Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.

There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.

None. Someday, some company will build and sell a tool that actually does that, and it will be hella privacy invasive. Actually, it'll probably just be another invasive feature added to the Ray Ban perv glasses.

I found out that the $130 name brand of a particular item lasted about 10x longer than the $35 no-name equivalent. Someone who’s pretty thrifty helped point me toward the brand. If part of what you’re paying for is sturdier materials and build, it might be well worth the extra cost.

For most things though, it’s not worth the price as far as I can tell. Nobody really cares if you wear no-name clothing, or if they do, they’re an asshole you want to avoid anyway.

OK, so I replied to a couple threads, but I’ll put my direct answer here. You have to frame it in terms of something they ALREADY care about, not try get them to care about decentralization.

I’m a non-technical Fedi user. I didn’t give a damn about decentralization or FOSS when I first joined. I only vaguely understood what those things even meant. (I do understand and care now, but that came later after I kept seeing people talk about them in Fedi spaces.)

I joined Lemmy because I cared about getting away from the big tech billionaires, basically. I’m sick of AI and don’t want to use Reddit as long as it’s partially owned by Sam Altman. I wasn’t thinking in terms of joining the Fediverse, I was thinking in terms of “Reddit alternative that doesn’t directly support Sam Altman/OpenAI.” The “choose an instance” thing was a barrier, but that faded after I found out I could change it later and decided to just default to the most popular instance for now.

Your non-technical friends probably don’t care about decentralization (yet), but they might care about:

-Fuck AI companies and the big tech billionaires

-Avoiding psychologically manipulative algorithms that make social media addiction more likely

-More human interactions, fewer ads and bots.

etc.

This part is harder, but you’d need to find communities on here they’d be interested in. I joined when I was thinking about deGoogling, and the thriving tech communities on here appealed to me for that reason even though I wasn’t a techie. This might be easier with a different part of the Fediverse, depending on the person’s interests. Lots of creative people of all stripes are on Mastodon, for instance.

As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lots of “AI detector” tools for both images and text are AI, yes. People using them don’t realize the irony because everyone wants so badly to believe there’s a way to stop all the AI fakers.

edit: please, someone come up with an actually reliable way to detect AI art, something that’s not based on probabilities that will be skewed by real artists having their art used to train AI

When you talk to people IRL outside of work, some of them are pretty cool and helpful for no other reason than because they want to be.

OMG, I’m going to have so much fun at the job interview

Limiting medical knowledge from reliable information resources would be terrible. I’d say that limiting the spread of plausible-sounding medical misinformation generated by a fancy autosuggest tool is good, though.

AI chatbots don’t actually “know” anything. They just generate the most statistically probable appearance of a response to each prompt based on their training data. They don’t tell you when something wasn’t in their training data or when there’s limited research on a subject, just give you the most statistically probable response like always, which leads to a “hallucination” that sounds true but isn’t. A tool that’s trained on MCAT testbanks and “aces” the MCAT won’t necessarily give reliable medical advice to real patient questions. Even if you gave an AI chatbot all the accurate training data in the world, it would still hallucinate information occasionally, and it wouldn’t give you any indication of when it did so. If your doctor screws you over, they can lose their license, but if ChatGPT screws you over, there’s currently very little to stop OpenAI from screwing over more people. OpenAI can just stand behind the disclaimer that says ChatGPT can make mistakes, never mind that users are treating it like a licensed medical professional. There are AI tools that are useful in medical research, but they’re a VERY different kind of AI from the AI chatbots this bill is concerned with.

If you want medical knowledge, there are tons of medical journals, news sources, blogs, and podcasts from doctors/scientists who don’t hallucinate BS when they don’t know something.

Save anything you think you might need that’s attached to a work account, like emails/contacts. You might be locked out soon.

Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.

Yeah, I really don't want to contribute to the ongoing loss of accessibility. People with disabilities have enough crap to deal with. They don't need random extra barriers on websites they'd like to read. Otherwise, I'd probably use that font.

what

I’m older but have the same sense you have. I think your best bet is to choose a career to pursue based on the kind of contribution you’d like to make to the world.

Right now, AI is mostly changing the way some jobs are done. Other new tech will probably contribute to more of those kinds of changes. If you choose a career primarily based a skillset you like using, I think there’s a good chance you’ll end up very disappointed later when the way the jobs are done changes. But if you choose based on impact and then develop a range of skills (especially people skills!), you’re more likely to end up OK.

You mentioned that programming and urban development interested you. Urban development seems more directly about making a certain kind of impact, so in your shoes, I’d go that direction. That said, I don’t know why you’re interested in programming, and maybe there’s an impact you want to make in that field too.

I made the mistake of choosing a career based on a skillset. New technology has reduced jobs in my field, but the much larger problem is that I hate the way the jobs are done now. I could probably stay motivated and do the extra shit needed to survive in that career in the longer term if I still felt like it made a positive impact on society, but the field itself doesn’t make the world better. So I made a shift into a new industry, although I’m not expecting stability from this one either, and it’s not one that would make sense for you based on your post.

bonus: most of these (and some of the other suggestions on this thread, like SearXNG) protect your privacy better than Google does

another thing: I think most people answering here aren't thinking about how it would feel to have the statistic they're choosing over their own heads.

Great essay, made a few things click into place for me. I've been hearing people complain about the tech industry's abandonment of quality for decades, but never quite mentally connected that to the funding model.

Another thought: a lot of the other phenomena discussed here seem to be happening in virtually every industry, as far as I can tell.

Thanks for sharing!

Dang, maybe it's time for me to consider re-converting to Catholicism

I don’t agree. Yes, under our current rules, posting things in public means people can do things you might not like with your work. And technically you agreed to Instagram’s BS when you made an account. But for all practical purposes, the rules changed after the fact for most people.

Someone who made their Facebook account in 2009 couldn’t reasonably have guessed that their posts might be used to train misinformation machines that would be forced into everything in 2026. Most people could have conceived of strangers looking at their photos and maybe even photoshopping them, but could never have conceived of gen AI in its current form until it arrived. Bloggers could have conceived of people plagiarizing them or taking their words out of context, but not of having their own past work used to feed tools designed to replace most of their future work opportunities while also spreading hallucinations. And some people might have made very different choices if they’d known, myself included. No one gave informed consent for all that data to be used for LLM training, because no one could have imagined what they were consenting to. Even now that we can, we’re being held hostage in a sense. You can’t meaningfully opt out of AI scraping without giving up participation in society, not when leaked private data and copyrighted works end up being used for AI training too.

As for looking for alternatives, it’s true that you can leave Instagram and use a different search engine. But there are limits. Most people are stuck with whatever software their job or school forces on them, even if they use alternatives in their personal lives. I can’t just tell my boss I’ll no longer be using Google collaboration tools or Microsoft products. I can recommend alternatives, but I don’t have the power to make the entire organization switch, especially when said boss actually likes AI. And almost every other office job in my country will likely require using the same software.

You’re right that we should never have seen big tech as a benevolent public square. You’re right that from a legal perspective, this person has no grounds for complaining about Instagram. But from a human perspective, they do. I think it’s quite reasonable to be upset that anyone who ever posted anything publicly for other humans to appreciate has been effectively forced to contribute to gen AI training. I think it’s reasonable to be frustrated that many of the common collaboration tools most of us are forced to use (for now, at least) have had AI stuffed into them. In a better society, we’d be able to share things publicly with other humans while opting out of tech we find harmful.

It depends where you live. Whatsapp is the default way of communicating in a lot of countries, way more popular than text messages. You might be able to get individuals to contact you another way, but if the group chat is in WhatsApp, you’re probably not going to persuade the group to change.