Ask Lemmy

My current list of reasons why you shouldn't use generative AI/LLMs

A) because of the environmental impacts and massive amount of water used to cool data centers https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

B) because of the negative impacts on the health and lives of people living near data centers https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

C) because they're plagiarism machines that are incapable of creating anything new and are often wrong https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-ai-limit-our-creativity/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/06/20/why-ai-has-a-plagiarism-problem/

D) because using them negatively affects artists and creatives and their ability to maintain their livelihoods https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374523000316 https://www.insideradio.com/free/media-industry-continues-reshaping-workforce-in-2025-amid-digital-shift/article_403564f7-08ce-45a1-9366-a47923cd2c09.html

E) because people who use AI show significant cognitive impairments compared to people who don't https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

F) because using them might break your brain and drive you to psychosis https://theweek.com/tech/spiralism-ai-religion-cult-chatbot https://mental.jmir.org/2025/1/e85799 https://youtu.be/VRjgNgJms3Q

G) because Zelda Williams asked you not to https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r0erqk18jo https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-07/zelda-williams-calls-out-ai-video-of-late-father-robin-williams/105863964

H) because OpenAI is helping Trump bomb schools in Iran https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/06/openai-pentagon-tech-surveillance-us-citizens/88983682007/

I) because RAM costs have skyrocketed because OpenAI has used money it doesn't have to purchase RAM from Nvidia that currently doesn't exist to stock data centers that also don't currently exist, inconveniencing everyone for what amounts to speculative construction https://www.theverge.com/news/839353/pc-ram-shortage-pricing-spike-news

J) because Sam Altman says that his endgame is to rent knowledge back to you at a cost https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-intelligence-will-be-a-utility-and-hes-just-the-man-to-collect-the-bills-2000732953

K) because some AI bro is going to totally ignore all of this and ask an LLM to write a rebuttal rather than read any of it.

The best use of AI I've seen thus far is reading legislative bills. Those monstrosities are so fucking long and filled with earmarks that it's next to impossible to understand what is in them.

Having an AI not only read the bill but keep a watch of it as it goes through Congress is probably the best use of AI because it actually helps citizens.

I am on record saying we need an AI that can track prices of various things that can then predict when the best time it is to buy something.

I want an AI bot that saves me money or gets me a good deal or extracts money from the capital class.

Medicine.

Evidence shows that some highly specialised models are better at things like detecting breast cancer in scans than human doctors.

Properly anonymised automatic second scans by an AI to catch the markers that human doctors miss for another review by a specialist is an excellent potential use case for an LLM AI.

Transcription services can save doctors huge amounts of admin time and allows them to focus on the patient if they know there's a reliable system in place for typing up notes for a consultation. As long as it's treated as a "please review these notes are accurate" rather than treated as a gospel recording and the data is destroyed once it's job is complete and the patient has been able to give informed consent.

The way these things are being used in actual medical contexts right now is frankly terrifying.

I think anything with text generation is fine. Your multiple Google searches are highly likely to eat more resources than that. Also, fuck Google, use Ecosia. But when I suspect an answer isn't one quick search away, I happily rather use Le Chat for answers, than give Reddit traffic, or have to wade through the shite that is Fandom, Wikia or whatever. Not to mention using AI helps me get past the issue of having to check multiple sites for an answer, just to find that the answer is "Google it" or "Nvm, solved it". Some of you fuckers did this.

However people need to understand that an AI is exactly as fallible as any person. Yes, it has access and capability to handle way more data but between trying to please you and just it getting it's wires crossed, it's going to make mistakes. YOU need to be able to assess the accuracy of the output. The more important the topic, the more careful you need to be and always assume that the possibility of error is there no matter how hard you try - JUST LIKE WITH ANY BIT OF INFORMATION. I see so many people cite academic articles like they prove whatever claim they are making, just to see that the study in question was funded by The Company That Wants to Prove The Claim and sample size was 3 people who work for The Company That Wants to Prove The Claim. At least AI has a small chance of pointing the issue out if YOU yourself tell it to be critical - and I actually suspect this is part of the reason some people hate AI. They don't like that it absolutely can be more intellectually rigorous than a person with an emotional investment in whatever they want to be true. Yes, you can have an AI asspat your grandest delusions but if you actually try to get it to be critical, it will be. You can use a hammer to hit people, or you can use it on a nail as intended (and how many times you hit your own fingers is on you, not the hammer).

I would draw a line on artwork, videos, music. While I'm not going to crucify actual artists using AI assistance to take out some tedium from a project, I still wouldn't encourage it. Stolen artwork to train AI is one thing and the environmental impact is VASTLY greater than just text. Generating one AI image can use as much energy as even a 1,000 text responses. I would also really like to be able to completely opt out of AI slop in media sites. I fucking hate that Soundcloud allows it.

And a last point on AI text responses: if you saw the rise of alt-right and the anti-vaxx stuff, you probably are familiar with gish galloping and Brandolini's Law. If not, you really fucking should be. AI can make it so much easier to debunk misinformation. YES it can make it easier to perpetuate too but this is where we see the AI weapons race. Bad actors can AND WILL use AI to fill any void with their rhetoric. If you value truth and facts and want to prevent misinformation from spreading you are gimping yourself if you're not using AI.

It's not going away. The cat is out of the bag.

As with any tool it has its use cases. It's not a good fit for everything. You can drive a screw with a hammer but a screwdriver works best.

We're experiencing the capitalist euphoria that happens when something new comes along. This needs to get regulated into submission like all the previous bubbles.

1. The sciences obviously

2. For me personally, data collation

3. Learning

4. Assisting with Linux sysadmin stuff (used to be a "how do I X" meant hours of scouring online forums and asking questions that might be deleted because draconian forum rules or get answered weeks later if at all, now I can get shit done in minutes)

   5. I also use it a lot to explore ideas and arguments, like a sort of metaphysical sparring partner.

Scientific use on your own massive data sets(think 100s of TB) - Sure

Consumer chatbot uses - May give the illusion of positive results, whereas the long-term outcome is an overall negative effect on the user.

Ofcourse, but I know better to not even bother trying to have a civil discussion about it here.

For sure. You could absolutely create and train a model ethically. It wouldn’t be nearly as useful in many aspects, but it would be gen AI. From an environmental perspective, I guess you could ask yourself the same thing of CPU intensive gaming. People play games for hours using up similar, often more, electricity as a small locally run LLM.

Would an upscaler be considered generative? Really all I can think of, but I do believe calling those generative is also a little bit of a stretch using the basic idea of "generation" extremely loosely.

Oh, and helping find new chemicals for medicine and other medical research. Of all the things that might benefit from "throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks," that's the only real good use it could be.

Everything can be justified. Even the most... miserable actions. Here is one: I let a kid drown, because I was busy saving a couple other kids that were drowning too. It's a legit choice but it is also not ok, and I would not want to be in the shoes of anyone having to face that situation and to live with the aftermath.

Regarding AI, I don't think the question should be whether it is justifiable or not. It's a tool, it needs no justification beside filling a purpose like a hammer or even a gun do.

The question should be to decide if we're OK a tool (that has been developed using humanity common knowledge) and that will deeply change all our lives and all of humanity future to be owned and controlled by a handful multi-billionaires that are already actively working their worst to make the world unfit to most of us. Or if we want for that tool to be ours and to be able to decide by ourselves what limit we want to put on its usage.

Well, at least that’s what I think.

I have no hate towards AI. No more than I hate a hammer (edit: or a gun) when someone use it to commit a murder. I’m much more critical of the way AI is not developed as a common good… which to me is unacceptable for a tool that only exists because because of our common knowledge.

GenAI is a plagiarism machine. If you use it, you're complicit.

Ethics aside, LLMs in particular tend to "hallucinate". If you blindly trust their output, you're a dumbass. I honestly feel bad for young people who should be studying but are instead relying on ChatGPT and the likes.

I have used copilot a couple times to be like "I have this scenario and want to do this. What are my options?". I'd rather have a good Internet search and real people, but that's all shitted up.

The answers from the LLM aren't even consistently good. If I didn't know programming I wouldn't be able to use this information effectively. That's probably why a lot of vibe coding is so bad.

Ask programmer bros who work on corporative hell.... It's almost mandatory today if you want to earn money programming.

If you're in a dev company that doesn't require AI, it's just a matter of time.

I think programmers are like 90% responsible for impact on environment due to AI use. I've a friend who work on a big company, they use AI literally everywhere you can imagine, even on Slack to answer other colleagues messages. They need to feed huge codebases to provide context to AI, at the end it's more resource hungry than generating video or images a few times a day.

its the next abstraction of search. A search does not answer a question correctly necessarily. Its pretty much not going to stop the same as having people not search online and instead go through newspapers and encylopedias and refernce texts. Energy wise if they are entertaining themselved and not generating images and just screwing around with text then its preferable to streaming vidoe if replacing it. The scariest part is it being used ineffectively and people not realizing it. I sometimes feel we are in a new dark ages with blood letting, trepanning, and curing demon possession.

No. I want to talk to a living machine mind, not a complexified chatbot controlled entirely by ultrarich techbro overlords.

All the uses I can come up with involve running them locally with my own training for specific uses.

One example could be to train one on my drawings to speed up the colouring or fleshing out sketches.

LLM's have their use, there is no doubt about that. I'm in the middle of creating a home brew campaign for my D&D group and unfortunately I'm a lousy artist and I wanted a few things visualized. Well, I used a photo generating AI to create something that had the visual I wanted. I'm going to use it for my campaign and it will probably just sit on my hard drive after I'm done.

My employer is rolling out AI and is asking us to find places to insert it into our workflows. I am doing that with my team, but none of us are really sure if it will be of any benefit.

The problem right now is we're at the stage where idiots are convinced it is something that it is not and they have literally thrown 10's of billions of dollars at it. Now... They are staring at the wide abyss that is the amount of money they invested vs the amount of money people are willing to pay for it.

I've seen arguments for and against the presence of an AI bubble... Personally, I think it's a bubble that's so large that it will take down several long established computer industry manufacturers when if pops. Those that are arguing its absence probably have large investments that they do not want to see fail.

No, never.

Mostly because it's illegally trained, a fact that is very often just overlooked. Because you know, there are no other easy options. Don't let them keep sticking to different rules.

It speeds up my dev time dramatically. I know what I want to do, I have an idea of how I want to do it. LLM generates boilerplate code I review. I tweak it. I fix the bug. If there is something I don't understand, I ask sources to review the output. I test it. Then I'll submit it for peer review once I'm happy with the code and the output.

Yes I suck at the conversation piece of emails in certain scenarios and having a soundboard to bounce off of helps. I still know when it spews things in not quite a fan of but it does do the heavy lifting for me.

Even so, still not a fan overall. It's like launching a nuke at a country to kill a rat. It's so bad for the environment, our brains, and our independence (in terms of hardware ownership because.... Well. Y'all know. )

I guess my tl;dr is it's not truly worth it.

Absolutely not — it's a computer program, a piece of software, pretending to be human. I've always been against that, especially now that it's less obvious if it's a real person talking 🙆, or just a computer program someone prompted 🤖

I value honesty, and, sincerely, I hate that the web is filled to the brim with AI 'slop'. As a human being who values creativity, I don't want to see that. Fundamentally it is made to mimic human output — it's not just annoying, it's disingenuous.