Ask Lemmy

It's usually bots. Unfortunately it's not easy to moderate them, but if a bot is reported, doesn't have a bot flag, and says a bunch of pro-ai stuff in addition to the reported activity it's usually enough evidence to ban. It's just one of their current tells, I wouldn't base a ban only on that though. Report when you suspect them though.

People have different opinions on AI, not everyone is vehemently opposed, and some view it as useful if used on the appropriate configuration.

Pro-AI people are a small minority in my experience, but are generally overrepresented in the tech geek communities that make up the majority of users on the fediverse. Anecdotally, I think that the vast majority of people are indifferent about AI, some of them may find it to be a novel replacement for web searching, but almost nobody is interested in paying for generative AI (as evidenced by the AI companies hemorrhaging cash). If you were to ask on a more creativity-centric community, you would find that anti-AI sentiment is near ubiquitous amongst the working creative class.

Sadly, there is a significant number of untalented and brainless fools who use unethical corporate AI models as a crutch to compensate for their lack of real-world skills and relationships.

But for as many people as there that claim to be pro-AI, you simply don't see people actively seek out AI-generated art, music, videos, or stories. I would argue that most of the consumers of AI content are people who have been unwittingly duped into reading/watching/listening to it

For reasons I can't quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.

AI psychosis is a documented problem.

Finally, pro-AI people are infinitely more likely to use AI to generate spam and proganda in support of their worldview than people who are against it. Are we supposed to believe people that have AI girlfriends are above using AI to write bogus posts and comments?

If people weren't fucking stupid, these scams would eventually stop working.

What's it been, 4 years since NFTs? And AI morons are already falling for this shit.

It seems like its usually just one person just posting over and over or making alts (I assume, based on the fact they just reiterate the same arguments), rather than a coordinated effort.

This is nothing new actually, the same thing happend during the crypto boom.

There's slop users (autoclankers) and then there's researchers or developers actually doing the same stuff they've been doing for 5+ years.

I think it just seems that way because there's always a clash on practically every post.

Some people don't see the inherent flaw in outsourcing their physical thoughts to a cloud model, or the massive economic bubble they are helping to create.

But some people are doing some genuinely interesting things that would have otherwise been impossible several years ago just because AI and model training research got a huge boost for everyone the past few years.

My personal favorite is a drone that rapidly identifies and counts produce plant quality, output, issues, etc for large farms with some brand spanking new image models, and it costs about as much as maybe a new toolbox. No one wants to manually weed through hundreds of acres to count buds and try to catch problems before its too late. It's a great upgrade from doing random samples that misses a lot of data.

On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.

It's like when you throw world and ml users into one post. They both think the other is louder, and also the big dumb lol.

The kind of people who make hating AI part of their identity are pretty rare in the real world. Lemmy just creates the illusion that this loud minority's views are way more common than they actually are.

And as always, the "pro-AI" people aren't as much for it as the haters are against it. It's not a binary thing between the two extremes. Every real person I've talked to about AI has had a pretty neutral view on it and is usually well aware of its limitations. Even the ones who lean heavily on it aren't as passionate about it than the haters are.

AI (LLMs) is/are a fantastic tool.

But that's what it is, a tool that can make some tasks easier.

It's not world-changing like some tech bros and CEOs think it is because they don't actually understand the technology.

It's also not the apocalypse or The Matrix or Skynet coming to end civilization. It's just a tool.

After the AI bubble bursts, AI will still be there, as a tool for humans to use.

I think it's possible that some of the people you see on Lemmy may have started using AI a little more in their lives and see it for what it is.

Honestly, the problem when talking about "AI" is how many different things that can mean.

• General AI chats
• Coding agents
• Automated pentesting/vulnerability discovery
• Image/video/music generation
• Grammar checking
• Automated support agents (phone or chat)
• Autonomous weaponry

and so many more. Being Pro-AI could mean you like one or two application of the AI, but be against it in the others. I know very few people that like it for the use of media generation. However, there have been a lot of long time vulnerabilities in very popular open source projects that was only just discovered. That seems like a pretty undeniable use case demonstrating its usefulness.

Then of course there's governments that want to get their greedy blood thirsty hands on it to create autonomous weaponry. So now if you try to defend AI for a use case like defensively finding program vulnerabilities you somehow also have to defend AI weaponry?

For a generic AI model, it is very powerful and can either be used to grow yourself or abused so your brain doesn't have to work at all. You can use AI to do the hard work for you, or use it as a personal tutor to guide you into what to learn. People will of course mention hallucinations as why it can't be used to learn, but you don't have to take AI at its words. If you were to ask it to create a lesson plan on what you should study for a subject, in what order, and resources are available, you can do all of the actual learning using content the AI has no control over. So what you do with that is going to be up to the person, and opinions on it are going to vary wildly.

Some people argue any use case is not okay given the various concerns of energy and water usage, and where those models sourced their training data. Not to mention if you support AI you must be supporting the AI companies. I agree there are concerns for the environmental impact, and the training data discussion is a long one on its own. However, I do think you can support AI as a technology, and not be okay with the way the technology is being done in regards to environmental impact. And given AI can be done on a local machine, I don't think it has to be tied at all with the big tech at all.

"AI" is such a wide and immense topic. And what we talk about with AI today will not be relevant come next year with how quickly it is developing. We shall see if some form of Moore's law applied with the growth of AI as far as efficiency and quality of the AI goes.

The fuckai crowd has always been a vocal minority, amplified by Lemmy’s small userbase. It was never going to last as the default message being heard.

Personally I think LLMs are pretty useful and run them on my PC occasionally. I’m more of a Fuck Corporate Datacentres kinda person.

I have been expecting there to be some softening and some people who use AI for coding on the DL here. It really has gotten significantly more common to at least try out tools like Claude Code. But those people aren't writing articles like that and I'm not seeing them.

I think AI has positives to help people, that being said I think it's out of control currently. I hope the bubble burst soon and we can actually get to a reasonable balance.

The community is pretty split. I know a lot of people are going to think the accoints are bots. Maybe they are.

But ive met people in real life that truely believe in llm ai solving all thier problems. Its not true bur thats what they believe.

Maybe it's just that the world isn't as uniform in their anti-AI opinion as you imagine it to be? Social media inherently forms bubbles, smaller platforms like the Fediverse even moreso than most. As the Fediverse grows opinions are likely to become more diverse.

Can't tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.

They're both "annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality" and they are spreading propaganda they picked up elsewhere.

If you ignore or are blissfully unaware of the negatives -- and all the companies behind all the major product lines do their best to hide and minimize them -- then it's easy to find utility. Basically everyone I know IRL actively chooses to use AI for something. Both CRAP (Computer-Rendered Artificial Pictures) and code generation are very common.

When I point out the ethical issues, I am generally dismissed entirely ("they'll fix that" or "my impact is small") or counter with something about quality ("it works now" and "it's getting better"), which I find is beside the point.

Same. I noticed that I finally got banned from a few random instances I'd never visited before under my moderation history, and they were all by the same guy who claimed I was an "anti-AI troll" lmao

The most hilarious part to this is I feel so dispassionate about the subject, I can seldom remember what it was I might have commented, and was probably something like "yeah this looks like slop" hahaha

It’s probably a mix of both, plus the normal cycle of online discourse. As AI tools become more common, you naturally get more people defending them, evangelizing them, or reacting against criticism. Some are genuinely enthusiastic users. Some are industry-adjacent people pushing narratives. Some are just contrarians who enjoy provoking anti-AI spaces.

On federated platforms like Lemmy, a small number of highly active users can also create the impression of a broader cultural shift. Repetitive framing like “people are irrationally afraid of AI” often comes from the same internet optimism culture that treated crypto, NFTs, and “disruption” as inevitable progress.

That said, there is also a real backlash to constant doomposting. Some users are tired of seeing every AI discussion framed exclusively around collapse, theft, or dehumanization, so they overcorrect in the other direction.

Your instincts are not unreasonable though. Coordinated narrative shaping absolutely exists online, especially around technologies tied to massive corporate investment.

I hardly ever see them. I love being able to just set my home feed to subscribed communities.

AI hs already been demonstrated as a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs. It is not a question at this point. At this point, all of the AI-evangelists are either extremwly stupid or fascists themselves.

It'd be great to see more centralist views. AI can be a useful assistant with certain things, but i dont get needing to be fully against or fully for it

Humans are social animals, in the United States especially where people are severely separated- they’ll look for and find any kind of easy access towards social interactions: including but not limited to Chat bots. It’s a sad reality that they would dismiss the negative affects it has on our social brains, dismiss the environmental effects it has on our planet, dismiss the social warmings because they’re too involved with LLMS “AI”.

That’s right, it’s not even AI; it’s only large language models or some agentic systems. Way smaller ones existed in the past, think Dr. Sbaitso (1992) or A.L.I.C.E. (1995.) it’s actually not hard to make a chat bot, just have it echo what the user says with some key phrases. That’s the whole existence of chat bots and today’s current “ai” only they have a LOT more variables that were generated off of huge randomly generated data sets (both off of free open sources and stolen data) and that’s what causes it to hallucinate: it’s the randomness that humans don’t have the ability to change or update simply because it’s such a huge list of variables. It’s so massive people think it’s real intelligence! PEOPLE WERE FOOLED ON 1990’s CHART BOTS TOO! 😭 😂

Anywho we recommend the movies Desk Set, Space Odyssey, pi and even Alphaville. They’re related to the subject and they’re pretty good at pointing out the bruhs.