
A hammer doesn’t consume exorbitant amounts of power and water.
What about self hosting? I can run a local GenAI on my gaming PC with relative ease. This isn’t consuming mass amounts of power.
Do you think hammers grow out of the ground? Or that the magically spawn the building materials to work on?
Everything we do has a cost. We should definitely strive for efficiency and responsibile use of resources. But to use this as an excuse, while you read this in a device made of metals mined by children, is pretty hypocritical.
No consumption is ehical under capitalism, take responsibility instead for what you do with that consumption.
Most of the material used in hammers does come from the ground.
Neither does an algorithm.
No, it actually does.
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
The algorithm is a bunch of math. It’s not until someone wants to run it that it needs any energy.
No shit, chumly. How many times a second do you think that math is “run”?
Many.
deleted by creator
Extreme oversimplification. Hammers don’t kill the planet by simply existing.
And neither does AI? The massive data centers are having negative impacts on local economies, resources and the environment.
Just like a massive hammer factory, mines for the metals, logging for handles and manufacturing for all the chemicals, paints and varnishes have a negative environmental impact.
Saying something kills the planet by existing is an extreme hyperbole.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”
Edit:
Controversial reply, apparently, but this is literally part of the script to a Philosophy Tube video (relevant part is 8:40 - 20:10)
We sometimes think that technology is essentially neutral. It can have good or bad effects, and it might be really important who controls it. But a tool, many people like to think, is just a tool. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” But some philosophers have argued that technology can have values built into it that we may not realise.
…
The philosopher Don Idhe says tech can open or close possibilities. It’s not just about its function or who controls it. He says technology can provide a framework for action.
…
Martin Heidegger was a student of Husserl’s, and he wrote about the ways that we experience the world when we use a piece of technology. His most famous example was a hammer. He said when you use one you don’t even think about the hammer. You focus on the nail. The hammer almost disappears in your experience. And you just focus on the task that needs to be performed.
Another example might be a keyboard. Once you get proficient at typing, you almost stop experiencing the keyboard. Instead, your primary experience is just of the words that you’re typing on the screen. It’s only when it breaks or it doesn’t do what we want it to do, that it really becomes visible as a piece of technology. The rest of the time it’s just the medium through which we experience the world.
Heidegger talks about technology withdrawing from our attention. Others say that technology becomes transparent. We don’t experience it. We experience the world through it. Heidegger says that technology comes with its own way of seeing.
…
Now some of you are looking at me like “Bull sh*t. A person using a hammer is just a person using a hammer!” But there might actually be some evidence from neurology to support this.
If you give a monkey a rake that it has to use to reach a piece of food, then the neurons in its brain that fire when there’s a visual stimulus near its hand start firing when there’s a stimulus near the end of the rake, too! The monkey’s brain extends its sense of the monkey body to include the tool!
And now here’s the final step. The philosopher Bruno Latour says that when this happens, when the technology becomes transparent enough to get incorporated into our sense of self and our experience of the world, a new compound entity is formed.
A person using a hammer is actually a new subject with its own way of seeing - ‘hammerman.’ That’s how technology provides a framework for action and being. Rake + monkey = rakemonkey. Makeup + girl is makeupgirl, and makeupgirl experiences the world differently, has a different kind of subjectivity because the tech lends us its way of seeing.
You think guns don’t kill people, people do? Well, gun + man creates a new entity with new possibilities for experience and action - gunman!
So if we’re onto something here with this idea that tech can withdraw from our attention and in so doing create new subjects with new ways of seeing, then it makes sense to ask when a new piece of technology comes along, what kind of people will this turn us into.
I thought that we were pretty solidly past the idea that anything is “just a tool” after seeing Twitler scramble Grok’s innards to advance his personal politics.
Like, if you still had any lingering belief that AI is “like a hammer”, that really should’ve extinguished it.
But I guess some people see that as an aberrant misuse of AI, and not an indication that all AI has an agenda baked into it, even if it’s more subtle.
My skull-crushing hammer that is made to crush skulls and nothing else doesn’t crush skulls, people crush skulls
In fact, if more people had skull-crushing hammers in their homes, i’m sure that would lead to a reduction in the number of skull-crushings, the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a skull-crushing hammer, is a good guy with a skull-crushing hammeryou’re absolutely right!
the ban on guns in australia has been disastrous! the number of good guys with guns has dropped dramatically and … well, so has the number of bad guys … but that’s a mirage! ignore our near 0 gun deaths… that’s a statistical anomaly!
Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people.
Ftfy
as an aussie, yeah, then you should stop people from having guns
i honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the total number of gun deaths in australia since we banned guns (1996) was less than the number of gun deaths in the US THIS WEEK
the reason is irrelevant: the cause is obvious… and id have bought the “to stop a tyrannical government” argument a few years ago, but ffs there’s all the kids dying in school and none of the stop the tyrant, so maybe that’s a fucking awful argument and we have it right down under
I’ve never understood how a redneck prepper thinks he’s going to protect himself with a bunch of guns from a government that has millions of soldiers, tanks, machine guns, sidewinder misses and nuclear weapons.
Secure your guns. Toddlers kill an insane number of people. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/toddlers-killed-americans-terrorists/
Hey, that level of pedantry is my job
Bad faith comparison.
The reason we can argue for banning guns and not hammers is specifically because guns are meant to hurt people. That’s literally their only use. Hammers have a variety of uses and hurting people is definitely not the primary one.
AI is a tool, not a weapon. This is kind of melodramatic.
GenAI is a bad tool that does bad things in bad ways.
then you have little understanding of how genai works… the social impact of genai is horrific, but to argue the tool is wholly bad conveys a complete or purposeful misunderstanding of context
I’m not an expert in AI systems, but here is my current thinkging:
Insofar as ‘GenAI’ is defined as
AI systems that can generate new content, including text, images, audio, and video, in response to prompts or inputs
I think this is genuinely bad tech. In my analysis, there are no good use cases for automating this kind of creative activity in the way that the current technology works. I do not mean that all machine assisted generation of content is bad, but just the current tech we are calling GenAI, which is of the nature of “stochastic parrots”.
I do not think every application of ML is trash. E.g., AI systems like AlphaFold are clearly valuable and important, and in general the application of deep learning to solve particular problems in limited domains is valuable
Also, if we first have a genuinely sapient AI, then it’s creation would be of a different kind, and I think it would not be inherently degenerative. But that is not the technology under discussion. Applications of symbolic AI to assist in exploring problem spaces, or ML to solve classification problems also seems genuinely useful.
But, indeed, all the current tech that falls under GenAI is genuinely bad, IMO.
things like the “patch x out of an image” allows people to express themselves with their own creative works more fully
text-based genai has myriad purposes that don’t involve wholesale generation of entirely new creative works:
using it as a natural language parser in low-stakes situation (think like you’re browsing a webpage and want to add an event to the calendar but it just has a paragraph of text that says “next wednesday at xyz”)
the generative part makes it generically more useful that specialist models (and certainly less accurate most of the time), and people can use them to build novel things on top of rather than be limited to the original intent of the model creator
everything genai should be used for should be low-stakes: things that humans can check quickly, or doesn’t matter if it’s wrong… because it will be wrong some of the time
GenAI is a great tool for devouring text and making practice questions, study guides and summarize, it has been used as a marvelous tool for education and research. Hell, if set properly, you can get it to give you the references and markers on your original data for where to find the answers to the questions on the study guide it made you.
It is also really good for translation and simplification of complex text. It has its uses.
But the oversimplification and massive broad specs LLMs have taken, plus lack of proper training for the users, are part of the problem Capitalism is capitalizing on. They don’t care for the consumer’s best interest, they just care for a few extra pennies, even if those are coated in the blood of the innocent. But a lot of people just foam at the mouth when they hear “Ai”.
Those are not valuable use cases. “Devouring text” and generating images is not something that benefits from automation. Nor is summarization of text. These do not add value to human life and they don’t improve productivity. They are a complete red herring.
Who talked about image generation? That one is pretty much useless, for anything that needs to be generated on the fly like that, a stick figure would do.
Devouring text like that, has been instrumental in learning for my students, especially for the ones who have English as a Second Language(ESL), so its usability in teaching would be interesting to discuss.
Do I think general open LLMs are the future? Fuck no. Do I think they are useless and unjustifiable? Neither. I think, at their current state, they are a brilliant beta test on the dangers and virtues of large language models and how they interact with the human psyche, and how they can help bridge the gap in understanding, and how they can help minorities, especially immigrants and other oppressed groups(Hence why I advocated for providing a class on how to use it appropriately for my ESL students) bridge gaps in understanding, help them realize their potential, and have a better future.
However, we need to solve or at least reduce the grip Capitalism has on that technology. As long as it is fueled by Capitalism, enshitification, dark patterns and many other evils will strip it of its virtues, and sell them for parts.
“Video games are dangerous.”
Fox News is dangerous. It turns your grandpa into a lunatic.
Hm… how do we square that one.
So is rock music! And if you inject one Marijuana you can die!
We once had played this game with friends where you get a word stuck on your forehead and you have to guess what are you.
One guy got C4 (as in explosive) to guess and he failed. I remember that we had to agree with each other whether C4 is or is not a weapon. Main idea was that explosives are comparatively rarely used in actual killing opposed to other things like mining and such. Parallel idea was that is Knife a weapon?
But ultimately we agreed that C4 is not a weapon. It was invented not primarily to to kill or injure. Opposed to guns, that are only for killing or injuring.
Take guns away, people will kill with literally anything else. But give an easy access to guns, people will kill with them. Gun is not a tool, it is a weapon by design.
Yet gun control works.
Same idea.
