this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Look, I don't want to be in a position of defending the plagiarism machines that are burning the world's forests whilst simultaneously somehow using all of the world's fresh water, but come on. The vast majority of people who are using AI image generation are not people who would otherwise have been involved in the creative process.
They are people who want to avoid learning Photoshop (reasonable - it takes a long time to learn, which may or may not be worth it given what you want to do, and also Adobe sucks shit) or want to avoid paying someone who knows how to use Photoshop (understandable - and would obviously be worth consideration if it weren't for all of the other problems with AI).
When you attack AI on the basis of it making people lazy - rather than any of the other things that are wrong with it - it just comes across as "Luddite". (Which is ironic, given that Luddism was originally about machinery resulting in worse working conditions for skilled workers, which is one thing AI actually will do.)
I, too, am a developer of closer to 15 years than I'd like to admit to myself, though mostly embedded and/or back-end. And while I have no problem with AI in its broad sense (obviously machine learning/spicy statistics, computer vision, and natural language processing and whatnot have potential to be enormously useful), I am generally hostile to generative AI. I thinking using copyrighted material as training data without the copyright holders' permission should be banned. And while I would have no objection to ethically-trained models in a hypothetical future where we have abundant clean energy to run the data centres and also all the new desalination plants we would need, that also remains a problem, and so I have resisted using such tools at work, too.
I agree with everything you've said after this point.
This is the crux of my problem. I find it to be overly judgemental. If you're self-employed and you need a website for your business or whatever, then you could pay someone to do it for you, but then you only have so much money in the budget. You could also learn how to code and/or graphic design and do it yourself, but then you only have so many hours in the day. If vibe coding produced something viable for you in the quickest, cheapest way, then that is obviously the rational and sensible thing to do. You might even spend the time learning something else instead that is more relevant to your interests.
Using generative AI to do something doesn't (necessarily) mean that you don't value the knowledge or skills required to do it the hard way, it only means that you value it less than something else that you might otherwise be doing with your time, and I don't think that is a moral failing.
As an example, I occasionally like to a bit of shitposting. Were it not for all those other things that I don't like about generative AI, I would probably be generating AI slop memes with the best of the them. As it is I mostly just stick to text-based comments with bad puns and references to song lyrics no-one will remember. I could put in the hours to learn how to use GIMP so I could do it without AI, but quite frankly I have books on the go, I've got a couple of musical instruments to learn/practise, and I spent all day at my software job, where I think critically (or so I claim), so I'd rather being doing those things instead. I don't think I have neglected my cognitive growth; I've just chosen to focus it on something different to what you might have.
Right, because you don't believe art has value or requires thinking. It's essentially worthless to you.
What people with a critical eye for art can tell you is that the art also has well-defined tasks with explicit perimeters and rules, and generative AI produces uncreative slop that looks amateurish if you have an eye for art. It's pretty typical for people to believe generative AI is better at tasks that they, personally, know nothing about - it's a Dunning-Kruger machine.