Ask Lemmy

I wanted to add, since I haven't seen anyone else mention it, I also hate AI and refuse to use it because it is the focal point of the biggest stock market bubble, pump-and-dump scam, that we have ever seen. When it pops, it will dwarf the housing market crash of 2007ish. It is so blatantly obvious to so many of us and we are powerless to stop it beyond boycotting and repeatedly voicing the flaws, failures and misinformation rampantly circulating the LLM technology. I hate "AI" for all the reasons everyone else has stated, but I also hate it for what the AI bubble will inevitably do to the worldwide economy and anyone who doesn't have a million dollar safety net.

I also hate "AI" because a LLM is not AI at all. Not in the sense of a general artificial intelligence. AI was a label applied to LLMs by marketing douchebags to hype their bullshit machine. But this is false. LLMs are not AI, they are not intelligent. But LLMs present the illusion of intelligence and that is enough to keep the game of musical chairs going, for now.

They claim to automate the work so we have more time to focus on imporant things. Has this ever happened? We got computers, productivity went up, and we still work 40 hours and are poorer than previous generations. In a time of climate crises, they take our dwindling resources so people can create stupid images and videos. I want to see creativity being shared.

Besides, everything AI learned is stolen from people who put the work in. I want people to visit my website, that I worked hard on. I don't want some LLM telling you what it "learned" from my work. I know search engines purposely make their results crap so the only way to get information is to use an LLM nowadays and I admit I use LLMs for that reason. I can't just google what I need anymore most of the time.

The Fediverse is generally-to-strongly anti-corporate. 98% of LLM AI is owned/controlled by corporations.

I can't speak for the community, however in 2022 when ChatGPT was in development, lots of us were excited about it. When ChatGPT came out, and the image AIs came out, I tried them and was pretty impressed at first. However as I learned more about them and time went on, I learned to not like them, and avoid them. This is what happened:

• I realized that ChatGPT would make subtle mistakes that were impossible to catch if you didn't have expert knowledge
• I wasted a lot of time using AI trying to get it to give me right answers
• People at work used ChatGPT to make subtle mistakes which negatively affected me
• I learned about how writers and artists were having their work stolen and put into these large models without their consent
• I learned about the environmental costs
• Computer hardware started getting stupidly expensive :(
• I learned how using AI can make you rely on it, and you lose critical thinking skills.
• I have seen people in the real world defer to "AI" as an authority on a subject.
• I learned how many of the AI tech bros sincerely believe their own hype and think that Advanced General Intelligence is going to develop out of the same tech as llm and pose a threat to humanity and/or save humanity
• Companies have started using AI to make customer service worse
• Small businesses turned to AI to make awful flyers and menues which make my experience in the world worse
• Bosses use AI as a way to fire people and or control the workforce better
• The surveillance state is using AI to destroy privacy

So that's why i don't like it and try not to use it any more.

This is just a starting point, but the insane amount of pollution and constant disregard for a better way of doing things was the first reason I dropped it. Even if it was a good, reliable product, the way it’s produced is egregious and wasteful: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA

The lemmy userbase consists of a lot of people who work or dabble in tech, a larger % than most other forums and social media. That means more people here have directly used AI for their day-to-day technical tasks/jobs, not your typical social media user who just uses AI to generate memes or do their school essay. So they have first hand experience of how inaccuracies with AI have larger consequences than 6 fingers on a hand.

Same reason that Luddites hated the textile factories. Its a tool but its the kind of tool that distances us from our work in a way that undermines our collective humanity.

I’m against AI for two main reasons: it’s a giant plagiarism machine built on the theft of the labor of millions, and it has disastrous environmental consequences in the form of rapid, giant data center deployment. (No, I am not impressed by whining about how all the internet uses data centers, build out and energy consumption remained modest until about 4 years ago). These are fundamental problems with the current implementation of the technology and I see no realistic way to change that, so I don’t see myself ever using it even if I did find it useful, which I don’t.

The only thing I’ve ever cared to have an “AI” do for me is answer incredibly niche questions that would take ages to figure out on my own, or require tracking down really obscure books, etc. But the nature of LLMs being ‘guess the next statistically most likely word’ means that it’s never going to be good for that. I can read on my own, I can write my own emails, and since I’m not a programmer I’m not stupid enough to fuck with code I don’t understand to do something a solution probably already exists for, if all the unmaintained vibe coded garbage hasn’t drowned it out. I don’t want a machine deciding what search results to show me, so I don’t use it as a search engine. I guess if I did more work with data it could maybe format it for me when I needed to make changes, but that would require trusting it not to randomly change parts of the data (which I don’t). So yeah, useless for me.

people that actively move to a federated community because their last one got enshitified tend to be against centralized platforms and are hyper aware of the potential for enshitification.

What could be more centralized (and enshitified) than AI? It's literally consuming content and regurgitating back to you.

Decades it pro, working on central stuff.

The current ai aka LLM is based on an illegal foundation, has high training and running resource cost and produces results that everyone in their field has to at least rework. This is while there are comparatively lightweight solutions that produce good results.

Not even mentioning the environmental and financial impact.

So yeah it's a tool and can be trained and used for useful things but it's sold as the solution for everything (especially them milking money) by the tech bros which it is absolutely not, leaving a wake of destruction and massive brain drain.

The worst part is that superficially it looks the part and higher ups in the business ate the most gullible people.

It doesn't seem to have much use. Supposedly we're all going to have AI do our work for us and we'll have more free time, which is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever seen.

Locally hosted models are less egregious than corporate cloud models that actively harvest and monitor your data.

Corporate AI feeds the surveillance machine, that in turn is used to suppress dissent.

That and GenAI output in anything creative or market-based gets very same-y and gives the end user an impression of the creator not caring to put in effort. Perceived low effort = spam.

Lastly, genAI gets pushed into everything. It’s a matter of simple oversaturation and it gets exhausting to have it seemingly everywhere. Not having the option to turn it off becomes, well, a turnoff. 🤷🏻

If you make slop you have to prove that it’s not slop, not the other way around

almost everybody here agrees that all AI is bad

If your eyes look only in black and white, then you believe that all people were actually only black and white as well. Even when they are colorful, you don't recognize that.

It's not nearly everyone. Possibly not even the majority. It's just the ones who do tend to be very vocal about it.

My understanding is that it stems from the opposition against big tech in general. The reasons for being against AI are not dissimilar to the reasons why they oppose Facebook, Google, Twitter and such.

Because everybody is?

well i sometimes use ai (sorry i hope i will stop using it sometime soon) but because nobody wants a machine to do everything if it did everything humans wont have a productive way to spend their time (not accurate since i am not 100 percent against ai)

and also it justifies big tech control (nothing in this post was written by AI)

and a lot more