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?
ignoring the hate-brigade for a moment.
it used to be the case, and perhaps is still partially true. lemmy users are a bit more tech savvy on average.
and i think there’s frustration among those people who actually understand how modern “AI” systems work under the hood, frequently with a far better real-world understanding than many of it’s loud proponents. and they tire of being told they “don’t get it”. when they actually do get it. better than the person telling them they don’t, but they’re utterly drowned out in the mindless hype train of the willfully ignorant masses.
and the thing fueling the hype train are dishonest greedy people who are not only happy to push the grift over responsible and well engineered “AI” technology.
but, and this is the real crux of it, keep the amazing true potential of “AI” technology in the hands of the rich & powerful. rather than using it to liberate society.
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/code/etc.
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
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?
I have had good experiences setting up agents to do my work for me - saving me up to 10x the time on certain tasks (I own my own business, so I’m using it to extend myself). It does not replace expertise or reviewing work products. And it can take weeks to get an agent to produce usable work products. But for me, AI is a tool to help me be more efficient. 🤷
That is a very nice way to say you don’t want to pay someone to do work for you.
AI greatly benefits business owners by replacing workers.
You are the future and Lemmy hates that.
To be fair, due to rate compression, I can’t afford to pay for someone to do this work. So no one was getting hired. The question is whether or not I could complete the work. I do pay several people to work for me - none of which can do the work I’ve assigned to my AI agents. But I for sure wouldn’t hire someone who is so resistant to change that they can’t even handle AI summarizing my emails for me.
That’s a common pattern. Countless tasks don’t get done because we don’t have enough employees, nor the money to hire more. The current employees take care of all the crucial tasks that are basic necessities for the company to survive. The “nice to have” task list is very long, so if AI can take make some crucial tasks easier or faster, that only means that those employees can spend some of their time doing some of the “nice to have” tasks. In cases like these, AI is not taking any jobs from anyone. If your company has no entries in the “nice to have” task list, it means management has zero vision and zero chance of making the company survive the next recession.
100%. My nice to have task list is mile long. And I want to get to it because they will make a real, meaningful differences for my team and clients. So, while there are real challenges with AI, the potential to help me, my business and my team is there.
That’s fair but I think we will adapt just as we did with the Internet. At least that’s what I hope anyway. I might be wrong
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.
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.
ai is basically just a fancier google search that uses a shitload of energy and has no guarantee of accuracy. ai in movies is way more impressive and fantastical.
look at what happens when ai tries to actually do anything. for example self driving. it just sucks. its not actually intelligent at all.
When you say it’s remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness, what do you mean?
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.
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.
AI in general is ok, but it’s not the solution to everything, no matter what the tech companies are trying to tell you. Many companies have failed to grasp this, and are pushing AI into anything and everything, even when it’s not very helpful. Many people are super annoyed because of this failure, and that’s the sentiment you’re picking up.
More specifically, companies are pushing LLMs, not just any random AI. You don’t hear people complaining about the fact that during a Teams meeting you can have the background blurred. I wonder if people even realize that Teams is using an AI to figure out which parts to blur and and which ones to keep sharp. That’s the sort of case where AI is just used the right way. When people complain about AIs, they are usually talking about LLMs or image generating AIs, not just any random AI.
Then there’s also signal processing. You can clean an audio signal with traditional FFT calculations or an AI. The AI results are pretty amazing, and I think that’s another good example where AI can and should be used. You don’t hear people complaining about that, now do you? Actually, people probably don’t even know that the stuff they’re listening to has been cleaned up with AI.
AI is a tool like any other. You just need to know when and how to use it. It’s also important to know when you should switch to some other tool or method.
lol, you’re getting downvoted just for asking, that should sum up the whole argument.
The hate is real here, and IMO most of it is unjustified. There are a few good points that are made:
- Training data was not ethically sourced. Can’t get around that, it just wasn’t. It was legal-ish, but it wasn’t moral. Image generators especially, the art was not willingly given - but IMO if you aren’t taking work out of their hands I don’t have a major issue with it.
- Same as your issue, AI is being shoved everywhere embodying the “If you’re a hammer everything is a nail”.
- Privacy concerns as you’ve talked about, and security.
That being said, I don’t have any issues with using it at home, local LLMs, and I’ll even say I use it daily to help with coding. I’ve been coding for 20 years and I have to admit it does help, if you know when to use it. It has sped me up considerably.
Ya why the hell am I being down voted 🤔
My guess is you’re being downvoted because you claim AI is the coolest invention since the internet, but ironically you present that claim to a corner of the internet instead of inside the safety of a prompt window. Some may find this ironic because instead of asking the “almost resembling consciousness” to generate an almost resembling answer, you opted to consult a primary source instead. Some folks might see this as the behavior of someone so close to figuring it out…
Hive mind.
Other commenter is right, and it’s exactly why I don’t give much credit to Lemmy’s general opinion on AI. If it’s so bad that even the discussion around it has to be downvoted, then I don’t think they’re arguing in good faith. Personally ChatGPT has helped me immensely with my work. It’s not the world-changer everyone swears it’s going to be, I’m fully out of the hype train - However only a fool would say that it has no value at this point. If engineers are refusing to use it, they’re going to be left behind. The real job loss will be for those who refuse to use it altogether. Solid engineers see it as a new tool in their toolbelt and use it as such.
Absolutely correct.
One random example: where I work, CVs are being filtered by an AI before they are opened by a human reducing the volume to a 20% of potentially good candidates. In that 20% there is always someone to hire, so it doesn’t matter if a good candidate is lost in the AI filter. Failing to optimize the CV for AI literally means being left behind.
This reminds me of something I heard: AI isn’t going to take your job. The person who knows how to use AI is going to take your job.
That is how much Lemmy hates AI, even a discussion about it that expressed any degree of positivity is bad.
You hit the nail on the head:
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.
Most cases in consumer ai, it’s data harvesting gone haywire and it’s not being implemented to benefit society.
From what I see, very few people are stupid enough to blanket hate it, but it is overhyped and being used maliciously.
No, it’s worth blanket hating because most all of the commercial “AI”:
- Are trained illegally on copyrighted works where the vast majority of the human artists/writers behind their works did NOT consent to their work being used to train for-profit models.
- Are actively being used to replace peoples’ jobs in many sectors, which is causing yet more economic hardship all because execs are too fucking dumb to understand how not intelligent “AI” is.
- Use an insane amount of power to train, and a still very large amount to run queries/etc on. This has massively accelerated power and water usage in many regions. This directly accelerates global warming for giant corporations’ profits.
- Are not actual artificial intelligence, so are marketed with literal misinformation.
I am amazed people are still this misinformed about why people dislike AI…
It’s a glorified parakeet
“All of your issues with ai go away if capitalism goes away”
Word. Clearly, capitalism drives the world economy, so…
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
