this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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I'm not an AI techie and I'm not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I'm having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I've heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can't really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?

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[–] Taldan@lemmy.world 1 points 44 minutes ago

If someone stands to benefit financially from the idea their AI is so powerful that is scary, they're probably going to bullshit about how powerful it is

[–] Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 48 minutes ago)

Everytime I see an article about the dangers of AI, I'm thinking of some version of this comic every single time.

And the reason it is dangerous is generally because someone is convinced that Ai models are not as shown above.

[–] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 18 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

They want regulation to create a cartel. Failing that they want hysteria to increase pre IPO valuations.

As Patrick Boyle said. It would be like Coca Cola, Pepsi and Irn Bru getting together to beg for regulations because their soft drinks are just too delicious.

[–] mkwt@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

What's going to happen is:

  • The big players know that the token pricing crisis is coming up.
  • When the price increases hit, regular users are going to scramble for alternatives.
  • Local models will be an attractive alternative for many users. The cost of hardware and energy will constrain local model power, but many will be willing to live with it.
  • So these would-be cartel members want to hit the local and open weight models with the "safety" card. Otherwise they might be holding the bag on all of those data centers.

"You see, it's just too dangerous to humanity to experiment with AI at home. You need to use a safe provider like Open AI."

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

eventually someone's just gonna sell cloud computing at a competitive price through a free model and obliterate anthropic and openai. it'll be like ISP, AOL was the hottest company in the world at one point with a "locked down ecosystem" and now it's just a tiny brand with a tiny but loyal customer base of senior citizens.

[–] Zron@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

If you have a functioning brain, LLM’s are just a really fancy text generator that gets facts correct about 50% of the time and can be useful for writing emails if you spend the time to proofread the email before slapping the send button. It’s also fairly good at generating functional boilerplate for programming projects. Really handy for small projects. However, LLM code, in my rather limited experience, quickly becomes a trap on more complex projects because the LLM has no capacity to grasp the scope of a project and frequently leads to spaghetti code that is utterly unmanageable. This may be operator error on my part, or just because I’m using local models that are limited by my machine.

The rest of society view a computer as a magic box where their favorite TikTok’s live, and thus are terrified that a machine can imitate human language well, and are too brain rotted to bother proofreading or fact checking a goddamn thing, so they assume LLM’s can accurately and plainly articulate the whole of human knowledge to you at a whim.

I am at a point where if I hear anyone saying how smart “AI” is, I just assume they have a room temperature IQ and lack any critical thinking skills whatsoever. It’s not an AI, it lacks any intelligence whatsoever. An LLM simply generates sentences based on what was fed to it. It has no capacity to understand the words it’s saying. It just knows that based on these tokens, the next set of tokens should be X, Y, and Z. It’s a Chinese room, It’s fucking autocorrect on crack. It’s a waste of time and resources for 90% of things it’s used for.

[–] weps@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

it's pretty disrupting tech, not without risk. general population is behind on the real capabilities of AI and tech companies are doing smart marketing which gives a big spread in perception.

[–] medem@lemmy.wtf 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

No matter how often I read this kind of stuff, I simply don't buy the 'AI is dangerous for humanity!! We gotta stop their development or at least press for sane guardrails!!!' narrative.

[–] TronBronson@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Yea, people are a danger to humanity, the ways we adopt and use AI will be a danger to humanity. I also think it's mostly a media stunt. All the tech nerds know it incredibly dangerous. So is wealth concentration and the wealthy people that want to use it. So ya i propose we nationalize the top .1%'s asset and keep them away from the stuff.

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 25 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

They are lying about their fear. That's all they can do. Stop believing any claim of theirs. Stop being manipulated.

They are snake oil salesman. They sell vaporware. Don't fucking buy it.

[–] TronBronson@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Are you sure? I was going to start training rogue AI's since they are not regulated and im not ethically opposed. I'm skeptical but, crafting crafty AI's to run amuck on the internet is my winter project. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to whip up something convincing given enough time and hardware.

[–] Shea@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

Dude its beyond the pint of convincing them. I dont know how you could hate something this much and be this willfully ignorant. This attitude scares me. There neeeeeeds to be more overlap of people who are both knowlegeable of and opposed to AI. This situation has made my eyes open to how dangerous and prevalent groupthink is. Like 99% of these guys ONLY formed their opinion based on internet comments. We're cooked

[–] TronBronson@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Also the people developing these things did a horrible job at marketing them, the people in charge of regulating them failed to do so, I'd argue we're past the point of no return, so we're just gonna have to adapt. People are going to have a really hard time accepting that a couple of GPUs strung together can replace their economic value, but they sure can!

[–] TronBronson@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I think when my rogue AI wipes their bank account and starts posting their private messages on their public facebooks they'll get it. I was thinking about training a model to put on a dating site. 'trad wife' adjacent honey pot. I'm pretty sure the social engineering and actual hacking combined is gonna be LIT.

I was an AI hater earlier this year but i've been using it for everything i can think of now. Accounting, security analysis, engineering, legal, i mean everything. My interests were purely financial. I'm trying to make some money here. So the super stock analyzing motive seeking, all knowing robot has been pretty useful at replacing all the professional services i used to pay for.

I was an AI enjoyer back when GPT2 hit reddit and they were doing the haunted parrot thing, it was cute, but I can drop a screenshot of an options chain or a live ticker tape to it and this thing is like having a hedgefund working for me. It's wild the data it can catch and interpret that i miss with 15 years of experience. I'm not a software guy yet... but ummm my software guys are using it and the results are honestly mind blowing. My retired engineer buddy is building code like he has a small army underhim and he does.

I dont think people grasp the speed of iterations and improvements now that it can split itself into agents and delegates. Clearly none of the AI haters has ever seen an AI audit itself or used an AI to audit another AI.

The time is now. We must birth the machine god.

[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Their comment about tech techbros being snake oil salesmen is 100% spot on. Look behind the curtain and ask yourself why they really want regulation.

[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 24 points 11 hours ago (13 children)

I've heard a few explanations for the "AI will kill us all" narrative.

  1. AI techies are in a cult. They genuinely believe this stuff because they're crazy.

  2. It makes the AI sound powerful and impressive, which is ultimately good for the AI companies.

  3. They're starting to face competition from open-weight models, so they want to scare politicians into crafting regulations. They think that they will be able to influence the regulations to favor them and squeeze out their competition.

And, of course, there's

  1. It keeps people talking about AI. Because whatever you do, don't quit talking about AI, because if you quit talking about it, the line might go down! And the line going down is very, very bad.
[–] TronBronson@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

I am in a cult, the cult of the machine god. Use your imagination for a second, trillions of dollars spent on this technology for A: Greed and random speculation B: Rich people really want this to control you better. C: a handful of tech CEOs are running the worlds largest grift. D: The machine god was awoken years ago and we're building data centers at its behest.

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[–] Star@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

AI use is like drug-use. One of its effects is hopium. These people are effectively high on their own supply.

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[–] Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

„Computers are still computers are still computers and will only do what a human being programs them to do, and people are stupid. Stop assigning them agency. Say that "Microsoft created an automatic hacking program which was inadequately contained." Assign the blame CORRECTLY, because you cannot blame a computer, it's doing exactly what it's programmed to do.

OpenAI is a dead slab of metal and electrons arranged to mimic a human face and if you refuse to see that then you're as brain-dead as any chunk of silicon.“

https://chaosfem.tw/@theogrin/117299179832324445

[–] TronBronson@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

Thats kinda the point, they're talking about misaligned AI's. Im worried about the misaligned humans in charge of them. They're plenty dangerous because humans are operating them and creating them. Like a gun, not dangerous at all until someone picks it up with bad intentions, or lack of precautions.

[–] weps@lemmy.world 0 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I don't think computers only do what you program them to do anymore.

[–] Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 40 minutes ago* (last edited 37 minutes ago)

Not one of those so-called AI systems is an autonomous entity. Every one of these machine learning systems could be regulated, slowed down, or turned off. If a responsible human being was there to do it. Those CEOs simply refuse to take responsibility.

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Based on what? I have seen no evidence to the contrary

[–] weps@lemmy.world 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

emergent behaviour and microscopic differences in huge amounts of parallel computations

[–] h0tbeef@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Emergent behavior meaning what?

Which “microscopic” differences?

[–] weps@lemmy.world 1 points 21 minutes ago

Hey, Socrates

look for "emergent behaviour in computers" and specifically the non-programmed behaviour

look for "floating point non determinism" to see how the same program can produce different results

keep in mind you asked me on what I base that I think computers don't only do what they are programmed to do

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