this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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This is an unpopular opinion, but as someone who builds stuff from scratch, this is the same feeling i get when someone holds up a 3d printed item and goes “i made this”
If they've created the 3d file themselves that seems like an accurate thing to say, as opposed to just printing something off the internet. Obviously the amount of effort and perhaps artistic expression is gonna differ, but like, I think most printed stuff only exists to serve a specific function anyway
That's an interesting take. It does beg the question: What is "from scratch?"
Does a potter need to go to a river bank to dig the clay he will make into a beautiful tea pot? Or is it still "from scratch" if he buys prepared clay? The question can apply to a woodworker. Does the use of power tools to make a chest of drawers less of a creative endeavor than someone that uses all hand tools to make the same chest? Do you need to fell the tree and mill it in to boards yourself to fit your definition?
Where does "from scratch" begin, and where does it end?
I was wondering the same myself. I carve signature seals/chops. I didn't make my knives from ores I refined myself. I didn't cut the various stones into the traditional chop sizes and shapes. I didn't invent the calligraphic forms used to represent the characters in the various seal scripts.
Is this "from scratch"? Is anything really "from scratch" anywhere?
I don't know myself. I don't think anyone really has an answer.
What you do requires skills. And most people don't have hose skills. I perhaps view what you do as being a craftsman. You take things that others have shaped and then assemble them into something that is different and more desirable. And there can be craftsmanship and artistry involved by everyone along the way.
I was a toolmaker. I designed and built tools. I sat at my desk and designed the tool in a CAD program, generated tool paths in a CAM program. Then used CAM to create all the G-Code needed. I then sent the program to the machine. I loaded the code and fixtured the piece of steel. At the push of a button the machine did the work as I stood there and watched. Not much different than AI in some ways.
If one sets aside the ecological disaster that AI is for a moment, (and this is the biggest evil IMO). I start wonder if AI is in and of itself "evil" or is it just a tool we haven't mastered the use of yet. I honestly go back and forth in this. I don't like AI generated art that is passed off as "real", but I can understand and be impressed by the skills it took to manage the tool to make that art. I certainly don't have those skills. But I'm all for the AI currently looking at my MRI scans for signs of cancer cells that even the most skilled radiologist might easily miss at the early stages.
It's a fuzzy and hazy world. And the older I get, the less sure of the answers I thought I had.
That depends, really. Making a decent print can be really difficult and people can be pround of succeeding at that part of the process. Especially if you have a bad printer. Making the actual 3D models yourself on the other hand is no different than making stuff from scratch. It's a skill that you have to aquire.
3d scanning is actually a lot of fun. I had a stint in a museum and we were scanning sculptures for replica molds (because some bitches just can't stop firing ballistic missiles at our museums). However, fixing those 3d models in Blender afterwards was not fun.
I'm pretty amazed what you can do with simple photogrammetry at home, but Blender is still not fun.
it is even less fun when you're just thrown into it without prior training. learning it on the go just because folks who were supposed to do it dropped out was rough.
I don't think that's wrong, but from the other direction.
They're both tools, and as long as you're open about what it actually means to use the tool and what you actually did I don't see an issue.
Sometimes 3D printing is as creative as printing someone else's design. Sometimes the creativity is a modeling and design problem. Sometimes it's a machine operation skill.
AI tools can be "write a book" or "draw me a cat", which isn't much , or it could used to do spot touch ups in a photo, or get feedback on a written work.
Doing something with or without different tools has different advantages and disadvantages, and changes the criteria that you judge it by.
Some people feel the same way about digital cameras or cell phone cameras. I don't think the device picking the exposure time and white balance makes it not your picture, it just means I'm not being impressed by your color pallet, but instead your subject and composition.
To me that's the least annoying part of AI at the moment. I'm open to the notion that you can be creative with tools that remove parts of the challenge, you just don't get credit for the challenge.
Be careful of your use of AI here too.
My phone's camera has "AI" all over it. But since the phone predates the degenerative AI craze, obviously it's not talking about LLMs and something-or-other diffusions and all the other degenerative, hallucinating AI things.
The term "AI" covers a whole bunch of technologies, and most of those have found niches where they're actually useful and don't burn up the planet to use. Like, say, the "AI" photo retouching features of my phone. Which, to be clear, predate what is shilled as "AI" today.
Of course modern phones call what my phone calls "AI" something else: "software". Because that's what "AI" that actually works is called after it has found its niche.
Not to be a serial contrarian, but I'd say what's being "shilled" as AI today is just as much AI as the AI of yesterday. Which is to say intelligent in the sense of "responsive to environmental changes", not "sentient or sapient".
Autocorrect, red eye reduction, and white balance correction are all different types of AI. So is the tuning function on most decent rice cookers. (Depending on the retouch feature you mean it actually could be from the modern AI wave. It started with images because humans notice a 10% gibberish rate in text, but we don't see a 10% error rate when removing a ketchup stain)
I don't think we're actually in disagreement, but I think in this particular threads context it's implicit that the intention of "fuck AI" isn't "fuck my rice cooker and its weight/heat interpolation function".
People feel that same way about any tool, and get a sense of dismissiveness towards people how use them. I usually don't care about the tools people use as long as they don't try to take credit for the part they didn't do. Whittling and using a lathe are different skill levels when making a table leg, and I won't be impressed by your radial symmetry if you used a lathe, but I can still like the table leg.
The biggest difference is that I don't think there's any generalized ethical issues with lathes that need to be addressed.
Getting upset about someone being open about using the tool, or even not being open about using it, is like getting hung up on questions of who gets credit for the symmetry of a table leg when the carpenter used a lathe powered by a live puppy grinder.
Oh, "AI" is purely a marketing term. You know how we know this? We can't define intelligence. There is literally no definition for intelligence that is broadly accepted. So anybody selling "AI", whether it's "neural networks" or "ant colonies" or "genetic algorithms" or whatever technobabble is being used is not intelligence of any kind. You can't make the artificial version, after all, of something we can't identify.
What I was pointing out only is that "AI" photo retouching is not automatically degenerative "AI" photo retouching. The "AI" retouching in my phone is not prone to hallucination. It predates the hallucination machines. It just does stuff like (mostly) smoothly removing things like strung cable in photos and that kind of stuff, or does some pretty splendid night time photography.
Modern phones with the same features don't call those features "AI" because today "AI" means the degenerative crap. They just call it "filtering". (And then, tragically, they put the degenerative crap into the camera software because we're not allowed to have nice things apparently.)
Ah, yes. The only bit of marketing terminology that has multiple high profile university research labs dedicated to it since the 50s.
You're conflating human intelligence with what it means in computer science. We have no way of consistently and meaningfully ranking human intelligence. The intelligence being referred to in AI is not the same thing. It's not even comparing apples to oranges. It's comparing the abstract notion of a triangle to a rabbit.
You may as well say "signals intelligence doesn't exist because we can't define intelligence".
Calling things techno babble doesn't help you look like someone who knows what they're talking about making a distinction.
I hate to break it to you, but that's largely generative AI. You haven't mentioned your phone specifically, but the features in question are at least quite similar to googles magic eraser and night sight features.
Unless your phone is hilariously old, it doesn't predate googles use and development of generative AI.
In one sentence you say it doesn't hallucinate, and the next you say it "mostly" smoothly removes things. First, where do you think it's getting what's behind what it removed? Second, what do you think is happening when it fails to get it right?
The computational photography features are largely a machine learning model being applied to techniques used by traditional photographers.
If you want to use them, I don't care. Just don't pretend they're fundamentally any different than using Photoshop AI tools to do the same thing. It's not. You're using an AI based tool to do something that someone else is doing by hand. It's trained on a dataset pulled from every picture on earth ever uploaded to the Internet.
Your perfectly color calibrated hdr+ photo without any weird stuff blocking the sky doesn't get the same credit as a person who meticulously composited and exposed a set of film photos for those bits.
I literally said one message earlier that my phone predates the outbreak of degenerative AI. I got it in 2021. If that's "hilariously old" to you, so be it. It works (unlike degenerative AI).
Now ask yourself this, Sparky. Why was it called "Artificial Intelligence"? If it was, and I quote:
I'll give you a little clue: "artificial intelligence" gets more research grants than does any of these:
Yeah, so your phone is definitely using the modern iteration of generative AI for the features you're defending. By "hilariously old" I meant more along the lines of "2014". It is exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about smartphone AI features.
It kinda feels like your problem with modern AI is less the ethical issues and more the results you get from it, with the way that you're defending it in the use case you like by saying it's a different type.
As for your odd attack on an academic field: none of those things existed when the departments were founded. Those were all the names for the grants they proposed that led to them creating those things.
Why do you have a hard time accepting that maybe a term has different meanings in different contexts, and using that as the basis for your criticism is shallow compared to any of the other incredibly valid reasons to criticize how it's built, supported, marketed, used or advertised?
Phone was released in 2021, meaning the software in it was made long before that. ChatGPT was pissed onto the world in 2022. Obviously exactly the same technology used.
Fucking Hell you're an annoying twat.