this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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I know lemmy has a big hard on for anti-AI but a few things here:
There are many legitimate criticisms against AI, especially generative models, but this ain't one
one of my specific issues is use of the word intelligence. exactly 0 of the "AI" built over the previous 60 years is "endowed with the faculty of understanding or reason"... it is false advertising at best and a scam if we're being honest.
if they called it "bag of words" processing or "computer that is pretty good at guessing what your taking about" i'd be less irritated when people laud it's accomplishments.
at the core, all of these technologies are signal processing and pattern recognition, nothing more.... no matter what musk, altman and the rest say there is no intelligence in there.
This is an issue of science in general, and MANY people take issue with naming conventions, even scientists themselves. Black holes aren't black and they aren't holes. The big bang didn't explode and there probably wasn't sound. The primordial soup didn't have chicken broth.
Unfortunately, that is exceedingly unlikely to change.
You are just using a very narrow definition of intelligence to mean exactly human-like intelligence. All intelligence is signal processing and pattern recognition. You can give LLM a novel task and it might complete it. Sometimes even well. Sure, you may argue it doesn't "understand" what's it's doing the way humans do (seemingly), but it's still intelligence of some kind.
I'm using the definition of intelligence from a dictionary. language should be accurate. if AI folks called it "intellectual mimicry" I would have no issues.
they are attempting to bequeath an endowment based on specious reasoning and the hope to make money; not on the actual abilities of the machine.
People focus on the "intelligence" part but ignore artificial, and I think that makes a big difference. The name is pretty apt honestly. It appears to be intelligent. It outwardly simulates intelligence. But it's all man made to present that illusion - like an artificial reef.
Artificial: made, produced, or done by humans especially to seem like something natural.
hmmm.. good one.
I think one could argue that "It doesn't actually understand what it's saying, it's just parroting its training data" also applies to a depressingly large portion of the human population.
As an autist, this is pretty much how I communicated with neurotypicals for most of my life. Person says something, I pull something out of my database of premade scripts and with any luck, it made sense in context. 😅😅
you just gave me some new slang! Instead of using AI to describe these technologies, I will use PP, for parrot processing. 🤣
"Stochastic parrot" is the term I see most often
Largely agree. AI isn't going away; the left needs to take a page out of Sanders and advocate instead for nationalizing and regulating instead.
Please stop "the left need to..." it makes no sense, everyone i know, even conservatives hate AI
The right is too ignorant to fix anything, let alone advocate for regulation and nationalization as I stated.
Let's not confuse "the left" with whatever the current blind AI hate is.
I've literally been accused of being anti-human for trying to differentiate AI from the genuine harms it is being used for. There was one post where scientists had used a specialized LLM to create novel bacteriophages, and the comments were freaking out, claiming it was super-bugs and a new bioweapon...
The problem is that the general public has adopted "AI" to mean the current popular machine learning thing, the general category of "generative AI", and if you want a message about it to be received broadly, you need to use terms people will understand.
In my case, I'm not aware of any GenAI models that produce useful output that I'd consider to be ethical, so I support this message.
Yes, that is the problem, because people don't understand that it's a short-hand, and don't understand the difference between harmful uses, and non-harmful uses. The concept itself becomes a meaningless tribal indicator of hate. "This person is acting unethically and unlawfully," has quickly become "I don't understand what this technology is, but when I see 'AI' I automatically hate whatever it's associated with." That is counter-productive to humanity as a whole.
So stop saying that any given technology or method is intrinsically bad, and start focusing on WHO is doing the harm and HOW.
If I'm having a direct discussion with somebody, then I'll make it clear what I'm talking about, and if they engage in a conversation about ethics, I'll explain why those things are unethical.
But if I wanted to post a public message to voice my sentiment, I don't think trying to post a long explanation every time would do any good, most people would probably just skip it when they saw it's longer than a couple lines of text. So for those cases, I'd say you have to go down to the level of current discourse to engage with the masses on their terms if you want to be heard.
That's a non sequitur. The initial point was "Stop using this term incorrectly, because it spreads misunderstanding and misinformation."
Nobody said you should write a thesis per reply, and my entire point was to focus on the harms, and the actors, not the tech.
Saying "AI is unethical," is a truly nonsensical statement. Even if we grant that AI is shorthand for LLM, is still isn't justified as all I need to do is find an instance of an open source model being trained on public data to refute it, and there are MANY.
Unless you think that using public data to make public software is inherently unethical, which is a hard stance to justify.
If you're upset with Sam Altman and ChatGPT, then you can simply say "Sam Altman is a thief, and ChatGPT uses stolen data." Which is infinitely more defendable than "AI is trained on stolen data and is unethical."
The issue is, I'd say the same applies to every model that produces useful outputs. LLaMa, Anthropic, Grok, DeepSeek, whatever else is out there. If you tell somebody that the LLM they're using is unethical, they'll nust go use another convenient corporate model.
And "public data" is not enough for me, because that typically means scraping copyrighted content from public websites, I'm not aware of a model that uses only data with permission (either explicit or granted by the license) that's useful, and the people who need to hear about ethical problems with GenAI especially don't know about that.
That you know of. Your lack of awareness is not an indication on the stance of the technology itself. If you have a problem with Grok, as I do, then condemn Grok, Twitter, and that pathetic man child that owns them.
Yeah, so actively fight against these toxic corporate activities. Fuck OpenAI. Fuck Google. Fuck Twitter. But the instant negative reaction to their shared tool is getting quite a few additional people caught in the blast.
Again, this is an expression of your ignorance, not reality.
OLMo 2 was trained on Wikipedia and other fully public forums. Its training sources and data is fully accessible and open.
GPT-NeoX is an untrained model that you can train yourself. It's literally just the foundations anybody could use.
Pythia is fully open source, and one of its training sources was GitHub. Which does genuinely bring in to question whether or not you can use GitHub to train AI. Personally, I don't see how branching a repository is any different than using the code to train a model. But the current anti-AI trend has people EXTREMELY sensitive to this concept.
Decided to check out the first example quickly. It's hard to dig through the information, but following the chain of sources:
So, it's using data from Common Crawl. What data, exactly? That'd be harder to dig up. DCLM has a repository, but they don't make an effort to point out how, or if, they're filtering the data.
What I can quickly find is information from Common Crawl itself, which is the ultimate source of data. On that I can immediately see only two things:
github.com. I doubt github has that many pages of non-user-generated content, so the question is... What data is going in there, who wrote it, and did anybody agree to that? What about other websites from those top domains, such asblogspot.com,wordpress.org,readthedocs.io? I doubt they got permission to use the 17175161 pages of content from blogspot they've scraped.So yeah, maybe there's a "good" model out there I'd actually accept, but I've seen "open" models being released, and I can't possibly check all of them, just checking the websites for one of the sources for one of the models took 20 minutes here, if I wanted to verify this properly I'd have to setup the tooling to query the terabytes of data for this source, and all others, and even there I'm not sure if I'd find answers.
Okay, so you actually take issue with internet scraping itself? Let me get things straight, do you have a problem with LLMs themselves, or the data used to train them? It seems like an obvious "Yeah, the data is the issue," to me but I want to clarify because I HAVE seen the other stance before.
And if it is just the data, does that mean your REAL issue is the act of internet scraping itself? Because then you're also going to have to condemn every search engine and indexing algorithm in the world and go back to pre-indexing days when we just typed in the URL as the only method.
Or is it the monetisation that you don't like? Because then the models I provided should be exempt because they're 100% free.
It's not as simple as one singular aspect, and I don't know if I might've been fine with it if it was actually open and free from the start. But where I draw the line on ethics is with the usage of data without permission to create models intended to reproduce the data - which means laundering the data, reproducing the patterns from it to create competition/replacements for the people who made the creative work it's trained on.
The monetization is a more complicated aspect, because it is also fact that at this point the big GenAI companies are dominating the market and consuming an unreasonable amount of resources to grow, and with that any use of LLMs is supporting that market. Using the services of those companies obviously supports them, publicly using LLMs supports the legitimacy of the market, and if the current trend continues, private use of selfhosted LLMs is making yourself dependent on them, and it sure seems like the tech market is doing its best to make the necessary hardware unavailable to people, meaning you're setting yourself up to be dependent on the companies in the future.
But, that's the fun thing - this is a short explanation of my opinion, because this is a complex topic, and I'm not writing this out every time, and people wouldn't read it. My specific opinion is that governments need to catch up on copyright law, and hopefully GenAI is a bubble that bursts soon. If anti-GenAI sentiments become more widespread, maybe it'll happen. If not, then I'll have to eventually give up on my morals, but for now I can only hope it doesn't come to that.
Using logical arguments is fascist, ableist and probably racist.
That's an ad hominem!