this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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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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Yeah? Well what if they got very similar results with traditional image processing filters? Still unethical?
The effect isn't the important part.
If I smash a thousand orphan skulls against a house and wet it, it'll have the same effect as a decent limewash. But people might have a problem with the sourcing of the orphan skulls.
It doesn't matter if you'we just a wittle guwy that collects the dust from the big corporate orphan skull crusher and just add a few skulls of your own, or you are the big corporate skull crusher. Both are bad people despite producing the same result as a painter that sources normal limewash made out of limestone.
Even if all involved data is explicity public domain?
What if it's not public data at all? Like artifical collections of pixels used to train some early upscaling models?
That's what I was getting: some upscaling models are really old, used in standard production tools under the hood, and completely legally licensed. Where do you draw the line between 'bad' and 'good' AI?
Also I don't get the analogy. I'm contributing nothing to big, enshittified models by doing hobbyist work, if anything it poisons them by making public data "inbred" if they want to crawl whatever gets posted.
Even if the data is "ethically sourced," the energy consumption is still fucked.
Depends on what ur producing, running llama 3.1 locally on a raspberry pi doesnt produce any meaningful impact on the climate.
The energy consumption of a single AI exchange is roughly on par with a single Google search back in 2009. Source. Was using Google search in 2009 unethical?
Total nonsense. ESRGAN was trained on potatoes, tons of research models are. I fintune models on my desktop for nickels of electricity; it never touches a cloud datacenter.
At the high end, if you look past bullshiters like Altman, models are dirt cheap to run and getting cheaper. If Bitnet takes off (and a 2B model was just released days ago), inference energy consumption will be basically free and on-device, like video encoding/decoding is now.
Again, I emphasize, its corporate bullshit giving everything a bad name.
I'm trying to make the distinction between local models and corporate AI.
I think what people really hate is enshittification. They hate the shitty capitalism of unethical, inefficient, crappy, hype and buzzword-laden AI that's shoved down everyone's throats. They hate how giant companies are stealing from everyone with no repercussions to prop up their toxic systems, and I do too. It doesn't have to be that way, but it will be if the "fuck AI" attitude like the one on that website is the prevalent one.
Yeah, maybe.
But I’m sick of getting lumped in with AI/Crypto bros for my fascination with the space. And I’m legit scared of those bros taking everything over. Guess it makes me want to shout into the void.