How do I explain my reluctance to use generative AI in good faith?
I want to let people know why I'm strictly against using AI in everything I do without sounding like an 'AI vegan', especially in front of those who are genuinely ready to listen and follow the same.
Any sources I try to find to cite regarding my viewpoint are either mild enough to be considered AI generated themselves or filled with extremist views of the author. I want to explain the situation in an objective manner that is simple to understand and also alarming enough for them to take action.
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If it's real life, just talk to them.
If it's online, especially here on lemmy, there's a lot of AI brain rotted people who are just going to copy/paste your comments into a chatbot and you're wasting time.
They also tend to follow you around.
They've lost so much of their brains to AI, that even valid criticism of AI feel like personal insults to them.
That's the issue. I do wish to warn me or even just inform them of what using AI recklessly could lead to.
Why care?
You're wanting to go out and argue with people and try to use logic when that part of their brain has literally atrophied.
It's not going to accomplish anything, and likely just drive them deeper into AI.
Plenty of people that need help actually want it, put your energy towards that if you want to help people.
To give some fucks, probably.
The post is aimed at me facing situations where I state among people I know that I don't use AI, followed by them asking why not. Instead of driving them out by stating "Just because" or get into jargons that are completely unbeknownst to them, I wish to properly inform them why I have made this decision and why they should too.
I am also able to identify people to whom there's no point discussing this. I'm not asking to convince them too.
You're asking how to verbalize why you don't like AI, but you won't say why you don't like AI...
Let's see if this helps, imagine someone asks you:
How the absolute fuck would you know how to explain it when you don't know why they don't like pizza?
You do have a point. I think I may be overthinking this after all. I'll just try to talk with them about this upfront.
More likely they feel insulted by people saying how "brain-rotted" they are.
What would the inoffensive way of phrasing it be?
Genuinely every single pro-AI person I’ve spoken with both irl and online has been clearly struggling cognitively. It’s like 10x worse than the effects of basic social media addiction. People also appear to actively change for the worse if they get conned into adopting it. Brain rot is apparently a symptom of AI use as literally as tooth rot is a symptom of smoking.
Speaking of smoking and vaping, on top of being bad for you objectively, it’s lame and gross. Now that that narrative is firmly established we have actually started seeing youth nicotine use decline rapidly again, just like it was before vaping became a thing
...and then you proceed to spend the next two paragraphs continuing to rant about how mentally deficient you think AI users are.
Not that, for starters.
The lung capacity of smokers is deficient, yes? Is the mere fact offensive? Should we just not talk about how someone struggling to breathe as they walk up stairs is the direct result of their smoking?
This is literally begging the question.
I don’t think it is, nor do I think name dropping random fallacies without engaging with the topic makes for particularly good conversation. If you have issues with OP’s phrasing it would benefit all of us moving forward if we found a better way to talk about it, yes?
It's not a random fallacy, it's the one you're engaging in. Look it up. Your analogy presupposes an answer to the question that is actually at hand. It's the classic "have you stopped beating your wife" situation.
I paste people's AI questions into a chatbot for the humor of it.
Yup, that's dbzer0
Edit: shit, they followed me here
Maybe trying to be objective is the wrong choice here? After all, it might sound preachy to those who are ignorant to the dangers of AI. Instead, it could be better to stay subjective in hopes to trigger self-reflection.
Here are some arguments I would use for my own personal 'defense':
This is a brilliant idea! I was wondering whether talking subjectively would be detrimental to my point, but having it explained this way is so much better. I think the key point here is to not berate the other person for using AI in between this explanation.
It goes a bit further than just not berating. People often get defensive when you criticise something they like, which makes it harder to argue due to the other side suddenly treating the discussion as a fight. However by saying "it's not for me" in a rather roundabout way you shift the focus away from "is it good/bad" and more about whether the other can empathise with your reasoning, and in turn reflect your view onto themselves and maybe realize that they didn't notice something about their usage and feelings about AI that you already did.
Am I reading it wrong, or are you saying that people who have a different point of view are ignorant?
Ah, sorry, I didn't mean ignorant in a general way, but to the critiques on AI/dangers of AI OP referred to in their post. I'll edit my comment.
That makes sense, thanks for clarification.
A discussion in good faith means treating the person you are speaking to with respect. It means not having ulterior motives. If you are having the discussion with the explicit purpose of changing their minds or, in your words, "alarming them to take action" then that is by default a bad faith discussion.
If you want to discuss with a pro-AI person in good faith, you HAVE to be open to changing your own mind. That is the whole point of a good faith discussion - but rather, you already believe you are correct, and are wanting to enter these discussions with objective ammunition to defeat somebody.
How do you actually discuss in good faith? You ask for their opinions and are open to them, then you share your own in a respectful manner. You aren't trying to 'win' you are just trying to understand and in turn, help others to understand your own POV.
Once you realize you can change your opinion about something after you learn about it, it's like a super power. So many people only have the goal of proving themselves right or safeguarding their ego.
It's okay to admit a mistake. It's normal to be wrong about things.
The problem is it's incredible rare to find others that are willing to change their minds in return, so every discussion either involves you changing your mind, or the other person getting agitated.
Chiming in here:
Most of the arguments against ai - the most common ones being plagiarism, the ecological impact - are not things people making the arguments give a flying fuck about in any other area.
Having issues with the material the model is trained on isn't an issue with ai - it's an issue with unethical training practices, copyright law, capitalism. These are all valid complaints, by the way, but they have nothing to do with the underlying technology. Merely with the way it's been developed.
For the ecological side of things, sure, ai uses a lot of power. Lots of data enters. So does the internet. Do you use that? So does the stock market. Do you use that? So do cars. Do you drive?
I've never heard anyone say "we need less data centers" until ai came along. What, all the other data centers are totally fine but the ones being used for ai are evil? If you have an issue with the drastically increased power consumption for ai you should be able to argue a stance that is inclusive of all data centers - assuming it's something you give a fuck about. Which you don't.
If a model, once trained, is being used entirely locally on someone's personal pc - do you have an issue with the ecological footprint of that? The power has been used. The model is trained.
It's absolutely valid to have an issue with the increased power consumption used to train ai models and everything else but these are all issues with HOW and not the ontological arguments against the tech that people think they are.
It doesn't make any of these criticisms invalid, but if you refuse to understand the nuance at work then you aren't arguing in good faith.
If you enslave children to build a house then the issue isn't that youre building a house, and it doesn't mean houses are evil, the issue is that YOURE ENSLAVING CHILDREN.
Like any complicated topic there's nuance to it and anyone that refuses to engage with that and instead relies on dogmatic thinking isn't being intellectually honest.
AI data centers take up substantially more power than regular ones. Nobody was talking about spinning up nuclear reactors or buying out the next several years of turbine manufacturing for non-AI datacenters. Hell, Microsoft gave money to a fusion startup to build a reactor, they've already broken ground, but it's far from proven that they can actually make net power with fusion. They actually think they can supply power by 2028. This is delusion driven by an impossible goal of reaching AGI with current models.
Your whole post is missing out on the difference in scale involved. GPU power consumption isn't comparable to standard web servers at all.
To be fair if we accidentally stumble upon fusion while foolishly pursuing AGI, that'd be a great thing
I really don’t think they do take up a lot more power but more how quickly they’re being built. At least in the US, power usage has been effectively flat, with datacenters and other growing power needs balanced with increasing efficiency….. but a lot of people want a lot of new datacenters at once
And the growth of power usage for ai data centers isn’t really all that high except that we’re structured for zero power growth. This really seems like the other side of the same issue we’ve been having with renewables: no infrastructure investment. We’ve been building effectively zero transmission lines for a couple decades. That equally means we have trouble bringing renewables online and we have trouble powering a data center that pops up. There’s every chance we already have plenty of power for the new datacenters but can’t get it there
You can think that, but you'd be wrong. A ChatGPT search uses 10x the power of a regular Google search.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about#%3A%7E%3Atext=A+request+made+through+ChatGPT%2C+an+AI-based%2CGoogle+Search%2C+reported+the+International+Energy+Agency.
Google has quietly removed their net-zero pledge from their website:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/google-quietly-removes-net-zero-carbon-goal-from-website-amid-rapid-power-hungry-ai-data-center-buildout-industry-first-sustainability-pledge-moved-to-background-amidst-ai-energy-crisis
This stuff isn't being built with renewables.
There are many, many differences between AI data centers and ones that don't have to run $500k GPU clusters. They require a lot less power, a lot less space, and a lot less cooling.
Also you're implying here that your debate opponents are being intellectually dishonest while using the same weasely arguments that people that argue in bad faith constantly employ.
The fact that a gou data center uses more power than one that does not does not matter at all.
You're completely missing the point.
The sum total of power usage for all non ai data centers is an ecological issue whether ai data centers use more, the same, or less power.
All data centers have an ecological footprint, all use shitloads of power, and it doesn't matter if one kind is worse than any other kind.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out in my comment.
If I take a shit in a canoe that's a problem. Not an existential one but a problem. If I dump another ten pounds of shit in the canoe it doesn't mean the first pound of shit goes away.
If I dump two pounds of shit in the canoe then the first pound of shit is still in the canoe. The first pound of shit doesn't stop being an issue because now there are two more.
You can have an issue with shit in the canoe on principle, which is fine. Then it's all problematic.
But if you're fine with having one pound of shit in the canoe, and find with three, but not okay with eleven, then the issue isn't shit in the canoe, it's the amount of shit in the canoe. They're distinct issues.
But it's NOT intellectually honest to be okay with having one pound of shit in the canoe and not being okay with the other two. You can't point at the two pounds of shit and say: this abominable! While ignoring the other pound of shit. Because it's all shit.
Sure, because that's a terrible analogy.
Gen AI data centers don't just require more power and space, they require so much more power and space that they are driving up energy costs in the surrounding area and the data centers are becoming near impossible to build.
People didn't randomly become "anti-data center". Many of them are watching their energy bills go up. I'm watching as they talk about building new coal plants to power "gigawatt" data centers.
And it's all so you can have more fucking chat bots.
When a family in the global south uses coal to cook their food, they release CO2. When a billionaire flies around the continent on a private jet, they also release CO2.
Do you consider the two to be equivalent in need or output?
If you want to explain your reasons 'in good faith' you should be honest, and not adopt other people's reasons to argue the position you've already assumed.
It's possible their intent is to solicit more concise, well-packaged versions of their existing position(s) that others have spent time honing.
Ah yes. AI is just dressed up exploitation and thievery of other people's ideas; a mashed up and uncreative slop. By the way, can I just aggregate prepackaged ideas about it from strangers to make my own argument? I don't want to spend time crafting or refining it myself.
Pretty wild position of you ask me.
The main difference is that OP would be asking for this, whereas AI just took it without permission. Humanity has always had wiser folks who can package ideas, and some folks who agree with the message but don't have the same skill to craft their own version. Division of labor has value :)
Now hang on a minute lol. AI is just stolen garbage, but obviously we expect the "wiser folks" here in the agora of lemmy are going to give reasonable / acceptable answers? This is like the mcdonalds of philosophy here.
So I see here two conjectures:
1q.) So let's say I take my 2 GPU workhorse PC and train basic language (not obviously line of reasoning, or guardrails, or other languages or anything like that) from a library of articles and professional documents I own or control. Then, by way of something like resource augmented generation (or similer idc) it gives me a well articulated argument of why AI is bad, is that reasonable? I would think this is a BETTER perspective than 2q below.
2q.) In what way is mining the totally anonymous, unverifiable posts of literally any person with a keyboard on lemmy MORE valuable than a reasonable sounding argument from any generative AI or just pressing the middle button on your phone over and over? This sounds totally stupid. "Division of labor" has probably made all of us dumber. I (coincidentally) build language models as part of my job, somewhere in this thread is an AI expert who has read 1 newspaper article and is "training" on the information from other lemmy comments.
At the same time we say "Holy shit AI bad, AI hallucinate, AI lies!" we are going to say it's totally cool and reasonable to shout into the internet box where rando people can say anything they want, and that's better?
I mean I do like the smug argument and the smiley face, but the premise that "Gen AI sucks, hone your argument against AI using ask-fucking-lemmy" borders on content for c/selfawarewolves. It's so ridiculous I practically expect you're just trolling the thread.
AI is bad because, in its current state, it takes up way too many resources and contributes heavily to climate change. All that and it's current output is often unreliable and/or displaces human labor.
As with the use of AI, someone asking other people for information should verify what they are seeing. Assuming OP already has their beliefs more or less set, they're potentially just looking for some more well-crafted arrangement of the ideas, and they have a preference to ask humans for that rather than AI.
Re: division of labor, likely it contributes to people having less broad and more specialized knowledge. The benefit, however, is that we don't need everyone to learn every single skill needed for self-sufficient living. I'd rather my surgeon to be a specialist in surgery, not needing to spend much of their time growing their own food, maintaining their home and clothing, and so on.
Yeah the wording on this is wrong. The closest adjacent (honest) question would be "how can I appear to be arguing in good faith when I have a predetermined position on this technology?".
EDIT:
I don't even like GenAI myself and that's how this comes off.
If you're looking for reasons: (1) sustainability / ecology, (2) market concentration, (3) intellectual theft, (4) mediocre output, (5) lack of guardrails, (6) vendor lock-in, (7) appears to drive some people insane, (8) drives down the quality of the Internet overall, (9) de-skills the people that use it, (10) produces probabilistic outputs and yet is used in applications that require deterministic outputs...I could go on for a while.
“It’s a machine made to bullshit. It sounds confident and it’s right enough of the time that it tricks people into not questioning when it is completely wrong and has just wholly made something up to appease the querent.”
I know people like this lol
I'm just honest about it… "I don't find it useful enough and do find it too harmful for the environment and society to use it"
And you then spend longer verifying the information its given you than you would have spent just looking it up to begin with.
Very simple.
It's imprecise, and for your work, you'd like to be sure the work product you're producing is top quality.
In a way aren't you asking "how can I be an AI vegan, without sounding like an AI vegan"?
It's OK to be an AI vegan if that's what you want. :)
Stop trying to make AI Vegan work. It's never going to stick. AFAIK this term is less than a week old and smuggly expecting everyone to have already assimilated it is bad enough, but it's a shit descriptor that is trading in right leaning hatred of 'woke' and vegans are just a scape goat to you.
Explain how AI haters or doubters cross over with Veganism at all as a comparison?
They're both taking a moral stance regarding their consumption despite large swathes of society considering these choices to be morally neutral or even good. I've been vegan for almost a decade and dislike AI, and while I don't think being anti-AI is quite as ostracizing as being vegan, the comparison definitely seems reasonable to me. The behaviour of rabid meat eaters and fervent AI supporters are also quite similar.
But there are other arguments against ai besides consumption of resources. The front facing LLMs are just the pitch. The police state is becoming more oppressive using AI tracking and identification. The military using AI to remote control drones and weapon systems is downright distopian. It feels like they're trying to flatten the arguments against AI into only an environmental issue, making it easier to dismiss especially among the population that doesn't give a shit about the environment.
The way the term is being used here though is to refer to vegans as preachy and annoying; it's not a pro-vegan term. It's just not a nice term to use as it ostracizes and belittles people fighting for rights.
Like veganism, abstaining from AI is arguably better for the environment.
That's not just true of those two things though. I'm looking for a tie that binds them together while excluding other terms. If it's an analogy what is the analogy?
This is the first time I've encountered the term and I understood it immediately.
Congratulations? Does that make it universal? Dude was being a prick when someone didn't know what it meant.
For me this was the first time hearing it. And it made immediate perfect sense what OP meant. A pretty good analogy!
The fuck is an AI vegan? There isn't meat and AI isn't food.
Your bed isn't really made for a king or queen.
The fuck it's not.
I get the impression his bed was made for twins.
Oh great the bots are hallucinating.
They're saying you're taking things too literally and not thinking about the potential meaning of the sentence.
There is a belief that a lot of Vegans basically preach to others and look down on people who still consume meat. Their use of AI Vegan was meant to utilize that background and apply it to AI, so they don't want to come off as someone preaching or being a snob about their issues with AI.
It seems to mean people who don't consume AI content not use AI tools.
My hypothesis is it's a term coined by pro-AI people to make AI-skeptics sound bad. Vegans are one of the most hated groups of people, so associating people who don't use AI with them is a huge win for pro-ai forces.
Side note: do-gooder derogation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation ) is one of the saddest moves you can pull. If you find yourself lashing out at someone because they're doing something good (eg: biking instead of driving, abstaining from meat) please reevaluate. Sit with your feelings if you have to.
You say "pro-AI" like there's a group of random people needing to convince others to use the tools.
The general public tried them, and they're using them pretty frequently now. Nobody is forcing people to use ChatGPT to figure out their Christmas shopping, but something like 40% of people have already or are planning on using it for that purpose this year. That's from a recent poll by Leger.
If they weren't at the very least perceived as adding value, people wouldn't be using them.
I can say with 100% certainty that there are things I have used AI for that have saved me time and money.
The Anti-AI crowd may as well be the same people that were Anti-Internet 25 years ago.
Of course people are using AI. It's the default behavior of Google, the most popular web search. It confidently spits out falsehoods. This is not an improvement.
And there are definitely people "needing to convince others to use the tools.". Microsoft and Google et al are made of people. They're running ads to get people to adopt it.
Buying stuff online and email are useful stuff in ways LLMs can only dream of. It is a technology nowhere near as good as its hype.
Furthermore , "the general public likes it" is a dubious metric for quality. People like all sorts of garbage. Heroin has its fans. I'm sure it'd have even more if it was free and highly advertised. Is that enough to prove it's good? No. Other factors such as harm and accuracy matter, too.
It’s called a euphemism. We all know that a vegan is someone who does not use animal products (e.g. meat, eggs, dairy, leather, etc). By using AI in front of the term vegan, OP intimates that they do not use AI products.
I suspect you’re smart enough to know this, but for some reason you’re being willfully obtuse.
Then again, maybe not. 🤷♂️Baseless slur made up by corporate-pushed mainstream media to normalize giving time and money to the AI companies that paid for their airtime
Ah ok. You might be new to language? There's this thing called analogy
Oh hey, language is supposed make ideas easier to transmit. The term is fucking clunky, using AI is not akin to diet.
Communicate clearer.
OP came up with the analogy. I understood quite well and caught up with it easily. Well done OP!
All current AIs are based on stolen content.
You mean commercial LLMs.
AI as a term includes machine learning systems that go back decades.
If nothing is taken from anyone and no profit is made from a model trained on publicly accessible data - can you elaborate on how that constitutes theft?
Actually - if 100% copy righted content is used to train a model, which is released for free and never monetized - is that theft?
People downloading stuff for personal use vs making money off of it are not the same at all. We don't tend to condone people selling bootleg DVDs, either.
Publicly accessible does not mean it is free of copyright. Yes, copyright law in it's current form sucks and is in dire need to get reformed, preferably close to the original duration (14+14 years). But as the law currently stands, those LLM parrots are based on illegally acquired data.
Publically accessible does not mean publically reusable. You can find a lot of classic songs on YouTube and in libraries. You can’t edit them into your Hollywood movie without paying royalties.
Showing them to an AI for them to repeat the melody with 90% similarity is not a free cheat to get around that.
This is in part why the GPL and other licenses exist. Linus didn’t just put up Linux and say “Do whatever!” He explicitly said “You MAY copy and modify this work, but it must keep this license, this ownership, and you may NOT sell the transformed work”. That is a critical part of many free licenses, to ensure people don’t abuse them.
If nothing is taken from anyone and no profit is made from a model trained on publicly accessible data - can you elaborate on how that constitutes theft?
Actually - if 100% copy righted content is used to train a model, which is released for free and never monetized - is that theft?
Cool. So you're in support of developing a model that financially compensates all of the rights holders used for its training data then?
Yes, I am. But i don't expect them to do that.
Good!
I don't either. But they probably should. And that's a reasonable position to take.
Sort this one with the girlfriend’s “would you still love me if I was a worm” philosophy. It’s so far outside of reality it’s not worth considering.
-- and are being used by rich sociopaths to replace the very people that made that content.
Thats on top of the large pile of shit.
That's perfectly fine if anyone just doesn't want to use it, but he's "strictly against" it and he's searching for reasons. Pretty irrational IMO. It doesn't surprise me, it's the general trend regarding almost any subject nowadays, and you can't blame AI for that.
I want my creations to be precisely what I intend to create. Generative Ai makes it easier to make something at the expense of building skills and seeing their results
The most reasonable explanation I’ve heard/read is that generative AI is based on stealing content from human creators. Just don’t use the word “slop” and you’ll be good.
Except that is also a subjective and emotionally-charged argument.
Is this really an intent to explain in good faith? Sounds like you're trying to manipulate their opinion and actions rather than simply explaining yourself.
If someone was to tell me that they simply don't want to use generative AI, that they prefer to do writing or drawing by hand and don't want suggestions about how to use various AI tools for it, then I just shrug and say "okay, suit yourself."
"There are emerging studies about AI induced psychosis[1], and there is a possibility to go psychotic even if one doesn't have pre-conditions to become one. I would like to be cautious with the danger, like with cigaretes or Thalidomide. You never know how it might be dangerous."
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19218
This really is a problem with expectations and hype though. And it will probably be a problem with cost as well.
I think that LLMs are really cool. It's way faster and more concise than traditional search engines at answering most questions nowadays. This is partly because search engines have degraded in the last 10 years, but LLMs blow them out of the water in my opinion.
And beyond that, I think you can generate some pretty cool things with it to use as a template. I'm not a programmer but I'm making a quite massive and relatively complicated application. That wouldn't be possible without an LLM. Sure I still have to check every line and clean up a ton of code, and of course I realize that this is all going to have to go to a substantial code review and cleanup by real programmers if I'm ever going to ship it, but the thing I'm making is genuinely already better (in terms of performance and functionality) than a lot of what's on the market. That has to count for something.
Despite all that, I think we're in the same kind of bubble now as we were in the early 2000s, except bigger. The oversell of AI comes from CEOs claiming (and to the best of my judgement they appear to be actually believing) that LLMs somehow magically will transcend into AGI if they're given enough compute. I think part of that stems from the massive (and unexpected) improvements that happened from GPT-2 to GPT-3.
And lots of smart people (like Linus Tordvals for example) point out that really, when you think about it, what is intelligence other than a glorified auto-correct? Our brains essentially function as lossy compression. So I think for some people it is incredibly alluring to believe that if we just throw more chips on the fire a true consciousness will arise. And so, we're investing all of our extra money and our pension funds into this thing.
And the irony is that I and millions of others can therefore use LLMs at a steep discount. So lots of people are quickly getting accustomed to LLMs thinking that they're always going to be free or cheap, whereas it's paid for by the bubble money and it's not super likely that it will get much more efficient in the near future.
What do you normally say that you're worried sounds like an "Ai vegan"?
Depending on how hardcore you are about it, you can't.
Are you getting up in people's face to tell them not to use it, or are you answering why you choose not to use it?
Are you extremely strict in your adherence? Or are you more forgiving based on the application or user?
There are two general points I like to make:
Energy usage honestly never seems to be a concern for people, so I don't even try to make that argument.
While I understand new data enters for ai are increasing power usage, it’s just highlighting the existing problems where there are decades of insufficient investment in infrastructure.
You can’t get enough power to run a new data center? Where were you when I complained we needed additional transmission lines to keep bringing more renewable energy online? Where were you when I wanted the huge infrastructure project to import huge amounts of Canadian hydro? I bet you wish you had that now.
I've strongly argued for this in the past.
All these tech bros with AI datacenters are putting their spare couch change together to build HVDC lines across the continent, right?
Here’s a piece I wrote to explain my apprehensive stance on AI to friends and colleagues: https://blog.erlend.sh/non-consensual-technology
You'd rather make your own painting than fill in a coloring book?
What is your viewpoint?
Mine, for example, is that not only I don't need it at all but it doesn't offer anything of value to me so I can't think of any use for it.
What is an “extremist view” in this context? Kill sam Altman? Lmao
Welcome to the world of being an activist buddy. Vegans are doing it for a living being with consciousness. Your cause is just too, imo, but just like the vegan who feels motivated and justified in bringing up their views because, to them, it’s a matter of life and death you will be belittled and mocked by those who either genuinely disagree or who do recognize the issues you describe but do not have the courage or self control to change
Start with speaking when it’s relevant. Note that this will not always win you fans. I recently spoke to my physician on this issue, who asked for consent for LLM transcription of audio session notes and automatic summarization. I am not morally opposed to such a thing for health care providers but I had many questions: how are records transmitted, stored, destroyed, does the model use any data fed into it or resultant summaries for seeding/reinforcement learning/refinement/updating internal embeddings/continual learning (this point is key bc the language I’ve seen about this shifts a lot, but basically do they feed your data back into the model to refine it further or do they have separate training and production models that allow for one to be “sanitary”), does the AI model come from the EMR provider (often Epic) or a 3rd party and if so is there a BAA, etc
In my case my provider could answer exactly 0 (zero) of these so I refused consent and am actively monitoring to ensure they are continuing to not use it at subsequent appointments. They are a professional so they’ve remained professional but it’s created some tension. I get it; I work in healthcare myself and I’ve seen these tools demoed and have colleagues that use them. They save a fairly substantial amount of time and in some cases they even guarantee against insurance clawbacks, which is a tremendous security advantage for a healthcare provider. But you gotta know what you’re doing and even then you gotta accept that some people simply will be against it on principle, thems the breaks
"it looks like shit from a butt and sounds like shit from a butt, and if I wanted to look at a shit from a butt, I would do that for free"
at work mgmt always brings it up. "we need to use it more!".
I say nothing. I smile and nod. I ignore AI prompts. I ignore emails written by AI. I ignore requests coming in to integrate AI into the product.
nobody has asked me about any of the inaction for the last year so I don't plan on drawing any attention to it by outing myself.
edit: I suppose if anybody does I can just say the AI agent I used failed to alert me to the thing they wanted. 🤣
One Thing to note: if you're strictly against it then you are on fact an AI vegan.
And that's okay!
Just like veganism you need to be clear though to us to help you answer that question:
what IS your reason? "At all" as absolute is not objectively feasible for all situations no matter your logic (stealing --> use an open model like apertus; energy --> link it to your solar panels, unreliable --> wrong use case, etc etc)
why do you want to convince others?
The issue is: you need to be honest to yourself AND to us to have a proper exchange.
"It doesn't feel right and I want to limit it's spread" is a way better answer then some stuff that sounds right but that are not grounded in your personal reality.
You're right. I cannot avoid it completely. Sometimes I use it unknowingly through some other online service intermediate or work in projects among peers who do use AI. What I should've said is I avoid using it to the best of my ability.
It's hard but right to admit that I'm coming off as an 'AI vegan' with what I've said earlier. I don't want to be casted out for not wanting to use something just for the sake of it, like with other mainstream social media.
For 2. would it then be a approach for you to focus on exactly your own complaint?
"Be careful when you use gen AI, it's sold to you as solution but you'll have more work figuring out why it doesn't understand you then it would be just doing it on your own".
Perhaps I'm not yet understanding what you mean with "contribute to" or the implications though.
In addition to what you listed my other issues with AI is that it’s all built on existing writing/art and people are really taking for granted what doing those things from scratch entails and also the environmental impact since all the AI infrastructure is a huge drain on resources.
If it's a decision you make out of conviction and value it is 100% like veganism so I would say embrace it
Live your truth and people will follow. Or not and that's ok too
Is this a work requirement? If not, who cares.
You are an AI vegan though. Why try not to sound like one?
"Its not my cup of tea".
Youre over thinking this
My goto is basically since I have to strictly verify all the information/data AI gives me, it's faster for me to just produce this information myself. It's what they literally pay me for.
i don´t necessarily think sources are needed.
people don´t really care: if an aquaintance asks you you can just tell them it´s not your thing. if an employer asks you, you lose either way. the deranged rants are reserved for close friends :) But if you need some evidence: Look into the environmental consequences (fire up those coalmines for LLM prompts), the several studies that suggest only 60% of all answers are factual, the MIT study that shows how the brain atrophies from using AI and the phenomenon called "ai psychosis"
Fundamentally what is evil about AI is that it is part of a growing global movement towards increasingly not seeing value in human beings but rather in abstracted forms of capital and power.
Irrespective of how well AI works or how quickly it evolves, what makes it awful is how it is in almost every manifestation it is a rejection of the potential of humanity. Cool things can be done with AI/pattern matching technology, but the thinking that gave birth to and arose around these tools is incredibly dangerous. The social contract has been broken by an extremist embrace of the value of computers and the corporations that own them over the value of human lives. Not only is this disgusting from an ethical standpoint, it is also senseless, no matter how powerful AI gets if we are interested in different forms of intelligence we MUST be humanists since by far the most abundant diversity of intelligence on earth is human/organic and this will continue to be the case long into the future.
What defenders of AI and people with a neutral opinion towards AI miss is that you cannot separate the ideology and the technology with "AI". AI in its meteoric economic acceleration (in terms of investment not profit) is a manifestation of the desire of the ruling class to fully extract the working class from their profit mechanisms. There is no neutrality to the technology of AI since almost the entire story of how, why and what AI has been has been determined by the desires of ideologies that are hostile to valuing human life at a basic level and that should alarm everyone.
This reminds me of those posts from anti-vaxers who complain about not being able to find good studies or sources that support their opinion.
I normally ask them if they have a moment to talk about the rebirth and perseverance* Nurgle. For they already embrace his blesses on the land.
Most people are against AI because of what corporations are doing with it. What do you expect corporations and governments are going to do with any new scientific or technological advance? Use it for for the benefit of humanity? Are you going to stop using computers because coorporations use them for their benefit harming the environment with their huge data centers? By rejecting the use of this new technological advance you are avoiding to take advantage of free and open source AI tools, that you can run locally on your computer, for whatever you consider a good cause. Fortunately many people who care about other human beings are more intelligent and are starting to use AI for what it really is, A TOOL.
"According to HRF’s announcement, the initiative aims to help global audiences better understand the dual nature of artificial intelligence: while it can be used by dictatorships to suppress dissent and monitor populations, it can also be a powerful instrument of liberation when placed in the hands of those fighting for freedom."
HRF AI Initiative
I am telling people to refrain from wasting my time with parrotted training data and that there is no "I" in LLMs. And that using them harms the brain and the corporations behind are evil to the core. But yeah, mostly I give up beyond "please don't bother me with this"
I tried AI a few times over the last few years, and sometimes I don't ignore the Gemini results from a search when I'm tired or I'm struggling to get good results.
Almost every time I've done either, helpful looking hallucinations wasted my time and made my attempt to find a solution to a technical problem less efficient. I will give specific examples, often unprompted.
I also point to a graph of my electric bill.
I also describe the logon script that a colleague (with no coding experience) asked for help with. He'd used AI to generate what he had to show me and was looking for help getting it to work. Variables declared and never used. Variables storing relevant information but different, similarly named variables used to retrieve the information.
You don't need artificial intelligence. We already have intelligence at home.
There isn't a way to use AI in good faith.
Either you are ignorant of the tech and its negative effects, or you arent.
What about cancer research? Or are you specificly talking about LLM & Image generating AI?
Generative AI isn't really useful except for slop.
It's kind of a cool idea to use it for finding unknown chemicals and stuff like that, but for media and most other uses it's been a travesty
Generative AI, sure, seems to be hard to find anything remotely useful for that (+the environment impact etc is stupidly high).
But neural networks are used everywhere in research, fast, cheap (a 2k€ graphic card can do it) and better than any other machine learning.
I'm not disagreing here, just pointing out all AI is not bad.
Neural Networks are Machine Learning
I think a lot of the things we used Machine Learning and LLMs for are good ideas, but we were doing that before we slapped them together and called it AI
Or people stopped calling machine learning AI, and tried to hype the NN with it. Then switched AI to language models and generative networks.
I mean Deep blue was AI back in the day, and so was pathfinders 🤷🏻♀️
Anyway, I'm not arguing with you.
You're right that AI is used now because marketing teams started calling it that.
Don’t bring it up unless prompted or posing philosophical questions to family and friends. I once was creating a video for a client that sent me some generated images into the video that he thought were hilarious. I told him sorry, no, didn’t over explain and just said that he would need to hire somebody else if he wants those things. It’s not very hard. I always try to push for human artists and explain not only is it better for the ecosystem but for copyright reasons.
Maybe part of the answer is to not be so strictly against it. AI is starting to be used in a variety of tools and not all your criticisms are valid for all of them. Being able to see where it is useful and maybe you even find it desirable helps explain that you’re not against the technology per se.
For example Zoom has an ai tool that can generate meeting summaries. It’s pretty accurate with discussions although sometimes gets confused about who said what. That ai likely used much less power, might not have been trained on copyrighted content
Personally it's because the harder something is pushed to me by large corporations, the more skeptical I am to begin with.
It is your stance, you don't have to compulsively change other people's minds, let them live their lives and you live how you want. For people that are wanting to listen to you, you can tell them how you feel about AI (or perhaps specifically AI chatbots) in both subjective and objective terms. If you want to prepare research and talking points, I think the most effective thing is to have a couple examples such as the Google AI box putting out objectively wrong info with the citation links leading to sites that don't back up any claim in it. Or how the outputs of comic style image generation tend to look like knock-off Tintin and appear uninspiring and unsettling. How reading generated paragraphs, looking at images and videos of fluffy slop is simply a waste of time for you. Just mix that with all the rest of the shortcomings people have provided and you'll make for a good discussion. Remember, the point is not to change people's minds or proselytize but rather to explain why you hold your opinion.
Check out wheresyoured.at for some "haters guides."
My general take is that virtually none of the common "useful" forms of AI are even remotely sustainable strictly from a financial standpoint, so there's not use getting too excited about them.
The financial argument is pretty difficult to make.
You're right in one sense, there is a bubble here and some investors/companies are going to lose a lot of money when they get beaten by competitors.
However, you're also wrong in the sense that the marginal cost to run them is actually quite low, even with the hardware and electricity costs. The benefit doesn't have to be that high to generate a positive ROI with such low marginal costs.
People are clearly using these tools more and more, even for commercial purposes when you're paying per token and not some subsidized subscription, just check out the graphs on OpenRouter https://openrouter.ai/rankings
None of the hyperscalers have produced enough revenue to even cover operating costs. Many have reported deceptive “annualized” figures or just stopped reporting at all.
Couple that with the hardware having a limited lifespan of around 5 years, and you’ve got an entire industry being subsidized by hype.
Covering operating costs doesn't make sense as the threshold for this discussion though.
Operating costs would include things like computing costs for training new models and staffing costs for researchers, both of which would completely disappear in a marginal cost calculation for an existing model.
If we use Deepseek R1 as an example of a large high end model, you can run a 8-bit quantized version of the 600B+ parameter model on Vast.Ai for about $18 per hour, or even on AWS for like $50/hour. Those produce tokens fast enough that you can have quite a few users on it at the same time, or even automated processes running concurrently with users. Most medium sized businesses could likely generate more than $50 in benefit from it per running hour, especially since you can just shut it down at night and not even pay for that time.
You can just look at it from a much smaller perspective too. A small business could buy access to consumer GPU based systems and use them profitably with 30B or 120B parameter open source models for dollars per hour. I know this is possible, because I'm actively doing it.
No is a full sentence.
Oh you want to explain. For those that are really interested, there are websites explaining the main points.
There are legitimate reasons people worry about AI. Here are some of the strongest, clearly framed concerns:
1. Bias and unfair decisions
AI systems often learn from biased data and can unintentionally discriminate—against certain races, genders, ages, or socioeconomic groups—in hiring, lending, housing, policing, and more.
2. Lack of transparency
Many AI models act as “black boxes,” making decisions that are hard to explain. This creates problems when the stakes are high (medical diagnosis, legal decisions, etc.).
3. Privacy risks
AI can analyze huge amounts of personal data, track behavior, or identify people through facial recognition—often without explicit consent.
4. Job displacement
Automation threatens certain categories of work, particularly routine or repetitive jobs. Without proper planning, this can increase inequality and unemployment.
5. Misinformation and deepfakes
AI makes it easier to create convincing fake audio, video, or text. This can undermine trust in media, fuel propaganda, and destabilize democratic processes.
6. Weaponization
AI can be used in autonomous weapons, cyberattacks, targeted surveillance, or manipulation—raising serious security and ethical issues.
7. Overreliance and loss of human skills
As AI does more tasks, people may become too dependent, reducing critical thinking, creativity, or expertise in certain fields.
8. Concentration of power
Powerful AI tools tend to be controlled by a few big companies or governments, potentially leading to monopolies, inequality, and reduced individual autonomy.
9. Alignment and control risks
Advanced AI systems may behave in unexpected or harmful ways if their goals aren’t perfectly aligned with human values—even without malicious intent.
10. Environmental impact
Training large AI models consumes significant energy and resources, contributing to carbon emissions.
If you want, I can also provide reasons why AI is good, help you construct an argument for a debate, or analyze specific risks more deeply.
Were you looking for this kind of reply? If you can't express why you have an opinion maybe your opinion is not well founded in the first place. (Not saying it's wrong, just that it might not be justified/objective.)
Please, for the love of god, tell me you didn't write that post with AI, because it really looks like that was written with AI.
Except the first phrase and last paragraph, it was AI. Honestly, it feels like OP is taunting us with such a vague question. We don't even know why they dislike AI.
I'm not an AI lover. It has its place and it's a genuine step forward. Less than what most proponents think it's worth, more than what detractors do.
I only use it myself for documentation on the framework I program in, and it's reasonably good for that, letting me extract more info quicker than reading through it. Otherwise haven't used it much.
My question was genuine. I haven't been an avid user of generative AI when it was first released and decided against using it at all lately. I tried to use it in niche projects and was completely unreliable. Its tone of speech is bland and the way it acts as a friend feels disturbing to me. Plus the environmental destruction it is causing on such a large scale is honestly depressing to me.
All that being said, it is not easy for me to communicate these points clearly to someone the way I have experienced it. It's like the case for informing people about privacy; casual users aren't inherently aware of the consequences of using this tool and consider it a godsend. It will be difficult for them to convince that the tool they cherish to use so much is not that great after all, thus I am asking here what the beat approach should be.
Isn't that exactly the answer you are looking for?
The "environmental destruction" angle is likely to cause trouble because it's objectively debatable, and often presented in overblown or deceptive ways.
“Good catch! I did make that up. I haven’t been able to parse your framework documentation yet”
You beat me to it. To make it less obvious, I ask the AI to be concise, and I manually replace the emdashes with hyphens.
I haven't tested it, but I saw an article a little while back that you can add "don't use emdashes" to ChatGPT's custom instructions and it'll leave them out from the beginning.
It's kind of ridiculous that a perfectly ordinary punctuation mark has been given such stigma, but whatever, it's an easy fix.