Ask Lemmy

The small help it gives does not equal the vast evil done to the environment, communities, and actual makers and creators.

Broadly speaking, fuck AI

AI itself is not bad.

But the unregulated industry, breaking laws all the time, people in charge are literal super villains, mass surveillance, producing even more idiots that I have to depend and interact with, ....

Take it away, it is not doing anything we want it to actually do. I only want robots/computers for one thing, and that is to do chores around the house. It doesn't do that, so I am out.

everyone i work with that uses it to generate text has lost the ability or patience to read anything, even very light text written by a human.

at best they skim, but mostly they demand in-person conversations so they can be spoon fed the contents of the documentation.

gone are the days of "this meeting could've been an email" because they won't (or can't) read the email.

so yeah, i hate it but am required to use it for work. which makes me hate it more.

I feel like it's making people dumber. I keep getting screenshots of Google ai summary from people as if that's the answer and they're confident in it. I keep finding those are not correct. For me, ai has created more work because I can no longer trust my colleagues statements.

If we're really, really lucky, the crash might take a few more industries with it, which could buy us a bit more time with regards to the climate collapse. If we're rather unlucky, it's just mindlessly accelerating suffering.

It has its uses. Generative stuff is ok **as long as ** you keep it to yourself. Its sometimes easier to ask llm for explanation on some obscure thing / to take a look at what information on system logs could mean. Its neat gatget. Kind of on par with some kind of useful tool but too unreliable to be of real use. And even if its useful to some, the cost and looming threats are not worth getting on the bandwagon (environment, if its successfull you wont be able to afford it, if its not capabilities will be reduced greatly if not completely and its not much use for you then). And most of all, if its as successfull as they want to sell to investors; have fun being unemployed and looking for job with other couple billion people as once the rich get theirs you wont get yours.

Other people who lose their minds because of it are the problem imo, though ones that do shouldnt have been on anykind of position that matters in the first place.

It has uses but not to the extent its hawked for. Its overused which is using to much power and driving up computer component prices. I would like to see more work with an os flavor that comes with a os optimized to assist with the os and allow for os addons. I envision specialized ais so like you would have a butler type os that is mainly about communicating with the user and then there would be various specialized ais the butler would speak with and you add them as needed. I hope these can be massively optimized and hardware can be made to more efficiently use them such that typical computer use uses no more power than what a typical laptop does that can do gaming.

AGI doesn't exist and is not being developed, but the idiots with all the money and power believe it is. Their stupidity and insistence on feeding all our resources to this stuff is gonna kill us all.

I refuse to use AI as a tool for anything other than making tools.

I can't write LISP but I use AutoCAD. I use an LLM to write LISP routines.

I spent MONTHS looking for a way to catalog my plant collection. Tried a dozen open source projects and none did what I wanted it to do. So I used Claude to make a simple database website....and it was able to add a ton of pipe dream features.

Nothing I make is for sale and I don't claim it as my own. They're tools for ME to use. And the important part is that once the tool is done, the LLM gets closed.

Just like the damage to our environment, AI is out of control and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I’ve used it to great effect on personal projects so, also like the environment, I’m part of the problem.

If you locally host it, I think it's fine.

It's a tool, much like when Google Search first started. LLMs can find things standard ways of doing research cannot. AlphaFold is a useful tool for protein modelling and experimental design, but everything it generates needs validation.

If you have a large dataset you can train to predict things not in the database. But again, everything generated needs to be validated.

Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

And you don't have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the "largest theft of labor in human history".

Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point... Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

Who benefits from this supposedly increased "productivity"? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

Now don't get me wrong... it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn't ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

"Open weights" is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

I can see how that's at least preferable to using some company's subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else's corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it's very much not as "open" or "local" as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it's not a whole lot different either way.

I think an ethical alternative to today's generative AI could exist--if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture--but I'm not seeing people invest any time in making that.

We've been using AI for decades and while generative AI is widely despised and mostly deserving of that despite, lumping all AI together while calling out the harms is doing a disservice to a lot of useful AI techniques and tools.

There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.

Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.

Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.

"Rapid Evolution" = recursing the same algorithm to juice ever diminishing returns out of the parlor trick at ever greater costs.

"Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions."

In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.

The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren't) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.

Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a "truth machine". A speaker I heard put it simply: "AI cheats." It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.

Its shit and I'll be glad when it gets flushed.

Currently, it's a skill amplifier. You can't code for shit and rely solely on it, it will give a shit product. You know how the whole codebase works and use it as needed? It will speed you up drastically while maintaining the quality you want.

Agents are a nightmare. They introduce a variable completely uncontrollable by you to your project, which will make you lose track of how everything works, resulting in a shit product.

I see its future on more optimized models that can run well locally on lower hardware, not those that use entire datacenters to power it. The big AI companies still do not generate profit and are doomed to fail in long term, but AI itself isn't going away.

Before asking what AI can do for you,

Ask how many kidneys do I need to sell, when my SSD fails?

Are humans, 3rd degree citizens on the internet now?

How many proof of work rounds do I need to keep my website from getting eaten by scrapers?

Are you a bot or am I?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but, IMHO, most of the problems I see being voiced by anti-AI (actually, anti-LLM) people, seem to have less (if anything) to do with the tech per se and more to do with capitalism's and corporations' usurpation of it.

I mean, if LLMs were something exclusively made and maintained by, say, a not-for-profit academia (as in a "Libre and Open Science" kind of academia where scientists are working for the entire Earth rather than working for profit/egoistic goals), like the Machine Learning field kind of already was back in the dawn of perceptrons, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be experiencing this whole dystopia, no?

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

it's sort of mixed.

overall i hate how it's being made, advertised, brainwashing people, used for fake images/propaganda, reducing signal to noise ratio with meaningless slop, environmental concerns etc.

OTOH there's some genuinely great things (imo) being made because of it. like people making drivers for long obsolete hardwares, reverse engineering proprietary blobs. maybe it isn't something very advanced technically but it's still something i find very interesting. most recently i saw someone got iOS 7 running on a HTC HD2 (leo), 17 years after that phone first released.

i still don't use llms yet other than short testing back a few years ago, but i might start using them soon. i really want to get volte working on my phone, i don't know how to reverse engineer the vendor's IMS implementation, and i've seen people with not much knowledge get it working on their phones with llm help.

maybe i'm justifying immoral things.. idk. something to think about.

It’s going to destroy human culture via homogenizing our arts and entertainment into a formless unappealing landscape of generic and easily digested slop.

People will stop bothering to learn music, writing, etc, because the idiot hacks in their school are able to create entire albums with absolutely no skill.

I mean… the data centers are already paying dividends to the lawmakers that enable their existence, and we’re rushing full-speed toward a computer industrialization of our environment that it cannot sustain.

Everything about it is going to be disastrous in the long run.

First of all, it isn't going away. Stop telling yourself that lie. If you hate it, then compare it to herpes or mosquitoes. Not going away. People love to talk about sensational things like bubbles or how it will end humanity. Stop being hysterical. It is software. You don't have to use it, you don't have to like it, but be informed. Saying it will go away is about as ignorant as saying the internet is a fad and smartphones are on the edge of failing out of the market. You just sound like a Luddite.

In the end, it is a tool. It can be used for stupidity, waste and nonsense, or it can be used for something good.

You can use a hammer to build something or you can murder someone with it. Any tool can be misused.

It is terribly inefficient in its current form. It needs to be refined just like any other technology. We used to have cars that got single digit mpg. Now you can buy a cheap car that gets 30+, a hybrid that can crack 50 or straight electric. Like anything, it will improve over time.

Society did not revert to riding horses, we did not give up mobile phones for land lines and ai isn't going away. There is solid historical precedent to demonstrate this. You can be the old man yelling at the clouds, but it won't do anything but make you look silly.

On one side…

On the other…

I’m a shameless local LLM shill. I have one loaded right now, experimenting with it.

I also thought Sam Altman was a psychopath before that was the popular opinion, and have never subscribed to OpenAI or even used their free UIs. Not once. Not even the “original” GPT 3.5.

I don’t plan on ever doing it. I will rail against them.

In other words, the sides aren’t mutually exclusive.

One can hate “AI” with a burning passion, using the term AI pejoratively. And be passionate about local ML.

Let me try to use an analogy.

We're farmers in ancient times. A shaman tells us that we can increase our crop yields by taking a bunch of kittens and dismembering them alive in the fields. You try it and it actually works. I don't want to do it and I'm disappointed by your choice.

I think LLMs are going to cause massive change, not all of it good.

Ultimately, I'm an optimist. I think in the long run, LLMs are going to enable us to do amazing things that we wouldn't have been able to do without them. In the short term... I dunno. It's going to be a rough transition.

I do think the people who think LLMs are going to keep getting better, leading to either some sort of techno-utopia, or kill us all off maybe don't really understand how they work and what the implications are.

I also think the people who are categorically against AI are making a mistake out of fear, but that's pretty understandable.

Currently? Frank Herbert