Why is this community suddenly overflowing with AI fanboys? I'm sick of it.
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 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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Consider how much money is behind AI right now and it's a lot easier to understand.
Is the implication here that the AI industry are astroturfing Lemmy/Piefed?
1, I don't really believe lemmy is as inconsiderable as people like to think, but whatever.
2, the money put into AI manifests in a ton of different ways. You've got people who like it because they want their stocks to go up, people who like it because their office pampers them for being a good sport about using it, people who like it because of the cultural osmosis of seeing it at the super bowl, as an ad between every 3rd and 4th reddit post, probably on the sidebar or whatever on polymarket, and you have people who like the fetishistic technofuturism of it all, a public image which is another product of ad agencies more or less.
So, even if no one is astro turfing lemmy in specific, our culture is still being astroturfed out the ass.
I hate AI data centers and tech billionaires. The only way around them is to direct people to alternatives that you can run locally on your own machine, like AnythingLLM or GPT4ALL.
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The word that has been sticking with me about AI is “disrespect.” Disrespect to the training material stolen. Disrespect to the people who wrote it. Disrespect to the communities shouldering the data center load. Disrespect to the people these companies are tracking through their services. Disrespect to authors of websites scraped for data. Disrespect to human intelligence and creativity. Etc.
I don't hate AI. It's a tool, I'm indifferent to it. I hate the people trying to force it on everyone and into everything, and their eagerness to fuck up huge numbers of lives to make a quick buck.
A tool has a deterministic outcome, you hammer a nail you know the outcome, you saw a board you know the outcome. No matter how many times you do the same process you know the outcome. Even dice have a boundary of outcomes you can understand.
You give an AI the same string of prompts multiple times and you will get a different outcome each time. Whether its updates to the model or the fact AI's own response contributes to its context which small changes will build up over time, there is no way of knowing what the outcome will be, how accurate it is, or how to recreate the same results (especially with multiple prompts involved).
I wouldn't call it a tool for that reason but maybe I am nitpicking here.
I'd say if a tool produces predictable results, even if not fully deterministic, it qualifies as a tool. It might not be right for jobs were precision is needed, but the current LLMs and GenAI are perfectly suitable for their primary purpose:
Conning idiots into trading their skills and natural intelligence for a promise of convenience, scamming managers into fucking over employees for a promise of saving money, then pulling the rug, cashing in on the desperation of those who can no longer function without it, ruining a generation of students that don't yet have the expertise to realise the full extent of the damage they're doing to their own skills (including, as some other post brought up, the skill to not kill people with your MedGPT malpractice), causing unpredictable damage to a host of economies and industries, fucking over residents that don't get a (democratic) say in whether they want to have a data center chugging their water supply, fucking up the climate, fucking the whole world...
In short: LLMs and GenAI are a tool to sell our future for a quick buck we'll never see.
I think it could be a tool. Maybe. So long as what you wanted was correct-sounding nonsense, it's perfect for that.
Of course, when they say "AI is a tool," what they mean is "AI is not political," which is obviously ridiculous. Tools have never not been political, and like Icarus, their wings will burn up eventually.
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Yeah, sort of.
I mean it is a tool made from stealing other people's work.
And also we have restrictions on other tools in society. Knifes for instance. They're pretty neat, but you wouldn't want to be giving them to kids or pretending that it solves every problem.
Sort of like cigarettes in the 1950s.
Or asbestos.
How it currently exists, yes in most cases it is trained on stolen cognitive labor. Do you think this is inherent to the technology itself, however? Consider a model trained on entirely public domain data, or non-copyleft liscence not requiring attribution. E.g., talkie
Totally agree that we need strict regulation.
If only we lived in a society where people could be freely able to produce cognitive labor while also being guaranteed a dignified life with universal basic services and income, regardless of what they produce. Then, like with piracy, LLM training, in my opinion, could be trained on anything without harming original authors.
I mean that's a wonderful "what if" situation. Universal basic income and an expanded commons.
But I'm going to pull you up on the notion of cognitive labour.
Most artists and writers are not just coming up with ideas but actually executing them.
Creating pictures, even digitally, usually requires the artist to place their body in a location for a duration and perform (often repetitive) tasks.
This is manual labour too. They chose to exchange their physical existence for the creation of this work.
The same is true of most writers too. Not just the typing up of their ideas, but frequently the physical process of acquiring the material to express those ideas. Travelling for interviews. Talking to people.
So yeah, don't let them get away with suggesting that theft was purely "cognitive labour" because that finishes the crime.
I would hate a hammer if everyone I cannot send dickwise demanded I perform brain surgery with it.
And that’s exactly where AI fits currently.
Imagine the head of a factory declaring, "Why am I paying all these people to assemble products when I could give 20% of them hammers and fire the rest."
I dunno about this analogy, I think if a hammer just got invented then for some trades 20% of the workforce with hammers will dramatically outperform the full workforce without.
AI is just not a hammer-calibre tool to begin with, but honesty I'd rather argue about where we go even if we imagine AI really is that useful. People being laid off en masse should be much more concerning than which technology their employers dramatically overestimed to get to that point. I think I'd be just as upset about mass layoffs in a fictional world where they were a sound business decision. I actually don't care that those decisions will tank some business after the next quarter.
It was mostly a joke because AI is getting shoehorned into everything in ways that makes as much sense as a hammer at every station of an assembly line; at the very least, AI is not actually replacing the laid off workers who were fired for lack of projects and work.
What I also think is pretty great about the AI-backlash is that it's effecting the educated "middle class", which has built society around gate keeping degrees. Nobody generally gave a shit when modernization displaced factory workers ("just the price of progress!"), because working with the BRAIN is obviously morally superior (/s), but now knowledge work is effected, they're feeling a drop of class consciousness.
Generative "AI" sucks.
this... tool is (kinda) ok, sucks and it's wrong a lot but that's besides the point.
the tool should be accessable, but NOT forced..
Without a doubt! LLMs are a fantastic tool. But they're just a tool! They makes some tasks easier.
They're not the mark of the beast.
They're not Skynet.
They're not even "artificial intelligence". That's all marketing.
Once this bubble bursts, humanity will be left with some great tools to move forward with.
I would agree with you if it wasn't so destructive to the environment
We don't hate it enough, we can still do better!
Everyone I see online hates Ai and everyone I know irl (but my gf) loves it.
Because AI completely destroys online communities but has a much lesser impact on local/IRL communities I suppose. So those depending on online communities a lot are likely geared to be much more adverse to AI.
A lot of people don’t dare to speak up against AI in person, but they still don’t like it. At my company if you were to criticize AI, you would tank your career
I see lots of enthusiastic love too
Well, if the concept of the belly brain is true, this is the only AI I'll accept or trust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_(art_installation)
"Da Pope!"
Why is he so sad that people dislike his sponsors?
Everyone doesn't hate AI, the pilot whales think we have it coming.
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