Ask Lemmy

Fundamentally what is evil about AI is that it is part of a growing global movement towards increasingly not seeing value in human beings but rather in abstracted forms of capital and power.

Irrespective of how well AI works or how quickly it evolves, what makes it awful is how it is in almost every manifestation it is a rejection of the potential of humanity. Cool things can be done with AI/pattern matching technology, but the thinking that gave birth to and arose around these tools is incredibly dangerous. The social contract has been broken by an extremist embrace of the value of computers and the corporations that own them over the value of human lives. Not only is this disgusting from an ethical standpoint, it is also senseless, no matter how powerful AI gets if we are interested in different forms of intelligence we MUST be humanists since by far the most abundant diversity of intelligence on earth is human/organic and this will continue to be the case long into the future.

What defenders of AI and people with a neutral opinion towards AI miss is that you cannot separate the ideology and the technology with "AI". AI in its meteoric economic acceleration (in terms of investment not profit) is a manifestation of the desire of the ruling class to fully extract the working class from their profit mechanisms. There is no neutrality to the technology of AI since almost the entire story of how, why and what AI has been has been determined by the desires of ideologies that are hostile to valuing human life at a basic level and that should alarm everyone.

This reminds me of those posts from anti-vaxers who complain about not being able to find good studies or sources that support their opinion.

I just mentioned to a friend of mine why I don't use AI. My hatred towards AI strives from people making it seem sentient, the companies business model, and of course, privacy.

First off, to clear any misconception, AI is not a sentient being, it does not know how to critical think, and it's incapable of creating thoughts outside from the data it's trained on. Technically speaking, a LLM is a lossy compression model, which means it takes what is effectively petabytes of information and compresses it down to a sheer 40Gb. When it gets uncompressed it doesnt uncompress the entire petabytes of information it uncompresses the response that it was trained from.

There are several issues I can think of that makes the LLM do poorly at it's job. remember LLM's are trained exclusively on the internet, as large as the internet is, it doesn't have everything, your codebase of a skiplist implementation is probably not going to be the same from on the internet. Assuming you have a logic error in your skiplist implementation, and you ask chatGPT "whats the issue with my codebase" it will notice the code you provided isn't what it was trained on and will actively try to fix it digging you into a deeper rabbit hole then when you began the implementation.

On the other hand, if you ask chatGPT to derive a truth table given the following sum of minterms, it will not ever be correct unless heavily documented (IE: truth table of an adder/subtractor). This is the simplest example I could give where these LLMs cannot critical think, cannot recognize pattrrns, and only regurgitate the information it has been trained on. It will try to produce a solution but it will always fail.

This leads me to my first point why I refuse to use LLMs, it unintentionally fabricates a lot of the information and treat it as if it's true, when I started

Check out wheresyoured.at for some "haters guides."

My general take is that virtually none of the common "useful" forms of AI are even remotely sustainable strictly from a financial standpoint, so there's not use getting too excited about them.

What are some good reasons why AI is bad?

There are legitimate reasons people worry about AI. Here are some of the strongest, clearly framed concerns:

1. Bias and unfair decisions

AI systems often learn from biased data and can unintentionally discriminate—against certain races, genders, ages, or socioeconomic groups—in hiring, lending, housing, policing, and more.

2. Lack of transparency

Many AI models act as “black boxes,” making decisions that are hard to explain. This creates problems when the stakes are high (medical diagnosis, legal decisions, etc.).

3. Privacy risks

AI can analyze huge amounts of personal data, track behavior, or identify people through facial recognition—often without explicit consent.

4. Job displacement

Automation threatens certain categories of work, particularly routine or repetitive jobs. Without proper planning, this can increase inequality and unemployment.

5. Misinformation and deepfakes

AI makes it easier to create convincing fake audio, video, or text. This can undermine trust in media, fuel propaganda, and destabilize democratic processes.

6. Weaponization

AI can be used in autonomous weapons, cyberattacks, targeted surveillance, or manipulation—raising serious security and ethical issues.

7. Overreliance and loss of human skills

As AI does more tasks, people may become too dependent, reducing critical thinking, creativity, or expertise in certain fields.

8. Concentration of power

Powerful AI tools tend to be controlled by a few big companies or governments, potentially leading to monopolies, inequality, and reduced individual autonomy.

9. Alignment and control risks

Advanced AI systems may behave in unexpected or harmful ways if their goals aren’t perfectly aligned with human values—even without malicious intent.

10. Environmental impact

Training large AI models consumes significant energy and resources, contributing to carbon emissions.

If you want, I can also provide reasons why AI is good, help you construct an argument for a debate, or analyze specific risks more deeply.

Were you looking for this kind of reply? If you can't express why you have an opinion maybe your opinion is not well founded in the first place. (Not saying it's wrong, just that it might not be justified/objective.)