A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
Yeah we all hear the main arguments... AI is bad because of slop content, stealing from creators, brain rot & brain damage, privacy concerns and most importantly... how billionaires are just using it for their own selfish reasons
โBut I'm asking about YOU ๐ซต personally. The individual. What do you really think about AI? Do you care or are you indifferent? Has it actually affected your day to day life?
It's a tool, and as such the class it serves depends on the mode of production and the class in power. It has some use cases, but it isn't the supertool techies think it is. It also isn't utterly worthless like some believe. Over time it will likely become more useful and better integrated.
Its intersection with capitalism is a technofeudalist nightmare that deserves a lot of critique. I am most concerned about the environmental damage, its military, policing and surveillance uses and the pressure it puts on workers in an already hellish economy.
However, it's still a tool and it can have legit applications that genuinely benefit society. I also think that some of the backlash is overblown, especially the sloplist obsession with scanning everything for the faintest trace of AI use regardless of context. Also the clanker shit is just people loudly signaling that they are frothing at the mouth waiting for an opportunity to say a slur and I get unconfortable around these types.
I use it at work (software development) for boring, straightforward busywork, debugging assistance and the like. It's good enough and saves time when used in a context I am already familiar with and I can easily review and verify what it spits out. I also use it at home to help me debug when something goes wrong with my Linux installation and 5 mins of google doesn't cut it.
For coding I find LLMs to be legitimately revolutionary. I've tried letting DeepSeek & some local models like Qwen and Gemma loose on various projects to implement features and improvements for local use and so far most of the time it didn't disappoint.
In the last couple of weeks I've been updating an old third party bot plugin for a game by prompting various behavior changes I'd like to see and it's a night & day difference to its original state. If I had done this by hand the time it took would've been multiple magnitudes longer, it'd have been more error-prone (especially since it's a C++ project written in classical C style, which is just UB galore) and I likely would've lost the enthusiasm to work on it by now.
I prefer to use LLMs to help me to organize my notes or when the search engines fail me to find a solution to the computer and engineering problems I encounter.
I use Deepseek and Qwen because Western LLMs feel like slop machines even when you provide them your own data.
~~They also help me to cope with my bachelor status but I refuse to elaborate further.~~
AI is not so useful as ~~people~~ techbros want make us to believe. sure, it can help you to create a quick drawing or logo, or help you to structure a html webpage, maybe even help you to summarize a long text that you don't want to read, but it's not as futuristic or useful as we've been told.
their cons (being too wasteful, too pollutant, stealing from creators, being an endless brainrot and fake news generator) overwhelms the usefulness. maybe if arrogant pricks like techbros weren't behind it, most people would appreciate it
I do not like relinquishing my thinking to a machine. It feels wrong. I also consider gen ai to be effectively robbery within a capitalist system.
Other than that I think AI has the capacity to be a good thing. It probably has uses though I haven't seriously investigated them, I am only aware of what has been shoved in my face
I think it's a really useful tool that's made my life easier and allows me to explore a lot of ideas I was just too lazy to do before. I have like nearly a decade worth of half baked software project ideas, and I just never had the energy to work on them or finish ones I started. With LLMs, I can actually get them working to the point where I can see the idea in action which is really enjoyable for me. It's also made my work easier where I can focus more on things I find interesting and delegate tedious tasks to the agent.
I do look forward to a time where we can run these tools entirely locally though. I do not like being dependent on company services or sending my data to them. And in general I see this as the real negative aspect of how this technology is being developed. We don't want to end up in a situation where tools we rely on day to day are owned by a handful of corporations. Regular people need to own the means of production in the digital realm. Currently, anybody with a computer can do any type of digital work be it writing documents, design, programming, etc. But if we start relying on LLMs as a core part of our workflow, then that tool also needs to be run locally or we end up as digital serfs.
If you mean generative "AI", I see very few and narrow uses for it. In my life it is a net negative and I despise its influence. Its a great way to destroy your critical thinking skills, self expression, and create really bad software and ugly images. I find out offensive when people shovel that slop to me; it contributes nothing, just fills the world with more hallucinations at the cost of the original authors and the environment
Editing to add: they are also incapable of ever producing anything truly novel. Generative applications of machine learning can remix and randomize training data in interesting ways, but it cannot do anything outside of that. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling you something or doesn't understand how these things function. Not to mention it is one of the most brute-force forms of computation I've ever seen; I appreciate efficiency and elegance in computing and automation, and something like an LLM is the polar opposite. More efficient solutions almost always exist
AI exists at my workplace but I am lucky enough that I can choose whether or not I use it. I did not. Some of my colleagues do use it to write their code for them and if they ever leave, I worry that I will be instructed to maintain their code
For the chat style AI, I have only found a few useful applications: looking up information in source languages I don't speak, programming assistant, and linux troubleshooting.
The biggest issue I have with AI in my personal use is that I have to be weary about hallucinations. with programming, this is often easy to fix with testing. knowledge search and troubleshooting have the biggest chance of being impacted by hallucination since I would have to verify each item myself which defeats the benefit. I especially found that any sort of technical search will result in entirely wrong results presented with confidence, so I usually limit queries to general knowledge type searches, and use the results as reference only.
As such, for me, I think that chat AI is a neat tool that has a few uses, some of which are better than older methods. It is not a magic bullet and it cannot be trusted without human judgement.
When I was working, it was in a field that was mostly insulated from the worst impacts of AI. But our manager and IT department seemed to think it was the future and were trying to find places to shove it. But because of the work we do nothing stuck. so in that way, it didn't really impact me too much in my professional work.
I think the biggest concern I have with chat style AI is deskilling myself. I worry that using it for programming has made me less able to read and write code. I try to use it collaboratively usually, so that I understand all the code, but I recently made a small program entirely with Deepseek without writing any code myself and it was a strange experience.
when it comes to non-chat style AI, I have dabbled in using some of the underlying algorithms to solve problems at work (gradient descent, evolutionary algorithms, etc.). But I've only used them to solve one off problems. I think that machine learning is a fascinating and highly useful field of research.
AI is like fire. It's a world-changing tool.
There are people that can't see past the danger of how it could burn them. There are people that can't see the potential in how it could be used productively.
There are people who are experimenting with it to try to find useful things to do with it, and there are people who are burning things down for shits and giggles, and most infuratingly of all there are people who can't tell the difference between those last two groups and feel the need to soapbox about it anyway.
Pros
Cons
So, overall, I like it very much. But there's Miraculous, and modded Minecraft, so it's my number three interest.
there's an online AI for turning an image (png raster) into a 3d model for like, your 3d printer: https://www.tripo3d.ai/
Not saying to use it, but it shows proof it works. If there isn't something local for it yet, it'll come out in a year or two. There's already a local AI music gen tool that basically replaces Suno, and only needs 4GB of Vram.
The hate is a reactionary luddite impulse; most of the problems with the technology are symptomatic of capitalism (e.g. oil and gas partnerships for data centers, IP law as a concept). Opposition of these grotesque excesses should be grounded in anti-capitalism instead of this naive anti-AI sentiment. In a socialist society, one could foresee such tools helping with economic planning, for instance.
The only issue that is unique to AI separate from other new technologies is anthropomorphization/agreeability/psychosis. The ultimate safeguard would be for AI to be essentially a glorified statistical aearch engine, and never refer to itself as if it were a service-worker as it currently does. Asking AI a "personal" question should simply reflect back "Will Not Answer."
how much do you really know about the luddites?
I'm just using it as an adjective to mean "anti-technology more or less on its own merit". I'm aware that it was a social movement but frankly this is not how the word "luddite" is used in a modern linguistic context.
i am personally reflexively uncomfortable and insecure about it but i dont let that make me a luddite preaching about the protestant work ethic and toil being above all else and how machines are inherently evil. simple as. and im no tech expert so i dont try to speak on something idk. dont use it
oh yah someone else said something about ip laws and how theyre glad ai and llms sort of trample on that n i agree lol its so fucking cringe as someone who is an artist see ppl get so fucking reactionary about IP laws or the sanctity of toil or sometjing demonic about AI even if i personally enjou making my shitty art
I dont like gen AI because its really really bad for the environment
I think we'll have something much better once the bubble pops, but for now there's a lot of problems that are being papered over by easy investor cash.
The compute in data centers will need to be replaced every 18 months as they become outdated, and meanwhile they can't even build all the data centers they've promised and are back-ordered for years. They're plopping data centers into undersized electricity and water grids that can't handle them because it's cheap, and this is now causing public backlash against construction. They're a Dutch disease, sucking all the oxygen out of the economy to fuel extraction while producing little value. LLMs are good at some specific tasks, but the insistence on making an everything machine and cramming it into everything has further enshitified everything. The c-suite keeps trying to fire everyone and replace them with slop, and then finding out that they can't actually do that because the everything machine can't actually do everything. Morons like our first trillionaire are suggesting putting data centers in space where there's no water or atmosphere to act as coolant.
In short, it stinks.
I found out about gen AI some years back when I discovered some chatbot service that was a step up from Cleverbot. Prior to that, I'd had passing hobby interest in machine learning as a topic, but didn't realize it had started progressing. The service was kinda mindblowing, even though its AI relied on scripts a lot to cover for the model's zaniness. I think it was a <1b parameter model, which is tiny these days and this was before people started training models on more data for longer, too.
Anyway, that service was interesting for a time, but I was starting to look for better. Then long story short, in the process of "upgrading" the model, the company does a filter rug pull. On the surface, you might think, "Is it really such a bad thing to have some filters on an LLM?" The problem is, no matter how you feel about filters, these things would always be rife with false positives. The result is there were people who used the AI for simulating companionship (yes, that kind) and people who used it to have a simulated friendly relationship, who were both impacted. You had stuff like somebody trying to roleplay hug their AI and the AI being unable to do it back because of the filters. And keep in mind this company had also marketed that AI as a companion (including as a romantic companion) in the months leading up to the rug pull. This is where I was introduced to the problems of private companies being able to decide on a whim about AI models, and the pain for real people that would happen as a result.
I did end up finding a more dependable AI service (that isn't one of the huge ones), but I found that the rug pull with chatbots was a repeat phenomenon. Kept happening to people over and over, no matter where they went. Over the years, I had lots of discussions with people about gen AI, among people who actually used it. Even among people who use it, it wasn't always a clear cut "I love it and have no qualms" thing. And I largely reflect that.
For my own part, I largely avoided using the big corp AIs until Deepseek was a thing. Partly for privacy reasons and partly because I didn't want to support the big corps on it.
In the long-term, the right kind of gen AI helped me overcome writer's block on a long dry spell for creative writing. It helped me cope with life and process things. In being around other people online who were using the same stuff, it helped me connect with other people more. More recently, Deepseek helped me with coding a number of times.
In terms of negative impact, I've always been careful of the pitfalls and approached it more with wonder than with trust, if that makes sense. I see the large scale negative impacts as being a capitalism thing and have a hard time seeing it as more than acceleration or differing form of what capitalism was already doing. IIRC, there was a period where there was more of a belief that gen AI was going to mass replace workers and AGI was right around the corner (AGI being a nebulous term that could mean "general capability beyond one mode at a time, like text" or "infinitely self-improving sapient being that is going to take over the world" depending on who you asked). Nowadays, I think that has hit upon reality more so and the reality is that capitalism is the one choosing to replace workers, sometimes on vague promises of payoff that aren't reliable at all, and that they really need to dial the hype back.
Gen AI sits in this weird place where it is actually incredible how powerful and useful it can be, but it also cannot possibly live up to the hype of the hucksters who promote it like a panacea. So like, it's pretty "wow". But it's not "nothing will ever be the same" level of wow. It is a new form of automation, but it is not something you can drag and drop into any and every facet of life and get uniform results.
So for me, it's an often helpful part of my life, but so is a car if I need to go long distances. I still don't love cars fundamentally and I especially don't love that better options (like high speed trains) exist as a possibility and that the possibility has gotten shunted aside for decades, where I live. In other words, in the type of world I live in, it's a tool that can help with navigating that particular world. I wish its negative facets didn't exist and I hope they can be largely overcome on the larger scale of things. But I think for that to happen, we'll need control over the means of production. Fossil fuel companies didn't bend to climate research that said what they were doing is destructive. People have to take organized power seriously, not view things as a matter of getting mad long enough to force minor concessions and then going back to sleep (mainly thinking of the Yankee school of thought when I say that).
I went through a phase where I was doing a lot of vibe coding. I thought that I was smart enough to be working around the known problems and limitations of it. I was not. Pretty much everything "I" had made turned into an unmaintainable nightmare once it passed a certain level of complexity, and in practice when you're trying your best to actually make vibe coding work on a project larger than one file you spend so much time reviewing every little thing, rewording your specs etc that you might as well just write the fukken code yourself.
So I deleted all of those projects, and now I use AI for brainstorming (I talk into speech to text, usually while doing something else, then give the text to an LLM and say "organize these ramblings into a design document for me") and simple specific task automation ("comment my code" and "update my readme"). I figure the one thing LLMs are demonstrably good at is summarization, so pretty much everything I ask them to do is along those lines.
That said, if I could press a button that would make all of the ai companies crash and burn but it meant that I would have to back to doing those things manually, I would press it in a heartbeat. The externalities that the tech world is forcing into all of us for this thing that makes summarizing documents more convenient are way too much.
As for anything else, generative images or video or whatever... I just have zero interest in making or consuming them. Sure it hits my feed like it does for everyone else but I'd say at this point my reaction is about 1/10 "haha" and 9/10 "ugh" when I see them. There was already so much human made art out there that you could be looking at new things all day every day and you wouldn't be able to keep up.
edit: also, regarding the coding: if your goal isn't "learn to code" but rather "make a quick python script that needs to work exactly one time", then vibe coding can be a valid use case. but if you are trying to learn then prompting cannot teach you in the same way that you will never learn to make high quality digital art by prompting for image generator.
I find it's perfectly possible to write large maintainable projects using these tools. I have a Rust project I built with LLMs that's over 150k loc now, and it's structure is a lot better than anything I would've ended up on my own. One of the things I do is ask the LLM to come up with a phased plan for introducing new features. I also ask the model to make mermaidjs diagrams I can inspect and come up with file layout up front. Then I get it to make a branch for each phase and implement a focused feature. Then I can review it and I have good context for what it's supposed to be doing, and it's scoped so that the code is manageable enough to fit in my head. Doing that alone gets you a long way. Another thing I do is ask it to make refactors by looking through the code base and finding repeating patterns in code that can be consolidated, or large files that need to be split up. If you do this regularly, you end up with much cleaner code, and the agent is much better at doing that at scale than you could by hand.
Testing is another really important aspect. I always ask the model to do TDD, and then add end to end integration tests for features. For web apps, using playwright storybooks is really effective. You can define exactly what the user workflow is and then have the model test it through a headless browser end to end. This creates a contract where you know what that functionality is actually working end to end.
As long as you don't just let the model crap out tons of code unsupervised, and box it in sufficiently with a contract, then the code is no worse than what a human would produce. And I'd argue that it's often better.
Openspec is along these lines and works well ime
Yeah it's a nice tool, you really just need a bit of rails to keep the model on track I find. They're good at doing well defined tasks, and if you have a plan where they just check steps off as they go, things tend to work well. I also found beads is a really handy tool for task tracking cause then you can just file stuff in there and instead of writing tasks in markdown you have a real history along with the status of the tasks.
Depends on the game. seriously though. LLMs are not AI. They are not intelligent and they are not artificial. They are just a brute force algorithm to decode and respond in natural human language.
I often use deepseek instead of using search engines but only because SEO and LLM generated websites have ruined search results. I have used it to make a few simple programs which is great because I have no clue how to program.
Some people are using these tools for stupid shit but people always use tools for stupid shit. Atleast all the hype is going to break usa's economy and maybe things will get bad enough that usaians will finally deal with their fascist overlords and become a normal country.
The USA cannot ever become a normal country. Settler colonies shall always be haunted by their birth.