Fuck AI

I believe AI is going to be a net negative to society for the forseeable future. AI art is a blight on artistry as a concept, and LLMs are shunting us further into search-engine-overfit post-truth world.

But also:

Reading the OOP has made me a little angry. You can see the echo chamber forming right before your eyes. Either you see things the way OOP does with no nuance, or you stop following them and are left following AI hype-bros who'll accept you instead. It's disgustingly twitter-brained. It's a bullshit purity test that only serves your comfort over actually trying to convince anyone of anything.

Consider someone who has had some small but valued usage of AI (as a reverse dictionary, for example), but generally considers things like energy usage and intellectual property rights to be serious issues we have to face for AI to truly be a net good. What does that person hear when they read this post? "That time you used ChatGPT to recall the word 'verisimilar' makes you an evil person." is what they hear. And at that moment you've cut that person off from ever actually considering your opinion ever again. Even if you're right that's not healthy.

My issues are fundsmentally two fold with gen AI:

1. Who owns and controls it (billionares and entrenched corporations)

2. How it is shoehorned into everything (decision making processes, human-to-human communication, my coffee machine)

I cannot wait until finally the check is due and the AI bubble pops; folding this digital snake oil sellers' house of cards.

Are people expected not to follow anyone they disagree with?

Generative AI and their outputs are derived products of their training data. I mean this ethically, not legally; I'm not a copyright lawyer.

Using the output for personal viewing (advice, science questions, or jacking off to AI porn you requested) is weird but ethical. It's equivalent to pirating a movie to watch at home.

But as soon as you show someone else the output, I consider it theft without attribution. If you generate a meme image, you're failing to attribute the artists whose work trained the AI without permission. If you generate code, that code infringes the numerous open source licenses of the training data, by failing to attribute it.

Even a simple lemmy text post generated by AI is derived from thousands of unattributed novels.

Do y'all hate chess engines?

If yes, cool.

If no, I think you hate tech companies more than you hate AI specifically.

First of all, intellectual property rights do not protect the author. I'm the author of a few papers and a book and I do not have intellectual property rights on any of these - like most of the authors I had to give them to the publishing house.

Secondly, your personal carbon footprint is bullshit.

Thirdly, everyone in the picture is an asshole.

I do use AI (mostly like Google), but I don't think it's justified or OK, lol - I'm the problem, and I know it.

AI is a marketing term. Big Tech stole ALL data. All of it. The brazen piracy is a sign they feel untouchable. We should touch them.

the fact that it is theft

There are LLMs trained using fully open datasets that do not contain proprietary material... (CommonCorpus dataset, OLMo)

the fact that it is environmentally harmful

There are LLMs trained with minimal power (typically the same ones as above as these projects cannot afford as much resources), and local LLMs use signiciantly less power than a toaster or microwave...

the fact that it cuts back on critical, active thought

This is a usecase problem. LLMs aren't suitable for critical thinking or decision making tasks, so if it's cutting back on your "critical, active thought" you're just using it wrong anyway...

The OOP genuinely doesn't know what they're talking about and are just reacting to sensationalized rage bait on the internet lmao

It’s so surreal when someone posts a meme about That Guy™ doing That Thing™ and then all of a sudden That Guy™ shows up in the comments, doing That Thing™

Like, can I get your autograph? You’re famous, bro!

I sure am glad that we learned our lesson from the marketing campaigns in the 90's that pushed consumers to recycle their plastic single-use products to deflect attention away from the harm caused by their ubiquitous use in manufacturing.

Fuck those AI users for screwing over small creators and burning down the planet though. I see no problem with this framing.

I would not to get close to bike repaired by someone who is using ai to do it. Like what the fuck xd I am not surprised he is unable to make code work then xddd

Do people who self-host count? Like ollama? It's not like my PC is going to drain a lake.

They only real exception I can think of would be to train an AI ENTIRELY on your own personally created material. No sources from other people AT ALL. Used purely for personal use, not used or available for use by the public.

This is extreme