No Stupid Questions

In my experience, people who use LLMs as educational tools... don't actually learn very well. They think they are, but they don't retain the knowledge nor do they seem able to infer from or apply the knowledge very well. There are even some early studies that are showing that using LLMs decreases cognitive ability, and considering how many kids and young people are using it to get their way though school and even higher education... I think we're using AI to raise a generation of stunted minds. That's going to be a bigger issue as time goes on and with the state of the world and who owns the LLMs... it looks like a grim, sad future thanks to this tech.

Kills the planet

Steals from artists

Widens inequality

Puts people out of work

Reinforces prejudices

Makes us stupid

Makes everything generic

Blows up the economy

Supports oligarchs

Can't be trusted, hallucinates and lies

Overhyped & overpromised

Can't generate outside of its training data

Is creating obscene surveillance state

Used in weapons to kill

Made computer components expensive

Ruined the internet with slop

Replaces human interaction

Just annoying

I loathe AI for multiple, personal reasons;

1. When I need to contact customer support of some sort, there is an AI bot that is no use and there are no real humans, because the AI is cheaper. I won't get the help I need or it's too difficult to reach.

2. My mother language is a bit more difficult one and many stores (especially online) are starting to translate everything with AI and that makes the text absolutely incomprehensible. Hard or even impossible to understand even the basic descriptions or the manuals.

3. Browsers have those forced AI-summaries when you try to look for something and those are often both wrong and impossible to turn off. (Or if it's possible to turn off, they keep turning back on.)

4. People I know are literally believing everything from those summaries and such and are very confidently wrong/misunderstanding whatever basic thing. It's very annoying. ("Let's ask STSÄTKEEPEETEE!")

5. Being parasocial online is becoming frustrating as I have been accused of being an AI bot on multiple occasions just because of the way I write in English. Knowing even basic grammar makes you a bot these days.

It's burning the environment down, destroying the shambles of the global economy, and being constantly shoved down everyone's throats even though it's only impressive to people who don't understand it

Reading through this thread and your responses gives the strong impression that you just want to argue while at the same time aren't very well informed on the matter. Where you do respond its mostly whataboutism rather than actually addressing the comment you are responding to.

Your post asks "Why do people hate AI?" and then goes on to validates many of the commonly heard reasons people have for hating AI. You end with a suggestion that if we could develop AI into something else in the future, it might be good.

So it seems you already understand why people hate AI and are promoting an agenda rather than asking a genuine question.

I don't think people hate AI per se - they hate big tech, and what big tech is doing with it. That's a legitimate gripe, but it's not the same thing as the technology being bad.

AI used well can be genuinely useful. I've dropped a couple of examples in other threads I won't rehash here, but the short version is: there are real world uses for this tech (world modelling, medicine, robotics).

Remember, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the team behind AlphaFold. That's the AI that cracked protein folding, a problem biology had been stuck on for 50 years. It's already being used by over two million researchers to accelerate drug discovery for cancer, Alzheimer's, and antibiotic resistance.

Hell, my dumb ass built a clinical notes pipeline that takes the tedium of charting from 15-20 mins down to about 3, with a policy gate that rejects LLM output before it ever reaches me if it fails criteria I defined. None that looks anything like the slop-firehose corporate rollout most people are reacting to.

Worth noting too: taking a black-and-white position on anything is just less cognitively expensive than arriving at a nuanced one. That's not a character flaw, that's called "being human". But that doesn't mean the nuanced position is wrong.

PS: The electricity/water data centre stuff is maybe more complicated than the headline takes suggest. This might be worth actually reading before treating it as settled.

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about

YMMV and ICBW

Imagine a shitty robot was just made available for free.

The shitty robot replaces you at work. It performs way faster with worse results, but the company hires a robot "expert" that fixes the results just enough that the product appears to be working. (Its not). You are now starving.

The shitty robot tells your kids that porn is a viable career path. And that they should kill themselves.

The shitty robot starts showing up everywhere, in advertising, TV shows, customer support lines, schools.

The shitty robot makes shitty art really fast, which people can sell or use how they want. Artists are now starving.

Imagine the shitty robot is now interviewing you for your next job.

Everything you said is why people hate it, and that hate is justified.

It will change society. It won't improve skills.

Studies already show the opposite at play. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

If the LLM could teach you how to code, but couldn't do the coding for you, it would be a tool for improvement. But it isn't used that way. Instead of saying "teach me how to code this", people are more inclined to say "code this for me".

On top of that, they're controlled by corporations who are not in the slightest bit interested in your welfare, privacy or economic success. They will invade your privacy, fuck over the environment, fuck over people and load their LLMs with propoganda and barriers that serve their political and social interests.

And as a bonus, they're a nightmare for the environment.

Having said all of that. I agree, they are going to fundamentally reshape society. But it's like the industrial revolution. Yeah, we ended up with a more efficient society, but it didn't make people freer, it further entrenched wealth in the hands of the wealthy, whilst fucking up the environment. That's what LLMs are going to do.

We could do them differently. That implementation isn't inherent in their nature. But we won't do them differently, because the people pushing it want the shitty outcome, because it's not shitty for them.

AI makes children stupid. AI is mostly used for making AI slop. AI is being used by governments to manipulate public perception. AI is being used to engage is scams. People are using it to cheat. AI is being used to offset critical thinking.

AI is being used by corporations to engage in mass layoffs to save a buck. AI is being used by police stations and federal agencies to identify people, with minimal success (misidentification). AI is being used to deny health claims without review. AI customer service is dogshit.

I was a futurist like you once. I wanted AI based on how the movies presented it. However, the reality is LLMs are being used not for human improvement, but instead for the purpose of creating a permanent underclass with few at the top.

TL;DR: fuck AI.

Chatgpt, list all instances where OP is trying to subvert people's points with logical fallacies, & burn a couple hundred extra Wh while you're at it, thanks. I'm sure it'd take less energy for me to do it, but nah

This book is probably more worth ur time than this post: https://ia801605.us.archive.org/29/items/aiboba/aiboba.pdf It's An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi

Because it sucks balls, just like anyone that approves of it.

Lot of people with legitimate complaints, lots more bandwagon people.