Even for people who generally like the function of AI (which seem to be fairly rare here) the absolutely obscene climate impact and implications for peopes jobs and livelihoods, privacy breaches, and general internet enshittification is surely reason enough to be against it.
The jobs thing i don't understand, its the distribution of productivity gains that's the issue, why we keep voting for the same politicians ensuring it goes to the wealthy is the real mystery.
Oh, I absolutely agree. But currently, the people in charge of making those decisions have demonstrated moral bankruptcy and will absolutely ensure the productivity gains funnel to the top. Until that changes, AI impact on jobs will likely be devastating.
And I'm all for changing it. It's just going to be a long and/or violent process.
Productivity gains are not across the board, and is a subject of scrutiny and debate.
But what AI really has done is basically redistributed American wealth to a smaller group of people, and therefore a smaller pool for the US politicians to focus on satisfying. If there is an AI bubble pop, what market watchers suspect is there's actually no other American sector to mitigate what is otherwise a recession.
It isnt moral bankruptcy, it is systematic. The capitalist who produces profit stays in business, the capitalist who does not goes bankrupt. It isnt morals of individuals, the dehumanization of the poor by the rich is a symptom of a system that prioritizes profits over humanity.
Capitalism is, among other things, a system of forced competition.
I'm glad to hear you are on the right side of it. But in order to be effective we have to name the actual problems. I am above all a humanist, and certainly the capitalist class contains some vile and hateful individuals. That is more clear now than ever before. But we are not made rich or poor by our morality; our morality comes from the conditions that dictate whether we are rich or poor.
The distribution of productivity gains and development of new technology are intrinsically and historically connected. New technology is only developed in order to exploit workers, either to make individual something which was previously socialized, or to directly replace workers with industrial advances; and in many cases both.
Marx said it best: Machines were the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
This was true for the Luddites and it is true today.
That I why I like small, specialized, locally hosted AI. Runs acceptably fast and quite on my gaming PC, it's private, and I can give it knowledge is small doses in specific topics and projects.
Which model do you use and what are your specs? I ran a couple using an RTX5060 with 16gb and it's too slow to be usable for larger models while the smaller ones are mostly useless.
I also have a 5060 (ti) with 16GB of RAM. I tend to use GPT-OSS:20B or Qwen3:14B with a context of ~30k. I have custom system prompt for my style of reponse I like on open web ui. That takes up about 14GB of my 16GB VRAM
But yeah it is slower and not as "smart" as the cloud based models, but I think the inconvenience of the speed and having to fact check/test code is worth the privacy and environmental trade offs
It has its uses but it feels like more of a 10-20% productivity boost when used effectively, not the 500%, “lets have openclaw replace my whole company!” kind of BS being pushed by AI companies.
If it is a productivity boost for you, it is at the cost of someone else who will have to proofread and test everything you do. LLMs (and genAI) are useless.
It’s no more work than proofreading any other code I write. Sounds like someone just slopped out code with an LLM and didn’t do the due diligence of checking it themselves. Using an LLM doesn’t mean no work. I think that’s when people get in trouble.
Then be an activist. Never pay for AI, I don't. Maybe 30 dollars a year for tools I can't do without, but take everything for free. Make the unsustainability fall due to its own weight. That doesn't mean I don't use AI every day for work, spirituality, and learning. Take advantage of what you have available. Group think sucks.
Never pay for AI, I don't. Maybe 30 dollars a year for tools I can't do without, but take everything for free.
Maybe you were referring to non-AI tools, though the mention of that here would be unusual, so the most likely reading of this is that you were saying something like “I don’t pay for AI, except when I do”.
I see where you're coming from... When there is no way of doing something without AI I take on a job and pay peanuts for AI. I choose to earn money over not paying for AI. I can totally live without it, it's just work is preferrable than a tantrum.
I have been working with LLMs for decades. I know what they can do and what they can't. I admit they have grown in leaps and bounds in the last few years because of the hype, but therein lies the issue: there is still way too much hype, it's not the end all solution some think it is, it's driving up hardware prices, the environmental impact is horrendous, and it's a new bullshit business marketing term that serves only to artificially inflate stock prices. "Agentic" is the new "data driven".
People come to Lemmy precisely because they're tired of big algorithmic corporate platforms. They come here precisely to get away from AI slop on platforms like Facebook. Hell, half the people here have been banned from reddit based on comically flawed algorithmic AI moderation tools. This platform is heavily selected for people who dislike AI and AI content.
Although I agree with the algorithmic abuses with AI, I didn't expect a group think to be so prevalent, especially in a tech-leaning group. I don't mind being popular, I guess the lack of AI might work to my advantage here.
Being tech-leaning is exactly why we are against AI. We are just much more aware of the resource it's consuming, the privacy it's infringing, and the content it's stealing.
No disrespect, but with that attitude you won't be tech-leaning for long. I understand where you're coming from, just the "We are" sounds a bit culty and I really dislike cults.
The issue with "tech-leaning" people who believe AI is the future is that they're in the "peak of mount stupid" part of the Dunning-Kruger curve. Once you get past that, you realize AI was never good at anything and it's harmful to everyone in a million different ways. Most of lemmy's tech-leaning people have already realized that, and are actively trying to avoid AI.
Reality as an artist dictates that all my work was datamined without my consent and anything I post in the future, should I choose to do so, will. And the end result of this data mining is to drive artists like me out of business. I don't mind the average Joe getting their anime girl with three titties in five minutes, but company owners are making money out of this and paying nobody for their source material.
I am not "against" AI. I am against unfettered capitalism and how it is poisoning humanity. AI can hold the same kind of promise that Internet v1 had before the first eternal September. But because of the "success" of the capitalization of the web, folks are flocking to AI on the assumption that something similar will happen to it. I see it as a gold rush. Some boom towns may happen along the way. Some may endure. But it's still very early to know that.
I get a strong impression that the whole extinction of humanity narrative is really just an astroturf marketing campaign by AI companies. They're basically scaremongering because it gets in the news, and the goal is to convince investors how smart these things are. It's the whole OpenAI claiming they're on the verge of AGI right before pivoting to doing horny chatbots. These are useful tools, and I also use them day to day, but the hype around them is absolutely incredible.
I think we have plenty of real risks to humanity to worry about, like the US starting a nuclear holocaust. We don't need to waste time worrying about imaginary risks like AGI here.
I'd also argue the whole energy consumption argument is very myopic. The reality is that these things have been getting more and more efficient, and there is little reason to think that's not going to be continue being the case going forward. It's completely new tech, and it's basically just moved past proof of concept stages. There's going to be a lot of optimization happening down the road. And even when you contextualize current energy usage, it's not as crazy as people seem to think https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
It doesn't look like that energy consumption blog post account for the cost of training the model. Otherwise, it should be telling us how many queries/sessions are assumed to be run over the course of the lifetime of a model.
Models training is a one off effort. Model usage is what matters because that's where energy is used continuously. Also, practically nobody trains models from scratch right now. People use existing base models to tune and extend them.
Training is a continuous expenditure. We're nearly ten years into this craze and we're still continuously pumping out new models. Whether they're trained from scratch or not is immaterial. Both processes still consume energy. If you want to justify the claim that training cost is negligible, you would have to show that this cost is actually going down over time and that it's going down sufficiently quickly.
Whether they're trained from scratch or not is very much material because it takes far more energy to do that. Meanwhile, we consume energy as a civilization in general. And frankly, a lot of energy is consumed on far dumber things like advertisements. If you count all the energy that goes into producing and displaying ads, that dwarfs AI energy use. So, it's kind of weird t0 single AI energy use out here as some form of exceptional evil.
You know what else takes far less energy than training a single model? One query. Yet, you argue that it's the main contributor to the energy consumption. Why is that? It's because there's a very high volume of them, thus bringing up the total energy consumption. At the end of the day, it's this total energy consumption that matters, not the cost of doing it once. Look at the total energy expenditure of training, not just the cost of doing it once.
So, it's kind of weird t0 single AI energy use out here as some form of exceptional evil.
We're talking about AI here because that's the topic of this thread. I've never seen anyone say that it's the only problem worth addressing. Plus, if you want to compare energy usage of ads (or anything else) compared to AI, you would first need to know how much energy AI is actually using.
Living with a knife to your throat is also highly dangerous and exciting. I don't recommend it.
The tech can't be un-invented, but it's still very much up for discussion wether society puts significant resources into the data centres to run this. Regulations on responsible use are also up for discussion.
One can conceive a lot of things, that doesn't mean one knows better thsn destiny... If I could go back to the 70s and live then, I don't know if I would, (I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for advances in science)... This was going to happen. It's actually a very fun time to be alive.
There was a post on Mastodon that I sadly cannot find right now that really articulated the fact that there's not necessarily a single problem with LLMs and generative AI - the issue is that there's an entire stack of potential dangers associated with them. To paraphrase:
Use of and reliance on LLMs for certain tasks has shown to have deleterious effects on critical thinking skills.
Even if that isn't true or I weren't concerned about it, I'd be concerned about its effects on my psychological wellbeing.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about the ethical issues of how their training data was and is acquired.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about its effects on the job market and the further upward concentration of wealth.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about the massive energy costs and the associated effects on utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about the massive cooling requirements and its effects on the global availability of clean water.
Even if certain approaches to or implementations of GAI solve one or a couple of these concerns, I'd have to overcome all of them (and likely others I've forgotten to list) to feel comfortable using GAI in any serious capacity, and even then it looks like I would end up with a tool that I'd have to constantly double-check to avoid hallucinations. It's just not worth it.
And nearly all of these arguments also to apply to others using GAI, so I'm forced to advocate against it.
I hear you man. I agree, if I could disappear it, I would, but I can't and it's here. I think resisting it is just wasting energy. There is definitely a bubble of hype around it. Who knows, I don't.
It sounds like you continue to use it, though. How do you justify it in the face of what I laid out above? "Waste of energy" is a shitty excuse for engaging in bad behavior.
I don't excuse it. It was born unethically stealing all of the internet. But like I said, it's here, I sure as hell am not going to become amish and make cheese. I like living in the modern world. Maybe some day I'll retire to the woods, but for now I got to live in this world, so I might as well take it in the chin and accept the damn thing.
I totally respect people not using it, it's just I've found people on Lemmy kind of don't respect people using it. I'm not here to change the world, though, I'm happy I opened this discussion.
I think there is a lot of misdirected frustration. The technology isn't the issue, the way it's been implemented is the issue. There are some useful use cases for AI.
I'm against the LLM bubble. They're gobbling up all of our compute, electricity, water, and basically all investment capital while not even generating productivity gains or improving anyone's lives. Internet search is now dead, all my fan communities are just full of slop instead of art from artists, and the piggies that own the data centers are destroying all culture to feed their autocomplete machines. LLMs have accelerated the decay of civilization in a way that we might struggle to recover from when the bubble pops. Half the time it's not even AI, the real work is just outsourced to some superexploited workers in the Global South.
There are some legitimate use-cases for LLM technology, but the way they're trying to cram it into everything is actually just wrecking everything. It seems like they're destroying the world for a worse calculator that can pretend to be your girlfriend.
Yeah, Lemmy is a bit over-the-top anti-AI, but most of it is based in reality.
There are a bunch of problems with AI. And they outbnumer any good ones by a mile.
The main cause of that fact is the entire AI bubble.
AI wastes a fuckton of energy. Of course, this energy isn't free: communities pay. Electricity demand goes up, and so does price. Then, most electricity isn't green. And on top of that, the rise in demand causes more electricity peaks, which almost exclusively get "fixed" through fossil fuel-based methods.
From another angle, AI disrupts markets. And not in a good way. Companies dump millions into AI while neglecting their employees (who get laid off because AI "can replace" them), and their customers as well (since instead of doing useful stuff for consumers they pump out AI-branded bullshit no one wants or needs).
Then, big AI companies spit in the face of copyright and have the audacity to turn around and claim copyright on their models' outputs. If inputs are free game, so are the outputs. Copyright is a very vague, misunderstood and misused term, and no argument I've heard claiming feeding stuff into AI is fair use was grounded in reality.
That all veing said, AI is here to stay. I've been thinking long and hard about similar fundamental changes to how human society functions, and I think i found one. Photography.
Way back when, you had to do things painstakibgly by hand. Drawing, copying books by hand, etc.
Then the printing press came. Revolutionary? Sure. But not as revolutionary as photography. Instead of writing by hand, you had to typeset by hand before printing. This made the process scalable, but it was still painstaking work.
But photography is a different matter. You just have to make (or buy) a camera and other required supplies (film, developing media, etc), and then you merely have to set up the camera, take the photo, develop the film, and make the photo.
Even in the early days of photography, while these processes took some time, it wasn't painstaking. To take a photo, you set up the camera, and wait. To develop film, you dunk the film into a chemical bath, and wait. To transfer the image onto paper - a similar ordeal. Set, forget.
Photography fundamentally changed how the entirety of society works. Painters complained and lost jobs and livelihoods - like the "jobs stolen" by AI. Instead of drawing stuff, which required a lot of skill, taking a photo is much simpler (abd faster).
Yesterday, instead of having to paint stuff, you'd take a photo. Today, instead of taking a photo, you ask AI.
On the copyright front, the paralels are obvious: Taking a photo of a book is fair use. But photocopying a book isn't. The problem with AI is that it does some transformations to the original, so it's obfuscated inside the model. But the obfuscation can be undone, as AI often happily spits out certain inputs verbatim when asked. Take a photo of a page - okay. Photocopy the entire book? Not okay.
The situation is the same when we look at artwork instead of books. Taking a photo of an artwork in a museum is okay. Scanning an artwork (duplicating it verbatim) - isn't. Same for movies. A frame is probably gonna be okay. The entire movie - won't.
Going by the closest analogue, there is absolutely no justification to indiscriminately feed everything and anything into AI, for indiscriminately photocopying and vervatim copying the same material is clearly protected.
Many people here know that "AI" as a term is pure snake oil. You aren't actually talking about anything until you say what you think it means, or specific examples.
AI research goes back to the early 1950s. Being "against" all of that old research is kinda meaningless... So it's your job to clarify what you mean, or not, and other users will respond accordingly.
30 year IT professional here, whose company is starting to utilize AI. So far for my workflow it does not provide any benefit. With that said, I am working with my team to find somewhere in our business and technical processes to make things better. It just hasn't happened yet.
I am against it, but not dead set. What I am against are the insane things that are happening due to the over zealous investment into LLMs. The Three Mile Island #1 reactor is in the process of being brought back into operation by Microsoft, just to power an AI data center.
That is absolutely insane. TMI #1 is a 60 year old reactor design that was built over 50 years ago and that is at least two generations behind modern reactors. TMI #2 experienced a meltdown back in 1979, hence why it is not an option to bring back into operation. There are several documented issues with that reactor design (remember that #2 melted down? It was due to one of these issues.) that will require monitoring and processes in place to make sure the reactor stays safe. Monitoring that is not needed on more modern reactor designs.
Western Digital has announced that their entire production run of hard drives is completely sold out. Micron exited the consumer market in order to supply AI. So hard drive and memory prices are going to get even higher than what they are now. That means computers, phones, and any consumer device that uses memory or HDD storage will see massive price increases.
That's the issue I have with LLMs. If the role out was anywhere near sane, then my attitude would be different. Right now it just looks like massive amounts of resources and money are being thrown into a pit with a dim hope that there would be some kind of return. Instead of a deliberate and planned role out that is sustainable in the long term.
Yep i agree. If it was rolled out correctly it could possibly be a decent tool. Also i like the distiction here of AI and LLMs.
But as is its just a very expensive predictive engine that spits out copyright enfringement witj billion dollar datacenters. Its a novelty to me asva software dev but thats about it. It makes templates easier but for anything with real math and understanding...llms are very bad at those sort of things.
I'm pissed at how its able to license wash Foss code and peoples IP. But it seems there are no rules for American or Chinese tech companies because they refuse to legislate so ip should be completely removed. There is no way any of their IP should be respected.
I think you'll find that the gripe is more about it being implemented badly, and in a way that's harmful on multiple levels rather than the technology itself.
I agree, although for a counter-case, db0 has involvement in community-driven image generation (Horde, some communities they host and banners they use).
My view isn't as blanket as pro- or anti- "AI" (and I add quotes because I see that as a science-fiction term adapted into a marketing fantasy).
These technologies are powerful and there are legitimate, productive, pro-social uses of them (an obvious example is assisting in medical diagnosis). They are not inherently incompatible with social values, environmental progress, and the other problems associated with it - these technologies are tools powered by electricity and materials. But the way they are currently implemented, the economic concerns around marketing them, and the lack of broad education around them, are very very dangerous.
The way regular people misunderstand and misuse the technology has already resulted in direct deaths, all kinds of mismanagement and mass sacking of workers. Mistrusting technology is no new issue, see ELIZA in the '60s for example, but this is so much more accessible, more misrepresented due to marketing campaigns and social media, and more powerful. Furthermore, a huge proportion of people don't have the media literacy to instinctively doubt its output - and this was already a big enough issue with news media.
Processing currently is largely done using non-renewable energy sources in large centralized data centers (consuming water, creating noise pollution, etc.) which has serious global and local environment issues.
Most of our exposure to this technology as regular citizens is wasteful or actively harmful, such as propaganda/forgery, vapid industrialization of artistic aesthetics, unsolicited sexualization, scams and fraud attacks, automated bots, advertising and other 'slop', along with misguided attempts to eliminate workers from jobs which cannot be adequately delegated to these tools.
Oh yeah, Lemmy is overwhelmingly against AI in any capacity. I'm one of the few that finds it useful for a handful of things and generally defend that use. That being said, it's definitely important to understand that "hallucinations" are a thing (though not nearly as prevalent as those here would claim), it's a major problem for the arts industry at large, it's objectively making people dumber (great studies on students who over rely on it), and there are terrible climate implications.
It's just a tool, and like any other tool there are pros and cons, and it should be used responsibly. But yeah, Lemmy hates the shit out of anything AI
Most rational comment I've read. I'm going to have fun on Lemmy, I do appreciate you can be very unpopular and it doesn't silence you. Appreciate your comment too :)
Not against AI. I use it quite a lot. I also find amusement when it tells me things that are just wrong in a very sure way. So never fully trust AI. If you accept that then AI can be quite useful.
Even for people who generally like the function of AI (which seem to be fairly rare here) the absolutely obscene climate impact and implications for peopes jobs and livelihoods, privacy breaches, and general internet enshittification is surely reason enough to be against it.
The jobs thing i don't understand, its the distribution of productivity gains that's the issue, why we keep voting for the same politicians ensuring it goes to the wealthy is the real mystery.
Oh, I absolutely agree. But currently, the people in charge of making those decisions have demonstrated moral bankruptcy and will absolutely ensure the productivity gains funnel to the top. Until that changes, AI impact on jobs will likely be devastating.
And I'm all for changing it. It's just going to be a long and/or violent process.
Productivity gains are not across the board, and is a subject of scrutiny and debate.
But what AI really has done is basically redistributed American wealth to a smaller group of people, and therefore a smaller pool for the US politicians to focus on satisfying. If there is an AI bubble pop, what market watchers suspect is there's actually no other American sector to mitigate what is otherwise a recession.
It isnt moral bankruptcy, it is systematic. The capitalist who produces profit stays in business, the capitalist who does not goes bankrupt. It isnt morals of individuals, the dehumanization of the poor by the rich is a symptom of a system that prioritizes profits over humanity.
Capitalism is, among other things, a system of forced competition.
I'm glad to hear you are on the right side of it. But in order to be effective we have to name the actual problems. I am above all a humanist, and certainly the capitalist class contains some vile and hateful individuals. That is more clear now than ever before. But we are not made rich or poor by our morality; our morality comes from the conditions that dictate whether we are rich or poor.
Even individualism is structural.
The distribution of productivity gains and development of new technology are intrinsically and historically connected. New technology is only developed in order to exploit workers, either to make individual something which was previously socialized, or to directly replace workers with industrial advances; and in many cases both.
Marx said it best: Machines were the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
This was true for the Luddites and it is true today.
That I why I like small, specialized, locally hosted AI. Runs acceptably fast and quite on my gaming PC, it's private, and I can give it knowledge is small doses in specific topics and projects.
Which model do you use and what are your specs? I ran a couple using an RTX5060 with 16gb and it's too slow to be usable for larger models while the smaller ones are mostly useless.
I also have a 5060 (ti) with 16GB of RAM. I tend to use GPT-OSS:20B or Qwen3:14B with a context of ~30k. I have custom system prompt for my style of reponse I like on open web ui. That takes up about 14GB of my 16GB VRAM
But yeah it is slower and not as "smart" as the cloud based models, but I think the inconvenience of the speed and having to fact check/test code is worth the privacy and environmental trade offs
It has its uses but it feels like more of a 10-20% productivity boost when used effectively, not the 500%, “lets have openclaw replace my whole company!” kind of BS being pushed by AI companies.
If it is a productivity boost for you, it is at the cost of someone else who will have to proofread and test everything you do. LLMs (and genAI) are useless.
It’s no more work than proofreading any other code I write. Sounds like someone just slopped out code with an LLM and didn’t do the due diligence of checking it themselves. Using an LLM doesn’t mean no work. I think that’s when people get in trouble.
Yup. I suspect on other social media that some of the positive sentiment towards AI is just astroturfing.
There a strong amount of astroturfing even over on Mastodon. I imagine it's worse on the billionaire owned socials.
If John Mastodon can't stop the astroturfing, there's no way those lesser founders can.
A tool becomes "good" or "bad" based on its implementation.
The current trend towards massive unsustainable data centers is pretty objectively "bad" for humans and other creatures for questionable benefit.
Localized AI, on the other hand, would be less harmful, and more useful. This would move the needle towards a more objective "good".
Yeah it’s like gmos. The biggest companies in the game are well documented as ill-intentioned profiteers. The technology isn’t inherently bad.
There’s usually a sub argument here of what the models are trained on - local or not.
Then be an activist. Never pay for AI, I don't. Maybe 30 dollars a year for tools I can't do without, but take everything for free. Make the unsustainability fall due to its own weight. That doesn't mean I don't use AI every day for work, spirituality, and learning. Take advantage of what you have available. Group think sucks.
There are AI tools you can't live without? That's really sad for you
Who said that? You're imagining things.
This you?
Maybe you were referring to non-AI tools, though the mention of that here would be unusual, so the most likely reading of this is that you were saying something like “I don’t pay for AI, except when I do”.
I see where you're coming from... When there is no way of doing something without AI I take on a job and pay peanuts for AI. I choose to earn money over not paying for AI. I can totally live without it, it's just work is preferrable than a tantrum.
...you use AI for spirituality? what are you even talking about
I believe"Big AI" will collapse.
I have been working with LLMs for decades. I know what they can do and what they can't. I admit they have grown in leaps and bounds in the last few years because of the hype, but therein lies the issue: there is still way too much hype, it's not the end all solution some think it is, it's driving up hardware prices, the environmental impact is horrendous, and it's a new bullshit business marketing term that serves only to artificially inflate stock prices. "Agentic" is the new "data driven".
People come to Lemmy precisely because they're tired of big algorithmic corporate platforms. They come here precisely to get away from AI slop on platforms like Facebook. Hell, half the people here have been banned from reddit based on comically flawed algorithmic AI moderation tools. This platform is heavily selected for people who dislike AI and AI content.
Although I agree with the algorithmic abuses with AI, I didn't expect a group think to be so prevalent, especially in a tech-leaning group. I don't mind being popular, I guess the lack of AI might work to my advantage here.
Being tech-leaning is exactly why we are against AI. We are just much more aware of the resource it's consuming, the privacy it's infringing, and the content it's stealing.
No disrespect, but with that attitude you won't be tech-leaning for long. I understand where you're coming from, just the "We are" sounds a bit culty and I really dislike cults.
The issue with "tech-leaning" people who believe AI is the future is that they're in the "peak of mount stupid" part of the Dunning-Kruger curve. Once you get past that, you realize AI was never good at anything and it's harmful to everyone in a million different ways. Most of lemmy's tech-leaning people have already realized that, and are actively trying to avoid AI.
Arrogance will hinder you more than help you brother.
I'll admit "we are" is a bit of an exaggeration. That is only based on my observation of the community.
Just because you have an unpopular opinion in actual tech leaning groups doesn't mean it's group think. It means your opinion sucks
Reality as an artist dictates that all my work was datamined without my consent and anything I post in the future, should I choose to do so, will. And the end result of this data mining is to drive artists like me out of business. I don't mind the average Joe getting their anime girl with three titties in five minutes, but company owners are making money out of this and paying nobody for their source material.
wait, you can ask for three titties....?..?
You can ask for four!
Too many tiddies.
Considering the username, I'm just sitting here wondering if we're just arguing against an LLM.
Looking at history.... Yeah. I think so.
Danm you caught me, shucks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am not "against" AI. I am against unfettered capitalism and how it is poisoning humanity. AI can hold the same kind of promise that Internet v1 had before the first eternal September. But because of the "success" of the capitalization of the web, folks are flocking to AI on the assumption that something similar will happen to it. I see it as a gold rush. Some boom towns may happen along the way. Some may endure. But it's still very early to know that.
Yeah check out the very next article in my feed:
( ° ͜ʖ͡°) lol exactly
Group thing? No.
Does it seem like the majority are against it? Yes.
I’ve leaned pretty heavily into using LLMs personally and professionally.
Good to know, I do too. It has its ugly dangerous extinction of humanity risks for sure, kind of exciting too, but it's here to stay for bad or good.
I get a strong impression that the whole extinction of humanity narrative is really just an astroturf marketing campaign by AI companies. They're basically scaremongering because it gets in the news, and the goal is to convince investors how smart these things are. It's the whole OpenAI claiming they're on the verge of AGI right before pivoting to doing horny chatbots. These are useful tools, and I also use them day to day, but the hype around them is absolutely incredible.
I think we have plenty of real risks to humanity to worry about, like the US starting a nuclear holocaust. We don't need to waste time worrying about imaginary risks like AGI here.
I'd also argue the whole energy consumption argument is very myopic. The reality is that these things have been getting more and more efficient, and there is little reason to think that's not going to be continue being the case going forward. It's completely new tech, and it's basically just moved past proof of concept stages. There's going to be a lot of optimization happening down the road. And even when you contextualize current energy usage, it's not as crazy as people seem to think https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
We're also starting to see stuff like this happening https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html
The biggest risk in terms of human extinction is a government allowing an AI to make unchecked military (e.g. nuclear) decisions.
At this point, I'd trust the AI over the clowns running the Burger Reich.
It doesn't look like that energy consumption blog post account for the cost of training the model. Otherwise, it should be telling us how many queries/sessions are assumed to be run over the course of the lifetime of a model.
Models training is a one off effort. Model usage is what matters because that's where energy is used continuously. Also, practically nobody trains models from scratch right now. People use existing base models to tune and extend them.
Training is a continuous expenditure. We're nearly ten years into this craze and we're still continuously pumping out new models. Whether they're trained from scratch or not is immaterial. Both processes still consume energy. If you want to justify the claim that training cost is negligible, you would have to show that this cost is actually going down over time and that it's going down sufficiently quickly.
Whether they're trained from scratch or not is very much material because it takes far more energy to do that. Meanwhile, we consume energy as a civilization in general. And frankly, a lot of energy is consumed on far dumber things like advertisements. If you count all the energy that goes into producing and displaying ads, that dwarfs AI energy use. So, it's kind of weird t0 single AI energy use out here as some form of exceptional evil.
You know what else takes far less energy than training a single model? One query. Yet, you argue that it's the main contributor to the energy consumption. Why is that? It's because there's a very high volume of them, thus bringing up the total energy consumption. At the end of the day, it's this total energy consumption that matters, not the cost of doing it once. Look at the total energy expenditure of training, not just the cost of doing it once.
We're talking about AI here because that's the topic of this thread. I've never seen anyone say that it's the only problem worth addressing. Plus, if you want to compare energy usage of ads (or anything else) compared to AI, you would first need to know how much energy AI is actually using.
Two points
It's not a forgone conclusion by any means.
Could one not conceive of a world where there is a group of actual human beings that hold different values to one's own ?
Is that so inconceivable to a person's worldview that it breaks a person's sense of reality ?
Seems like a weird place to start. But here we are.
One can conceive a lot of things, that doesn't mean one knows better thsn destiny... If I could go back to the 70s and live then, I don't know if I would, (I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for advances in science)... This was going to happen. It's actually a very fun time to be alive.
There was a post on Mastodon that I sadly cannot find right now that really articulated the fact that there's not necessarily a single problem with LLMs and generative AI - the issue is that there's an entire stack of potential dangers associated with them. To paraphrase:
Use of and reliance on LLMs for certain tasks has shown to have deleterious effects on critical thinking skills.
Even if that isn't true or I weren't concerned about it, I'd be concerned about its effects on my psychological wellbeing.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about the ethical issues of how their training data was and is acquired.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about its effects on the job market and the further upward concentration of wealth.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about the massive energy costs and the associated effects on utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
Even if I weren't concerned about that, I'd be concerned about the massive cooling requirements and its effects on the global availability of clean water.
Even if certain approaches to or implementations of GAI solve one or a couple of these concerns, I'd have to overcome all of them (and likely others I've forgotten to list) to feel comfortable using GAI in any serious capacity, and even then it looks like I would end up with a tool that I'd have to constantly double-check to avoid hallucinations. It's just not worth it.
And nearly all of these arguments also to apply to others using GAI, so I'm forced to advocate against it.
I hear you man. I agree, if I could disappear it, I would, but I can't and it's here. I think resisting it is just wasting energy. There is definitely a bubble of hype around it. Who knows, I don't.
It sounds like you continue to use it, though. How do you justify it in the face of what I laid out above? "Waste of energy" is a shitty excuse for engaging in bad behavior.
I don't excuse it. It was born unethically stealing all of the internet. But like I said, it's here, I sure as hell am not going to become amish and make cheese. I like living in the modern world. Maybe some day I'll retire to the woods, but for now I got to live in this world, so I might as well take it in the chin and accept the damn thing.
I totally respect people not using it, it's just I've found people on Lemmy kind of don't respect people using it. I'm not here to change the world, though, I'm happy I opened this discussion.
I think there is a lot of misdirected frustration. The technology isn't the issue, the way it's been implemented is the issue. There are some useful use cases for AI.
Completely agree.
I'm against the LLM bubble. They're gobbling up all of our compute, electricity, water, and basically all investment capital while not even generating productivity gains or improving anyone's lives. Internet search is now dead, all my fan communities are just full of slop instead of art from artists, and the piggies that own the data centers are destroying all culture to feed their autocomplete machines. LLMs have accelerated the decay of civilization in a way that we might struggle to recover from when the bubble pops. Half the time it's not even AI, the real work is just outsourced to some superexploited workers in the Global South.
There are some legitimate use-cases for LLM technology, but the way they're trying to cram it into everything is actually just wrecking everything. It seems like they're destroying the world for a worse calculator that can pretend to be your girlfriend.
Yeah, Lemmy is a bit over-the-top anti-AI, but most of it is based in reality.
There are a bunch of problems with AI. And they outbnumer any good ones by a mile.
The main cause of that fact is the entire AI bubble.
AI wastes a fuckton of energy. Of course, this energy isn't free: communities pay. Electricity demand goes up, and so does price. Then, most electricity isn't green. And on top of that, the rise in demand causes more electricity peaks, which almost exclusively get "fixed" through fossil fuel-based methods.
From another angle, AI disrupts markets. And not in a good way. Companies dump millions into AI while neglecting their employees (who get laid off because AI "can replace" them), and their customers as well (since instead of doing useful stuff for consumers they pump out AI-branded bullshit no one wants or needs).
Then, big AI companies spit in the face of copyright and have the audacity to turn around and claim copyright on their models' outputs. If inputs are free game, so are the outputs. Copyright is a very vague, misunderstood and misused term, and no argument I've heard claiming feeding stuff into AI is fair use was grounded in reality.
That all veing said, AI is here to stay. I've been thinking long and hard about similar fundamental changes to how human society functions, and I think i found one. Photography.
Way back when, you had to do things painstakibgly by hand. Drawing, copying books by hand, etc.
Then the printing press came. Revolutionary? Sure. But not as revolutionary as photography. Instead of writing by hand, you had to typeset by hand before printing. This made the process scalable, but it was still painstaking work.
But photography is a different matter. You just have to make (or buy) a camera and other required supplies (film, developing media, etc), and then you merely have to set up the camera, take the photo, develop the film, and make the photo.
Even in the early days of photography, while these processes took some time, it wasn't painstaking. To take a photo, you set up the camera, and wait. To develop film, you dunk the film into a chemical bath, and wait. To transfer the image onto paper - a similar ordeal. Set, forget.
Photography fundamentally changed how the entirety of society works. Painters complained and lost jobs and livelihoods - like the "jobs stolen" by AI. Instead of drawing stuff, which required a lot of skill, taking a photo is much simpler (abd faster).
Yesterday, instead of having to paint stuff, you'd take a photo. Today, instead of taking a photo, you ask AI.
On the copyright front, the paralels are obvious: Taking a photo of a book is fair use. But photocopying a book isn't. The problem with AI is that it does some transformations to the original, so it's obfuscated inside the model. But the obfuscation can be undone, as AI often happily spits out certain inputs verbatim when asked. Take a photo of a page - okay. Photocopy the entire book? Not okay.
The situation is the same when we look at artwork instead of books. Taking a photo of an artwork in a museum is okay. Scanning an artwork (duplicating it verbatim) - isn't. Same for movies. A frame is probably gonna be okay. The entire movie - won't.
Going by the closest analogue, there is absolutely no justification to indiscriminately feed everything and anything into AI, for indiscriminately photocopying and vervatim copying the same material is clearly protected.
Many people here know that "AI" as a term is pure snake oil. You aren't actually talking about anything until you say what you think it means, or specific examples.
AI research goes back to the early 1950s. Being "against" all of that old research is kinda meaningless... So it's your job to clarify what you mean, or not, and other users will respond accordingly.
30 year IT professional here, whose company is starting to utilize AI. So far for my workflow it does not provide any benefit. With that said, I am working with my team to find somewhere in our business and technical processes to make things better. It just hasn't happened yet.
I am against it, but not dead set. What I am against are the insane things that are happening due to the over zealous investment into LLMs. The Three Mile Island #1 reactor is in the process of being brought back into operation by Microsoft, just to power an AI data center.
That is absolutely insane. TMI #1 is a 60 year old reactor design that was built over 50 years ago and that is at least two generations behind modern reactors. TMI #2 experienced a meltdown back in 1979, hence why it is not an option to bring back into operation. There are several documented issues with that reactor design (remember that #2 melted down? It was due to one of these issues.) that will require monitoring and processes in place to make sure the reactor stays safe. Monitoring that is not needed on more modern reactor designs.
Western Digital has announced that their entire production run of hard drives is completely sold out. Micron exited the consumer market in order to supply AI. So hard drive and memory prices are going to get even higher than what they are now. That means computers, phones, and any consumer device that uses memory or HDD storage will see massive price increases.
That's the issue I have with LLMs. If the role out was anywhere near sane, then my attitude would be different. Right now it just looks like massive amounts of resources and money are being thrown into a pit with a dim hope that there would be some kind of return. Instead of a deliberate and planned role out that is sustainable in the long term.
Yep i agree. If it was rolled out correctly it could possibly be a decent tool. Also i like the distiction here of AI and LLMs.
But as is its just a very expensive predictive engine that spits out copyright enfringement witj billion dollar datacenters. Its a novelty to me asva software dev but thats about it. It makes templates easier but for anything with real math and understanding...llms are very bad at those sort of things.
Are we talking about AI, LLMs or both?
My research was on AI but not llms.
AI represents a lot things people here dislike (large stock bubble companies, scraping, energy waste, etc)
Yup looks like AI
I'm pissed at how its able to license wash Foss code and peoples IP. But it seems there are no rules for American or Chinese tech companies because they refuse to legislate so ip should be completely removed. There is no way any of their IP should be respected.
Marketing account.
Edit: the archived page with the marketing description.
yes, and? I live off AI. I promise, I'm not working for chatgpt to make you use it. Amazing. Warning: Potato guy here.
I think you'll find that the gripe is more about it being implemented badly, and in a way that's harmful on multiple levels rather than the technology itself.
I agree, although for a counter-case, db0 has involvement in community-driven image generation (Horde, some communities they host and banners they use).
My view isn't as blanket as pro- or anti- "AI" (and I add quotes because I see that as a science-fiction term adapted into a marketing fantasy).
These technologies are powerful and there are legitimate, productive, pro-social uses of them (an obvious example is assisting in medical diagnosis). They are not inherently incompatible with social values, environmental progress, and the other problems associated with it - these technologies are tools powered by electricity and materials. But the way they are currently implemented, the economic concerns around marketing them, and the lack of broad education around them, are very very dangerous.
The way regular people misunderstand and misuse the technology has already resulted in direct deaths, all kinds of mismanagement and mass sacking of workers. Mistrusting technology is no new issue, see ELIZA in the '60s for example, but this is so much more accessible, more misrepresented due to marketing campaigns and social media, and more powerful. Furthermore, a huge proportion of people don't have the media literacy to instinctively doubt its output - and this was already a big enough issue with news media.
Processing currently is largely done using non-renewable energy sources in large centralized data centers (consuming water, creating noise pollution, etc.) which has serious global and local environment issues.
Most of our exposure to this technology as regular citizens is wasteful or actively harmful, such as propaganda/forgery, vapid industrialization of artistic aesthetics, unsolicited sexualization, scams and fraud attacks, automated bots, advertising and other 'slop', along with misguided attempts to eliminate workers from jobs which cannot be adequately delegated to these tools.
Oh yeah, Lemmy is overwhelmingly against AI in any capacity. I'm one of the few that finds it useful for a handful of things and generally defend that use. That being said, it's definitely important to understand that "hallucinations" are a thing (though not nearly as prevalent as those here would claim), it's a major problem for the arts industry at large, it's objectively making people dumber (great studies on students who over rely on it), and there are terrible climate implications.
It's just a tool, and like any other tool there are pros and cons, and it should be used responsibly. But yeah, Lemmy hates the shit out of anything AI
Most rational comment I've read. I'm going to have fun on Lemmy, I do appreciate you can be very unpopular and it doesn't silence you. Appreciate your comment too :)
I’ll explain it in away that would make sense to you. It’s a vibe.
Not against AI. I use it quite a lot. I also find amusement when it tells me things that are just wrong in a very sure way. So never fully trust AI. If you accept that then AI can be quite useful.