Asklemmy

When people say "AI," I assume they are talking about the large corporate Neural Networks that get branded as "AI" for marketing purposes.

I hate these because they're a grift. They're funded and maintained by a handful of ultra-rich idiots who saw no value in learning social sciences nor the humanities, and thus have failed to learn from history. The people pushing for mass adoption believe in a variety of unscientific pseudo-religious conspiracy beliefs about AI gods and devils leading humanity.

I hate that the cost of these cults are being foisted onto the rest of society by way of government and corporate contracts.

I hate that mass media is rapidly degrading in quality in order to justify the purchase of said contracts.

I hate that the people making important decisions that affect my life and well-being — doctors, the people who develop my software, my government representatives, news reporters, lawyers — are not just willing, but actively excited at the prospect of turning off their brains and letting black boxes controlled by opaque corporations make the decisions for them.

I hate that despite 3+ years of hype and 10+ years of public access, the only people who have demonstrably benefitted from it are Nvidia, scammers, and people who don't want to use their brain.

But mostly, and this is the clincher, I hate that we are literally destroying the earth to run these machines. Even if every other problem disappeared overnight, this should be an argument killer. We only get one home, and we are setting fire to it. I don't care if it improves the lives of millions of humans, because it is hastening the death of hundreds of billions of lifeforms.

I hate that people ignore this or conveniently forget it or are just apathetic about it. I hate that this argument just carries little to no weight for most fence-sitters. I hate that people treat feeling emotional about the destruction of our only home as being irrational. I hate ecoterrorism being excused by marketing babble and shitty faux-skeptical wishy-washiness.

This is not a direct answer to your question.

I've heard 2 really great takes about LLMs & GenAI, that have stayed with me - though I don't have the best wording for them anymore.

1. As AI is trained on previously created data, it fundamentally looks backwards. Human creativity creates new things and inherently looks to the future.

2. AI is trained on the vast corpus of human works and synthesizes that info into a median response. You will never get exciting and bold insights, just bland and inoffensive responses.

Because it's built on the creative collective works of everything that's ever been put on the Internet with no attribution or compensation for people who's authored works were stolen. Maybe that's why?

First, you made that classic blunder. You wrote "AI" without defining it, as if it was meaningful. We always see people do bait-and-switch arguments surrounding this topic. Always. So, if you want a meaningful answer, you need to actually provide a definition...

Are you asking why people hate ChatGPT? If so, you should ask that.

Second, you made a mistake. You think people hate AI when the hate is reserved for the assholes getting rich by fucking us all over as they destroy our communities, clean water, and affordable electricity. Remember, it's the people who do horrible things who need to be stopped.

Using ai to make it solve complex problems, analyse things and summarise objective outcomes is fantastic.

Unfortunately making it slop out is easier and TikTok-brained people are keen on making it poop slop. That’s why the consumer level ai makes me bit grossed out as well.

Its a tool. Great tool. Like photoshop and excel. But it can be also abused to steal, manipulate and destroy what have been built so far by humanity in seconds.

And the second one just makes it even worse this invention is made by Americans so “it has to be profitable” cancer all over it. That’s why it sucks now. Its capitalism driven not humanity. Even open ai changed to for profit “for undisclosed reasons”. The thing doesn’t work now unless you throw lots of bucks on it.

Its going to be better and way more useful at some point. But not anytime near until America’s upcoming economical crash. American capitalism is one of the worst thing happened to human kind and until its controlled nothing ever coming out from country is going to be beneficial to human kind. That’s why it sucks big time now.

I'm on Lemmy because I'm anti capitalist and generally support progressive policies such as circular economic practices and sustainability. I'm against AI because it goes against everything I mentioned. The gains aren't worth the cost.

Pro:

• It's good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it'll give you an answer immediately that's tailored specifically to your question.

Con:

• Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that's hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It's like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.

Pro:

• It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.

Con:

• People who use it for this are getting dumber. It's growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that's no longer true these systems are breaking down.

Another Con:

• It's fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.

Pro:

• It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.

Con:

• The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don't even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.

I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.

Because we’d rather have national forests, clean water, job opportunities, a sustainable future and liberty than live in morodor with the eye of Sauron staring at us all the time

You do realize that the vast majority of people hate LLMs right? They are power, water resource hungry worthless things that have yet to prove any worth to the human race.

Because it's not really ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. It's basically fast computing. And stealing data from other websites.

Because it's lame, and sucks shit

I like computers and now can't easily afford to do the projects I'm interested in. I get very little value from AI and it destroyed my hobby. It also is a massive bubble that will hurt the majority of the world once it pops. It's dumb.

Game communities I used to love browsing have become inundated with low-effort, vibe-coded crapware. It's now 20 times harder to find anything good. Hardware is 20 times more expensive. My insurance company is using AI to deny me medical help. A skill I spent 25 years developing suddenly is full of morons who think they know as much as I do because they can have Claude vomit out something resembling software.

There is A LOT to hate.

Nuclear power can make energy.

Nuclear power can eradicate the planet and leave areas uninhabitable for untold years, and those it doesn't vaporize are altered for the rest of their lives. And sometimes they aren't aware until years after.

AI has good uses when applied carefully, such as in medical research.

AI is also being used as a reason to replace workers, it consumes massive amounts of energy, it creates sound and infrasound destroying environments around it, it consumes massive quantities of drinking water from surrounding areas, and is ultimately spurring on a society of wealthy ruling class who view humans as cattle, out in the open, and no one is stopping them.

Is it any wonder why people hate these things? But yes, a tool is a tool. It's the people using it that hate should be properly directed towards. Unfortunately, those same ruling class epstein elites dismantled education over decades, so it's harder for people in this day and age to think dialectically. It's easier to think in black and white, in extremes, just like media would have you believe, just as the culture wars have taught us for decades.

I'm not completely against it. I do recognise its threats to privacy, the planet, and intellect though. The average person trusts it too much.

Personally, I do not use it that much. I do however use it to help with research. I find being able to ask a question quite useful as a jumping off point for further research. I do not rely on it to answer correctly, simply to aid in pointing me in the right direction. Then I go off and do more specific research.

I have been moving from windows 10 to linux mint recently, it was quite useful in aiding with this at times. Not all the time, just at the right times. If there were a particular issue I was struggling with it could help point me in the right direction, though I would not trust it to simply spit out the right advise and commands to type to fix an issue without researching exactly what those commands did, how that would potentially help fix the issue and how to revert if it messed something up. I have seen many examples where the advise it gave was terrible and potentially destructive because I researched the advise it gave, had I of not it would have really messed things up. It must be used responsibly.

People are all to quick to talk into their phones, get a response and trust it to be all knowing. Their queries are forever recorded and logged to their personal identity without and option to opt out. I use privacy orientated search engines with ai functionality such as duckduckgo and ecosia. Ecosia makes it very easy to verify the sources of information given from their ai, also they put in efforts to be as green as possible. Very respectable.

So no, I am not against ai. I am against the usual way in which the average person uses it and the way the majority of companies are using it to exploit people and the planet to turn a profit.

Under capitalism, LLMs are used purely for the benefits of the capitalist class, spying on all of the working classes and enabling immense repressions. It isn't a tool without any and all merit, but under capitalism it will always be used against our best interests.

Why are there so many people on Lemmy asking this same question over and over again. This has got to get over ten now in the last week.

I don't hate AI, I hate how much it's shoved down my throat every day. If it was used in appropriate use cases and not injected into everything because profits then I wouldn't care so much.

There's a variety of reasons, but the biggest is that Lemmy as a whole is FAR more class-conscious than the average populace, or even that average internet user, and generative AI has been developed by the wealthy and powerful, as a tool to oppress everyone else.

Because we’re mostly not bots.

Its a massive theft machine destroying the earth in an attempt to eliminate labor value with no benefit to anyone in the long run other than the ultra rich. AI isn't for you, its for rich people to get richer so they dont have to pay humans to do work.

Fuck AI. LLMs can be interesting but the atmosphere that is "AI" is a net bad on society.

This isnt even mentioning how fucking boring and generic its output is.

i can't speak for everyone, but a lot of people are outraged that they have been replaced or soon will be. Millions of people will be unemployed. This is bad, because we are a consumer-based economy, and we're losing even more consumers.

After decades of low pay for most workers, this is the very last thing we need.

Techbros ruin everything.

I have no problem with AI use for science, health, and uplifting humanity like figuring out optimal ways of doing things, minimizing waste.

Currently, it's just another disingenuous ploy to make rich people even richer forcing it on everyone at an expense of climate and human livelihoods.

And finally, are consumer AI really "intelligent" like its touted or is it ~~marketing~~ lies for making the lines go up?

i don't particularly enjoy having to constantly question what's real and what isn't anymore.

i don't particularly enjoy having humanity's well of information undermined by disinformation factories.

i don't particularly enjoy every space i had to express myself creatively and experience others expressing themselves creatively being drowned out in mass-produced incoherent slop that i cannot possibly connect with.

i don't particularly enjoy that climate change has now been rapidly accelerated for the sake of a tool that's completely unreliable at doing anything it's marketed to do and has done irreversible damage to the very fabric of our society.

do you?

I mean, take your pick. This is a place where a lot of us…

• are leftists who disagree with extractive, anti-human economic systems
• left Reddit because they insisted on controlling how people could connect to each others ideas
• like the open collaboration of open source, which is getting wrecked by AI
• like open access communities like wikipedia, which are also getting undermined by AI
• dislike copyright law, which is being selectively ignored here because the people violating it are rich (on paper)
• are marginalized people, who tend to be disproportionately effected by AI decision-making

Im an AI engineer and even I hate AI. When I say AI, I mean LLMs specifically. It definitely has its use cases. LLMs are pretty good at parsing unstructured data, and generating boilerplate code, but that's about it. Every other use case is a combination of buzzword bingo and slop generation.

AI, uses a tremendous amount of energy, produces an ungodly amount of heat and noise, and pollutes potable drinking water. The overreliance on LLMs for everything is lazy at best and sloppy at worst. LLMs are being applied in scenarios where I could have built a deep learning model that would fit comfortably on a laptop from 2018, and doing a worse job at predictions at that.

Ignoring the fact that they were trained on a ton of copyrighted data, which was labeled for dollars a day by humans in poorer countries, and regularly gets basic information wrong. Yeah, it fucking sucks. And the only people who stand to benefit from it are about a half dozen tech companies who are taking contracts with the US government to track citizens both online and IRL.

I'm curious why this question gets asked on lemme so often.

Ai:

• ruins the planet by polution
• is used to influence political discourse, erase facts and history.
• is a tool brought to you by people who at the very least don't want the masses to be free (look up palantir owner)
• is being pushed with the end goals to have a tool of mass surveillance and control.
• makes people abandon their ability to think critically (or in general really)
• is used to violate copyrights by it's very design. If you think artists have been undervalued so far just you wait. They don't want creative people anymore.

Take your pick, it's war and you're in it.

I really don't understand how people can be so blinded by hopium that they cannot see the blindingly obvious consequences of allowing this insane tech to co-opt our planet, at the behest of the most powerful and evil people to ever live.

There may be use cases for this tech but it not worth it to sacrifice the entirety of our natural world to be ground up and processed to feed this behemoth. It is purely wishful thinking that this will solve everything and they are willing to pay ANYTHING to try it. They are gambling with the planet and it's like 2% chance they win, otherwise life dies.

We were told 15 years ago, that we had a decade to change course to prevent CATASTROPHIC heating of the planet and degradation of the environment. Instead of doing really anything about that, we have exponentially increased out energy needs and fuel/water usage. Now with ai, we are doing it all over again in the span of a few years. Please explain with mathematics, how we get out of this trap of thermodynamics and not all die from heat? How does ai save us? Does it get us closer in any way? Or is it so that the elites can goon a little harder and try to fill the void inside them with yet more money?

Ask yourself, what value does it add?

It's a hammer being sold as a replacement for builders. I don't hate AI, rather than all of stuff that's called "AI" these days is being sold as something more than it is.

Just listen to Jensen, the token salesman, of Nvidias fame.

If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed

This is what I hate. The mad greed of these companies; the blatant disregard of everyone that these CEOs are displaying; the blind rush without a thought about consequences. "AI" is just the latest fad that got ruined by good old capitalism.

Assuming you're talking about generative AI and most (or all?) chatbots - the only people who 'like' it are the rich, the elderly, the tech illiterate, and the right-wing. None of these has any presence on Lemmy. Or on reddit, for that matter. AI sentiment is pretty much the same across the two platforms, from what I've seen.

The only places where I've seen any kind of unironic pro-AI content is Facebook and LinkedIn. So basically platforms filled with the aforementioned groups.

Because it is a massive financial scam built on a lame cult.