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.
When people say “AI,” I assume they are talking about the large corporate Neural Networks that get branded as “AI” for marketing purposes.
I hate these because they’re a grift. They’re funded and maintained by a handful of ultra-rich idiots who saw no value in learning social sciences nor the humanities, and thus have failed to learn from history. The people pushing for mass adoption believe in a variety of unscientific pseudo-religious conspiracy beliefs about AI gods and devils leading humanity.
I hate that the cost of these cults are being foisted onto the rest of society by way of government and corporate contracts.
I hate that mass media is rapidly degrading in quality in order to justify the purchase of said contracts.
I hate that the people making important decisions that affect my life and well-being — doctors, the people who develop my software, my government representatives, news reporters, lawyers — are not just willing, but actively excited at the prospect of turning off their brains and letting black boxes controlled by opaque corporations make the decisions for them.
I hate that despite 3+ years of hype and 10+ years of public access, the only people who have demonstrably benefitted from it are Nvidia, scammers, and people who don’t want to use their brain.
But mostly, and this is the clincher, I hate that we are literally destroying the earth to run these machines. Even if every other problem disappeared overnight, this should be an argument killer. We only get one home, and we are setting fire to it. I don’t care if it improves the lives of millions of humans, because it is hastening the death of hundreds of billions of lifeforms.
I hate that people ignore this or conveniently forget it or are just apathetic about it. I hate that this argument just carries little to no weight for most fence-sitters. I hate that people treat feeling emotional about the destruction of our only home as being irrational. I hate ecoterrorism being excused by marketing babble and shitty faux-skeptical wishy-washiness.
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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Because it’s built on the creative collective works of everything that’s ever been put on the Internet with no attribution or compensation for people who’s authored works were stolen. Maybe that’s why?
I don’t see why that’s an issue. Creatives won’t even have to make anything creative anymore, AI can just be used to make things the they would have. That will save them so much time, enough that they can go do cheap labor for 18 hours of the day, like a good slave.
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.
Pro:
- It’s good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it’ll give you an answer immediately that’s tailored specifically to your question.
Con:
- Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that’s hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It’s like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.
Pro:
- It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.
Con:
- People who use it for this are getting dumber. It’s growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that’s no longer true these systems are breaking down.
Another Con:
- It’s fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.
Pro:
- It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.
Con:
- The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don’t even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.
I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.
I’m on Lemmy because I’m anti capitalist and generally support progressive policies such as circular economic practices and sustainability. I’m against AI because it goes against everything I mentioned. The gains aren’t worth the cost.
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.
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
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.
Because it’s not really ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. It’s basically fast computing. And stealing data from other websites.
Because it’s lame, and sucks shit
Because we’d rather have national forests, clean water, job opportunities, a sustainable future and liberty than live in morodor with the eye of Sauron staring at us all the time
Because we’re mostly not bots.
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.
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.






