Someone on bluesky reposted this image from user @yeetkunedo that I find describes (one aspect of) my disdain for AI.
Text reads: Generative Al is being marketed as a tool designed to reduce or eliminate the need for developed, cognitive skillsets. It uses the work of others to simulate human output, except that it lacks grasp of nuance, contains grievous errors, and ultimately serves the goal of human beings being neurologically weaker due to the promise of the machine being better equipped than the humans using it would ever exert the effort to be. The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with.
The people that use generative Al to write things for them have no interest in writing. The people that use generative Al to find factoids have no interest in actual facts. The people that use generative Al to socialize have no interest in actual socialization.
In every case, they’ve handed over the cognitive load of developing a necessary, creative human skillset to a machine that promises to ease the sweat equity cost of struggle. Using generative Al is like asking a machine to lift weights on your behalf and then calling yourself a bodybuilder when it’s done with the reps. You build nothing in terms of muscle, you are not stronger, you are not faster, you are not in better shape. You’re just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.
You’re just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.
Chef’s kiss on this last sentence. So eloquently put!
Damn that hits the nail on the head. Especially that analogy of watching a robot lift weights on your behalf then claiming gains. It’s causing brain atrophy.
the analogies used and the claims made are so dumb, they make me think that this is written by ai 🤣
It’s extremely wasteful. Inefficient to the extreme on both electricity and water. It’s being used by capitalists like a scythe. Reaping millions of jobs with no support or backup plan for its victims. Just a fuck you and a quip about bootstraps.
It’s cheapening all creative endeavors. Why pay a skilled artist when your shitbot can excrete some slop?
What’s not to hate?
It was also inefficient for a computer to play chess in 1980. Imagine using a hundred watts of energy and a machine that costed thousands of dollars and not being able to beat an average club player.
Now a phone will cream the world’s best in chess and even go
Give it twenty years to become good. It will certainly do more stuff with smaller more efficient models as it improves
If you want to argue in favor of your slop machine, you’re going to have to stop making false equivalences, or at least understand how its false. You can’t make ground on things that are just tangential.
A computer in 1980 was still a computer, not a chess machine. It did general purpose processing where it followed whatever you guided it to. Neural models don’t do that though; they’re each highly specialized and take a long time to train. And the issue isn’t with neural models in general.
The issue is neural models that are being purported to do things they functionally cannot, because it’s not how models work. Computing is complex, code is complex, adding new functionality that operates off of fixed inputs alone is hard. And now we’re supposed to buy that something that creates word relationship vector maps is supposed to create new?
For code generation, it’s the equivalent of copying and pasting from Stack Overflow with a find/replace, or just copying multiple projects together. It isn’t something new, it’s kitbashing at best, and that’s assuming it all works flawlessly.
With art, it’s taking away creation from people and jobs. I like that you ignored literally every point raised except for the one you could dance around with a tangent. But all these CEOs are like “no one likes creating art or music”. And no, THEY just don’t want to spend time creating themselves nor pay someone who does enjoy it. I love playing with 3D modeling and learning how to make the changes I want consistently, I like learning more about painting when texturing models and taking time to create intentional masks. I like taking time when I’m baking things to learn and create, otherwise I could just go buy a box mix of Duncan Hines and go for something that’s fine but not where I can make things when I take time to learn.
And I love learning guitar. I love feeling that slow growth of skill as I find I can play cleaner the more I do. And when I can close my eyes and strum a song, there’s a tremendous feeling from making this beautiful instrument sing like that.
Show me the chess machine that caused rolling brown outs and polluted the air and water of a whole city.
I’ll wait.
Servers have been eating up a significant portion of electricity for years before AI. It’s whether we get something useful out of it that matters
That’s the hangup isn’t it? It produces nothing of value. Stolen art. Bad code. Even more frustrating phone experiences. Oh and millions of lost jobs and ruined lives.
It’s the most american way possible that they could have set trillions of dollars on fire short of carpet bombing poor brown people somewhere.
As with almost all technology, AI tech is evolving into different architectures that aren’t wasteful at all. There are now powerful models we can run that don’t even require a GPU, which is where most of that power was needed.
The one wrong thing with your take is the lack of vision as to how technology changes and evolves over time. We had computers the size of rooms to run processes that our mobile phones can now run hundreds of times more efficiently and powerfully.
Your other points are valid, people don’t realize how AI will change the world. They don’t realize how soon people will stop thinking for themselves in a lot of ways. We already see how critical thinking drops with lots of AI usage, and big tech is only thinking of how to replace their staff with it and keep consumers engaged with it.
You are demonstrating in this comment that you don’t really understand the tech.
The “efficient” models already spent the water and energy to train, these models are inferior to the ones that need data centers because you are stuck with a bot trained in 2020-2022 forever.
They are less wasteful, but will become just as wasteful the second we want it to catch up again.
You are misunderstanding the tech. That’s not how this works, models are trained often, did you think this was done only a few years ago? The fact that you called them bots says everything.
You’re just hating to hate on something, without understanding the technology. The efficiency I’m referring to is the MoE architecture that only got popular within the last year. There are still new architectures being developed, not that you care about this topic but would prefer to blindly hate on what’s spewed from outdated and biased news sources.
Yeah nah
Same shit people said in 2022
In 3 more years you’ll be making the same excuses for the same shortcomings, because for you this isn’t about the tech, it’s about your ideology.
You make weird assumptions seemingly based on outdated ideas. I’ll let you be, perhaps you need some rest.
We hate it because it’s not what the marketing says it is. It’s a product that the rich are selling to remove the masses from the labor force, only to benefit the rich. It literally has no other productive use for society aside from this one thing.
You hate it because the media which is owned by the rich told you to hate it so that they can horde it themselves while you champion laws to prevent lower class from using and embracing it. AI haters are class traitors
- It’s theft to digital artisans, as AI-generated works tend to derive heavily without even due credit.
- It further discourages what’s called critical thinking.
- It’s putting even technically competent people out of work.
- It’s grift for and by techbros.
- It’s not theft
- PEBKAC problem.
- totally agree. This right here is what we should be worried about.
- yep, absolutely. But we need to be figuring out what to do when all the jobs go away.
- If vanilla ice takes 6 notes from the base line from a queen song it’s theft and costs $4mio. If AI copies whole chapters of books it’s all fine.
- No. PEBKAC is if it affects one person, or maybe a handful of people. If it affects whole sections of the population it’s systematic. It’s like saying “poverty is an user error because everyone could just choose to be rich”.
I don’t hate AI. AI didn’t do anything. The people who use it wrong are the ones I hate. You don’t sue the knife that stabbed you in court, it was the human behind it that was the problem.
While true to a degree, I think the fact is that AI is just much more complex than a knife, and clearly has perverse incentives, which cause people to use it “wrong” more often than not.
Sure, you can use a knife to cook just as you can use a knife to kill, but just as society encourages cooking and legally & morally discourages murder, then in the inverse, society encourages any shortcut that can get you to an end goal for the sake of profit, while not caring about personal growth, or the overall state of the world if everyone takes that same shortcut, and the AI technology is designed with the intent to be a shortcut rather than just a tool.
The reason people use AI in so many damaging ways is not just because it is possible for the tool to be used that way, and some people don’t care about others, it’s that the tool is made with the intention of offloading your cognitive burden, doing things for you, and creating what can be used as a final product.
It’s like if generative AI models for image generation could only fill in colors on line art, nothing more. The scope of the harm they could cause is very limited, because you’d always require line art of the final product, which would require human labor, and thus prevent a lot of slop content from people not even willing to do that, and it would be tailored as an assistance tool for artists, rather than an entire creation tool for anyone.
Contrast that with GenAI models that can generate entire images, or even videos, and they come with the explicit premise and design of creating the final content, with all line art, colors, shading, etc, with just a prompt. This directly encourages slop content, because to have it only do something like coloring in lines will require a much more complex setup to prevent it from simply creating the end product all at once on its own.
We can even see how the cultural shifts around AI happened in line with how UX changed for AI tools. The original design for OpenAI’s models was on “OpenAI Playground,” where you’d have this large box with a bunch of sliders you could tweak, and the model would just continue the previous sentence you typed if you didn’t word it like a conversation. It was designed to look like a tool, a research demo, and a mindless machine.
Then, they released ChatGPT, and made it look more like a chat, and almost immediately, people began to humanize it, treating it as its own entity, a sort of semi-conscious figure, because it was “chatting” with them in an interface similar to how they might text with a friend.
And now, ChatGPT’s homepage is presented as just a simple search box, and lo and behold, suddenly the marketing has shifted to using ChatGPT not as a companion, but as a research tool (e.g. “deep research”) and people have begun treating it more like a source of truth rather than just a thing talking to them.
And even in models where there is extreme complexity to how you could manipulate them, and the many use cases they could be used for, interfaces are made as sleek and minimalistic as possible, to hide away any ability you might have to influence the result with real, human creativity.
The tools might not be “evil” on their own, but when interfaces are designed the way they are, marketing speak is used how it is, and the profit motive incentivizes using them in the laziest way possible, bad outcomes are not just a side effect, they are a result by design.
It’s actually a useful tool… If it were not too often used for so very dystopian purposes.
But it’s not just AI. All services, systems, etc… So many are just money grabs, hate, opinion making or general manipulation… I have many things I hate more about “modern” society, than I do as to how LLMs are used.
I like the lemmy mindset far more than reddit and only on the AI topic people here are brainlessly focused on the tool instead of the people using the tool.
What are your views on gun control?
But whatabout YOUR thoughts on bladder control???!
Oh, I was genuinely curious — this very same argument can be used when talking about guns. This very same argument is used when talking about guns.
This wasn’t an attempt at a strawman, I’m merely drawing parallels. To say that this one topic is one where Lemmy focuses on the tool and not the people using them is false.
The better comparison I’ve seen is knives. Knives have multiple purposes, yet they can also be used quite dangerously. Guns on the other hand only really have one purpose. Since AI can at least be used for other more useful stuff (think protein folding), I would say they are closer to knives.
I think ego is an underestimated source for a lot of the anti-AI rage. It’s like a sort of culture-wide narcissism, IMO. We’ve spent millennia patting ourselves on the back about how special and unique human creativity is, and now a commodity graphics card can come up with better ideas than most people.
I am occasionally getting hired by vibe coders, to fix their AI’s mess. It’s not ego. AI is just not smart enough to replace my job, and many others.
My anti-AI rage is caused by the marketing, trying to convince people and investors that AI can do the work of humans with lower cost. Many companies, especially those developing software, fired a large percentage of the work force, and then they were trying to hire them back to fix the AI’s shit.
Another reason for my hate is its energy needs. There was another post, that was talking about an estimation on how much energy GPT-5 needs. It’s thought that it needs the power of 2 nuclear reactors. This much energy to barely be able to do any job.
People make a complete mess of DIY with powertools, that doesnt mean that the powertools are the problem.
The energy usage stuff is just silly, its dwarfed by streaming and video games, never mind actually energy intensive things like heating transport and meat rearing.
