I’ve been on Lemmy for about 2 weeks now, and I’ve noticed a trend:
The VAST majority of posts that mention AI in any manner are some dig or criticism or some other negative commentary, and the rare ones that have anything positive to say about it almost always have negative whatever-Lemmy’s-version-of-karma-is.
I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.
I actually think the technology is interesting but it’s being used by evil people to do evil things.
If it was trained on ethically source data and that just used to generate smeary anime girls and shit it would be a lot less objectionable.
This is not a direct answer to your question.
I’ve heard 2 really great takes about LLMs & GenAI, that have stayed with me - though I don’t have the best wording for them anymore.
-
As AI is trained on previously created data, it fundamentally looks backwards. Human creativity creates new things and inherently looks to the future.
-
AI is trained on the vast corpus of human works and synthesizes that info into a median response. You will never get exciting and bold insights, just bland and inoffensive responses.
-
Because it’s built on the creative collective works of everything that’s ever been put on the Internet with no attribution or compensation for people who’s authored works were stolen. Maybe that’s why?
I don’t see why that’s an issue. Creatives won’t even have to make anything creative anymore, AI can just be used to make things the they would have. That will save them so much time, enough that they can go do cheap labor for 18 hours of the day, like a good slave.
Using ai to make it solve complex problems, analyse things and summarise objective outcomes is fantastic.
Unfortunately making it slop out is easier and TikTok-brained people are keen on making it poop slop. That’s why the consumer level ai makes me bit grossed out as well.
Its a tool. Great tool. Like photoshop and excel. But it can be also abused to steal, manipulate and destroy what have been built so far by humanity in seconds.
And the second one just makes it even worse this invention is made by Americans so “it has to be profitable” cancer all over it. That’s why it sucks now. Its capitalism driven not humanity. Even open ai changed to for profit “for undisclosed reasons”. The thing doesn’t work now unless you throw lots of bucks on it.
Its going to be better and way more useful at some point. But not anytime near until America’s upcoming economical crash. American capitalism is one of the worst thing happened to human kind and until its controlled nothing ever coming out from country is going to be beneficial to human kind. That’s why it sucks big time now.
When people say “AI,” I assume they are talking about the large corporate Neural Networks that get branded as “AI” for marketing purposes.
I hate these because they’re a grift. They’re funded and maintained by a handful of ultra-rich idiots who saw no value in learning social sciences nor the humanities, and thus have failed to learn from history. The people pushing for mass adoption believe in a variety of unscientific pseudo-religious conspiracy beliefs about AI gods and devils leading humanity.
I hate that the cost of these cults are being foisted onto the rest of society by way of government and corporate contracts.
I hate that mass media is rapidly degrading in quality in order to justify the purchase of said contracts.
I hate that the people making important decisions that affect my life and well-being — doctors, the people who develop my software, my government representatives, news reporters, lawyers — are not just willing, but actively excited at the prospect of turning off their brains and letting black boxes controlled by opaque corporations make the decisions for them.
I hate that despite 3+ years of hype and 10+ years of public access, the only people who have demonstrably benefitted from it are Nvidia, scammers, and people who don’t want to use their brain.
But mostly, and this is the clincher, I hate that we are literally destroying the earth to run these machines. Even if every other problem disappeared overnight, this should be an argument killer. We only get one home, and we are setting fire to it. I don’t care if it improves the lives of millions of humans, because it is hastening the death of hundreds of billions of lifeforms.
I hate that people ignore this or conveniently forget it or are just apathetic about it. I hate that this argument just carries little to no weight for most fence-sitters. I hate that people treat feeling emotional about the destruction of our only home as being irrational. I hate ecoterrorism being excused by marketing babble and shitty faux-skeptical wishy-washiness.
I mean, take your pick. This is a place where a lot of us…
- are leftists who disagree with extractive, anti-human economic systems
- left Reddit because they insisted on controlling how people could connect to each others ideas
- like the open collaboration of open source, which is getting wrecked by AI
- like open access communities like wikipedia, which are also getting undermined by AI
- dislike copyright law, which is being selectively ignored here because the people violating it are rich (on paper)
- are marginalized people, who tend to be disproportionately effected by AI decision-making
The penultimate one makes no sense though. Also, most of the items in your list are not really about AI, they are about capitalism.
And who owns the giant public AIs that are doing all the damage? Capitalists.
You won’t find nearly as many people in here shitting on running a local version of some small model in your own house to take care of your own needs. Obviously somebody’s going to complain because somebody will complain about fucking everything…
But all of the capture and devour capitalism is at the heart of every public AI right now.
Of course. But then the issue is not AI is it? It’s like always capitalism. Like the first ever AI research and development happened in the USSR. They hoped that by striving to create intelligence/consciousness we would learn more about ourselves and what it even means to be intelligent and conscious.
AI is not evil, it’s not bad or destroying the world. Capitalism is destroying the world.
What they are calling AI is not evil in itself. But it is being used as a weapon against the environment, artists, progress, education, and internet discourse. That is where the hate comes from.
I mean, what they are calling AI quite literally isn’t AI
That is why I used those words ;)
Lol
Why are people pretending all those issue appeared with AI? You think the environment would be less fucked without AI? Artists? Education?
It’s like people complaining about smartphones making kids depressed. Like growing up during an apocalypse wouldn’t be the main cause? Perhaps?
These are the results of the long sharp road of capitalism. With or without “AI” we would be fucked.
Literally yes to all of your stupid questions. Any others?
nobody is saying these attacks are solely caused by AI. but shoehorning it into every place of work , every classroom, every TV set and youtube video is making things worse.
Nobody was running dozens of fucking diesel and natural gas generators to keep their minecraft server up, you fucking potato.
Ai:
- ruins the planet by polution
- is used to influence political discourse, erase facts and history.
- is a tool brought to you by people who at the very least don’t want the masses to be free (look up palantir owner)
- is being pushed with the end goals to have a tool of mass surveillance and control.
- makes people abandon their ability to think critically (or in general really)
- is used to violate copyrights by it’s very design. If you think artists have been undervalued so far just you wait. They don’t want creative people anymore.
Take your pick, it’s war and you’re in it.
ruins the planet by polution
AI on its own doesn’t ruin the planet or cause pollution, if corporations are ruining the planet to train AI models the issue is corporations not AI
deleted by creator
Platforms themselves are self-selecting. I’m speaking for myself here. I am on Lemmy because I dislike the power that big tech has gotten to control content, policy, news, and global perceptions. As such, I self host and use federated technologies where possible. The vast majority of AI tools are controlled by the same centrally controlled big tech companies that I’m here to avoid. There are self-hosted AI tools or there, but basically every AI tool was trained using scraped data, and, for instance, my Searx-ng instance was flooded by so many bots that I had to make it harder to use for myself just to keep the bots out. My blog? Constantly scraped, killing my bandwidth. A lot of foss projects used to have bug bounty programs and accepted code from any contributor to wander in, but are now closing off due to AI slop code contributions. So, the type of person you’ll find here probably hates AI if they’re like me. Also, I work in tech and have to bite my tongue every time a co-worker “helpfully” sends me a Copilot Slop answer to a question when I was asking for a judgment call or an opinion.
Because I and some associates spend years traveling, collecting , and documenting some very specific information on an uncommon family of animals, their care in aquaria, and ecological curiosities. We had a website which hosted all the documented info, a small but active community of people with this niche interest. A few minor ads and affiliate links kept the site running, and allowed our few naturalists to go to more places and document rarer species. Now LLMs have stolen all our content and google shows all of our information in its AI searches as if it owns it and never links the information to the community that lovingly curated it. Our website had to be taken offline forever because all our traffic is just scrapers.
So please, tell me how AI stealing everything we worked hard on for years and selling it to you is considered a good thing?
i don’t particularly enjoy having to constantly question what’s real and what isn’t anymore.
i don’t particularly enjoy having humanity’s well of information undermined by disinformation factories.
i don’t particularly enjoy every space i had to express myself creatively and experience others expressing themselves creatively being drowned out in mass-produced incoherent slop that i cannot possibly connect with.
i don’t particularly enjoy that climate change has now been rapidly accelerated for the sake of a tool that’s completely unreliable at doing anything it’s marketed to do and has done irreversible damage to the very fabric of our society.
do you?
Yeah, that’s capitalism for ya.
We need a revolution.
Because we’re mostly not bots.
Not yet, but I’m sure AI bros will find a way to mass register bots here. I already reported lots of people who had a distinct AI writing style. Over time it will be harder to distinguish those from real users 😓
Someone else can give a more comprehensive answer, but here are a couple bullet points:
- Models trained by violating copyright
- AI data centers using tons of water and power, driving up costs for local residents
- AI data center noise pollution
- “Slop” results (uncanny valley pictures, incorrect answers given confidently, etc)
- Companies using AI as an excuse for anti-worker actions (notably massive layoffs)
- Concern over how much of the largest companies valuation is tied to AI hype (because it affects everyone’s retirement accounts)
-
Trained by the same thing humans are.
-
Video games are worse and get worse as they run 100% constant and are constantly evolving, not short bursts or getting more efficient over time like AI
-
Localized
-
More accurate than humans -especially humans on social media
-
AI is replacing shitty jobs; just like machines did in the industrial revolution
Trained by the same thing humans are.
This is at best, misleading and completely wrong at worst. An LLM is completely different from a human mind. It’s a mathmatical model that finds the average of any given input against a massive dataset.
Video games are worse and get worse as they run 100% constant and are constantly evolving, not short bursts or getting more efficient over time like AI.
This is a completely made up statistic dreamed up from the thought of “people use computers at home, so why is that different than a datacenter?” The thing is, those datacenters dont run in short bursts, they run constantly, as long as there is money to be made. And while the hardware does get more efficient as new developments are made, that improvement doesn’t offset the resource usage, it just improves density of compute.
Localized
Absolutely unhinged opinion that could only come from someone incapable of empathy. There is a worldwide cost of living crisis happening right now. Anything that makes life worse for a regular person, while offering almost no benefit to anyone outside the top of this boondoggle is to be hated.
More accurate than humans -especially humans on social media
Another completely made up statistic based on nothing. Yes, misinformation on social media is a problem in modern society, but those people are not being treated as subject matter experts. AI is often being treated that way, despite working from flawed data that distills assumption into fact by way of some reddit comment or retracted paper.
AI is replacing shitty jobs; just like machines did in the industrial revolution
What’s the weather like under that rock where you live? AI is not replacing the backbreaking labor of harvesting vegetables, it’s not clearing sewer pipes, or pumping septic tanks. It’s being used to (poorly) replace artists, engineers, and writers. The work that people actually want to do.
Gonna ignore the sad attempts at rebuttal by someone that appears to be out of touch with reality (shunning social interactions?).
Where I live? -It’s replacing depressed and lonely artists and writers. -That shit often isn’t healthy or a good way to get human interaction / attention. Engineer? -Can be high stress with lives on the line, it will also be a waste of time / schooling for many. (You’re also arguing for their accuracy here). Enter productivity sooner: retire sooner. The other jobs you mention are high pay that grunt and migrant workers can profit from.
People that compare their wealth against a billionaire don’t realize that the billionaire is inspired and the wealth benefits all in capitalism. Neither pure capitalism nor communism succeed. China isn’t pure communism.
I really just hope you’re trolling at this point.
Wow, assuming you’re being genuine, I’m pretty surprised. It’s rare to encounter a true AI cultist.
It’s no surprise when a come-back from you is only an attempt to insult rather than add anything of substance.
You’re definitely a troll, and a bad one at that. You literally insulted them in the comment they replied to, in a much more childish and shitty way. And no matter if you’re a troll or not, you need professional help, you have some major issues.
If they ain’t a troll they are one of the weirdest humans I’ve encountered
Yeah, because calling someone a cultist is very professional and mature. Get bent and stop gaslighting people.
I think you’re lost here. Maybe you skipped reading the post?
This isn’t a debate over whether AI is useful or not. It’s not a conversation about whether people are right/wrong if they dislike AI. The point of this thread is to help OP understand why some people have strong, negative feelings about AI.
Delusional
Thanks for being one of the few other sane and intelligent people here.
-
Im an AI engineer and even I hate AI. When I say AI, I mean LLMs specifically. It definitely has its use cases. LLMs are pretty good at parsing unstructured data, and generating boilerplate code, but that’s about it. Every other use case is a combination of buzzword bingo and slop generation.
AI, uses a tremendous amount of energy, produces an ungodly amount of heat and noise, and pollutes potable drinking water. The overreliance on LLMs for everything is lazy at best and sloppy at worst. LLMs are being applied in scenarios where I could have built a deep learning model that would fit comfortably on a laptop from 2018, and doing a worse job at predictions at that.
Ignoring the fact that they were trained on a ton of copyrighted data, which was labeled for dollars a day by humans in poorer countries, and regularly gets basic information wrong. Yeah, it fucking sucks. And the only people who stand to benefit from it are about a half dozen tech companies who are taking contracts with the US government to track citizens both online and IRL.
I can’t answer for anyone else but I hate it because it makes us stupider, it degrades human knowledge as a whole, it contributes to climate change and is helping to dissolve culture by isolating us into fewer and fewer shared spaces
Techbros ruin everything.
I have no problem with AI use for science, health, and uplifting humanity like figuring out optimal ways of doing things, minimizing waste.
Currently, it’s just another disingenuous ploy to make rich people even richer forcing it on everyone at an expense of climate and human livelihoods.
And finally, are consumer AI really “intelligent” like its touted or is it
marketinglies for making the lines go up?I don’t necessarily think that’s even techbros, it’s CEOs/management ruining it. They’re trying to bleed water from a stone, and they’re killing the planet to do it without giving a snigle fuck.
that is who is usually referred to as tech bros imo. It’s the elon musks, the people that are in charge and seem to have a superficial understanding of the technology (more than what tou can say about most CEOs unfortunately) but are actually only interested in money. The people that actually innovate and work on the technologies are often smarter than that.
Unfortunately someone needs to pay the bills and those people are passionate enough about the technology that they end up working for the tech bros and ultimately contribute to the problems







