I work in the AI world and understand a lot of reasons to hate AI (like how every company is trying to ram it down people’s throats). However I am genuinely curious why the hate is so popular, and what arguments/opinions people have, and would like to hear the discussion.
Even advertising, which is forced on everyone and disliked, doesn’t seem to get as vocal a response for hate.
Why do you hate AI? Why do you think the hate is so vocal/common/strong?
After reading comments:
I am thinking it’s simply:
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Have aspects that people can strongly dislike eg the points people list.
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Be forced into everyone’s life and media constantly.
Like a similar psychological phenomenon to when Nickelback was hated, but magnified by being more serious and grounded.
I think that we should also be careful with where the hate is directed, since modelling learning of distributed systems at scale is very essential science and technology to be able to understand biology, physics, neuroscience, etc. The only way humanity currently scales new technologies unfortunately is through the capital machine, and the scale is a necessary component of this science.
First, if you’re actually curious, I recommend perusing this community and reading a lot.
I’ll do a short, non-exhaustive list that I will try to not turn into a rant.
Generative AI, LLMs, specifically is what I’ll be referring to. Not things like image recognition or OCR.
- All LLMs today are inherently using stolen data.
- AI hyperscale data centers are ruining our environment
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- water
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- air
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- especially in communities that are already underserved
- I want to spend what precious little time I have speaking and interacting with other Humans, not arguing with robots or even “Being more productive.”
- huge cybersecurity concerns
- Something something economy, but this is tied with my humans point. If we’re improving the economy by automating shit, while many are not getting the basic necessities of life, that’s an issue.
I see most of these points, but for some reason it feels like it doesn’t capture the magnitude and widespread hate. Has it just become a sticking point to signal anti American capitalism (I’m not trying to imply American capitalism is bad or good, just stating it)?
Yeah I am subscribed to this community
Kills the planet
Steals from artists
Widens inequality
Puts people out of work
Reinforces prejudices
Makes us stupid
Makes everything generic
Blows up the economy
Supports oligarchs
Can’t be trusted, hallucinates and lies
Overhyped & overpromised
Can’t generate outside of its training data
Is creating obscene surveillance state
Used in weapons to kill
Made computer components expensive
Ruined the internet with slop
Replaces human interaction
Just annoying
Why the hell is your username “rapist1”?
Because he forgot the password to his original account ‘rapist’?
More likely due to being blocked everywhere, like this account will be after I downvote all their content
It is destroying the objective sense of truth we have enjoyed since the advent of photography. I hope you understand the scale of that blow to civilized society.
AI slop is bad, I don’t think anyone disagrees including all the people with careers in AI. I think the reason why it doesn’t stop anyone is because it’s seen as a byproduct of technological knowledge… basically the cat of how to generate such things is out of the bag, and the point of that cat was the knowledge of learning complex data. As I mentioned on another comment, you need to have this knowledge to begin to understand things like the brain as a system
The people funding its development want it specifically for this property though, and have artificially boosted its development and fought against its regulation to maximize this damage for their own gain.
That’s a criticism of the system, not the technology.
This will happen (and happens) with any technology today that has the ability to be misused for money
No, you’re wrong. And judging from all the comments you’ve been making in reply to people explaining to you why you’re wrong, I’m wondering why you’re here seemingly to pick fights instead of actually learn, which is what you had intimated in your original post.
Some technologies are uniquely suited to be harmful, easily exploited by the greedy and extremely difficult to be made safe. Generative AI is one such technology. We are certainly happy to critique the systems and the people behind this agenda. We will also critique the technology itself.
Wait what? What sense of truth? Do you know when fake photography started? Around 5 minutes after photography was invented. Now it has become even easier but no one should have ever thought “ah, it is in a photograph so it must be true”. AI has nothing to do with that.
Not sure if I should bother with a coherent response here, but the advent of fakes that are convincing, can be done in video form, and do not require hours of professional skill to produce is really, really meaningful and not equivalent to any pre-existing technology.
I work in the AI world
False. There is no “AI”. There is nothing to hate because it doesn’t exist. I hate the grift that “AI” exists. The grift that you actively promote.
Since “AI” doesn’t actually exist, the grift is able to claim ANYTHING as “AI”. This arbitrary collection of disparate technologies should be judged by their own merit. They’re lumped together simply to mislead and take advantage.
Furthermore, like any technology under capitalism, these technologies will inevitably be used for theft and violence as we’ve already seen. Here are a few examples:
- LLMs - It’s cool to have an autocomplete chatbot until starts making kill lists.
- Computer Vision - It would be cool to find tumors but it’s primarily used to find and kill people on the other side of the planet.
- Image filters (yes people call this “AI” lol) - It’s cool to make my photos silly but it’ll be used to exploit and harass women, etc.
- Big Data/Compute - It would be cool if this was used to better humanity but instead it will be used to profit the few from surveillance, incarceration, genocide, planetary destruction, etc. As we’ve already overwhelmingly witnessed.
They promise the good stuff so they can profit from the worst stuff. That’s fundamental to the grift.
I recommend searching the comm for similar questions as this is nothing new.
For your first point about me claiming “AI”: this channel is literally called “fuck AI”, I don’t care what it’s called, I’m just using the common language.
Your next points are about some negative companies/uses like palantir. Since you probably don’t hate other technologies that have bad uses as well as good ones, I am wondering what you think is especially bad about neural networks (did you form your own opinion or are you jumping on some identity?); hell, I don’t even know what you mean by kill lists for LLMs, and given the popularity I’m going to guess people find much use for them that aren’t this or bad.
Why are you asking here? There are like a million YouTube videos and blog posts about it already, or you can go find a young person in your life and ask them why “Generative AI” is terrible and they’ll be glad to tell you. (e.g. Kane Parsons!)
If you’re asking for expert research into the topic, some names come to mind: Timnit Gebru, Alex Hanna, Emily M. Bender, Karen Hao, Adam Conover, Ed Zitron, Paris Marx, Mo Bitar. I also report regularly on this topic via the Vibe Coded podcast and Cycles Hyped No More newsletter.
The hate has become vocal and common because it’s a fascist technology bankrolled by oligarchs which will cook a planet already on the brink of extreme climate change, bring the open web to its knees, and lead weaker minds into psychosis. But other than that, it’s totally great! 😆
Ironically, the reason I hate is AI is the brain-rotted people who think they can prompt humans to answer their questions for them instead of doing any research of their own. It’s even worse when they attempt to argue with you, which I expect is phase 2 of this post.
Good suggestion about looking into prominent speakers and see if any captures what people feel… but I think asking “people on the street” is valuable. Internet communities like these are the closest thing to asking people on the street not limited by geography.
I have looked into a bunch of these, and have ideas about the hate including the obvious lists, but I don’t think any of them actually capture why the hate is widespread
the energy usage for bullshit generators to make up shit for the tecno fascists is my main reason
It’s evil, full stop. Either it’s a series of expensive, environmentally destructive parlor tricks designed to create a false impression of intelligence and inner life in order to enable the economic displacement of our fellow humans in an already wildly economically stratified world or, worse, it’s an attempt to create and then enslave an actual intelligence with an actual inner life.
Fuck every fucking thing about that and fuck everybody working toward it, including OP. You’re doing evil shit in the world and you don’t understand why people don’t like it. You’re confused and upset that people actually do have morals and beliefs that haven’t been buried under the strain of modern life. You want to steal from others, degrade their daily life, enable systems of coercion and control, then have people treat you nicely because you think you’re special and clever and you deserve to be rewarded because you figured out what the next big thing is ahead of the herd. You’re not, you don’t, and you haven’t.
In top of all of that, it just sucks. When it isn’t making up bullshit, it’s producing the most boring, milquetoast nonsense imaginable. On the bright side it may be wrecking the economy shortly.
So please, do yourself and all of us a favor- find something useful and fulfilling to do with your life and stop building the torment nexus. You get one short ride on this rock, don’t waste it making your life and the lives of others worse.
Damn, well said. I got nothing to add…
Is neuroscience evil? How do you think humans understand more about the brain without the same knowledge? You can’t get there from proteins and biology and equations, at some point you have to start simulating large distributed systems of computation and learning.
Also I do understand a list of points of why it’s not liked as some posts have listed, just wondering if someone has insight onto why the hate seems to stick greater than the sum of those lists.
I’m sure you realize that most of what you say about morals is widely applicable to most technological revolutions that we accept. What is special about “AI” or is it an alignment point to signal things?
The seemingly constant degradation of available, meaningful information. I’m not sure if it’s the search engines, the website content, or just my imagination, but attempting to obtain reliable information using any other online means seems to be getting harder little by little.
I blame a combination of the willful push towards ai, over-usage for it went it is not needed, and the documented feedback loop of llms now consuming more and more llm generated content leading to less and less actual content, or real content being buried in the generative maelstrom of ai written feces.
Couple that with the llm biases, guardrails and annoying quirks (spelling mistakes, repeated words/code, hallucinating sources, etc) and my trust in anything touched with ai is gone.
Things like factuality and informativeness have improved and continue to improve, but the hate only gets more widespread, so I don’t know if this covers the phenomenon
I get the sense that you are here to promote Ai, more than debate based on your other responses, though that in itself is debate-worthy in my opinion.
The negative implications of generative ai far outweigh the benefits to anyone other than those looking to somehow cash in on the current craze.
Not only is it frighteningly unsustainable, willfully enshrouded in deep misinformation/propaganda, dangerously unregulated and desperately over-hyped, it has also contributed far greater losses to society compared to any fathomable gains.
Using the argument that it will get better doesn’t really sit well with real people that are already dealing with job losses, water scarcity, grid problems, privacy invasion, sophisticated fraud attempts, hallucinated information, data loss…. The list goes on.
It’s only a matter of time before the costs catch up to these providers and they either have to introduce heavy biases to specific products or services to generate ad revenue en masse, or abandon ship leaving the rest of us to deal with the consequences.
If you really are here to promote AI as I suspect, then I wish you the best of luck.
You are going to need it.
Look at the other posts, we have this question every day. Also: new account and you don’t explain what you do with that AI at work.
My question is: why do you love AI?
Even advertising, which is forced on everyone
Ads are not forced, I block them everywhere. I cannot avoid or block AI.
You could have picked any name and that’s the one you chose?
@rapist1 I see you don’t like me calling attention to your edgy ass name.
Look at the username and try to tell yourself without laughing that this isn’t a troll.
I don’t want it to do things for me. It very often eliminates my ability to vet the information I want at a glance.
I also think it’s basically being weaponized as a propaganda machine and surveillance tool and when you add that to the fact that it’s so convincingly sychophantic, that’s just outright dangerous.
It also cuts out meaningful context. A summary of what is likely already a summary isn’t helpful if you plan to actually use the information for anything. Part of how the human brain recalls information is by reading and understanding details and then parsing which details are important enough to remember for recall or use later vs which can be looked up.
Summarization by AI very often removes that context and because this is a learned skill that skill is likely to get rusty over time.
Additionally to that some people use it as a way to offload their need to think and that’s dangerous especially with the feedback loop of agreement it gives. I have seen several examples of AI sychophantically “agreeing” with whatever the user says regardless of whether it is factual or not.
And then of course there’s the fact that it’s often marketed as intelligent with the ability to tell truth, lies, and so on. That marketing isn’t true to how it actually works and what it actually does.
When you add to that the training data that stole the work of actual people, I just don’t see this as a cost the benefit ration where Generative AI can win.
We have had adblockers for decades so ads aren’t really an issue with a few minutes of effort.
Ads don’t make people unemployed, less intelligent, use up all a city’s water or power supply, and jack up the price of RAM.
Its the sacrifice of everything to feed it when we know none of this is necessary. This shit doesnt need data centers. It could all run locally. Yeah the models will be smaller, but who cares? We dont hate the hallucinatory auto complete as much as we hate the men manipulating society with it. It can be done right, but it has been selected as the harbinger of inequality and dystopia.
