My understanding is most of you are anti AI? My only question is…why? It is the coolest invention since the Internet and it is remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness. No joke the AI in sci fi movies is worse than what we actually have in many ways!
Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely anti “AI baked into my operating system and cell phone so that it can monitor me and sell me crap”. If that’s what being Anti AI is…to that I say Amen.
But simply not liking a privacy conscious experience or utilization of AI at all? I’m not getting it?
How can I say this? Enormous power in unskilled and greedy hands only leads to collapse. Well, and AI is like a control tool and not an assistant as you think. I’m not even saying that he kills a living soul and makes life empty and dead. For me personally, he is a serious threat. I advise you not to be too optimistic, we are not in some kind of utopia, you know?
ignoring the hate-brigade, lemmy users are probably a bit more tech savvy on average.
and i think many people who know how “AI” works under the hood are frustrated because, unlike most of it’s loud proponents, they have real-world understanding what it actually is.
and they’re tired of being told they “don’t get it”, by people who actually don’t get it. but instead they’re the ones being drowned out by the hype train.
and the thing fueling the hype train are dishonest greedy people, eager to over-extend the grift at the expense of responsible and well engineered “AI”.
but, and this is the real crux of it, keeping the amazing true potential of “AI” technology in the hands of the rich & powerful. rather than using it to liberate society.
lemmy users are probably a bit more tech savvy on average.
Second this.
but, and this is the real crux of it, keeping the amazing true potential of “AI” technology in the hands of the rich & powerful. rather than using it to liberate society.
Leaving public interests (data and everything around data) to the hands of top 1% is a recipe for disaster.
Lemmy loves artists who have their income threatened by AI because AI can make what they make at a substantially lower cost with an acceptable quality in a fraction of the time.
AI depends on being trained on the artistic works of others, essentially intellectual and artistic property theft, so that you can make an image of a fat anime JD Vance. Calling it plagiarism is a bit far, but it edges so hard that it leaks onto the balls and could cum with a soft breeze.
AI consumes massive amounts of energy, which is supplied through climate hostile means.
AI threatens to take countless office jobs, which are some of the better paying jobs in metropolitan areas where most people can’t afford to live.
AI is a party trick, it is not comparable to human or an advanced AI. It is unimaginative and not creative like an actual AI. Calling the current state of AI anything like an advanced AI is like calling paint by numbers the result of artistry. It can rhyme, it can be like, but it can never be original.
I think that about sums it up.
Acceptable quality is a bit of a stretch in many cases… Especially with the hallucinations everywhere in generated text.
Most of that gets solved with an altered prompt or trying again.
That is less of an issue as time goes on. It was just a couple years ago that the number of fingers and limbs were a roll of the dice, now the random words in the background are alien.
AI is getting so much money dumped into it that it is progressing at a very rapid pace. an all AI movie is just around the corner and it will have a style that says AI, but could easily be mistaken with a conventional film production that has a particular style.
Once AI porn gets there, AI has won media.
Eh, I at least partially disagree. I’ve noticed some of the modern models (such as Claude 4.0) have started to hallucinate more than previous models. I know you’re talking about image generation, but still. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but maybe it’s cause the models are beginning to consume their own slop.
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f3722c1/o3-and-o4-mini-system-card.pdf
OpenAi May 2025: in their internal tests the newer model the higher hallucination rate.
maybe it’s cause the models are beginning to consume their own slop.
That’s going to be a huge issue indeed because synthetic data contains bias and it’s proven that produced biased models.
Fairly stated
The less tech-savvy of lemmy
Lemmy loves artists who have their income threatened by AI because AI can make what they make at a substantially lower cost with an acceptable quality in a fraction of the time.
AI depends on being trained on the artistic works of others, essentially intellectual and artistic property theft, so that you can make an image of a fat anime JD Vance. Calling it plagiarism is a bit far, but it edges so hard that it leaks onto the balls and could cum with a soft breeze.
While I mostly agree with all your arguments, I think the ‘intellectual property’ part - from my perspective - is a bit ambivalent on Lemmy. When someone uses an AI that is trained on pirated art to create a meme, that’s seen as a sin. Meanwhile, using regular artists’ or photographers’ work in memes without paying the author is really common. More or less every news article comes with a link to Archive.is to bypass paywalls and there are also special communities subject to (digital) piracy which are far more polular than AI content.
I’m not saying that you are wrong or that piracy is great, but when pirating media or creating memes, you can pinpoint a specific artist that created the original piece. And therefore acts as a bit of an ad for the creator (not necessarily a good one). But with AI it’s for the most part not possible to say exactly who it took “inspiration” from. Which in my opinion makes it worse. Said in other words: A viral meme can benefit the artist, while AI slop does not.
It is unimaginative
Can you make an example of something 100% original that was not inspired by anything that came before?
That’s not what imaginative means.
If you’d like an example of AI being exceptionally boring to look at, though, peruse through any rule 34 site that has had its catalogue overrun with AI spam: an endless see of images that all have the same artstyle, the same color choices, the same perspective, the same poses, the same personality; a flipbook of allegedly different characters that all. look. fucking. identical.
I’m not joking: I was once so bored by the AI garbage presented to me, I actually just stopped jerking off.
If you people would do something interesting with your novelty toy, I would be like 10% less mad about it.
Ironically you just said that artists are wrong to be concerned.
The threat of AI is not that it will be more human than human. It is that it will become so ubiquitous that real people are hard to find.
I couldn’t find many real people.
Are you sure that I’m real?
It is the coolest invention since the Internet and it is remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness.
No. It isn’t. First and foremost, it produces a randomised output that it has learned to make look like other stuff on the Internet. It has as much to do with consciousness as a set of dice and the fact that you think it’s more than that already shows how you don’t understand what it is and what it does.
AI doesn’t produce anything new. It doesn’t reason, it isn’t creative. As it has no understanding or experience, it doesn’t develop or change. Using it to produce art shows a lack of understanding of what art is supposed to be or accomplish. AI only chews up what’s being thrown at it to vomit it onto the Web, without any hint of something new. It also lacks understanding about the world, so asking it about decisions to be made is not only like asking an encyclopedia that comes up with answers on the fly based on whether they sound nice, regardless of the answers being correct, applicable or even possible.
And on top of all of this, on top of people using a bunch of statistical dice rolls to rob themselves of experiences and progress that they’d have made had they made their own decisions or learned painting themselves, it’s an example of the “rules for thee, not for me”. An industry that has lobbied against the free information exchange for decades, that sent lawyers after people who downloaded decades old books or movies for a few hours of private enjoyment suddenly thinks that there might be the possibility of profits around the corner, so they break all the laws they helped create without even the slightest bit of self-awareness. Their technology is just a hollow shell that makes the Internet unusable for all the shit it produces, but at least it isn’t anything else. Their business model, however, openly declares that people are only second class citizens.
There you are. That’s why I hate it. What’s not to hate?
AI doesn’t produce anything new.
Many humans don’t, either.
Oh really? Man, you don’t say!
What’s your point?
False equivalencies, or ‘Whatabouts’ are not a form of argument, they’re a deflection debate tactic.
I am will aware it is not conscious 🙄. Hence the word RESEMBLES.
But here’s the scary thing. Even with all your song and dance you just types when we are interacting with AI our brains literally can not tell the difference between human interaction and AI interaction. And that to me…is WILD and so trippy
when we are interacting with AI our brains literally can not tell the difference between human interaction and AI interaction
I can certainly tell, at least a lot of the time. I won’t say all of the time, but LLMs are squarely in uncanny valley territory for me. Most of what they generate seems slightly off, in one way or another.
I’ve never knowingly engaged with a proper chat bot beyond the ‘virtual help desk’ things some sites use. By proper I mean some sizable system beyond what can be typically run at home.
Home ran ones are bizarre though, so far whatever I try they get stuck on go-to phrases and tend to return to specific formats of response over and over. Very much not passing the turing test.
It doesn’t even resemble a consciousness. It’s not even close.
Also, why are you asking your question to begin with if your answer is then just a condescending “but sometimes we can’t tell AI from humans apart”? Yeah, no shit. It’s been like that at least since the 60s. That’s not the point. If that’s all you have, then go ahead, be happy you found something “wild and so trippy”. But don’t ask if there are legitimate reasons to reject AI if all you want to do is indulge yourself.
Yeah, that mostly just proves that humans are idiots, something we’ve known for awhile.
OK remember like 70 years ago when they started saying we were burning the planet? And then like 50 years ago they were like “no guys we’re really burning the planet”? And then 30 years ago they were like “seriously we’re close to our last chance to not burn the planet”? and then in the past few years they’ve been like “the planet is currently burning, species are going extinct, and we are beginning to experience permanent effects that might not snowball into an extinction event if we act right now?”
But sure, AI is really cool and can trick you, personally into thinking it’s conscious. It’s just using nearly as much power as the whole of Japan, but you’re giggling and clapping along, so how bad can it really be? It’s just poisoning the air and water to serve you nearly accurate information, when you could have had accurate information by googling it for a fraction of the energy cost.I hate AI because I’m a responsible adult.
current AI is absolutely not better than sci-fi AI, not by a long shot.
I do think LLMs are interesting and have neat potential for highly specific applications, though I also have many ethical concerns regarding the data it is being trained on. AI is a corporate buzzword designed to attract investment, and nothing more.
Ai isn’t inherently a bad thing. My issues are primarily with how it is used, how it is trained, and the resources it consumes. I also have concerns about it being a speculative bubble
If you think that AI closely resembles a conscious flesh and blood human being you need to go outside more. That is a dangerous line of thinking and people are forming relationships with a shoddy simulacrum of humanity because of it. AI is still in it’s early conception and it’s only a matter of time before someone’s grok waifu convinces them to shoot up a school.
Scientists have estimated that the power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023, partly driven by the demands of generative AI. Globally, the electricity consumption of data centers rose to 460 terawatt-hours in 2022. This would have made data centers the 11th largest electricity consumer in the world, between the nations of Saudi Arabia (371 terawatt-hours) and France (463 terawatt-hours), according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach 1,050 terawatt-hours (which would bump data centers up to fifth place on the global list, between Japan and Russia).
If your phone could do the ai trash, it would still be morally bankrupt and devoid of any humanity. But it’s done on 5 gpus that eat as much energy as your entire household.
The real usefulness of ai technology is probably limited to 1% of what it is now. Signal processing, protein folding, translation and transcription are all fine and well. But it is 99% spam and so I’ll judge the technology on that.
Its not smart. Its a theft engine that averages information and confidently speaks hallucinations insisting its fact. AI sucks. It wont ever be AGI because it doesn’t “think”, it runs models and averages. Its autocomplete at huge scale. It burns the earth and produces absolute garbage.
The only LLMs doing anything good are because averaging large data models was good for a specific case, like looking at millions of cancer images and looking at averages.
This does not work for deterministic answers. The “AI” we have now is corporate bullshit they are desperate to have make money and is a massive investor hype machine.
Stop believing the shitty CEOs.
It’s a glorified parakeet
I myself despise capitalism, and would not like to see the current global ecological disaster worsen because some stupid-ass techbros forcing their shit on everyone.
LLMs and image generators are incredible inventions to be sure, but my main opposition to them is related to the very real negative outcomes of flooding our society with computer generated drivel.
- Small time artists are fucked. Anyone and everyone who could make money from small commissions is now out of a job, period. Even though generators will never be as good as real artists, the fact is that most people don’t care and the generation is good enough. Oh yeah and real artist who are continuing to do real work regardless now have to live in a world where they can and will be accused of using the bots even when they aren’t.
- Internet search is fucked. Search for an image and you’ll have to sift through AI sites for the real thing, search on a topic and you’ll be inundated with language model slop. Search music on sites like Spotify and certain genres are now swamped by “artists” who make an album a week of generated trash, making the already difficult problem of discoverability that much worse.
- People with certain kinds of susceptability to addiction are fucked. There are now countless people who feel that they are in love with a chat bot, because they suffer from modern loneliness and have tricked themselves into seeing a Mechanical Turk as a real person. There are also people who have turned a chatbot into an abusive cult figure, people who’ve amplified delusions with them, and other terrible mental health related outcomes that will only keep getting more common.
- The fact that these text generators are so easily confused for thinking machines means that a genuinely alarming number of people are now offloading their ability to think critically to the bots. An entire generation of students are graduating high school and college right now having learned literally nothing. Those systems weren’t perfect before but this is definitely worse.
There’s more stuff but I’ll end this by saying that I’ve use an LLM to help me write code and it’s pretty good at doing repetitive writing that has to strictly follow a certain format. Still need to understand code in order to read and troubleshoot its output though, which is why everything the so-called “vibe coders” make is so sloppy.
Although you’re not wrong, you should consider that what’s normal for you today fucked somebody’s job yesterday.
Small time artists are fucked
Textile workers have been fucked by machines, same for anyone working with horses was fucked by cars, and mass production fucked more of less any job that existed before… or not? Those jobs still exist today, they are just less prevalent and often a well paid niche.
Internet search is fucked.
The internet we know today with SEO and ads-driven businesses had been around for 20-30 years max and it is now a dumpster on fire with all the user tracking that has been put in place. We won’t miss it should it disappear.
Textile workers have been fucked by machines
I’m not a fan of this comparison because textile machines replaced textile workers at the same time as demand for textiles increased a thousandfold. The industrial revolution achieved this increased demand by increasing people’s living standards - instead of having a handful of outfits people (in the privileged parts of the world at least) started keeping dozens or hundreds of them - but with art demand/consumption is already effectively “maxed out” because every person with an internet connection already has access to more art than it is possible for them to consume in their entire lifetime, so increasing the amount of art produced can only have a “zero sum” effect on art writ large because the amount of art will increase while demand will not.
The internet we know today… We won’t miss it should it disappear.
Yes but it should disappear back into the direction of many smaller websites and more privacy, not in the direction of all of that texture being totally consumed by LLM generated search results and everyone further congregating on a smaller number of sites that collect every iota of data possible.
with art the living standard is already effectively “maxed out”
Quite frankly, it’s not. Now “video on demand” means that you can sit on your couch and start the movie when you want. Tomorrow it may mean that you will also decide the content. Another sequel of Star Wars? Sure! A new season of Game of Thrones? No problem!
Moreover, AI is being used to create products and also in scientific research. It’s already improving our standards.
Yes but it should disappear back into the direction of many smaller websites and more privacy, not in the direction of all of that texture being totally consumed by LLM generated search results and everyone further congregating on a smaller number of sites that collect every iota of data possible.
My guess? AI will kill the cheap stuff, but internet will not change much overall and surely not rapidly.
I don’t think you understood what I meant by increasing demand/consumption. “Another sequel of Star Wars” or “A new season of Game of Thrones” aren’t increasing demand for art, they’re replacing previous forms of art with generated forms. And the usefulness of machine learning in fields like medical research is great - but it isn’t going to massively increase consumption.
I see your point. Assuming that in the future we will consume content as we do today, you are probably right.
My point is a bit different though: things will change. Famously in the 70s somebody didn’t see the point of having a computer at home because nobody would need the stuff that computers could do in that period. Then needs changed, new needs came, computers evolved, and now we have computers even in our pockets. With AI it will likely be the same.
I imagine there is probably somebody who died of a fentanyl overdose on an American street last week, who would have had a relatively prosperous life as a textile worker or horse trainer if they had been born 160 years ago.
Lots of good points in the replies here, but I want to make the perhaps secondary point that the automation of thought is generally just bad for you. Dgmw AI (even LLMs) has its uses, but we’re already seeing the atrophying effects on some people, and in my experience as a teacher I have seen a number of people for whom chat bot dependency has become a serious problem on a par with drug addiction. I dread to think what’s going to happen to these people when we enter the ‘jack up the prices’ phase of the grift, let alone the ‘have you considered product/voting X may solve your problems’ phase, which is currently only being held back by engineering difficulties.
“All of your issues with ai go away if capitalism goes away”
Word. Clearly, capitalism drives the world economy, so…