I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of pro-AI posts on this platform.
Various posts with titles similar to “When will people stop being afraid of AI” or “Can we please acknowledge AI was very needed for X”
Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.
AI (LLMs) is/are a fantastic tool.
But that’s what it is, a tool that can make some tasks easier.
It’s not world-changing like some tech bros and CEOs think it is because they don’t actually understand the technology.
It’s also not the apocalypse or The Matrix or Skynet coming to end civilization. It’s just a tool.
After the AI bubble bursts, AI will still be there, as a tool for humans to use.
I think it’s possible that some of the people you see on Lemmy may have started using AI a little more in their lives and see it for what it is.
You know what’s crazy is that everyone has begun rebranding things that existed before AI as AI.
The algorithm summary of a common question in Google results? Now it’s AI.
Trello’s automation tasks moving items marked as “Done” to archive? Now it’s AI✨
It’s idiotic lol
Marketing BS. The bad part is all the C-Suites falling for it.
To be fair, given the power consumption it requires, it definitely leans towards civilization ending.
We also have “the Internet” slurping up massive amounts of energy.
Current Global Electricity Breakdown:
- Total Data Center/Infrastructure Demand: Approximately 2.0% of global electricity.
- AI-Specific Share: Roughly 0.5% of global electricity.
- “Traditional” Internet/Cloud: Roughly 1.5% of global electricity.
The Internet is also a tool that humanity uses. Should we shut that down too? (I would argue yes considering how the “Information Superhighway” somehow made the average person dumber, but that’s a different discussion.)
Except the Internet is actually useful. AI has not shown that it deserves to use that insane amount of energy. It’s actually insane that you think AI isn’t an issue when it’s using 1/3rd as much energy as the ENTIRE INTERNET
Google at some point also was a great tool. Wikipedia also joins the rankings. LLM chatbots are great but certainly not the primary source of information.
What annoys me is that people began to use them to not to do simple things like writing their own posts about their own things. They began to generate content instead of making it. It is obvious that anything what takes time to be produced, will most certainly be automated once tools are given. But this annoys the hell out of me.
Seeing posts, comments, content generated by LLM, I feel that I am being robbed of artistry, curiosity, interactions with real people. I can automate chats with my family, friends, colleagues, children. But that wont be me. That will be perfect grammar sentence generator, not me - real, tons of mistakes, typos, mostly renting about everything, passionate, bored, funny, witty, dull me.
It saddens me that LLMs are exedcuting (almost?) final blow to a society that is sustaining social media terminal damage.
They began to generate content instead of making it. […] [This] annoys the hell out of me.
Seeing posts, comments, content generated by LLM, I feel that I am being robbed of artistry, curiosity, interactions with real people.
That is probably the greatest irritation I have with my wife right now. I don’t wanna start fights over it, but I also don’t make a secret of my disdain that she uses LLMs for her work. I get it, she has to, because her business requires churning out a lot of text quickly to stay competitive and I want her to succeed, but I hate what the internet has come to and I hate that she participates in that race to the bottom.
typos, mostly renting about everything
That is either a wonderful coincidence or a clever joke, but I love it either way.
Unfortunately we will always have problems explaining to people how to use the right tool for the right job.
The old “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” saying still applies.
Using LLMs to automate your social media is dumb as shit and I don’t understand why people are doing that. It is actively destroying social media. Which may be the natural end-state of a social media platform. Isn’t that why most of us are on Lemmy right now? Because of the state of Reddit and Xitter?
Also, generative AI making art and music and literature is dumb as shit too. Why would you make an AI that does the fun stuff that humans actually want to do? I can’t wait to have AI finish playing BioShock for me…
LLMs are neat, and useful for some things - but as with practically everything in modern society, capitalism is ruining it.
It’s also not the apocalypse […] It’s just a tool.
So, the problem with tools is that their existence still affects the systems they’re a part of.
For instance, war between the US and Russia is much more dangerous now (yes, it used to be dangerous before as well) because now we have nuclear bombs. We did a whole cold war thing about it. Nuclear bombs change the world even when they’re not being used.
Similarly, meth is just a tool. It is entirely possible to smoke meth, not become addicted, have a great time, vacuum your entire house I guess, come down, chill, and move on with the rest of your life. But, that’s not what we would say meth’s effect on society is, is it?
I am so happy that you are capable of using AI without becoming a psychopath. I am concerned about the psychopaths.
Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.
They’re both “annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality” and they are spreading propaganda they picked up elsewhere.
Same. I noticed that I finally got banned from a few random instances I’d never visited before under my moderation history, and they were all by the same guy who claimed I was an “anti-AI troll” lmao
The most hilarious part to this is I feel so dispassionate about the subject, I can seldom remember what it was I might have commented, and was probably something like “yeah this looks like slop” hahaha
If you ignore or are blissfully unaware of the negatives – and all the companies behind all the major product lines do their best to hide and minimize them – then it’s easy to find utility. Basically everyone I know IRL actively chooses to use AI for something. Both CRAP (Computer-Rendered Artificial Pictures) and code generation are very common.
When I point out the ethical issues, I am generally dismissed entirely (“they’ll fix that” or “my impact is small”) or counter with something about quality (“it works now” and “it’s getting better”), which I find is beside the point.
code generation
You mean Slopware “Development”?
(I opted to keep the “Development”, putting it in quotes as a sarcastic nod to the fact it’s no longer actual development)
Sort of. A friend used it to generate some “tests” of questionable quality, a cousin is using it to help her learn and use a DSL (my term, not hers) for interactive tasks for her students, another friend was using it for source code generation, but I don’t recall the specific results.
I disagree that it is no longer development, I see LLMs as yet another tool for generating code, and we’ve had generated “source” code since before C was standardized. I think the any code output by most LLMs is derivative of so many works under so many licenses that it is likely not possible to distribute it at all without violating some copyright and is certainly unacceptable for any Free Software project.; I think this is ethically true even if courts find LLM outputs are not derivative works or not subject to copyright protection at all – at least as long as copyright protects Disney. But, I know people that are working on a Free Software LLM, and “the Stack” provides enough information that you could provide all the necessary attributions for works derived from it.
While LLM hallucinations are a real concern, they can be less impactful when doing code generation because of all the automated static checks plus the culture of peer-review. But, I also tend to favor languages with static type systems.
I disagree that it is no longer development, I see LLMs as yet another tool for generating code, and we’ve had generated “source” code since before C was standardized.
Fair. There is a difference between using LLMs to generate boilerplate code customised to your context or provide a starting point if you’re stuck on a given problem and struggle to find a different perspective for approaching it, and using it to get around having to do mental work.
My term is intended for the kind of vibe coding where there is little, if any, technical skill involved and people are just letting LLMs slop together code without meaningful code quality assurance. In those cases, I don’t think it warrants recognition as development. If it produces workable results, cool. Call it software generation.
Using it as a learning assistant would probably be the most justified use case in my opinion. I have my reservations whether it is suitable for that purpose but I don’t know enough about the specific way it is applied to comment on that. If it produces training code that isn’t directly published you dodge the legal iffyiness, and if it helps build skills, that solves the “relying on AI makes you unlearn skills” issue.
Zoomers and gen x that drank the kool aid. What’s worse is they are saying yes to high paying jobs to fuck us all in the ass.
As a member of GenX (1980)…
Yep, that sounds like my peers. Most of them believe the marketing or are at least convinced enough to indulge. The hold-outs are getting more infrequent.
I used to feed AI anything I wrote that I wanted to sound professional to save me time and brain power. Not only do I have no need for that anymore considering I’ve just accepted that my CS degree was truly a waste of my life, but now I realize I’d encourage the building of data centers so now I’m fully radicalized to never use them
Dude your CS degree is not a waste. AI is just a tool. Anyone who thinks they can replace their staff with it are in for a rude awakening. I understand how much harder it is to get your foot in the door though. Its not permanent though. I remember when “no code” was going to take the jobs. The job just changes a bit.
I’ve been around long enough to have experienced multiple technologies that were the “end” of programmers and yet they still exist.
As you pointed out, the job changes a bit, but we are still here. When I started, the job was a lot more about compilation. You had to remember exact syntaxes (spelling, letter cases, line continuation, ect) and code optimization. You couldn’t just look up a function name or something like a win32 API by typing part of it into your code editor. You couldn’t even just go to Google and search because Google and the Internet didn’t exist. You had a literal shelf of books next to your desk that were heavily worn and you referenced constantly. Books got handed down from senior programmers to junior programmers. The senior got a new book that wasn’t held together by a rubber band and the junior got a stack of pages, often partially glued together by coffee stains, that contained invaluable notes in the margins.
Compilers used to be really dumb. Schooling, blogs, articles, ect, these days are all about “readable code”, but for a long time readability wasn’t even in the top 10 or 20 things that you thought about. Just getting the damn thing to compile was easily half of your job and time spent. Schooling and articles spent a massive amount of time discussing optimizations and memory usage. Things like “if else” vs “switch”, which one was actually better and how you could abuse both. Just in case you were wondering, “switch” was king and the “if else” lovers can get go fuck themselves.
I have seen massive shifts in the industry, and companies will use any excuse to fire everyone useful and eviscerate themselves in the name of short term profits. People used to talk about IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Compaq, ect, like they talk about Amazon and Facebook now. But those are just brands owned by some new titan that didn’t even exist that long ago.
CS will come back, it will be a little different, but new companies will rise from the carcasses of all those that tried to replace developers with ai.
Honestly, given what Facebook is these days, I am more surprised that they still have that many software developers to lay off than I am with the idea that they are laying off people due to AI.
Current AI is unsuitable, but automation of some kind (maybe not AI) will be necessary for a nearly workless future. Life is kind of dumb as is, it’s better if we spent time in the gym, or doing yoga, or learning something, instead of spending life in the pesticide factory, then dying after 3 years of retirement from a horrific disease.
We already had (pre-2020) all the automation we needed to work less than 20 hr/wk and produce all the necessarily calories, fresh water, and housing for everyone. But, instead we chose to turn a few people into decabillionaires and continue to bicker over the scrap like we weren’t in a post-scarcity society.
LLMs, transformers, convolution layers, characteristic tensors, etc. all have some legitimately novel uses, but all the big “AI” product lines are unethically developed, irresponsibly deployed, and dishonestly marketed.
If you want an ethical chatbot, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus_(LLM) .
I don’t know of a ethical model that’s good for images or code, yet, but I know people are working on them. The IBM Gemini models are getting close, but I don’t know if IBM will ever get the training data completely “clean” / open / free.
I’ve been told that StarCoder is an ethically-trained free software model, but some of my research ( https://mot.isitopen.ai/model/StarCoder ) contradicts that assertion, and I’ve not looked into it deep enough to resolve that conflict myself. (IMO, we don’t actually need automated code generation, we need to write less code in better languages with better tests and more reuse; but you may not agree.)
I’ll use AI to summarize a long document. That’s about it.
Why?
Not the person you asked, but I’d guess it’s multi-factorial. First that LLM-based summaries ARE generally higher quality than the pre-LLM summary tools output. Second, that LLMs are being given away free at point of prompt and are easily found; while summarizing tools have existed at least since 2000 (MS Word contained one), they were not easily found and usually involved purchasing some larger software collection, or a onerous install process. Third, everyone* hates** reading: if you’ve ever has user-support as part of your job, you’ve probably has at least one user where the message they read to you off of their screen tells them exactly what to do, but they chose to call you before really reading the message.
Also, I’m not sure what “long” is. It can be really hard to keep enough attention on something though 100s of pages, especially when it’s not trying to be engaging and is rather dry.
To OP, I would say that you might want to rethink using an LLM summary for any decision process. The LLM architecture makes “hallucinations” inevitable so eventually you are going to read an LLM summary that says the document includes something that it does NOT.
Oh certainly. Basically, I use it in the same way I used the Schaum’s outlines in university. The summary provides a quick outline. To get an actual understanding, I go to the source myself.
I do like to read, but slogging through an entire 500 page manual when I only need like to read six paragraphs to get my job done, is a bit much. And yes I do know how to use indices, but stuff can be buried amidst so many cross references.
It’s usually bots. Unfortunately it’s not easy to moderate them, but if a bot is reported, doesn’t have a bot flag, and says a bunch of pro-ai stuff in addition to the reported activity it’s usually enough evidence to ban. It’s just one of their current tells, I wouldn’t base a ban only on that though. Report when you suspect them though.
People have different opinions on AI, not everyone is vehemently opposed, and some view it as useful if used on the appropriate configuration.
The big difference for me is that “pro AI” is very different from “recognizing where AI is useful”.
Can my little Intel B70 help me code faster? Yes. Super helpful.
Can a cluster help analyze MRIs to catch things doctors don’t? Also yes.
Can a giant data center replace writing 1MM easy emails while destroying the environment? Yes, but it probably shouldn’t.
You can recognize value and the importance of regulation at the same time.
The problem is that there is a current developing dogma around AI that, because the last example you gave exists, then it must be opposed in all cases. There is a lack of nuance. That is why there may be some “pro-ai” posts, to point out this nuance. The only reason they exist is due to the bias against it as a whole.
I’m 100% sure I haven’t seen all the ‘pro ai’ posts, but the ones I have seen are not nuanced. They’re very likely bots, and all-in on, or argumentative for, AI.
I have seen them not posted by bots, as I have posted them on a Lemmy burner account. So this is somewhat personal for me.
this is a SOCIAL NETWORK not an AI platform
we’re expecting to interact with people
Yes, those articles are for people. Advertising to AI makes no sense.
What part of what I said implies that I want bots to take the place of humans on social networks? What a very strange conclusion to jump to. I just think that AI has some useful applications.
Pro-AI people are a small minority in my experience, but are generally overrepresented in the tech geek communities that make up the majority of users on the fediverse. Anecdotally, I think that the vast majority of people are indifferent about AI, some of them may find it to be a novel replacement for web searching, but almost nobody is interested in paying for generative AI (as evidenced by the AI companies hemorrhaging cash). If you were to ask on a more creativity-centric community, you would find that anti-AI sentiment is near ubiquitous amongst the working creative class.
Sadly, there is a significant number of untalented and brainless fools who use unethical corporate AI models as a crutch to compensate for their lack of real-world skills and relationships.
But for as many people as there that claim to be pro-AI, you simply don’t see people actively seek out AI-generated art, music, videos, or stories. I would argue that most of the consumers of AI content are people who have been unwittingly duped into reading/watching/listening to it
For reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.
AI psychosis is a documented problem.
Finally, pro-AI people are infinitely more likely to use AI to generate spam and proganda in support of their worldview than people who are against it. Are we supposed to believe people that have AI girlfriends are above using AI to write bogus posts and comments?
Also, for reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.
Elon Musk is making his typical wild promises again, this time about AI leading to UBI and abundance for everyone … as he makes money from xAI, of course.
They are all saying that since someone threatened to molotov Altman’s house, but at the same time they’re doing everything in their power to make sure nothing resembling ubi ever happens.
I think the majority of people are pro AI and don’t give it a single thought. Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated and people don’t understand why you would point out that the guitarist had three arms.
I think it’s more accurate to say that the majority of people are indifferent to AI and that businesses are caught up in the hype of cheap genAI being good enough to replace specialized workers for specific fields like graphic design.
People use it for certain things that they lack skills in or don’t want to spend effort on but seem to generally see a lot of it as a solution looking for a problem and resent how it’s being forced into everything. Similar to the resentment towards cars moving to put everything on giant touchscreens. The last time I bought a car I was talking to the salesman about how I had no interest in the newer cars with the giant screens and he said that practically everybody that came in said the same thing and that car manufacturers are pivoting back to physical controls because nobody wants the touchscreens. Enough people would rather buy 10+ year old cars than newer models because of the lack of physical controls that it’s forcing car companies to reconsider their push for touchscreens for everything.
Cell phone companies were quaking in their boots (okay, not really, but you know what I mean) over the fact that even in their own polling they were finding that 50% of users either didn’t use AI features or didn’t find them useful in their day to day phone usage and 30% found it actively made their user experience worse. 20% positive feedback is not a good sign for a healthy market with potential for growth.
Add in that kids are conflating AI with low-quality and false information. Literally using the term AI when they don’t believe something like the way we used to use Photoshopped or “fake news,” and using “slop” liberally and frequently.
Even experts in various industries seem to have a weird paradoxical opinion on AI despite being pro AI. There’s been consistent polling that has shown that experts say that AI is good enough to replace people in any given field except for their field of expertise, where it’s too unreliable to ever be able to do the job. It doesn’t matter what the field is, the opinion is the same.
It’s probably safe to say that people don’t really care one way or another about AI, but dislike the companies involved in the AI bubble.
Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated
But why do you care? I don’t get it, when was the last time you cared about how a restaurant advert looked? It either has good food or doesn’t, who cares about their marketing? It has always been fake anyway
I agree. It’s lazy and makes me hate it more. I don’t trust a content user doing it.
My husband works with it, at an ai company, in an ai data center. He gushes about it 24/7. It’s even getting hard for him to defend.
If people weren’t fucking stupid, these scams would eventually stop working.
What’s it been, 4 years since NFTs? And AI morons are already falling for this shit.
I lean anti-AI, but comparing generative AI to NFTs is very strange to me. Even if you didn’t intend to imply any similarity beyond both being scams, surely generative AI is at least a much more compelling scam.
LLMs can now understand, to some extent, almost any text humans can. They might not be able to reason about it well, but they can at least translate it, summarize it, etc. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I’d have told you there was a near-zero chance of that happening within our lifetimes. NFTs were just “if we put baseball cards on the blockchain, people might buy them because of that same quirk of psychology.”
Transformers are like blockchain: an interesting use of mathematical principles to solve certain problems in a novel way, where the hype around that core attracts charlatans and scammers and combinations of the two traits who claim that it will go on to solve totally different problems in such a way as to revolutionize the world we live in.
NFTs were the end of that line for blockchain where the machine started to eat itself. I can see a future, stable use of blockchain in some limited contexts, but cryptobros have always overstated the contexts in which that particular type of digital ledger can be more useful than other types of digital ledgers.
We’ll see where the end of the road is for transformers, and what’s left at the end. I believe that computer inference will always be useful in some contexts, and that the advances in huge models with absurdly large numbers of parameters have unlocked some previously impractical tasks, but I could also see that settling into a general background existence as just another technological tool for doing things in a world that still looks pretty similar to the world today.
“You don’t understand, she’s REAL! Especially if you use your left hand.”
You look lonely…
It seems like its usually just one person just posting over and over or making alts (I assume, based on the fact they just reiterate the same arguments), rather than a coordinated effort.
I assume, based on the fact they just reiterate the same arguments
I saw someone else make this same argument. Can’t believe you made an alt to post it again.
It’s a sad state of affairs. Post anything that is going against the grain, you must be a bot or part of a coordinated attack…
Some people are unlearning the fact that different opinions exist :'(
This is nothing new actually, the same thing happend during the crypto boom.
There’s slop users (autoclankers) and then there’s researchers or developers actually doing the same stuff they’ve been doing for 5+ years.
I think it just seems that way because there’s always a clash on practically every post.
Some people don’t see the inherent flaw in outsourcing their physical thoughts to a cloud model, or the massive economic bubble they are helping to create.
But some people are doing some genuinely interesting things that would have otherwise been impossible several years ago just because AI and model training research got a huge boost for everyone the past few years.
My personal favorite is a drone that rapidly identifies and counts produce plant quality, output, issues, etc for large farms with some brand spanking new image models, and it costs about as much as maybe a new toolbox. No one wants to manually weed through hundreds of acres to count buds and try to catch problems before its too late. It’s a great upgrade from doing random samples that misses a lot of data.
On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.
It’s like when you throw world and ml users into one post. They both think the other is louder, and also the big dumb lol.
On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.
This might be a bit of a hot take, but I don’t really see anything inherently wrong with this. The scientists and engineers will continue doing their serious work regardless of public opinion, and while some of them may have tangentially benefited from from increased interest and funding in the field, most of it is going to these corporate LLM models which are taking up all the oxygen in the room.
That’s a bubble that needs to burst. I think it’s more important to keep public sentiment rightfully focused in that direction. Let’s face it, you’re really not going to be able to educate the general public on these nuances. The field at large will persist regardless.
If you don’t differentiate and keep the two in the same pot you won’t be able to fund research into the useful stuff. It’s true that consumer hype and research funding decisions are not the same, but they may be indirectly linked. A public fund may fear public outrage if it continues funding X millions of AI projects even if they’re not LLM related.
So the reputation damage may affects viable, net positive applications.
The kind of people who make hating AI part of their identity are pretty rare in the real world. Lemmy just creates the illusion that this loud minority’s views are way more common than they actually are.
And as always, the “pro-AI” people aren’t as much for it as the haters are against it. It’s not a binary thing between the two extremes. Every real person I’ve talked to about AI has had a pretty neutral view on it and is usually well aware of its limitations. Even the ones who lean heavily on it aren’t as passionate about it than the haters are.
I haven’t talked to a lot of people about AI, but I’m extremely skeptical, and my wife, who isn’t usually dialed into this sort of thing, fucking hates it. I’m not sure how that plays out across the general populace, but I’m inclined to think it’s pretty unpopular.
Bots are trying to gaslight to into thinking that slop acceptance is inevitable. It’s just bullshit. Everyone hates slop art. Everyone hates slop music. Everyone hates slop text. Everyone hates forced slop integration.
The only people that like AI are the people that own the chatbots that want to deskill you.
People rarely arrive at these views independently - it’s always influenced by the people and environment around them. Kind of like how cigarette smokers tend to know lots of other smokers, while people who don’t smoke hang out with other non-smokers.
I’m not claiming nobody hates AI or that there’s no valid reasons to oppose it. All I’m saying is that the impression of how widespread that hate is - the one platforms like Lemmy give - isn’t exactly representative of the real world.
Hate is an extreme emotion. Those kinds of emotions are rarely motivated by reason alone, so it often looks more like an ideological stance than a purely rational one. People caught up in strong emotions aren’t exactly known for thinking clearly. There’s a well-known quote about facts not caring about people’s feelings, but I think it’s the other way around: feelings don’t care about facts.
The kind of people who make hating AI part of their identity are pretty rare in the real world. Lemmy just creates the illusion that this loud minority’s views are way more common than they actually are.
Yup, essentially every office worker at my company is pro-ai whereas shop workers have a bit more distain for it.
I got asked to organize shop drawings into categories so that they can feed their LLM data on the different types of products we produce, so long as it’s not someone’s personal information It genuinely doesn’t bother me.
Your view is the exact opposite of reality given the number of AI Data centers that are being delayed and just outright stopped by local communities.
I don’t think the people who don’t want AI data centers in their backyards are motivated by hatred toward AI. It tends to be mostly driven by things like environmental worries and energy and water demand.
“I don’t think people that are motivated to catch murderers are motivated by their hatred of murder. It tends to be mostly driven by things like no liking dead bodies or the fact Susan is no longer around.”
That obvious bad faith you demonstrate there is nothing but a confession about your own character.
One could say the same to you. What you described is inexorably linked to AI. Those things will always be a part of it. If AI was useful, or liked, by the general public – if it served a single useful function they appreciated, they would accept the consequences of its existence.
People like driving in the US. It is destroying the environment. It poisons the water and air. It is expensive and raises taxes, hell most property tax that most people pay in the US goes towards road maintenance for cars, and nearly half of all utility expenses are due to the complexities of car-centric urban design. But people accept that.
People are not accepting of AI. Period. It does not provide enough value for its cost.
NIMBYism is a real phenomenon. People just don’t want stuff like that built near them - including schools. It’s not because they’re against education. You’re projecting your own views on AI onto other people while ignoring all the other possible explanations for their actions. You can say it’s inextricably linked to AI, but you saying that doesn’t make it so. I’m sure some of those people think that, but I’ve seen no evidence that it’s the main driver of it.
While NIMBYISM is real, it’s not happening here. The protests in council meetings are not ‘we don’t want it here,’ it’s ‘we don’t want it anywhere in our state.’ Because the effects of AI are state wide reductions in resources.
Trying to equate people who don’t want their environment and their homes destroyed by AI data centers with nimbys is such a brain dead take. Just truly despicable.
AI hate is such a spoiled white people issue. They just don’t understand the value proposition because they already got their cake and ate it too.
Here in SEA LLMs have been life changing for people yet we should be upset because some corporate logo designer is losing their job?
More so that the widespread use of AI encourages more and more data centers being built, which uses an insane amount of electricity, most of which is not generated with renewables, accelerating the already dire global warming.
In other words, people’s desire to get crappy art or hallucinated code is speeding up the death of our planet and everything on it.
Let’s not delude ourselves that we don’t need more datacenters shall we? We’ll never need less compute, ever so these will have to be built anyway.
There’s an answer to all of these problems that, ironically, isn’t binary do or don’t but rage bait gets the better of everyone and here we are.
Honestly, the problem when talking about “AI” is how many different things that can mean.
- General AI chats
- Coding agents
- Automated pentesting/vulnerability discovery
- Image/video/music generation
- Grammar checking
- Automated support agents (phone or chat)
- Autonomous weaponry
and so many more. Being Pro-AI could mean you like one or two application of the AI, but be against it in the others. I know very few people that like it for the use of media generation. However, there have been a lot of long time vulnerabilities in very popular open source projects that was only just discovered. That seems like a pretty undeniable use case demonstrating its usefulness.
Then of course there’s governments that want to get their greedy blood thirsty hands on it to create autonomous weaponry. So now if you try to defend AI for a use case like defensively finding program vulnerabilities you somehow also have to defend AI weaponry?
For a generic AI model, it is very powerful and can either be used to grow yourself or abused so your brain doesn’t have to work at all. You can use AI to do the hard work for you, or use it as a personal tutor to guide you into what to learn. People will of course mention hallucinations as why it can’t be used to learn, but you don’t have to take AI at its words. If you were to ask it to create a lesson plan on what you should study for a subject, in what order, and resources are available, you can do all of the actual learning using content the AI has no control over. So what you do with that is going to be up to the person, and opinions on it are going to vary wildly.
Some people argue any use case is not okay given the various concerns of energy and water usage, and where those models sourced their training data. Not to mention if you support AI you must be supporting the AI companies. I agree there are concerns for the environmental impact, and the training data discussion is a long one on its own. However, I do think you can support AI as a technology, and not be okay with the way the technology is being done in regards to environmental impact. And given AI can be done on a local machine, I don’t think it has to be tied at all with the big tech at all.
“AI” is such a wide and immense topic. And what we talk about with AI today will not be relevant come next year with how quickly it is developing. We shall see if some form of Moore’s law applied with the growth of AI as far as efficiency and quality of the AI goes.
One of the first things I say when non tech people ask me about ““AI”” is :
“The term AI here is just marketing wank”
