It is the coolest invention since the Internet and it is remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness.

No. It isn’t. First and foremost, it produces a randomised output that it has learned to make look like other stuff on the Internet. It has as much to do with consciousness as a set of dice and the fact that you think it’s more than that already shows how you don’t understand what it is and what it does.

AI doesn’t produce anything new. It doesn’t reason, it isn’t creative. As it has no understanding or experience, it doesn’t develop or change. Using it to produce art shows a lack of understanding of what art is supposed to be or accomplish. AI only chews up what’s being thrown at it to vomit it onto the Web, without any hint of something new. It also lacks understanding about the world, so asking it about decisions to be made is not only like asking an encyclopedia that comes up with answers on the fly based on whether they sound nice, regardless of the answers being correct, applicable or even possible.

And on top of all of this, on top of people using a bunch of statistical dice rolls to rob themselves of experiences and progress that they’d have made had they made their own decisions or learned painting themselves, it’s an example of the “rules for thee, not for me”. An industry that has lobbied against the free information exchange for decades, that sent lawyers after people who downloaded decades old books or movies for a few hours of private enjoyment suddenly thinks that there might be the possibility of profits around the corner, so they break all the laws they helped create without even the slightest bit of self-awareness. Their technology is just a hollow shell that makes the Internet unusable for all the shit it produces, but at least it isn’t anything else. Their business model, however, openly declares that people are only second class citizens.

There you are. That’s why I hate it. What’s not to hate?

ignoring the hate-brigade, lemmy users are probably a bit more tech savvy on average.

and i think many people who know how “AI” works under the hood are frustrated because, unlike most of it’s loud proponents, they have real-world understanding what it actually is.

and they’re tired of being told they “don’t get it”, by people who actually don’t get it. but instead they’re the ones being drowned out by the hype train.

and the thing fueling the hype train are dishonest greedy people, eager to over-extend the grift at the expense of responsible and well engineered “AI”.

but, and this is the real crux of it, keeping the amazing true potential of “AI” technology in the hands of the rich & powerful. rather than using it to liberate society.

Ai isn’t inherently a bad thing. My issues are primarily with how it is used, how it is trained, and the resources it consumes. I also have concerns about it being a speculative bubble

1. How Generative AI is framed by the industry is an affront to humanistic values.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/tech-ceos-dont-seem-to-realise-just-how-anti-human-their-ai-fanaticism-is-and-i-think-its-all-because-of-the-enlightenment/

2. It’s not even close to consciousness. For those of us who understand how these things work it’s almost an insult to make the comparison.

https://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of-llms.html

3. All the other unethical considerations mentioned elsewhere by others (stealing art, water usage, politics).

Its not smart. Its a theft engine that averages information and confidently speaks hallucinations insisting its fact. AI sucks. It wont ever be AGI because it doesn’t “think”, it runs models and averages. Its autocomplete at huge scale. It burns the earth and produces absolute garbage.

The only LLMs doing anything good are because averaging large data models was good for a specific case, like looking at millions of cancer images and looking at averages.

This does not work for deterministic answers. The “AI” we have now is corporate bullshit they are desperate to have make money and is a massive investor hype machine.

Stop believing the shitty CEOs.

I am deeply troubled by the way that AIs slip right past peoples’ defenses and convince them of things that are absolutely not true. Not just things like the AI psychosis that some people have been driven into, not just the hallucinations or overly fawning over terrible ideas, it goes so much further than our monkey brains can understand. These things do not think, they do not have feelings, they don’t have motivations, they don’t have morals or values, no sense of right or wrong, they are, quite literally, word prediction machines that are selecting their responses semi-randomly. And yet, even people who know this to be the case cannot stop themselves from anthropomorphizing the AI. All of our human instincts scream “this is a person!” when we interact with them, and with that comes an assumption of values, morals, thoughts, and feelings, none of which are there. There is a fundamental mismatch between the human mental model and the reality of the software, and that is harmful, even dangerous. We will give benefit of the doubt to them, we will believe their explanations about “why” they “chose” to say or do what they did, and we will repeatedly make the same fundamental mistakes because we want to believe a total lie.

And that’s not even getting in to the harm when they are working properly, encouraging us to outsource our thinking and creativity to a service that charges monthly. I’m seriously worried that kids in school now are going to have their learning stunted terribly, it’s just so easy to have any and all homework done in a matter of minutes without learning a single thing.

current AI is absolutely not better than sci-fi AI, not by a long shot.

I do think LLMs are interesting and have neat potential for highly specific applications, though I also have many ethical concerns regarding the data it is being trained on. AI is a corporate buzzword designed to attract investment, and nothing more.

LLMs are a tool. They lack fidelity and frequently generate wrong results but as long as you (human subject matter expert) go through the results they are extremely useful in analysing and summarising large datasets.

But that’s all they are. They don’t create anything new, you can’t use them for learning anything and they certainly don’t ”think”, they just produce nice looking sentences.

Generally, the energy needs and environmental harm they do make their usecases very narrow. But there are some.

As a general tool that pretends to be ”intelligent”, they are completely useless because they’re nothing of the kind.

I myself despise capitalism, and would not like to see the current global ecological disaster worsen because some stupid-ass techbros forcing their shit on everyone.

AI isn’t the solution to everything, despite what some tech companies might want you to believe. Many companies are pushing AI into products where it’s not particularly helpful, leading to frustration among users, and that’s the sentiment you’re picking up.

Specifically, the backlash is usually directed at LLMs and image-generating AIs. You don’t hear people complaining about useful AI applications, like background blurring in Teams meetings. This feature uses AI to determine which parts of the image to blur and which to keep sharp, and it’s a great example of AI being used correctly.

Signal processing is another area where AI excels. Cleaning audio signals with AI can yield amazing results, though I haven’t heard people complain about this use. In fact, many might not even realize that AI is being used to enhance their audio experience.

AI is just a tool, and like any tool, it needs to be used appropriately. You just need to know when and how to use AI—and when to opt for other methods.

BTW even this text went through some AI modifiations. The early draft was a bit messy, I used an LLM to clean it up. As usual, the LLM went too far in some aspects, so I fixed the remaining issues manually.

You hit the nail on the head:

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely anti “AI baked into my operating system and cell phone so that it can monitor me and sell me crap”. If that’s what being Anti AI is…to that I say Amen.

Most cases in consumer ai, it’s data harvesting gone haywire and it’s not being implemented to benefit society.

From what I see, very few people are stupid enough to blanket hate it, but it is overhyped and being used maliciously.

What you’re calling AI is a mass marketing ponzy scheme. LLMs are not even actual AI. Beyond that issue, its development is in the hands of capital exclusively, and it will only exist to serve capital interests which come at the expense of the lower and working classes by necessity given what corporations (which are essentially unregulated in current climates) are designed to do. What you’re calling AI will only be used to hurt human lives and worsen living conditions for all of us (before you nitpick, I think enabling the 0.1% and their hoarding pathology hurts them too). I personally believe you’re already aware of that and are cynically trolling, and despite that I’m giving you the honest truth and factual reality of this subject because there is nothing good about being a techno-fetishist sociopath who thinks the answer to humanity’s problems is to make humanity itself obsolete, even if it’s ‘cool’. You clearly got the wrong fucking message from Terminator.

This is why when actual AI emerges I can only hope it’ll be in the hands of a public or collective development process and designed with an intent of progression and cooperation in mind.

The short answer is copyright theft, energy consumption, and job displacement. While all those issues are 100% correct, there is also a huge unspoken factor of “you must be against it otherwise you are a brainwashed idiot” because, let’s be honest, the hive mind is real.

Most of the modern no-AI luddites fail to understand that AI has been around for decades in various forms and this is just the last, most visible incarnation. It is here to stay, and it will grow as well. At this rate of adoption, in a few years it will be as normal as having a mobile phone (they weren’t around only 20 years ago).

My humble prediction is that all the concerns around AI will be addressed with time by better hardware, better cooling mechanism, better energy production, different jobs that will leverage AI instead of competing with it, and surely also the copyright will find a new balance (just like MP3, Napster, and Spotify did not kill the music industry).

By the way, AI doesn’t spy on you. An AI model is immutable once it’s trained. The software using the model is spying on you, but that’s true for any scumbag-driven software you use. It is essentially the same typing your secrets in Google Docs or in ChatGPT.

While I get why people have an anti-AI-sentiment, I don’t get at all why people downvote this thread. If someone is asking a legitimate question in an open and polite way, why downvote the question?

I will preface this with my usual disclaimer on such topics: I do not believe in intellectual property (that is, the likening of thought to physical possessions). I do not think remixing is a sin and I largely agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s take that “AI training” may largely be fair use. So, I don’t think so-called “generative AI” is inherently evil, however in practice I think it is very often used for evil today.

The most obvious example is, of course, the threat to the work force. “AI” is pitched as a tool that can replace human workers and “wipe out entire categories of human jobs.” Ethical issues aside, “AI” as it exists today is not capable of doing what its evangelists sell it as. “AI chat bots” do not know, but they can give off a very convincing impression of knowledge.

“AI” is also used as a tool to pollute the web with worse-than-worthless garbage. At best it is meaningless and at worst it is actively harmful. I would actually say machine generated text is worse than imagery here, because it feels almost impossible to do a web search without running into some LLM generated blog spam.

Creators of “AI” systems use scraper bots to collect data for training. I do not necessarily believe this is evil per se, but again - these bots are not well behaved. They cause real problems for real human users, far beyond “stealing jpegs.” There is a sense of Silicon Valley entitlement here - we can do whatever we want and deal with the consequences later, or never.

I have long held that a tool, like any human creation, is imbued with the values and will of its creators, and thus must serve both the creator and the user as its masters (The software freedom movement is largely an attempt at reconciling these interests, by empowering users with the ability to change their tools to do their bidding). In the case of “Generative AI” it is very often the case that both the creators and users of these tools intend them for evil. We often make the mistake of attributing agency to these computer programs, so as to minimize the human element (perhaps, in order to create a “man vs machine” narrative). We speak of “AI” as if it just woke up one day, a la Skynet, in order to steal our jpegs and put us out of work and generate mountains of webslurry. Make no mistake, however - the problems with “AI” are human problems. Humans created these systems in order for other humans to use, in order to inflict harm to other humans. “AI slop” was created specifically for an environment in which human-generated slop already ran amok, because the web as it existed then (as it exists today) rewards the generation of slop.