I noticed almost everybody here agrees that all AI is bad, and anything produced by AI is slop. and refuse to use any software made in part or in whole with AI or help of AI? Please mention your background and usage of AI with your answer.
I also posted it here.
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well i sometimes use ai (sorry i hope i will stop using it sometime soon) but because nobody wants a machine to do everything if it did everything humans wont have a productive way to spend their time (not accurate since i am not 100 percent against ai)
and also it justifies big tech control (nothing in this post was written by AI)
and a lot more
The lemmy userbase consists of a lot of people who work or dabble in tech, a larger % than most other forums and social media. That means more people here have directly used AI for their day-to-day technical tasks/jobs, not your typical social media user who just uses AI to generate memes or do their school essay. So they have first hand experience of how inaccuracies with AI have larger consequences than 6 fingers on a hand.
They claim to automate the work so we have more time to focus on imporant things. Has this ever happened? We got computers, productivity went up, and we still work 40 hours and are poorer than previous generations. In a time of climate crises, they take our dwindling resources so people can create stupid images and videos. I want to see creativity being shared.
Besides, everything AI learned is stolen from people who put the work in. I want people to visit my website, that I worked hard on. I don’t want some LLM telling you what it “learned” from my work. I know search engines purposely make their results crap so the only way to get information is to use an LLM nowadays and I admit I use LLMs for that reason. I can’t just google what I need anymore most of the time.
Has this ever happened?
Doing laundry used to be among the most time-consuming household tasks. Washing machine at the time probably offered women more liberty than the pill did.
Most workplaces pay for your time anyway - not output.
And then what happened? Double income couples have to squeeze in time for laundry in the weekend.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say. You pro washboard and bucket? Because no person who has actually ever used one is.
They’re saying the productivity gains didn’t go to the workers. Every benefit you got at home was yet another excuse for C-suits to not pass profit gains onto the workers, because, “you’re life is getting easier anyways, you greedy slob!”.
Man, it’s like my boomer parents.
“We have all this technology now, maybe we can improve our lives a bit”
“Oh, you’re saying we should go back to the dark ages!?”
Can’t argue with these people.
My feeling is im not sure much has increased quality of life since the 70’s. The only thing I can point to is maybe the microwave.
The microwave was invented in the 1940s.
yeah just was not in many kitchens until the 80’s
Yea, just pointing out how tech hasn’t really advanced much for normies except for computers and better but not new tech … at least until capitalists all decided enshittification was the way to a golden future…
And now these greedy fucks are trying to take away massive advancements from the past so they can put it into a subscription model…
People do not hate MBAs nearly enough.
yeah and I love computers but more and more I question if they have had much of a actual improvement on quality of life for the average person. Im not even sure if nock on effects matter that much. I mean it did allow us to map the human genome and do a lot on protein folding and drugs but im not sure we would not have been about the same level along even without them.
Decades it pro, working on central stuff.
The current ai aka LLM is based on an illegal foundation, has high training and running resource cost and produces results that everyone in their field has to at least rework. This is while there are comparatively lightweight solutions that produce good results.
Not even mentioning the environmental and financial impact.
So yeah it’s a tool and can be trained and used for useful things but it’s sold as the solution for everything (especially them milking money) by the tech bros which it is absolutely not, leaving a wake of destruction and massive brain drain.
The worst part is that superficially it looks the part and higher ups in the business ate the most gullible people.
The Fediverse is generally-to-strongly anti-corporate. 98% of LLM AI is owned/controlled by corporations.
I will say, one benefit of the LLMs getting better at hacking are all the new jailbreaks for the Sony PS4 and PS5. Sony said it’d be impossible to support backwards compatibility for PS3 games on the PS5, but that’s been proved wrong and there are now PS3 emulators being ported over for jailbroken PS5.
It doesn’t seem to have much use. Supposedly we’re all going to have AI do our work for us and we’ll have more free time, which is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever seen.
No, we won’t have more free time, we will be just “more productive”. If the company you work at finds a way to make you more efficient or more productive, they wont give you more free time. Instead, they will make you work same hours and expect more from you.
Companies are not trying to make us more efficient, they’re going to make their profit margin larger. This is a situation posed by Cory Doctrow in The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Imagine a hospital with 10 radiologists reviewing scans for cancer. Sam Altman sells the hospital an AI radiologist analysts that costs the same as 5 human salaries and can do the job of all 10 of them. Of course the AI is not foolproof, so hospital wants the AI analysis to be reviewed by humans, and they figure only 3 of the radiologists are needed for this. From the hospital’s POV, they have a net savings of 2 radiologist salaries. This is the dream of companies that are implementing AI.
The 3 remaining radiologists are considered “reverse centaurs” since they’re turned into results-checking drones. They will continue to be overloaded with cases and less intimately involved in the patient analysis, which will turn into general rubber stamping the AI output, rather than spending the time actually analyzing.
This is just a starting point, but the insane amount of pollution and constant disregard for a better way of doing things was the first reason I dropped it. Even if it was a good, reliable product, the way it’s produced is egregious and wasteful: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA
go local
I can’t speak for the community, however in 2022 when ChatGPT was in development, lots of us were excited about it. When ChatGPT came out, and the image AIs came out, I tried them and was pretty impressed at first. However as I learned more about them and time went on, I learned to not like them, and avoid them. This is what happened:
- I realized that ChatGPT would make subtle mistakes that were impossible to catch if you didn’t have expert knowledge
- I wasted a lot of time using AI trying to get it to give me right answers
- People at work used ChatGPT to make subtle mistakes which negatively affected me
- I learned about how writers and artists were having their work stolen and put into these large models without their consent
- I learned about the environmental costs
- Computer hardware started getting stupidly expensive :(
- I learned how using AI can make you rely on it, and you lose critical thinking skills.
- I have seen people in the real world defer to “AI” as an authority on a subject.
- I learned how many of the AI tech bros sincerely believe their own hype and think that Advanced General Intelligence is going to develop out of the same tech as llm and pose a threat to humanity and/or save humanity
- Companies have started using AI to make customer service worse
- Small businesses turned to AI to make awful flyers and menues which make my experience in the world worse
- Bosses use AI as a way to fire people and or control the workforce better
- The surveillance state is using AI to destroy privacy
So that’s why i don’t like it and try not to use it any more.
That is a reasonable list I 100% agree with you. Many of them are part of my experience. Especially as using AI as an authority. You can’t even convince them otherwise.
However, I’ve got a question for you: have you noticed any good or correct usage of AI.
Recently I’ve been looking up ethically trained models and there do seem to be a handful out there. I haven’t tried them yet.
I’m pretty ok with the ones that help subtitlers do their work but that’s about it that I’ve found so far.
First point is quite important. In some cases it’s merely nuisance, but in the extreme it could cause a fatal error. Reminds me of a parable:
An astronomer keeps a subscription to a newspaper, and uses it to keep informed about politics, world issues, etc. One day the astronomer is excited to see that their paper is running an article on space: planets and stars and black holes and shit. Excited, they flip over to the article to see what they have to say and how they’re educating people. They’re shocked at the contents. They had expected that the paper would dumb things down with metaphor or layman’s terms but it’s worse than that - key parts of the article are factually, demonstrably, and completely wrong. Maybe not “Sun revolves around the Earth” stuff, but easily verifiable things and common misconceptions.
Realizing how badly the paper does within a field they know intimately, the astronomer cancels their subscription. If the newspaper reports about special interests are so wrong, they clearly aren’t a good source of truth for the things that matter.
AI provides the output of that newspaper dialed up to a million percent by volume.
Your first bullet point is why I encourage people if they are going to use it to use it for something they know really well or will see the effects where mistakes are not going to be that bad with consequences (video games). I don’t think anyone should use it for things they don’t know till they get a good idea of how it performs on things they do.
No, it’s not about knowing the llm that would ever make it OK to use on a subject you do not know…
The entire point is you have to know when it is spitting out jibberish.
What I meant is then they can see its limited and be aware that you have to evaluate its response. Its pretty much the same as searching the web was but we all know many people just found something and took it as gospel. Its kinda the same thing.
Yea, and if they’re not a master in a field, they cannot validate its output.
Just because an LLM didn’t output garbage for one query does not magically make it less likely to output garbage on a different topic. That’s one of many reasons people in the know really hate this. You cannot just trust the output ever, which begs the question, “why do these rich goons all trust it enough to replace jobs?”.
Because they’re idiots that cannot validate any part of it.
You don’t need a masters anymore than you do to read a paper in the field. I mean you can say the exact same thing about web searches. You can use logic and reason combined with some double checking to validate its output. I personally have instructions to provide references for all answers it gives so that I can double check and get a better idea about the thing im looking into. It is disturbing though how much of its output is hidden behind its learning and it can’t give you a reference.
Tell me you’ve never designed and built something truly complicated without telling me.
Some things don’t show up before you see the crash unless you know what you’re doing intimately in many fields.
yeah but that is not what people are using llms for.
Same reason that Luddites hated the textile factories. Its a tool but its the kind of tool that distances us from our work in a way that undermines our collective humanity.
It’s rarely the work that people strive deep meaning from that gets automated away or replaced with much more efficient tools. Does a combine harvester distance us from scything? I guess so but does anyone want to go back?
Anyone that was against combine harvesters because they would lead to massive deforestation and environmental pollution would have been on the money, though. Modern agribusiness is a nightmare.
Even with those problems, making more food inherently has more value than “I can spend less time on office emails”.
Seems that anything has more value than spending time on office emails. If anything can be automated away, that should be the first thing to go.
Oh damn now that you mention it I guess people that live near data centers do deserve to live in an environment full of pollution for that.
No almost nobody would want to, and it probably wouldn’t be possible to do without starving a lot people. There still is an awful mostly hidden cost for the conveniences we receive from new technologies.
That messaging is why the luddites are considered silly.
The Luddites are why we got Saturdays off…
If you think they’re silly it’s because you fell for old ass propaganda.
They wanted to make sure as worker output went up, wages went up.
They were fine with looms, they just wanted paid accordingly.
When owners wouldn’t negotiate, they burnt the fucking looms down.
Literally ba 1:1 analogy to today’s data centers and AI.
Wake the fuck up already and learn history
Oh yeah the angry old man again rambling and totally not comprehending the words he is reading.
I think most people in your life probably stop listening half way through your senten—
Guess I’ll see you on your next account
lol.
That is a completely different message than what the top comment in this thread is saying though. Somehow the capitalists have been able to paint a picture of luddites that is more like the top comment, i.e. something vague about distancing us from our work instead of receiving fair wages. And that message actually is silly.
Sounds the same to me. It is through our labor that purpose is found. Capitalists would have you believe that the luddites were entirely frivolous, as it was owners of capital who profited from the destruction of their labor.
I find them interesting because as a movement in retrospect it has been branded that way, as being silly and frivolous. I personally am not so sure they weren’t making a good point with their actions. Probably though, in 30 years, reactions towards the current automation of certain jobs will be seen similarly as frivolity. Those people won’t have a good idea what exactly it is people were trying to protect. In the same sense that people now have trouble understanding what the Luddites were losing to react the way they did. Nobody thinks about the labor behind the clothes they wear now, because of how ugly that reality is.
Probably though, in 30 years, reactions towards the current automation of certain jobs will be seen similarly as frivolity.
Honestly, it already looks ridiculous.
To be clear, I think the automation of jobs is, at least in the immediate, a serious problem, with real consequences. The problem is real. The issue is that objecting to the technology itself is idiotic. That’s not a fight you’ll win. The technology exists. People are going to use it. And in the long run we’ll all be better off for it.
There’s serious conversations to be had about how we use AI, and how we deal with the consequences of its use, and especially how we manage the transition. But you can’t have those conversations with someone who insists that AI is the devil and that we need to stop it, and who gets mad at you when you suggest otherwise.
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I’m against AI for two main reasons: it’s a giant plagiarism machine built on the theft of the labor of millions, and it has disastrous environmental consequences in the form of rapid, giant data center deployment. (No, I am not impressed by whining about how all the internet uses data centers, build out and energy consumption remained modest until about 4 years ago). These are fundamental problems with the current implementation of the technology and I see no realistic way to change that, so I don’t see myself ever using it even if I did find it useful, which I don’t.
The only thing I’ve ever cared to have an “AI” do for me is answer incredibly niche questions that would take ages to figure out on my own, or require tracking down really obscure books, etc. But the nature of LLMs being ‘guess the next statistically most likely word’ means that it’s never going to be good for that. I can read on my own, I can write my own emails, and since I’m not a programmer I’m not stupid enough to fuck with code I don’t understand to do something a solution probably already exists for, if all the unmaintained vibe coded garbage hasn’t drowned it out. I don’t want a machine deciding what search results to show me, so I don’t use it as a search engine. I guess if I did more work with data it could maybe format it for me when I needed to make changes, but that would require trusting it not to randomly change parts of the data (which I don’t). So yeah, useless for me.
I respect you honest answer and fully understand your concerns. You have your own genuine reasons not to use AI. How ever as things evolve and, since I could use company provided AI for almost two years now, I can tell you LLMs now are not simply a tool to predict the next word. They got so much more advanced than that. I am not advocating for AI companies. I would want to run one locally. Just trying to keep you updated on the subject because you seem to have a niche interest in it. But I guess it won’t be enough reason to start using it.
Locally hosted models are less egregious than corporate cloud models that actively harvest and monitor your data.
Corporate AI feeds the surveillance machine, that in turn is used to suppress dissent.
That and GenAI output in anything creative or market-based gets very same-y and gives the end user an impression of the creator not caring to put in effort. Perceived low effort = spam.
Lastly, genAI gets pushed into everything. It’s a matter of simple oversaturation and it gets exhausting to have it seemingly everywhere. Not having the option to turn it off becomes, well, a turnoff. 🤷🏻
If you make slop you have to prove that it’s not slop, not the other way around
It’s not nearly everyone. Possibly not even the majority. It’s just the ones who do tend to be very vocal about it.
My understanding is that it stems from the opposition against big tech in general. The reasons for being against AI are not dissimilar to the reasons why they oppose Facebook, Google, Twitter and such.
The loudest minority. That is a phenomenon that amazes me. For example here, you can just say you find AI useful or that you like and your post will be in negative down votes. So it gives a feeling that it is what the majority are thinking. Hopefully there is IRL. :D
Are you actually reading the comments or are you just being obnoxious and wilfully ignorant?
almost everybody here agrees that all AI is bad
If your eyes look only in black and white, then you believe that all people were actually only black and white as well. Even when they are colorful, you don’t recognize that.
I’d say that it’s mostly people worried about job loss from technological change.
I don’t have a problem with generative AI, but a number of the people who don’t like it are very vocal. I’m not going to run around making a big deal out of my position on each post the way some of them do.
