No Stupid Questions

It's really super simple what turned me against it. The absolute torrent of mindless garbage. Blogs and articles, and videos, and people who can't hold a conversation without saying "Hang on, let me ask ChatGPT", garbage code that people submit and demand I fix because "Claude said it should work" only to find out they couldn't explain what it does or why, let alone figure out how it works themselves. The absolute sea of AI generated spam, the robo-calls, the infinite, endless baying of, infinite idiot electric sheep. People who literally cannot read without a chat bot reading it to them.

This is hell. This is hell and every single AI is an legion of demons, and all I have to slay it is the lump of bacon-flavoured jello with anxiety between my ears to slay all the trash it generates.

What should we do about it? I'm not putting that on the internet. Nice try though. If you want to fix it, you fix it by abandoning the digital wherever possible and living in the real world. Touching grass, talking face to face with real human beings. You're not going to find the solutions in digital spaces. You find them in the faces and hands of your neighbours.

When I watched about 5 maker videos in a row. Each one was struggling with a build. Then they all say "now until this point I had being using AI and realised it was lying to me/from the start. After searching the web for 20mins I found the answer" I genuinely said wtf out loud.

Shamefully I've also done this myself.

Its gernly not faster to seek information via LLMs even when they give you links to the data they've referenced.

I've also seen a high level exec use it to make a 10year department plan in the 5 minutes before a meeting.

Also both staff and managers using it for their relevant parts of performance reviews. They could just skip the review altogether and save time.

One thing we can do is stop calling it AI. It's just a LLM and complex guessing machine.

Somethings (like performance reviews) need to be explicitly declared to NOT use AI.

• LLM is good for language-related stuff. i.e., translation(also convert legalese to common street), summaries???, removing noise words from huge texts.
• generative models are suped up photoshop-bandaids

those are good at what they initially are made for.

• LLM for search: nobody asked for.
• LLM for ask jeeves?: search has already been doing this. website localized search is even better.
• LLM for writing: only for shitposting.

the marketing and shoe-horning around it are BS. if i can change something, i wish the improvement was more on protein-folding, weather prediction, farming and logistics.

I dabbled with ChatGPT when it first came out, then this happened:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

That was the catalyst that turned me against it. I’m a pretty big reader and I love finding new authors and stories. Knowing that people were cheating the system to make a quick buck did not sit well with me. Knowing that a scifi magazine that has published some of my favorite authors received so many bad submissions that they had to shut it down for a while made me angry.

Then came the information about inaccuracies, environmental issues, AI psychosis, and it being forced into Google searches made me not want to have anything to do with it. I was so disgruntled that I switched every one of my default search engines to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ so I can avoid it.

One of my biggest gripes is that people use it for an easy quick solution but do not verify the information is correct through other sources. I have a friend who is very into AI, to the point he told his employee that he must use it during work hours when trying to find solutions. I told him, if my boss said that, I would start looking for a new job immediately.

That said, I’m not entirely against LLMs in specific circumstances. I can see how it’s useful in research spaces, but it should be triple checked by a human. Or in creating documents and summaries of meetings, but again should be triple checked by real humans.

I don’t trust the output, I don’t trust the companies behind the output, I just don’t trust it.

I got a degree in data science cause machine learning is cool as hell. Interesting math that does cool shit, if a bit fiddly. We can process cancer scans faster and more accurately than ever before!

Then the fucking crypto bros showed up and thought you could use it to replace literally anything, stole the entire contents of the Internet, and gave us shit quality tools (validating my opinion that the tool is support, not replacement), and are destroying the planet in the process.

And I've given it a shot. Only tool that was useful was Claude and I kept it on a tight leash. Every app based on AI (gave up distinguishing LLM long ago) hasn't been been worth the bits it was written with.

Edit: oh right, that thing where it's also making us dumber. That's in there too.

It's destroying software because juniors are no longer using their brain to learn.

It's destroying intelligence because most people will use it as an external brain.

Two main catalysts:

1. Seeing how dumb 99% of products are.

2. Seeing how dumb 99% of users are.

Call my naive, but I truly did not see it coming. I didn't expect cognitive surrender. I didn't expect the whole world to start continvoucly morging. I didn't expect lawyers to submit fake case citations, again and again and again.

I didn't expect society as a whole to just shrug their shoulders and decide that accuracy doesn't matter.

I also didn't expect how much or how rapidly the bubble would inflate. GPU prices were already crazy, but now RAM and even SSD prices have roughly doubled in the past year, with no end in sight, with all production toward data centers. This is a disaster. We're seeing higher prices for downgraded machines, like Microsoft's 8GB Surface.

Seeing as we're all on Lemmy, I hope that I will not need to belabor the point that centralization is bad. The shift toward data centers and away from personal devices is a shift toward centralization. It's a shift toward greater censorship and away from freedom.

It's not coincidence that this is happening at the same time as fascism is rising all around the world, that online ID laws are passing all over the world, that privacy-protecting technology like VPNs and end-to-end encryption are under greater and greater attack, and that knowledge repositories like The Internet Archive and Wikipedia are under attack. The shift is toward governmental control of the Internet, of access to knowledge in general.

Now the US government gets the final say on who will have access to ChatGPT 5.6. Surprise, surprise.

I'm not anti-AI or anti-LLM per se. I am anti-corruption and anti-bullshit. I am pro-consumer, pro-privacy, pro-individuality. In practice, that means I am anti-AI. Or more generally (but less strongly), I am anti-cloud.

As for what I would do: well the real solutions are the same as the solutions to most of modern society's problems. We need extensive economic reform. But barring that, we need to do whatever we can to shift the balance back toward personal, private computation. We don't need more datacenters. We don't need trillion-parameter models at all. The only thing they are good at is basic stuff you don't need them for (unless you're an idiot), and generating well-masked bullshit.

Edit: Oh, and I would also hold all the corporations accountable for their obviously-illegal behavior, like pirating all the copyrighted material in the world. We definitely need more transparency in terms of training data.

While I agree with the environmental, ownership and financial concerns, for me it's seeing how stupid and dependent it makes people.
If we can't get rid of them as a society, we should at least restrict/ban them in schools and universities.

It's being pushed into situations where having a black box of probability is not what you want. Support bots as an example, you want the same outcome for the same problem. Not a different outcome because someone didn't put a question mark.
You don't want the bot being able to hijack an account because it was asked in the specific way. See Facebook support bot.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/metas-ai-support-bot-instagram/

You don't want a chat bot to tell airline customers they can do something when the airline has a FAQ section specifically saying no you can't.
See Air Canada support bot.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

You don't want AI bots hallucinating court cases to justify a case. Many news articles on this.

It's used as a workforce reduction mask.
Businesses are using AI rollouts to lower the number of front line employees. Only for the tool to fail.
See Oracle firing 21,000 people to boost ai numbers.
https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/23/21000-oracle-jobs-vanish-amid-big-reds-big-bets-on-ai/5260086

It's oversold:
When Gardner says only 30% of AI deployments work as sold after asking over 700 IT executives. Why are people still treating it as anything but a broken tool?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/07/only-28-of-ai-infrastructure-projects-fully-pay-off/5221652

For a black box of probability it is terrible at maths. There has been instances of AIs failing high school math tests.
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-ai-struggle-math-problems.html

edit: sources as I grab them on mobile.

The fuck is with the sudden influx of "innocent" pro-AI "I'm-just-asking" questions on the fediverse lately? Are you a troll using a bunch of alts, or are the tech bros so fucking desperate to get people's buy in before the bubble pops that they're posting fake shit on the fediverse of all places?

I'm not super against it, I'm just annoyed at how it doesn't actually solve my problems. The other day I gave it my router model and firmware version then asked it to give me instructions to go to a specific menu and it failed. I was too lazy to pull up the documentation and I suppose it also was too

Edit: though I used chatgpt so that might've been the reason

It ruined HDD and other hardware prices ... and for what? To generate shitty art, porn and misinformation.

If you have the power to change our current situation what would you do.

Something involving Italian plumbers and CEOs.

The extreme damage to the environment they cause made me firmly against them. Add to that the destruction of the RAM and GPU markets, poisoning people's water, skyrocketing cost of living, their use for mass surveillance, etc.

I'd honestly impose very strict environmental regulations and usage regulations. I'd also impose regulations preventing AI from replacing humans, given all AI isn't reliable enough to do that in virtually any field.

To me it's the "replacing people" part of it all, with no plan on what to do with the "replaced". That shit should exist for the people and the world to move forward in a progressive way. What we have today is just desperate attempts to build power and cash for an entity, nothing more.

• inaccuracy
• unethical training data (all data should be obtained with proper consent and licensing at the very least)
• environmental impact (not even on a per-query/token basis, but the ramming through of data centers without proper environmental and other considerations)
• concentrates more wealth upward at the expense of workers (in current implementations, anyway)

If I had the power to change:

• all training data and gains are reset. Any new training data must be ethically and legally sourced.
• renewables, infrastructure (grid infra, among others,) etc. all gets done before we go into data centers
• more workers rights, maybe UBI before all the jobs stop dropping
• all news must legally avoid opinion to be called news and may not use AI-generated text or assets (unless UBI goes a lot further where working jobs becomes something people can do if they want, but I don't think the magical wand I waved to get here is even magical enough for that).

I would answer this but I feel like it's just a billionaire in disguise trying to figure out how to better market their product and that sums up why I hate 2026

I can't even trust that you're human. That's why.

When every app got its own Ai agent. It's so much worse than this in scope but I won't write it all down now.

It's making fools feel like sages.

I choose to not use it intentionally.