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 actually think the technology is interesting but it’s being used by evil people to do evil things.
If it was trained on ethically source data and that just used to generate smeary anime girls and shit it would be a lot less objectionable.
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 😓
First, you made that classic blunder. You wrote “AI” without defining it, as if it was meaningful. We always see people do bait-and-switch arguments surrounding this topic. Always. So, if you want a meaningful answer, you need to actually provide a definition…
Are you asking why people hate ChatGPT? If so, you should ask that.
Second, you made a mistake. You think people hate AI when the hate is reserved for the assholes getting rich by fucking us all over as they destroy our communities, clean water, and affordable electricity. Remember, it’s the people who do horrible things who need to be stopped.
Game communities I used to love browsing have become inundated with low-effort, vibe-coded crapware. It’s now 20 times harder to find anything good. Hardware is 20 times more expensive. My insurance company is using AI to deny me medical help. A skill I spent 25 years developing suddenly is full of morons who think they know as much as I do because they can have Claude vomit out something resembling software.
There is A LOT to hate.
A skill I spent 25 years developing suddenly is full of morons who think they know as much as I do because they can have Claude vomit out something resembling software.
Gosh yes.
very confident morons with fucking hammers
This is not a direct answer to your question.
I’ve heard 2 really great takes about LLMs & GenAI, that have stayed with me - though I don’t have the best wording for them anymore.
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As AI is trained on previously created data, it fundamentally looks backwards. Human creativity creates new things and inherently looks to the future.
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AI is trained on the vast corpus of human works and synthesizes that info into a median response. You will never get exciting and bold insights, just bland and inoffensive responses.
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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.
I like computers and now can’t easily afford to do the projects I’m interested in. I get very little value from AI and it destroyed my hobby. It also is a massive bubble that will hurt the majority of the world once it pops. It’s dumb.
You’re describing the effects of data centers, not AI. AI doesn’t change the prices on computer components, nor is it in any way a bubble. I think you’re describing corporations buying up components for their data centers, which they intend to use for AI, but that isn’t attributable to AI itself. It’s like saying authors are to blame for trees being cut down to make paper - completely ignoring that books can be digital.
AI training needs data centers. The companies wouldn’t be buying up components without this gold rush.
And books need paper. Trees wouldn’t be cut down if authors quit writing. Therefore, AI and authors are evil.
(You can train AI without data centers and you can write books without printing them.)
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.
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.
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
I really don’t understand how people can be so blinded by hopium that they cannot see the blindingly obvious consequences of allowing this insane tech to co-opt our planet, at the behest of the most powerful and evil people to ever live.
There may be use cases for this tech but it not worth it to sacrifice the entirety of our natural world to be ground up and processed to feed this behemoth. It is purely wishful thinking that this will solve everything and they are willing to pay ANYTHING to try it. They are gambling with the planet and it’s like 2% chance they win, otherwise life dies.
We were told 15 years ago, that we had a decade to change course to prevent CATASTROPHIC heating of the planet and degradation of the environment. Instead of doing really anything about that, we have exponentially increased out energy needs and fuel/water usage. Now with ai, we are doing it all over again in the span of a few years. Please explain with mathematics, how we get out of this trap of thermodynamics and not all die from heat? How does ai save us? Does it get us closer in any way? Or is it so that the elites can goon a little harder and try to fill the void inside them with yet more money?
Under capitalism, LLMs are used purely for the benefits of the capitalist class, spying on all of the working classes and enabling immense repressions. It isn’t a tool without any and all merit, but under capitalism it will always be used against our best interests.
You do realize that the vast majority of people hate LLMs right? They are power, water resource hungry worthless things that have yet to prove any worth to the human race.
Instead of staring at a bug for six hours until I have a literal panic attack, I can ask copilot for help after I can’t find a solution after an hour.
It helped my autistic ass get back to my hobby and love. But I am looking into switching to a local llm instead of one from the data center.
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?
Why are there so many people on Lemmy asking this same question over and over again. This has got to get over ten now in the last week.
Because /fuck_ai exists
