Fuck AI

True, nuance is dead on social media. Especially in high propaganda places where people treat bad faith arguments like a virtue.

It is weird how the position is both that AI is simultaneously incapable of producing any work of any quality and also an existential threat to all human labor on the planet.

It really sounds like they have two arguments that they're smashing together and treating like one.

First, AI system do produce poor quality output a lot of the time. Much like any other technology, the first few years are not exactly an example of what is possible.

For example, the first jet aircraft could only operate for a few hours or their engines would literally melt. People are sitting here looking at these prototype jet aircraft and claiming that there will never be commercially viable jet travel. (and yet, in this same metaphor, somehow jets will also take over all forms of travel imminently).

LLMs and Image generators are not AI, they're simply the easiest and cheaptest to train, which is why you have all of these capitalist vultures jumping on these products as if they're the future.

That's really the core of the second part of the argument which is essentially: "Capitalists have too much money and have decided to gamble that money on the AI industry, resulting in unsustainable spending and growth that harms real people and communities".

By itself, this is a good argument also. People are starting to understand the sides, we're on the bottom and the people on the top who have the power often make horrible decisions in order to chase profit and the result is that regular people are being hurt by those decisions.

The red herring is that they're blaming these problems on AI instead of the billionaire humans who are actually choosing to put in these data centers and fire workers, etc. A language model or diffusion model isn't choosing to fly in natural gas generators to power datacenters and pollute communities. Elon Musk chose that.

Getting angry at AI is a useless distraction. There are human beings that are making these decisions and the ones that bear responsibility for the damages, not a few Terabytes of spicy linear algebra.