I spent my life as a researcher in the ML space (now called AI) because I didn’t want people to have to deal with the same hardships I did. I saw the incredible strides we made in search and creative tooling. Nobody else will have to spend days rotoscoping a character. We will be able to find any picture just by searching for a blurry, low resolution one.

But it’s turning into a system that is used to funnel money from the most vulnerable population into the coffers of the wealthy. Instead of equalizing, it’s exacerbating inequality.

As I see it, a model trained on pubic data should be a public good. You can charge people at cost for inference and training, but unless you provided the data you’re obligated to give the weights back.

There’s a lot of hostility to AI and I think a lot of it is ill informed or ignorant. People are opposed to data centers, but they’re focused on the “AI” part, when in reality said data centers use less water than laws and serve more than just AI. They give you Nerflix and search results and YouTube. (Not to say it’s never an issue, just that there’s more nuance. Water constrained areas are not a good place for data centers.) I’m personally more opposed to data centers because it prevents me from owning my own hardware. I want to buy a thing and use it as I desire. I don’t want to pay a subscription fee to use my own computer.

There are a host of other objections, but I’ll leave it here for now. There are a lot of good reasons for hating LLMs, but mostly people jump on the bandwagon and hate them for stupid or inaccurate reasons, preventing us from having productive conversations.

everyone i work with that uses it to generate text has lost the ability or patience to read anything, even very light text written by a human.

at best they skim, but mostly they demand in-person conversations so they can be spoon fed the contents of the documentation.

gone are the days of “this meeting could’ve been an email” because they won’t (or can’t) read the email.

so yeah, i hate it but am required to use it for work. which makes me hate it more.

If we’re really, really lucky, the crash might take a few more industries with it, which could buy us a bit more time with regards to the climate collapse. If we’re rather unlucky, it’s just mindlessly accelerating suffering.

The small help it gives does not equal the vast evil done to the environment, communities, and actual makers and creators.

It has its uses. Generative stuff is ok **as long as ** you keep it to yourself. Its sometimes easier to ask llm for explanation on some obscure thing / to take a look at what information on system logs could mean. Its neat gatget. Kind of on par with some kind of useful tool but too unreliable to be of real use. And even if its useful to some, the cost and looming threats are not worth getting on the bandwagon (environment, if its successfull you wont be able to afford it, if its not capabilities will be reduced greatly if not completely and its not much use for you then). And most of all, if its as successfull as they want to sell to investors; have fun being unemployed and looking for job with other couple billion people as once the rich get theirs you wont get yours.

Other people who lose their minds because of it are the problem imo, though ones that do shouldnt have been on anykind of position that matters in the first place.

Just like the damage to our environment, AI is out of control and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I’ve used it to great effect on personal projects so, also like the environment, I’m part of the problem.

AI itself is not bad.

But the unregulated industry, breaking laws all the time, people in charge are literal super villains, mass surveillance, producing even more idiots that I have to depend and interact with, …

Take it away, it is not doing anything we want it to actually do. I only want robots/computers for one thing, and that is to do chores around the house. It doesn’t do that, so I am out.

Broadly speaking, fuck AI

Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.

Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

“Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.

I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.

Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

I feel like it’s making people dumber. I keep getting screenshots of Google ai summary from people as if that’s the answer and they’re confident in it. I keep finding those are not correct. For me, ai has created more work because I can no longer trust my colleagues statements.

Currently, it’s a skill amplifier. You can’t code for shit and rely solely on it, it will give a shit product. You know how the whole codebase works and use it as needed? It will speed you up drastically while maintaining the quality you want.

Agents are a nightmare. They introduce a variable completely uncontrollable by you to your project, which will make you lose track of how everything works, resulting in a shit product.

I see its future on more optimized models that can run well locally on lower hardware, not those that use entire datacenters to power it. The big AI companies still do not generate profit and are doomed to fail in long term, but AI itself isn’t going away.

There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.

Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.

Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.

We’ve been using AI for decades and while generative AI is widely despised and mostly deserving of that despite, lumping all AI together while calling out the harms is doing a disservice to a lot of useful AI techniques and tools.