Ask Lemmy

It's a tech.

Do I hate JavaScript for what it has done to the web? No, I hate people who use JavaScript in their webpages with evil intent.

I have a mentality and way of seeing things that doesn't really allow me to hate a technology.

That being said, I really dislike all the AI content that people put online. Searching anything has become a pain. And the amount of webpages that are AI written is outrageous.

Since I want to write in a bit more detail about my personal LLM/AI journey so far I will just give a Tl;Dr here: I started as a hater for that barely functional piece of junk that dared to call itself AI and slowly started to come around once it became better and more reliable. Now, let's start with the story time.

I still remember when cleverbot was the best way to talk to a computer and it was pretty shit, then suddenly ChatGPT popped up one day. I obv. had to give it a try and I was amazed that we already got that far and it happened basically over night (I know now that at that point the first LLMs existed for quite some time but it took a while for them to blow up and therefore me discovering their existence). At that point, they were pretty inacurate, couldn't even do simple math (which I found really ironic since that is basically the only thing a computer can do and very well too) and was inaccurate most of the time. I always had to double check each output and had to manually fix it pretty much every time, if it even was salvagable in the first place. But usually, I was better and faster at any task I could possibly give it so I became anti AI, started hating on the technogy and mocking people who used it.

Half a year later I finally decided to give it another try and it actually improved. Simple math was correct most of the time, it started to get most facts straight and some tasks like formatting text was either correct or just had some small mistakes I could easily fix myself. That was the turning point for me where I stated using it more often and hating it less.

Now, I actually like AI/LLMs. I use it almost daily for questions about pretty much anything that isn't about recent news (which is still very prone to errors) or about a nieche topic (same issue). The main reason why is because I stongly prefer getting taught new things with the chance to ask follow up questions or to clarify things I didn't underatand. I also use it to do simple tasks for me I don't want to do myself, like formatting texts in specific ways. And I also use image gen whenever I need an image, be it for my profile picture, banners or anything else, since I hate drawing stuff myself, do not have the money to commission stuff from actual artists and noone but AIs want to do it for free.

And as a developer, I of couse use AI coding tools. However, I have to say that I'm not a fan of agentic coding, better known as vibe coding to most non-developers, where you tell the AI what you want and it does all the coding for you. In my experience, the result sucks. Too many unneccesary comments, too many checks that usually just degrade the performance of the software and at some point, shit just starts breaking, the AI can't fix it and the codebase is too messy for me to read into it and fix it myself so I have to start over and do it myself anyway. For small stuff, like a simple script to inject into a website to make a table sortable or a cronjob that deletes every file in a temp folder that is older than a week, I have no issue with letting an AI vibecode that for me, then reading through the result to make sure it actually does what it should before using it. But for larger projects, I just give the AI access to my codebase and then chat with it when I'm stuck, unsure which approach fits best or give it smaller tasks to do for me and always check the output manually, never trust it fully. So after auto-completing words, then lines, then code snippets/chunks, I see coding LLMs as the next step that lets me generate even lager chunks, or even entire files, but with a more cautious approach. And it replaced the rubber duck for debugging.

One thing I almost never do is use AI to generate, enhance or even correct texts I'm writing. Take this comment for example, I bet I've made multiple mistakes and an AI could find better words and write everything way shorter while still getting the important bits right, but for some reason I do prefer to rather keep the human imperfections in it. Only for more.. professional settings, I sometimes rely on AI to do a bettrr job at writing than me, and most of the time, it delivers.

Now, what I am still concerned about is the future of AI. What I haven't mentioned so far is that I never paid for AIs and never will. If they are trained on stolen works where the creators of said works never received any compensation, neither will any AI company see anything from me. But as long as I can use it for free, I will continue doing so. However, I fear that this will soon change, since investor funding will not last forever and looking at the current hardware market and electricity costs, they will need a whole lot of money to keep going. And I'm pretty sure ads won't cut it this time so I'm really curious how this will end: Will the bubble burst and every large AI company will have to downscale massively to survive or will enough people decide to pay to keep them running the way they do right now? Once again, I will enjoy the benefits while they last and run local models once they try to start charging me, or just return to doing everything myself like before, but I will never support them financially.

it has rotten peoples brains to the point they cant function without asking it to hallucinate more.

Started like you. Fascinated by the reponses i was getting from the LLMs. Then started to notice hallucinations, read.up a bit, and deduced its a fundamental flaw of the approach they use. Its not.going to 'get better', because as i said, its fundamental to the methodology.

Nowadays, its a nice conversation piece, or a natural language interface to search. Not worth the investment.

Given my background in CS though, i still believe in traditional ai methods and wish the funding went into that instead. Some specialized ais, e.g. medical imaging are pretty good. Others are glorified brute force or hueristic filtering of large data sets. Not those.

There are some good uses, but that is outweighed by the vast amount of problems it is causing and will continue to cause as generations are raised with it existing from their birth.

Generative AI can get fucked. I'll never use it.

The "AI" tools that are used for stuff like folding proteins and other beneficial work like that get a pass. Everything else should be relegated to the wastebin of history just like Facebook/Insta/Twitter, etc...

I want my job security back!

But yeah, I get it. LLMs and image gen was hella fascinating at first. No shame in greeting something new with curiosity.

well. was it trained ethically? no. has it been deployed ethically? no. but, has it made our lives easier? also no

As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

It's a double-edged sword. On one hand, AI can be used to quickly find solutions to problems you might not have been able to solve and I've heard that AI can be used in some cases to help people who are disabled. I've been using free AI services occasionally for personal use and they can be pretty good for the most part, sometimes it seems like the AI knows exactly what I want while other times, it either seems to ignore part of my prompt or just have no idea what I need from it.

On the other hand, people are losing their jobs, it's destroying the economy, people have already used it to spread misinformation and malware, it's being used both to create and to promote scams, it's possibly damaging the environment with all the water the data centers use, they're all trained off of stolen data, and there's probably a lot of other issues that I'm either forgetting or just not aware of.

All in all, it's hard to promote the use of AI but I understand it's usefulness. I will never pay for an AI service and when I use the free ones, I always use them with an ad-blocker so they don't get any monetization from my usage.

I was in the same boat as you - one of the earliest to get on Copilot (bing chat at the time) and ChatGPT, and I also played a lot with craiyon/dalle mini. I thought it was fun, and even regrettably used it for roleplay. I started to become skeptical around 2024 as well but I found it really difficult to stop using it. I was quite heavily addicted in a way, and it was really difficult to stop myself. It also completely wrecked my ability to independently think and be creative.

Now that I'm out of it, I am pretty strongly anti-genAI, and I see such little use for it. I've always enjoyed art and have been taking a lot of time lately to improve mine, and I am doing it for personal enjoyment but I also notice that I'm finding it particularly hard to be seen online or get commissions, and I think the saturation of AI is partially related to that. I also see it doing more in IT spaces, which is particularly scary as that was my strongest subject and what I want to go into as a career.

My mother has even started offloading parenting to it, asking it "how to deal with [me]" which really hurts, and I see more and more people just getting consumed by AI psychosis.

I really hope the situation with AI can change for the better soon somehow, it can't be sustained like this

I think it's a tool, but a tool that has been weaponized. I think "AI" (I use quotes because we are really talking about LLMs primarily) have some fantastic applications for automation, things like dictation, pattern recognition, etc.

But unlike non-AI tools that can do similar tasks (linters, non ai machine translation, dictation, hell even search engines at this point) AI does the task with the confidence of an expert, speaking in a confident voice, to people who generally don't know if the information is accurate. It's being sold as a knowledge hub, when in reality it is a tool, one that can be wrong and does not think. And the marketing is agressive. They want you to forget how to think for yourself so you have to pay a subscription for thinking.

AI psychosis is real, I've seen it happen in real time with my coworkers. The quality of our new hires has gone downhill because none of them seem to know how to solve a problem. I often hear "Claude thinks this" in response to issues that are just barely above basic level. There is no longer a desire to find knowledge or puzzle out a problem when it can be cognitively offloaded to the llm. There is danger in the very service that the llm provides - reduction in friction in your daily life also equates to a reduction in learning. Which sucks because noodling out complex problems with an llm as a rubber duck can actually be a great learning experience in situations where a product expert isn't around to bounce off of. But it comes with the caveat of knowing how to check the answers and having the curiosity to delve into those answers and dig through them yourself. Without that crucial step you are just offloading your brain to the computer to think for you and you learn nothing.

And I can't blame the AI psychosis on stupid people. It's being marketed as an all knowing infallible assistant. Yet tangibly many every day people find their lives made worse for it. AI has been shoved into everything when it isn't even as good as the thing it is replacing, or it fails more often.

Then we get to the actual generative functions of ai. Generative art, be it picture or text, is trained without permission or compensation, on the work of millions of artists, with the goal of making those artists obsolete. As an artist I've seen every single artistic industry be hit with this, from stock photography to furry porn to high budget movies. And much like the previous use cases of AI replacing currently existing software, it's replacing artists with less quality products. AI art is recognizable because it is homogenized by default. And sure it's tweakable, but by default it is recognizable as this uncanny homogenized "good enough" picture to get an idea across. And much like everything else it's being used as a way to capitalize on industries, because at the end of the day the only reason to use generative ai for art is to make it faster and cheaper. Every single person that uses it that I've seen has used it for the same reasons. "I don't have time to learn x" or "I need an idea out now" or "I can make more by doing this". Its because art has become completely monitized. People don't create for the sake of creation now, it's for a job, or for a deadline, or for clout. Artists who love their craft and are not bogged by deadlines or bills are overwhelming against AI in general, as artists are some of the most vocal anti generative AI crowd.

When we look at all of this, AI is a tool that has some great localized use cases, especially in pattern recognition, dictation, language, etc. but it's been coopted as a brain subscription by the people in charge of training it and selling it to us. It's been shoehorned into every aspect of our lives, made everything more expensive, made people dumber, collectively destroyed the lives of artists off the backs of their work, and enshittified almost every single industry.

The tradeoffs aren't worth it.

Edit: also forgot to add the privacy nightmare that comes from AI surveillance

I'm usually not against "tools" but I have a hard time finding something useful with LLMs.

The only good usage of LLMs is to optimize algorithms in complex code. Something like "move this variable and your application will be 100x faster." But even for that case, we could have alternatives that do not involve LLMs.

That's it, everything else is bad and useless:

• mega companies profiting from piracy without being sued
• AI companies who publicly declare that they want us to give up our brains and become slaves
• layoffs (it's never officially because of AI, but it's always a manager thinking that he can fire people or not hire new guys because Cursor is good enough for the peasants)
• employees have way more work without being compensated
• making people stupid
• making students more lazy than they are, and allowing them to cheat (cheating required some dedication, not it's free for all)
• artists in all fields are being fucked and may not live from their art
• replacing customer service with chatbots that prevent people from getting answers
• bots everywhere
• spamming forums (look at what happens right now on Lemmy)
• DDoS and attacks on web sites
• enabling script kiddies to shit on the internet
• hallucination and lies
• actually, LLM are 100% hallucinating all the time, the fact that they are coherent is a statistical side-effect
• data centers, pollution, pissing people off when they live around one data center
• generated images, it's really creepy for some reason (even for a simple restaurant menu)

The examples I gave are real and I have experienced them first hand, it's not an anti-AI crusade. For the first time in my life, I don't see how a technology can be useful.

I mostly don't care and as much as people flip out about it I odn't think it's any more relevant than, VIRTUAL REALITY, or BIG DATA or a BLOCKCHAIN.

or any of the other hype machines that come around every couple of years and then fizzle out into nothingness.

...My honest opinion?

Generative AI is little more than a thoughtless, low-effort way for lazy people without real talent, skills and discipline to exploit the hard work of others, often in a futile attempt to make money by fooling people into buying slop or hiring people who aren't qualified.

It is the biggest gift to fraudsters and liars in human history, and is already an extremely dangerous tool for social engineering, hacking, con artistry, surveillance and mass manipulation. In just a few short years of the AI bubble it has already eroded the basic utility of the internet and muddied the waters of factuality and objectivity.

AI hasn't changed the way I work, nor has it changed the media that I want to consume. I'm not interest in things made using AI, and I avoid anything that seems to be. If anything it has made me appreciate genuine human artistry more than ever, and it has made it clean who in society values culture and who doesn't. Generative AI use is a mark of shame to me, and I will never knowingly support someone who has used it.

To make matters worse, it is hurting people's livelihoods and ruining a bunch of hobbies. That's to say nothing of how it is destroying the environment and creating an extreme risk of economic collapse.

To me it's so obviously destructive to human culture and democratic society that I honestly can't believe people aren't pushing back even more strongly than they are. People are just starting to realize how lame and toxic generative AI is, and are starting to hate what it represents, though still not enough for my tastes.

It sucks, and people who use it are pathetic.

I have a pretty dim view of LLMs.

1. Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEO's who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

3. I'm wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).

4. I do not think LLM's can be "just a tool" as many claim.

5. 99% of LLM's (the ones virtually everyone use) are trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLM's have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

6. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

It has its uses. It's just ruined by the bad apples of people who've long have had malicious intent where if you put anything that was intended for a good purpose in front of them, they'd ruin that for everyone.

For example, when there are things I do not know about like objects, I can take a picture of it, direct and show ChatGPT by asking what it is and it'll tell me. It's convenient to talk to an LLM to understand phrases, slang, slurs and their history about them in real time. I also have enjoyed using it to fix and enhance images that my phone's piss-poor autofocus fucks up on with some images.

I think what really ruins AI is that, select people and companies are way too heavily reliant. It is not a solve-everything tool. It is not something you go to about everything, like mental therapy. It is not something you should be using to cheat on homework, to have it help you with getting by in colleges and school that rely on your own problem solving skills to navigate.

Overall I thought it was an amusing parlor trick but when I found out how much energy it uses I want it to die in a fire and for everyone to forget it was ever invented.

kinda negative. It tends to do a good enough job at time but can't really make anything all that great to me compared to human experts/professionals. I think its very useful for the average person when they can't afford to pay and expert and need something. So like the person who wants to make a picture of their pathfinder character. Before someone might be able to hire someone if they had the cash or if they were lucky had an artistic friend who could do it. Now anyone can. Its use in business spaces now for communication is painful. Many people don't proof read the output and allow the message to get lost in the communication they had written. They need to remember they are communicating with people.

I don't hate it but I also refuse to use it. I'm dumb enough without surrendering my thinking to a klanker.

There is also the environmental cost and enshittification of neighbourhoods.

I've unsubscribed from several youtubers who use it.

RSS is probably my favourite way to consume information so when I find out a feed uses AI to write or research I delete them pretty quickly.

Edit: corrected two early morning mistakes.

I think you can't trust it and need to check it's work. I feel the same about most navigation apps, and ADAS systems in cars.

If you can't trust it 100% of the time, you can't trust it at all.

It's a tool. There are uses. However we're currently in the 'if all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail' phase. Overhyped, oversold.

Whats often left out is that it's often trained illegally and should carry the same punishment that private people have to face on illegal acquisition of things.

Basically it doesn't matter what it is. It's the current thing that's financially blown way out of proportion to shovel our money around and to a select few, if we want it or not.

Mixed feelings. I’m kind of an AI pilled doomer.

I see that AI can be a productivity boost - if used correctly in the right places. But I’m also increasingly worried that it might one day replace any work that’s done on a computer (which is most white collar work).

I’m doing a lot of data processing work. I’ve been able to see AI do all this in one go:

• Read a vague Jira task item about some data error.
• Diagnose on real data what the underlying problem might be.
• Find the line of code that need to be changed.
• Rerun the data pipeline with the new line of code.
• Verify on new data that the error has been fixed.
• Submit a pull request describing the change with a detailed report on impact analysis.

Is it perfect? No, it’s often making mistakes and digs deep into the wrong rabbit holes. But is it crazy that it has managed to do all of this once? Yes it is. This was unimaginable just a few years ago.

If this level of automation going to continue in this pace, what’s left for us humans?

I think the technology is cool and holds a lot of promise in certain niches. I've been into it since 2019 and learned a lot just watching it evolve.

That said, I'm skeptical and I think some folks rely on it too much. I work with someone who just copy/pastes Claude on every response. You have to do your own thinking and you have to double check everything it outputs. It follows direction, but it doesn't hesitate to make incorrect assumptions and inferences, and often the things you tell it isn't what it does.

I saw an AI guy explaining some prompt technique where you tell the AI to ask questions until it is 95% certain what you want it to do, but it doesn't have certainty and it can't achieve 95% of something it doesn't have, so it asks questions — sometimes pointless ones — until it has performed the ceremony of achieving 95% certainty. And I suppose maybe that that ceremony does help in some cases, but it's not doing what you tell it to do.

AI has a lot to offer. Sometimes when I ask it to write code, it does so using libraries and annotations I wasn't aware existed. I learn about things that way. It writes cleaner code faster than I do because it doesn't hesitate and overthink. But everyone knows about the hallucination issues. And you have to make your instructions as narrowly scoped and unambiguous as possible — approaching the complexity of code.

I get frustrated because I am a believer in AI, but I'm surrounded by people who don't seem to know how to use it appropriately and it's frustrating. Skepticism and critical thinking is crucial to successful use of AI, otherwise you're going to be caught with your pants down, having relied on it to do your thinking for you, and suddenly you realize you don't understand the very thing you've supposedly done.

In a way it reminds me to when digital painting just started to become affordable and everyone with access to a computer thought themselves an artist.

This is that, times ten thousand. That the tool is available doesn't mean that you know what to do with it.

I've seen niche cases I liked the thing produced, but they were that, niche cases where the person used an ai tool to help them get to the specific thing they wanted.

As long as I can still detect it I block those who use it.

I use it for coding, for translation and for some irl chore / bureaucracy. It's very useful to me, though not without flaws and dealing with some of its stupidity. I am now finally in a position where if I can't find a good existing program that solves my problem - I can whip up exactly what I want in a week (as opposed to a 6 month endeavour)

I don't use image/video/audio generation

I'm conflicted with a lot of it. I hate seeing ai generated content when I'm not looking for it but there are also some games that are pretty fun that rely on LLMs to work. Origins was a pretty good proof of concept and things like fantasy parliament would be amazing if they weren't so resource intensive and could be run locally.

My main problem is just how inefficient that side of it is, it shouldn't use the same computing power to run your own local model as it does to run something as insanely detailed as RDR2 or cyberpunk 2077.

GenAI is a technology. You shouldn't make a religion from it.

As with all technologies, it has it's strengths and weaknesses, and it has it's good and bad uses, and so on.

Currently, many people do not take proper care of it's failures.

Shit peaked before 9/11 when SmarterChild dropped on AIM

Too broad of an question to answer to.

I use it quite a bit. It replaced search engines for me and I like to have conversations about esoteric topics that no other people in my life is interested in talking about. It's by far the most fascinating piece of new technology that has been invented during my lifetime.

But I also think it'll lead to our destruction eventually. Not GenAI but AGI/ASI.

I think there is a way that we could implement genAI that is good and reasonable and useful -- training only on the creative commons, digitalizing existing public domain books and releasing them for general consumption, carefully building harnesses and testing for safety before release, building data centers in unused areas with green energy. We, however, have decided to deploy it in the most harmful way possible instead because a few tech ceos looked at the output and immediately went insane and decided they should build god.

Generative AI will completely die out, it's only a matter of time. And, it will happen sooner than later.

I don't think about it but I use it daily throughout the day. I hardly ever visit Wikipedia anymore and don't go through 10 websites to answer my questions. I use Gemini because all my documents and data is in Google drive.