I’ve been on Lemmy for about 2 weeks now, and I’ve noticed a trend:
The VAST majority of posts that mention AI in any manner are some dig or criticism or some other negative commentary, and the rare ones that have anything positive to say about it almost always have negative whatever-Lemmy’s-version-of-karma-is.
I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.
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
The penultimate one makes no sense though. Also, most of the items in your list are not really about AI, they are about capitalism.
And who owns the giant public AIs that are doing all the damage? Capitalists.
You won’t find nearly as many people in here shitting on running a local version of some small model in your own house to take care of your own needs. Obviously somebody’s going to complain because somebody will complain about fucking everything…
But all of the capture and devour capitalism is at the heart of every public AI right now.
Of course. But then the issue is not AI is it? It’s like always capitalism. Like the first ever AI research and development happened in the USSR. They hoped that by striving to create intelligence/consciousness we would learn more about ourselves and what it even means to be intelligent and conscious.
AI is not evil, it’s not bad or destroying the world. Capitalism is destroying the world.
What they are calling AI is not evil in itself. But it is being used as a weapon against the environment, artists, progress, education, and internet discourse. That is where the hate comes from.
I mean, what they are calling AI quite literally isn’t AI
That is why I used those words ;)
Lol
Why are people pretending all those issue appeared with AI? You think the environment would be less fucked without AI? Artists? Education?
It’s like people complaining about smartphones making kids depressed. Like growing up during an apocalypse wouldn’t be the main cause? Perhaps?
These are the results of the long sharp road of capitalism. With or without “AI” we would be fucked.
Literally yes to all of your stupid questions. Any others?
nobody is saying these attacks are solely caused by AI. but shoehorning it into every place of work , every classroom, every TV set and youtube video is making things worse.
Nobody was running dozens of fucking diesel and natural gas generators to keep their minecraft server up, you fucking potato.
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.
ruins the planet by polution
AI on its own doesn’t ruin the planet or cause pollution, if corporations are ruining the planet to train AI models the issue is corporations not AI
Platforms themselves are self-selecting. I’m speaking for myself here. I am on Lemmy because I dislike the power that big tech has gotten to control content, policy, news, and global perceptions. As such, I self host and use federated technologies where possible. The vast majority of AI tools are controlled by the same centrally controlled big tech companies that I’m here to avoid. There are self-hosted AI tools or there, but basically every AI tool was trained using scraped data, and, for instance, my Searx-ng instance was flooded by so many bots that I had to make it harder to use for myself just to keep the bots out. My blog? Constantly scraped, killing my bandwidth. A lot of foss projects used to have bug bounty programs and accepted code from any contributor to wander in, but are now closing off due to AI slop code contributions. So, the type of person you’ll find here probably hates AI if they’re like me. Also, I work in tech and have to bite my tongue every time a co-worker “helpfully” sends me a Copilot Slop answer to a question when I was asking for a judgment call or an opinion.
Because we’re mostly not bots.
Not yet, but I’m sure AI bros will find a way to mass register bots here. I already reported lots of people who had a distinct AI writing style. Over time it will be harder to distinguish those from real users 😓
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?
Yeah, that’s capitalism for ya.
We need a revolution.
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.
Because I and some associates spend years traveling, collecting , and documenting some very specific information on an uncommon family of animals, their care in aquaria, and ecological curiosities. We had a website which hosted all the documented info, a small but active community of people with this niche interest. A few minor ads and affiliate links kept the site running, and allowed our few naturalists to go to more places and document rarer species. Now LLMs have stolen all our content and google shows all of our information in its AI searches as if it owns it and never links the information to the community that lovingly curated it. Our website had to be taken offline forever because all our traffic is just scrapers.
So please, tell me how AI stealing everything we worked hard on for years and selling it to you is considered a good thing?
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
marketinglies for making the lines go up?I don’t necessarily think that’s even techbros, it’s CEOs/management ruining it. They’re trying to bleed water from a stone, and they’re killing the planet to do it without giving a snigle fuck.
that is who is usually referred to as tech bros imo. It’s the elon musks, the people that are in charge and seem to have a superficial understanding of the technology (more than what tou can say about most CEOs unfortunately) but are actually only interested in money. The people that actually innovate and work on the technologies are often smarter than that.
Unfortunately someone needs to pay the bills and those people are passionate enough about the technology that they end up working for the tech bros and ultimately contribute to the problems
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.
Ask yourself, what value does it add?
I don’t know about value but certainly a lot of cost to hardware.
No, AI does not. Data centers do, and they’re being used for AI, but AI can be used without data centers. You’re mis-attributing the blame. Blame negligent corporations making unnecessary data centers, not the technology they aim to use.
Better medicine and healthcare in general.
At the expense of most people’s income of course because that’s what it’s mainly used for and electricity and their health directly and indirectly.
Machine learning in medicine and healthcare has been around for decades, and has basically nothing to do with the LLM and image generation garbage that has now colloquially become known as “AI”.
Half the problem with “AI hate” is how goddamned nebulous of a term it’s become. When people say they hate AI, they’re almost certainly talking about specifically all the new generative commercialized stuff from just the past few years, but so many people hear that and assume something a LOT broader.
Most of the time they’re not even talking about AI, they’re instead talking about ancillaries like data centers, but they can’t fathom the distinction.
Hmmmm I wonder what all these data centers are being used for.
Yeah, and authors are to blame for trees being cut down. It doesn’t matter that books don’t necessarily need to be printed on paper, it’s a clear line from authors writing to trees being cut down, so we should all hate authors.
Right?
Because it is a massive financial scam built on a lame cult.
Because it’s a technology wielded by the most powerful to harm the rest of us.
Removed by mod
Mostly because it was trained on everyone’s stolen data but then the elite are gatekeeping it. Combined with mass theft of public funds in order to fund their AI and the billionaires end goal to create a dystopian tech overlord society.
Also when the AI hallucinates it’s extremely annoying.
I detest that a pretty limited and inefficient technology became a functional deity. Whatever cost is paid upfront to serve it is just, whatever resource it needs is reserved, whatever it produces should be spread uncritically low and high. Like all copium for the masses, it becomes a prosthetic device people become dependent on in their lives, and whatever I choose it or not, it becomes projected onto me too, making the products and aftermath of GenAI boom a part of my daily live and a tax I now pay.
From a power/economics perspective, it’s a cover for the biggest companies and most punchable CEOs to take our shared knowledge, skills and means of compute from us and sell them back to us as a subscription, while pissing in the community well they just eroded.
As a consumer I play around with local machine learning-based tech to OCR pages, create transcripts, extrapolate images and frames in video. I haven’t found a usecase for rented GenAI in my workflow but I usually don’t cringe at people using it as long as they don’t take pride in using it (and it happens a lot, oooff). I despise rich companies and people masturbating around the topic, firing people in droves, enshitifying everyithing and taking ever more power.
