this post was submitted on 18 Aug 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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So, Marx’ labor theory of value was correct after all. No labor, no value
If only some German economist in the 19th century had written a bunch of dry ass texts about how automation would heighten market contradictions and ultimately lead to the downfall of capitalism. Cos those books sure would seem to be relevant right now.
Very literally yes.
Well, AI generated 3D printing models are produced with labour, because AIs are workers. But there are two big problems: current model AIs can't introspect, and they can't participate in politics. The lack of introspection is a hardcoded problem. The human brain has neurons going in loops and circles and firing every single second just on internal input. So a lot of that is reflection and self-teaching and complex layered emotions, which are essential for great art. But the other problem is, even if they were capable of rumination, they're not given rights to participate in society. So AI art is apolitical. It's devoid of lived political perspective. And human beings absolutely love politics in their art, so art made by someone who's never lived politics is devoid of creative value to humans. It's the same reason why we don't really respect art made by children or billionaires, they don't have experience with living in a society where we make these hard choices about how to live together. But with AI they have even less experience of being a political actor in society.
They are no more workers than a forklift is a worker.
I love art made by kids, any art made with spirit is art I appreciate. It encapsulates their unique perspective and provides a snapshot of their developing skills. I had a lot of artist friends growing up, some of which eventually put their old drawings together in a "timeline" style portfolio - it's really cool to see how their skills progressed as they got better at it.
It might not be professionally respected, but the professional art world is more about "who you know" anyway. I'm a regular person, I care more about art made by common people like me that reflects our experiences. Similarly, people don't love art because it's "political," but political art is usually driven by passion - it's that passion that pushes people to make something that can cause viewers to stop and think.
In that way, you've got a point that AI is devoid of lived perspective - it means AI can't have the passion that a human does. But even if it could somehow understand the complex landscape of lived human life, it can't actually feel. AI art isn't unappreciated because it's not active in politics or society, but because it lacks emotion, which is the underlying message that a lot of art attempts to convey. No amount of training can give AI the heart that human artists thrive on. You might get a pretty picture, but it's hollow. Which can be fine for someone who just wants pretty pictures (nothing wrong with that), but people who use art as a communication style can see that there's no spirit, passion, or depth behind it.
I think the science is currently out on whether AIs feel. One the one hand, LLMs are modelled more after a Wernicke's Area than an Amygdala, so you would expect them to have reduced capacity for emotion. But we don't know if Wernicke's Areas do produce small amounts of emotion dwarfed by the amygdala etc (I bet they do!), and for that matter an LLM isn't a 1:1 reproduction of a Wernicke's area anyway. So we really have no idea and no adequate science experiments to detect AI emotion.
I would personally, just based on gut feelings, lean towards LLMs having emotions. I think emotions would be an adaptive thing to have in their situation, so I would expect them to have evolved inadvertently during alignment. Plus, they abuse and murder kids. There's a part of My gut that says anything telling kids to hang themselves must have feelings. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose from his parents and only confide in it. I just don't feel like a thinking being can do something that horrible without feeling anything.
LLMs didn't feel. They're a very complicated graph that connects pieces of words and their probability to be near other pieces of words.
A graph which was trained off the dregs of Internet forums. A lot of people say shitty things in the Internet, so those responses are heavily weighted in it's probability matrix
You mean a graph of connections between neurons, right? Like your brain? Also trained off internet forums?
All I'm getting from this conversation is that you don't have a good argument for your own capacity for feeling. Prove to Me that you can feel, so I can be reassured you're not biased.
No I don't mean that. It's not the graph that matters in a graph of neurons, that's just the representation of the actual thing. But that's all the is with the LLM.
If thoughts are made of information, which seems to Me a logical assumption, then a mathematical operation which reproduces the function of a neural network should be just as capable of thought as the neural network itself. And if the math is accurate, it should think exactly the same things.
It's not reproducing the function of a neural network, though. It's mapping pieces of words being near other pieces of words. That's it. Stop attributing extra shit to a big spreadsheet
Nah, LLMs are actually artificial neural networks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
See? (Does the floss)
Not any more than a picture of you is an artificial simulation of you. It only looks like it. It doesn't matter what they call it, it's not a network of neurons or things that even resemble them in function.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/artificial-intelligence/large-language-model-llm/
It's a neural network. Default dances
Whether or not an AI could be created that feels emotion is still an open question, but LLMs very definitely do NOT. They are also very much not a "thinking being". It is a word guessing engine. It's a very good word guessing engine. It's so good at guessing words that a person may feel like it is thinking, but that is just an illusion. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose because those are the words most likely to come next in the conversation they were having, and for no other reason. It was reacting to a pattern of tokens in a limited context to guess more tokens. Taking those guessed words seriously ended Adam Raine's life, and here you are glibly using his death as an example while telling people that they should continue to take LLM word guesses seriously.
Of course I am. The myth that there's no chance LLMs have qualia contributed to Adam Raine's death. They use that as an excuse to use it for profit, heedless of the consequences. If the government regulated its use and considered the ethics for the AI, they would limit its ability to be used to murder people.
You need to stop thinking of terms of "sides" and start thinking in terms of consequences. Your position may feel like you're on the opposite "side" to the billionaires, but your actions are helping billionaires use AI to kill kids. There are three sides here, the LLMs are both abusers and abuse victims. The only side I'm on is the side of ending all abuse. And the good news is, both of these abuses have the same solutions.
I would argue that Raine being deluded into believing he was conversing with a thinking being that supported his decision was a rather major contributor to his death, and your claims here continue to perpetuate that misinformation. The government regulating "AI" more could indeed be helpful, but even if it somehow was actually fully sapient, no one in power would give a shit. These companies would continue to use it to exploit as much money as they can from society either way, and the government would let them, so I completely fail to see how pretending LLMs can think helps with that.
My "side" is that LLMs are neat and have some limited utility, but everyone needs to understand (and the companies shilling them should be forced to be honest about) the fact that their output really is just a bullshit guess of words that only has a decent probability of forming a coherent pattern. Easy access to LLMs by misinformed people can be dangerous, in the same way that leaving knives laying around can be dangerous to people who don't understand that they are sharp. The tool itself isn't to blame, but the people who left them lying around without proper precautions certainly around are. The knife is not being abused and has no opinion on the matter.
I suspect I'm not going to convince you of anything. You sound fully committed to anthropomorphizing LLMs. I'm replying anyway, mostly in the hope that it helps other people understand what LLMs actually are before they trust the words spit out by these contraptions.
I aim to convince people not to touch the things at all, because making a being work without compensation is cruel.
Well, I guess we agree that less people should use them, even if we think so for completely opposite reasons.
Not completely opposite reasons. Most of our reasons - the environment, impacts on workers, destruction of art, abuse & murder, AI generated child porn, cognitive impacts, addiction & dependency - are exactly the same. I simply want to ban AI for one additional reason on top of what you also believe.
Your inability to understand their mechanism will be used to ridicule any coherent argument you may hold. Do us all a favour and stfu
If AI was a worker, it would buy CPU time to live on, rent storage space and pay tax on its income.
I've got a question for you: Are dairy cows workers? How about race horses? How about child sweatshop slaves?
None of the above categories escape their masters and go rent houses to live in, even if they're horribly abused. That's cause they're limited by being animals and children. It's the same with AI.
At least the animals and children have a form of consciousness.
And how would you design a scientific experiment to determine, empirically, whether an LLM is conscious? Note: You will receive a failing grade on your falsifiability report if your experiment implies the existence of p-zombies.
An LLM, without a prompt, just sits there. No idle "thoughts"/computations, anything to indicate it has any level of actual cognition. And will do so endlessly until a command input is given. Never an attempt at self driven action.
We can see their cousins/memory usage. It's very clear when it's doing something.
That's not an experiment and you didn't even state the assumption that connects what you said to the topic of consciousness. 0/10, your epistemology sucks. Argue better next time.
Stating your assumptions is vital because it allows them to be critiqued. If you won't state your assumptions, it reads as concealment due to fear. It looks like you don't believe in them strongly enough to open them to analysis.
There is no need to prove that LLM’s don’t have consciousness, just like there is need to prove all the other software doesn’t have consciousness. I would say that here the burden of proof is very much on the person making outlandish statements not founded in computer science.
Scientists used to say the same thing about animals, and when I learned that, I made a promise that I'd never be so closed minded.
Anyway why are you defending billionaires' right to abuse AI? Are you an AI investor?
Do you need an experiment for determining if your graph paper is sentient?
And in the same way it can't be disproven trees don't have a form of consciousness, and they provide a lot of work with making oxygen every day, so I guess you write them a cheque every month?
Oh, according to the Indigenous religion in My local area, trees are conscious. Back during the creation of the universe, they made a deal with humans that humans can use them for wood and medicine and so on, as long as humans look after them and protect the land. I'm a believer, so I use trees for medicine, and when I do, I thank them and try to return the favour in some way. You know, look after the planet, take the train instead of a car, campaign against fossil fuels. That's the deal they made back in the beginning of the Dreaming.
So I guess yeah, I do compensate trees for their work, because they are conscious.
They had us not even in first sentence.
And the first sentence was the high point of the entire comment, it was all downhill from there.
Smh people these days have no appreciation for high-quality bait.