Meet the AI vegans. They are refusing to use artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/06/meet-the-ai-vegansOpen linkView original on lemmy.world691
Comments444https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/06/meet-the-ai-vegansOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Carnivores: vegetable vegans.
And jus lik that we come full circle 😂
This works so well specially for those people that refuse to touch anything "not cooked" in their plate or that is green.
My god, it's unstoppable
Not trafficking children vegan
Age of majority vegan
On this blessed day, we are all truly vegans.
I love your profile image. I should reread Rice Boy.
High five, fuck yes. Cool person detected. I think you're the first one to spot it, too.
I wish I had that series in print. Might be time to look into that
Ooh, print would be amazing. $30 for the softcover, wonder about shipping though...
I have to believe you're underestimating how recognizable TOE is.
It's a hard one to gauge for me. I'm pretty sure I found it via stumbleupon back when that was really great. I read the whole thing in close to one go, and I never hear anyone else talk about it.
stumbleupon, wow... That takes me back.
I interpreted that as techno, as in the genre, for too long.
Incels: sexual vegans
I keep trying to eat meat but it just won't cooperate!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men
It’s like taking the last syllable of the name of the hotel and tacking it onto every scandal, because you didn’t understand that it’s part of the name of a hotel, and not some sort of indicator of scandal.
Please see yourself out
Freeze! Vegan police!
Chicken's not vegan?
You're hereby invited to /c/vegan, as you appear to be a Northern Hemisphere vegan.
Found an autocorrect vegan!
I mean "Straight edgers" is on the same level already
The Germans are probably upset with this comparison
What for a nonsense. Do these other countries not sort their waste or what? Do they not know about efficiency? Next thing you're going to tell me they don't sort their white, green and brown glass separately.
"AI vegans"
ffs, just publish an article with a single clownemoji for the same effect.
The big corporations desperately want AI to be popular because they've thrown literally insane amounts of money at it and still don't know how to monetize it.
There's going to be a huge push to make it seem like everyone loves it and it's weird not to use it constantly
It's going to go horribly and come off like that "fellow kids" meme, exactly like this headline
I'm already seeing a surge of AI simp trolls on Lemmy in the last few days.
Ironically enough they're the same trolls as the vegan drama.
They don't care about the topic, they just want to troll and they've been up/device banned from all the major social media, so they'll always be here
MBA dweebs running VC firms wanna desperately replace people with AI for short term profits.
This is it.
A good example were those Apple AI ads. So cringe. Google's ads aren't much better but at least Gemini works.
They do know how to monetize it. API access generated $1Billion in 2023. There's also huge R&D potential in fields like genetic research and medicine.
Profitability is another question though. Likely we're waiting for advances in cold fusion or late stage renewable development for energy costs to go down enough.
And all that $1B revenue cost them was a $5B loss! https://www.wheresyoured.at/howmuchmoney/
Yes my second paragraph alleged as much. Not that you read that far of course.
Ironically he could have asked AI to summarize it.
Thank you.
As much as I hate AI... I think I hate the people who hate AI more lol
AI having to wait on cold fusion for profitability is one of the funnier concepts I've heard today, thank you.
It's being used to research fusion too
I know, I regularly sleep with one of the researchers involved with several similar pojects (aren't I cool). Fascinating stuff though! Very much not comparable to commercial LLMs, though.
People pay for the "premium" because they believe the makers who said it can increase their profitability and make them money.
My employer keeps trying to shove it down our throats too.
They're desperate to find anyway to make it reduce work, be cause they've already paid for it under the assumption it would let them cut staffing
Now they're finding out they got swindled, do you think they'll re-up on AI?
The AI companies offloaded how to monetize it to consumers and scared them into being left behind unless they discovered how to use it.
It's a short term bubble.
AI in this form has been used for like 15 years, to generate trillions of dollars worth of value. I think you're just talking specifically about ChatGPT and consumer-facing LLMs.
Suuuuuuuuuuure it has....
He's probablly talking about shareholder "value", AKA inflated stock prices, rather than actual value.
lol ok. I've literally done it. Please, go enlighten yourself on google.
"Enlighten yourself" you mean make your argument for you?
You do you bb. Keep believing whatever makes you feel best.
Sounds kinda like you've got nothing and you know it
It’s quite common for me to be annoyed, angry, or upset at a headline writer. Then there’s the feeling I got reading “Meet the AI vegans.”
Whole new level.
That's because the author seems to be a journalism vegan, writing vegan and self-awareness vegan.
Its so wacky out there. When I read something like this I'm sure its The Onion. And its not. Then I read a headline about US politics and its totally believable , alas its The Onion.
I refuse to believe this title is anything other than engagement-bait, personally.
Seems to me you‘re a BS vegan.
Yeah, pretty disappointing to see from the Guardian.
You'd be surprised how much more serene your headspace can become if you stop expecting anything beyond stupidity, incompetence and negligence as the default human behavior.
This is such a stupid name for this.
Abstaining from a thing does not make one a vegan. That's not how any of this works.
I'm sex vegan. Cry about it virgins
It's like how they put the word gate after something to say that it is a scandal involving the former word.
Somesort of political scandal involving road maintenance? Oh yes well that's roadgate then. Even though the Watergate scandal was in fact it scandal in the watergate hotel, rather than a scandal about water.
Awe so the article author has a vendetta against vegans got it.
But it makes people come off as extremely annoying. So that's working.
Calling them after a maligned (if harmless) group seems like a choice to paint refusing to use AI as being annoying, preachy and scorn-worthy.
They seem very determined to pressure people into using AI regardless of it's practicality, environmental impact, or anything. Fuck this shit.
There’s been recent pushes in that regard, investment in AI shit has been enormous but the financial payoff for anyone besides hardware manufacturers remains nonexistent. So investors and corporations have recently redoubled their efforts into trying to get everyone to use it in the hopes that this somehow will make them profitable.
yeah, this is 1000% deliberate manufacturing consent
"Have you ever been called an AI vegan?"
"No... Shit no! I believe saying something like that'd get your ass kicked!"
how to belittle and minimize a very serious thing: call any protesters of it a " ___ vegan"
It's not cool to use "vegan" like this.
It's like vegangate or something.
Got a good chuckle out of me tho
People just going about their business living their lives as they have for many years...
Silicon Valley: Hey fuck you. Also I came up with a dumb nickname for you.
"Newspaper which uses AI to write its articles concocts derogatory term for people who doesn't use AI"
This makes about as much sense as calling Linux users "Windows vegans".
Choosing to not use AI isn't some wacky contrarian position, it's a tame position that can easily be justified. (Don't want to use AI? Then don't.) If anything, trying to assert that constantly using AI for everything would be the new normal is the wacky position.
i wonder if they came up with such term to mock those who dont want to use ai and possibly actual vegans on the side.
And here i am not using it because I'm old and cranky.
I just don't use it because it's shit and doesn't do anything I need any better than I can do myself in the same time.
I'm choosing to abstain because it's shit. The ethical things are just a bonus. It produces inaccurate information and bland soulless images.
It doesn't produce information, it produces text. Expecting that text to contain information is a fools errand
I refuse to use it because it's shit.
We are not the same.
What bullshif us this?
A. I vegan is a nonesence title.
How about " people who don't want the world to end even faster tell corps to fuck off"
It's a lead. Because they've already made vegans mockworthy
You kind of summarized being vegan
I don't use A.I. because I've had nothing but negative interactions with A.I. Customer service bots that fail to give adequate responses, unhelpful and incorrect search result summaries, and, "art," that looks like shit hasn't made me want to sign up for ChatGPT or Gemini. For most people, this isn't a moral stance, it's just that the product isn't worth paying for. Stop framing people that don't use A.I. as luddites with an ax to grind just because tech bros spent billions on a product that isn't good yet.
It's fair to say that the environmental and ethical concerns are significant and I wouldn't look down in anyone refusing to use AI for those reasons. I don't look down on vegetarians or vegans either - I don't have to agree with someone's moral stance or choices to respect them.
But you're right, LLMs are full of crap.
LLMs definitely are full of crap. But that isn't the point of them (even if some corporations make it seem like it is)
They are supposed to be used for text generation. And you are supposed to read through everything afterwards to correct any hallucinations.
It can't work on its own, and make mistakes about 30% of the time.
But there are use cases where that isn't a problem. Use them as inspiration for creative writing prompts for example. They are crazy good at that.
Truth is definitely a bit of a blind spot for LLMs.
Wait till you see the price of a burger in another five years.
Yea, it's often really fucking cheap for the value, just like streaming services to an extent
Customer service AI sucks, I think we can all agree to this
But if you really believe that ChatGPT and Gemini is mainly for generating art, then you're completely wrong
You only notice AI-generated content when it’s bad/obvious, but you’d never notice the AI-generated content that’s so good it’s indistinguishable from something generated by a human.
I don’t know what percentage of the “good” content we see is AI-generated, but it’s probably more than 0 and will probably go up over time.
Shit take, the more AI-made media is online, the harder it is for AI developing companies to improve on previous models.
It won't be indistinguishable from media made with human effort, unless you enjoy wasting your time on cheap uninteresting manmade slop then you won't be fooled by cheap uninteresting and untrue AI-made slop.
They all use each other's data to improve. That's federated learning!
In a way, it's good because it helps have more competition
I was talking about ai training on ai output, ai requires genuine data, having a feedback loop makes models regress, see how ai makes yellow pictures because of the ghibli ai thing
Sure, that mainly applies when it's the same model training on itself. If a model trains on a different one, it might retrieve some good features from it, but the bad sides as well
AI requires genuine data, period. Go read about it instead of spewing nonsense.
If they weren’t trained on the same data, it ends up similar
Training inferior models with superior models output can lower the gap between both. It’ll not be optimal by any means and you might fuck its future learning, but it will work to an extent
The data you feed it should be good quality though
Maybe, but that doesn't change the fact that it was trained on stolen artwork and is being used to put artists out of work. I think that, and the environmental effect, are better arguments against AI than some subjective statement about whether or not it's good.
I try not to use AI at all. I am not missing out on anything.
I also try, but it is invoked on my behalf. For instance, at work if I make a pull request now multiple AI bots are summoned to give an analysis of my code changes. It's extremely verbose and annoying, and I think basically nobody reads it because all it does is just spam the comments section with way too much text.
I vehemently hate OpenAI, ChatGPT, et al. At least it's funny when it summarizes my changes as significant improvements that improve code maintainability. I guess getting glazed by the bot in a way my manager can see is helpful to my career? Though honestly he probably also doesn't read that shit. So glad all this energy is wasted for nothing.
It is sickening how much slop is created that will never even be looked at.
I hate this attitude from people who don’t even try things before saying they are not missing out. Try AI! You have to experience the head bashing, head scratching time sink, after which you do a manual search anyways. It is a marvellous wonder how bad modern "cutting edge" tech can be.
They may have come to this decision through experience.
Having used it a bit, I find it's like someone a bit stupid with a lot of time on their hands, but no knowledge, saying "I'll learn everything you need to know from Google and write you an answer", just speeded up a lot. And just as frustrating.
Just wait until you have an employer tell you that you need to write up a summary of how you used AI in your every day activities to save 25% of your day to work on other activities.
You'll use AI to write the summary and then soon discover that your employer is a tool and is paying more than double your salary to keep that AI around to do literally nothinf 98% of the time it exists.
I applaud folks like this - they make a choice and stick with it. No "I'll never use AI to generate art but I vibe code to save time" hypocrisy. No "I use it to help me with maths, but I'd never use it to steal artistic work".
Just straight up "it is an environmental hazard, it is unethical, not engaging". Should be called "AI Ethicists" rather than "AI Vegans".
Yeah, I too hate those hypcrites who complain about the massive environmental impact of AI, then drive a 10 mile round trip to buy a burger made from a cow raised on soy.
Would you happen to be a vegan who is also anti-car by any chance?
If so, I can recommend fuckcars on ml as they share your viewpoint.
No I'm a meat eater who is anti-car! I'm more getting at how people have latched on to the energy use of AI models without realising the huge energy usage that goes into their daily lives.
are the two comparable? genuinely asking because i suspect AI usage is an order of magnitude or so more...
You're right that there's orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that's far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.
Definitely a good point to raise; thanks for doing so!
Here's a fun one - where do you stand on those forced to commute dur to housing prices near inner city work (e.g. I live in near poverty paying a mortgage for a small place near where I work due to poor public transport so I can walk to work - how does this figure into the anti-car vision? Is it an employer issue, a government issue, a personal sacrifice, or something else entirely?)
Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.
Good to know, I'll go ask one if the profs in our school of built environment for more info. See if they can offer more insight there.
If you're interested in this topic, I simply must plug the Adam Something YT channel :) He makes funny but also serious videos about urban and transport planning, and whatever new "trains but worse" transport idea techbros came up with this month.
Starting it with "AI" is already misleading. Whatever the noun is should be preceded by "Anti-AI."
I dunno, the use of AI Ethicist fits as they're not against the concept of generative AI as a whole, they're against unethical generative AI (in terms of stolen training data and environmental harm).
If the world transitioned to a post-IP (intellectual property) society (as we need to), with AI eating less power, then AI Ethicists are unlikely to object.
Fair!
Im also a gun vegan, a car vegan, a facebook vegan, an exercise vegan (unfortunately), a windows vegan, ... just not actual vegan.
I feel like thats a bad way to use the word vegan.
Shitty click baity title
I don't use it because I have no trust in it.
Sounds like you are not eating enough small rocks a day. You should eat 1 small rock a day.
Wtf this is the weirdest thing to read while taking a shit in the morning
This was an actual response that Google's stupid Gemini LLM really gave somebody. The notion was lifted from a satirical Onion article which the LLM regurgitated as if it was an established fact.
We need to poison the models with more satire on the Internet.
Yup, satire is lost on the dumb and LLMs have no intelligence.
also because it's shit, if my memory serves me, I have successfully used AI for a productive task 1 time out of 7 attempts so far... it saved me 5 minutes
That is part of the trust thing. I spent more time fixing the word salad it spat out than it would have taken to write the document.
Yes, hand in hand...
Anecdotal of course, but every person I know who claims AI is a huge productivity booster simply trust it blindly.
I can't even get "Copilot" to return a proper answer from its own meeting transcript... just yesterday there was some confusion about an IP address we exchanged in a past meeting... I asked Copilot to check the transcript and give me the IP of the vendor's server (which I pointed by name of system and who spoke it in the meeting) and it gave me the IP of MY server, functionally the complete opposite of what I was asking but with full confidence in its answer
Don't use it for things you need trust in then.
Inspiration for creative writing prompts for example. Things that make you double check every word that has been generated or where it doesn't matter they hallucinate.
We let environmentalism become an individual issue, and that was a mistake. Can we not do this for AI? It's a society-wide problem, not something you can solve by measuring your own personal AI footprint.
Stupid-ass title.
Stupid ass-title
No, it isn't, it's fucking stupid. The author was kind enough to link the source of that shitty idea, and the AI/vegan parallels are, per said article: ethical, environmental and wellness concerns.
Gee wiz, I sure never saw people with those 3 concerns in regards to anything other than veganism!!!
/s
ITT: people really upset at being called 'vegan' for some reason.
It's pretty clear that the author doesn't intend it as a compliment.
That sounds like a 'them' problem. Veganism is based.
Nothing wrong with being a Luddite
It was always about worker's rights anyways:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
It was about making sure that as mechanization resulted in a lower need for labor, that workers compensation remained steady, and they worked less hours.
People hating luddites is just the result of centuries old propaganda from the wealthy
There literally is. It's a mentality that prevents vaccine adoption rates and such. That said, being slow to adopt a technology like Boomers to the Internet is okay. Not adopting a technology because it has no inherent value and is being foisted on us by the ruling class is solid bro behavior.
Tell me you don't know who the Luddites were without telling me you don't know who the Luddites were.
Oh I didn't realize that everyone uses the term literally. I thought it had expanded to mean a general lack of adoption of change. My bad I guess.
The luddites were skilled labor rioting against capital using machines to replace them with unskilled low wage labor
So I'm not the only one who refuses to touch it?
Around me and everywhere it's getting insane that it feels like there's literally no one who hasn't used it or use regularly for all kinds of shit.
Search sucks and the AI is faster for tech questions. Try searching a Linux cli question or obscure error. Lots of stuff from over a decade ago that are no longer relevant. And you have to wade through so much to find the right one. Or type in AI wait a minute and get the answer.
Uhhh, type in AI, wait a minute and get an answer. How are you checking it?
rm - f /isn't the only filesystem footgun.I'm finding AI to be right roughly only 60% of the time, and it's as bad and hallucinatory about shell scripts as it is about everything else.
It will happily admit its mistakes and give you another answer when you call it out, but it's no more likely to be right that time.
I've had them give me the exact same answer a second time. They politely apologized first, of course, and they were just as confident that it was correct as the first time.
You check it by following the link to the webpage where it found your answer and reading that.
AI as a search engine is good, but never blatantly trust any search result they come up with. It is however incredible at wading through the slop that is SEO.
Can you give an example?
We don't need to invent new terms, like 'AI Vegan', when we have a perfectly good term already: Butlerian Jihadist.
'AI vegan'....
Where I come from, saying something that stupid will get you killed.
"refuse" lol as if there were a general requirement to use this shit
If anyone says the words "AI Vegan" to my face, I'm throwing shit.
Make sure to wash your hands after.
Or use a sling for higher velocity
Aigen or Aibstenant something for a term. Vegan is not right.
"AI vegans"? I knew guardian was already bought by tech bros, but wtf is that phrasing lmao I dont use AI either, simply because it is wrong more often than not and I am still capable of googling myself, but being cautious equals to being vegan in tech bro eyes?
Come on Guardian... why frame it like that? Folks using AI should be called out as strange.
I just don’t have a use for it. I already am generative AI.
The better term would be "LLM gobbling fuckheads" for those who use that stuff and believe it has anything to do with "AI"
Reading this thread, I wonder if the term is intended to divide a largely environmentalist opposition.
Makes "nocoiner" seem tame by comparison.
There it is. The stupidest headline I've read all week.
I'd rather be called a Luddite than ai vegan
luddaite?
This deserves more votes
The irony of environmental activists using the word "veganism" while not being vegan 😒 (being vegan is one of the most significant reduction to greenhouse emissions that is within your personal choice)
Eh. Factory farming is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, particularly through methane released by large livestock herds.
But the industry is so saturated with subsidies and shielded from liabilities and exempted from taxes and so comically wasteful in its surplus production that there hasn't been any material benefit to veganism as a social movement. You can take a moral position (and you should, eating meat is awful for a variety of reasons). But there's no actual correlation between an increase in vegan eating habits and a decrease in agricultural emissions. All we ever get is more meat shipped abroad or thrown in the trash.
The real curb to agricultural production has been raw materials constraints - limits on arable land, potable water, and slaughterhouse workers - that have (directly or indirectly) emerged from a changed climate. Outside these limits, all we've really achieved is "Grapes of Wrath" style surplus destruction to keep retail prices up.
If a factory farm can produce another dead cow, it does, even if it can't reliably bring the carcass to market. The profit margins are set so artificially high that they'd be fools not to do so. Only herd die-offs resulting from heat waves, water shortages, and a lack of below-market migrant labor seem to dissuade them from trying to expand.
20 years ago you could have said "Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it's absolutely futile."
Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.
I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won't have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.
Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.
The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That's true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.
there is no causal link between any of those events, and increased demand decrease availability.
I don't really believe what economists claim, v but you don't even seem to know what they say in the first place
In the short term. Over the mid and long terms, highly profitable demand can induce supply in a free market system.
Solar and Wind electricity are both great cases in point. Once they became more cost-efficient to build and operate than coal plants, the demand for coal plummeted while the demand for new green installations surged.
I'm inclined to follow the data, at least at first glance. We're entering a CO^2^ production peak, in large part thanks to the cost-spread between installing/operating new fossil fuel plants and their green peers.
There are other factors at play. I can't get the mysterious explosion of the Nordstream II pipeline out of my head and what the consequences of climate change are of that. Then there's the closing of the Suez trade and the collapse in development of Balkan Crude. But the incredibly cheap alternatives - largely pioneered and industrially propagated by the world's largest socialist state - can't be ignored as having a huge influence on consumption habits.
Can animal-free meat follow the same path? Idk, maybe. But given the way the US developers and investors had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a modern green grid, I suspect we'll see meat alternatives take off abroad long before they become truly popular in the US.
So just the "Appeal to futility" logical fallacy? I'm convinced!
Every change starts somewhere. Yes, 0.001% of the population can be vegan and it most likely won't save a single slaughterhouse animal. But 1%? That's already significant enough to make at least some change, and 10%? That's already setting market trends and modifying industries, 50%?
You get my point. You joining the current vegan population is significant! The vegan population is estimated to be 9% in india and mexico, 5% in Israel, 2% in the UK, 1.5% in the US, and estimated to be a total of 1%-3% of the global population. This is a movement that has probably saved more lives and more gas emissions than many others have.
At some point, you have to recognize factory farming as a public policy decision rather than a retail choice. And the response has to be organized and political, not individualistic and consumerist.
It's significant for popular politics, sure. But a vegan community that satisfies itself with attaching blinders when they pass through the Bad Foods aisle at the grocery store is going to end up in the same place as the climate activist who only owns a bike.
The difference between the US and India is that if you go around trying to butcher cows in particularly devote areas of India, you're subject to serious political reprisals. In the US, it's practically a sacrament to eat burger.
It is both, and both affect each other. False dichotomy?
Strawmaning what being a vegan is. It is far from just turning a blind eye.
You know that they eat plenty of other animals right? If you go there, meat and animal products are a very big part of the local food.
I can't take these arguments seriously.
It's induced demand. Increased capacity invited consumption.
Per capita they're heavily constrained. They have three times the population and one third the land area. They can't slaughter animals to match US consumption patterns even if they try.
That's incentivized a culture of veganism as normal and virtuous, as a consequence. And it has allowed the population to expand to 1.3B without experiencing rates of malnutrition common to more rural countries (Kenya, Argentina, and Haiti, for instance) where enormous stretches of land have been dedicated to feedstock.
Right. This isn't an argument against veganism; it's an argument for vegans getting organized.
thank you. no matter how many times I point out the inefficacy of consumer choices or how I word it, I end up with bad faith and fact-avoidant responses like you got.
Veganism is a philosophy, not a boycott.
so you recognize that this:
it's not actually a good argument for veganism?
They aren't using the word. Other people are using it and applying it to them.
Incorrect, get the guillotine
No an Image generation is not ten times the impact pf a Google search, a ChatGPT query is. Image generation is probably a lot more.
What a terrible choice of words. They’re immediately assigning political placement and party to the idea of avoiding AI use instead of appealing to all of humanity on this topic.
Plus, it’s a silly metaphor.
Which is the vegan party?
I want to avoid it but with google making sure that search results get worse and worse I'm in a bit of a pickle. Other search engines still feel lile they're a bit behind though
Journalists constantly trying to be the origin of a term.
It's honestly not even the worst way I've even seen it used.
I used to watch some League of Legends (I know, I know) streams from time to time, and there's a meta where your mid laner, who is supposed to be a strong carry, gives up all their farm to the roaming jungler roll so they become the super-carry.
In any case this somehow got termed to be the "vegan mid" strategy. Ugh. Veganism is when you starve, apparently.
Its neither for me, i just dont like getting wrong information and AI is giving tons of it.
Also its not intelligent it just fucking sounds so
So normal decent human beings
I’ll just stick with calling myself “old man yelling at clouds” for the double meaning and so I’m not a vegan of any kind, thanks.
I only eat non-sentient AIs too.
"the dark souls of" vibes
I'm a soulslike vegan.
How about we don't call that being an AI vegan and just call it a moral objection. That's fucking ridiculous, that's a term designed to make not using AI for that reason look bad and preachy.
AI is the new crypto. It will appear to die off but the aspects that work will be integrated into everything.
What aspects of crypto have been integrated into everything?
I think it's scam. Before crypto scam was in couple of places but now it's everywhere.
The US government.
techbros graced everyone else with disruptive, innovative methods of money laundering
Wishful thinking. Crypto never got anywhere anyway. I am already seeing AI slop on billboards and all.
Crypto went as far as a YouTube ad for me. I am seeing everyday examples of AI use and generated slop.
It's at all time highs
Yeah, maybe the charts, not the public influence
I am a AI Freedom Fighter.
I prefer Neo-Luddite. There's a few aspects of modern tech I eschew - AI/LLM bring one of them.
Why neo?
Why not?
(It's not really something I've ever thought about since I started using the term. It kinda just is.)
AI isn't the meat, jack. It's slop.
I can only imagine someone came up with AI vegan after they decided to eat steak that evening while thinking they're the ones who are pressed by vegans...
HA!
I feel like I should be annoyed at the headline, but honestly it's clever. Veganism isn't just a diet, but an ethical framework on minimizing harm so this fits all three aspects in the articles.
I support artists who had their work stolen as part of dataset, it's largely the same reason I don't eat animals, it's all about consent. Being harmed without consent is always wrong.
Likewise the environmental footprint of meat and AI are massive and unnecessary. The carbon footprint between meat and plant protein is massive, just like the difference between building more data centers and supporting existing artists.
AI is bad for your mental health, we don't really have complete research on what exactly AI does to our brains but I've seen enough people thinking they "unlocked sentience", became "digital gods" and started AI "relationships" to steer clear for my own protection. Not dissimilar to the studies that show a plant based diet is better for your heart and immune system. I'd still be eating plants even if it were bad for my health, I care more about the ethical side, but existing research very much shows it as a net positive.
Neat concept.
People who care*
Missed opportunity to coin the term “Aitheist” Fools.
Well shit, I didn't know they had a name for us. That's cool.
I can't say I'm a (normal) vegan, but I'm definitely an AI vegan. I was turned off by the ethical considerations, and the few "bites" I have tried leave a bad taste in my mouth. I avoid using it because much of the training data was (and is) stolen, the power costs are far too high compared to the utility, and it's basically worthless to me, having a screwed up response to nearly every prompt I tried.
Exactly the same as me.
Love me a good steak, never even tried AI.
I've stood by while my colleagues have used it. I ask them a question they might know, just to check before I start spending time reading documentation. They'll go "just ask Bing!" (Company endorsed AI.)
They'll keep prompting and prompting and discussing the results, meanwhile I just go directly to the docs and find the information right there written on the screen.
I won't subject myself to the dumbification. I don't even use copilot to auto-complete as much as a for loop. I know how it's written, damnit.
Now we wait for article “meet genocide vegans: people who are against Israel’s genocide against Palestinians based on ethical reasons”
While billionaires keep using their private jets.
AI vegan is not a thing and shall never be.
The correct term is Technophile. Anyone obsessed with tech would never hand it off to a third party to do when they can go through the joy of learning themselves.
I've never used AI, even when wanting to give it a try. There was either a queue or a fee, or must click-wrap agree to terms and conditions for free two months and I wasn't going to do those.
I never did an NFT either.
Eh, you can download and run them locally now, and they don't even phone home.
The only AI I'd ever want is something like a VI from Mass Effect. Runs locally and harvests absolutely zero data.
"AI vegans" media trying to put an enemy up again. Smh
There has to be a catchier name than AI vegans...
I hate the term AI vegan. I prefer mistechnitinoimosyne. More classy.
so.... you're refusing AI, but you are using AI? isnt the point of the story that people are not using because ethics? its not a discussion on how good they are, which is somewhat irrelevant.
Can we please stop coming up with words that describe that we do not do a thing like it is not normal? Just like having to call yourself an atheist because you do not believe. You should call yourself a theist if you believe, because you actively do it. Call yourself what you are, do, or see fit, not what you are not.
I hate this timeline
propaganda like this is so fucking sad
colonizers don't have anything to value in their culture and they don't have a future so they want to rip on people who aren't buying their garbage
Hi. That's me.
If at any point I'm required to use it for a job I'll learn. Till then I can do my own googling, reading, math, etc.
I just don't need it. And the push to put it in literally everything makes me not want it at all. Corps don't do good things. Always seeking a rent. Always digging for a profit. And always at our expense.
Let's not call it that
I installed it locally on my computer to help me with resolving some coding issues if I’m stuck, write cover letters for jobs, and help me organize ppt decks. No information is shared, I’m only using local computing resources, and I’m not propping up a failing business model.
What model and UI are you using?
Qwen 2.5 coder. Running on LLM studio.
People who use the term "vegan" for somebody they consider extremist, ascetic, or annoying are really telling on themselves.
Most vegan leathers are made from compostable materials, because (surprise, surprise!) many vegans are also environmentalists.
ha so I'm a double vegan
today I was trying to find how to manipulate a trunk on an aruba switch and JFK the internet search results were fucking shit on a platter! I tried to reword it in ways that might give me a better result but it never happened. None of the commands the AI suggested would have worked.
I FUCKING HATE AI results in the web searching tools
HEre's a tip, paste the chapter index from the manual in it, ask "which chapter are relevant to " $question Then paste the chapter it asks, then formulate your question The AI search result though, useless because they're contextless, it's like a car without a steering wheel.
Guys it's fine, you're overreacting. I only use local instances of AI and I always ask it for consent before using it to deepfake porn of my favorite celebrities in their debut roles. You vegans are overreacting and taking it too far. Humanity has been using AI for like 6 months now and our bodies aren't biologically ready to go back to writing our own homework. You really need to check your privilege; we can't all afford fancy tools like GIMP to make our own art.
Wow, so just like humans eating animal products throughout our early existence as beings, AI is the default position? What kind of bullsh*t is this? Just because billionaires are forcing these llms down our throats?
The propaganda is unreal.
I'm an LLM freegan, I guess. But I'm cutting back too, the usefulness peaked.
If they had come up with something original like that, it would have been better. But creating constructive neologisms takes work, I guess.
Try if one of the following strikes your fancy
AIniks
NoBots
Cogclean
Algorejects
Synthephobes
I quite like synthephobes !
Synthless
Cogstainers
Analogians
I'm not sure if AInik works, wouldn't that mean they are a fan of AI? Also unsure of the synth- options as a friend of synthesizer musicians, but as a non musician maybe I should use that myself 🤔 I can't interpret analogian without help...
But the others sound pretty great! Cogstainers is awesome because it can be reworked into different word types. Verbs, adjectives. Incredible.
AIniks, it's something like refusenik, chainik and beatnikm yeah I'm not sure if it's anti, or pro or something else, it's also hard to say
I think analogian just sounds like vegan and it's for people who prefer analog meatbased wetware.
Synth- as in synthetic, against synthetic fakeness
A cogstaining synthless analogianSynthfree ?
Makes more sense now, I only picked up one the first 2/3 and thought of other things 😅
Why does this use of the "vegan" word sound so condescending?
That's really stupid.
Thats 99% lemmy users
I have local self hosted AI that runs in my solar system. I don’t use AI because it ROTS your brain. We are not the same.
Yo
I refuse ever touching an AI-driven app or feature, having seen too much slop.
I'd rather call myself a rejectionist than something called fancy.
I've interacted with AI. Once.
My employer enabled it on my laptop. It introduced itself to me and asked how it could be helpful. I asked it how to disable it. It responded HAL style.
Never reached out to it again.
TIL I'm a lot of thing vegan... also, not a vegan.
Count me in
I think some AI use is clearly worth the costs (like helping with scientific research or accessibility), some clearly isn't (like generating spam), and much falls in a gray area where reasonable people can disagree. So do I think it's ethical to use me? In many cases, yes - but I understand why thoughtful people might conclude otherwise, and I don't think they're wrong to avoid AI if they've weighed the considerations and found the costs too high.
I played around on an AI image generating website for a while. Eventually got bored with it.
On my list of "dont's", inspired by Luke Smith, I do not use AI.
Not AI vegans. More like LLM deniers. They know how to use it, they know what it does, they know how to trick it, they know how to abuse it.
Thought it was gonna be about Rationalists.
Someone should launch a Project Poison which offers information to websites to protect themselves from scrapers and to poison and devalue AIs and companies that ignore their restrictions. I'm sure there are plenty of ways it could be done - nonsense about niche subjects, libelous facts about celebrities and people with money, false attribution for quotes & art, images captioned with things they do not contain, offensive slurs. Just feed AIs with sufficient trash and it will output trash.
Dafuq Do they forgot to teach AI how to read two column text AGAIN?!
I find it hilarious that most people in this thread are complaining about being called a "something vegan", like I can understand not being happy with the current AI trend, but it seems like the word "vegan" is what makes everyone ticks, it's NOT an insult, the "normal" vegan are very happy to be called like that, because what it refers too is something that they agree and identify with. If you agree and identify yourself with what those journalist are calling "AI vegans", the name doesn't matter, embrace it, call yourself that to easily express what you believe about AI.
Vegan is not an insult, it is a compliment.
I selective use AI for low risk applications.
I can use it to reskin a picture to a water painting or whatever for the purpose of using it as an icon in a smart home app or similar.
i also use it to clean audio for memes with friends.
At the moment its not reliable to solve actual problems. I simply don't use to for those purposes because it sucks.
If we go this route, there is also from for AI Crossfitters
stupid headline from the guardian but that's just expected.
Guess i'm vegan now
Did anyone let them know that reproduction harms the environment?
Can you pick them out if crowd by their furled brows?
Just hold up a picture, they'll show up to tell you why they think it's generated
Stupid title, but in all honesty, now would be the time to create a new religion where there are restrictions on hyper modern things like AI, robotics, etc.
We must not create a machine to counterfeit human thinking. That could be the most important phrase in the entire thing.
Almost like there might already be a text or novels out there that warn on the dangers of mankind's hubris.
That's a weird way to spell luddite
Corporate simp
Y'know, as long as we're childishly name-calling
You're not wrong. I am skeptical of AI, and I worry if that makes me a Luddite. I think refusing to use it for anything probably does qualify one as a Luddite. Using it for limited purpose with oversight is the correct approach.
I don't. If it makes me a Luddite, I'm a Luddite.
What doesn't change is that this is a train heading toward a derailment at highspeed while on fire.
Just today I had to walk through why GitHub copilot should not be used for security purposes. I explicitly told the engineer that a constructed url would be detected as a potential XSS vector by our vulnerability scans. They implemented several things, most of which did nothing. Finally, I grabbed the documentation on how to fix it, gave them the line number, gave them the function, and let them build and test it. It ran through the scans and of course it passed.
I get the desire from leadership. I really do. But I'm more interested in our products not costing us more, especially when the LLMs are going to fail the economy on a wide scale.
I think it depends on the reason you do not use it. The Luddites were primarily frustrated over automation displacing their high-skill job with low-skilled ones that produced worse quality goods. It's a 2 for 1: we are losing the jobs we need to survive, but also we lose the personal touch from the work of artisans + lose appreciation for their talent.
I am not carte blanche against AI as a concept, but it really does seem like a technology that makes interactions worse quality, more depersonalized, and on top of that it has a horrible externalized environmental cost which benefits nobody in the long run.
Addendum: I believe technology has the power to be liberating when it provides for all of us, and oppressive when it concentrates wealth+power into the hands of moguls and tyrants.
I sense jealousy in this one.
Hear me out: what i, this is a plot to boost vegan numbers. Given latest stats huge portion of population does not use or see any use in AI - i.e. can be claimed AI vegans so in aggregation reports those could be viewed as a subset of Vegans... resulting in undeniable truth that 90%+ of population are vegan now
This is someone more obnoxious than ai tech bros
I think this IS an AI tech bro. Or at least an AI tech bro dick-rider.
Ai vegans are people who only use ai generated porn.
I can not wait, until the time of the perpetually seeking attention moron ends. Its always something with these fucking people. If you dont wanna use AI, just dont use it. Theres no fucking gun to your head. And we dont need to know youre not using, much less, find out youve got a dumb fucking name for yourselves.
"Theres no fucking gun to your head." Bosses: 🦜🤖 🟰💹, 👨💼🔫🤓
Not just bosses. Tech companies have leveraged a good portion of the world's economy on AI, and are shoveling money directly into the ovens to shove it down our throats.
No one asked for any of this. Not a goddamn soul asked for AI order takers at McDonald's. Because it's not about choice. The choice to abstain is going to get more and more painful to make as time goes on. By design.
If it gets you talking about it, even in the context of telling them to shut the fuck up, it's working :)
LOL gen z kids are fucking hysterical. AI will save the world, it has already started.