I want to let people know why I’m strictly against using AI in everything I do without sounding like an ‘AI vegan’, especially in front of those who are genuinely ready to listen and follow the same.
Any sources I try to find to cite regarding my viewpoint are either mild enough to be considered AI generated themselves or filled with extremist views of the author. I want to explain the situation in an objective manner that is simple to understand and also alarming enough for them to take action.
Maybe trying to be objective is the wrong choice here? After all, it might sound preachy to those who are ignorant to the dangers of AI. Instead, it could be better to stay subjective in hopes to trigger self-reflection.
Here are some arguments I would use for my own personal ‘defense’:
- I like to do the work by myself because the challenge of doing it by my own is part of the fun, especially when I finally get that ‘Eureka!’ moment after especially tough ones. When I use AI, it just feels halfhearted because I just handed it to someone else, which doesn’t sit right with me.
- when I work without AI, I tend to stumble over things that aren’t really relevant to what I’m doing, but are still fun to learn about and might be helpful sometimes else. With AI, I’m way too focused on the end result to even notice that stuff, which makes the work feel even more annoying.
- when I decide to give up or realize I can’t be arsed with it, I usually seek out communities or professionals, because that way it’s either done professionally or I get a better sense of community, but overall feel like I’m supporting someone. With AI, I don’t get that feeling, but rather I only feel either inferior for not coming up with a result as fast as the AI does or frustrated because it either spews out bullshit or doesn’t get the point I’m aiming for.
This is a brilliant idea! I was wondering whether talking subjectively would be detrimental to my point, but having it explained this way is so much better. I think the key point here is to not berate the other person for using AI in between this explanation.
It goes a bit further than just not berating. People often get defensive when you criticise something they like, which makes it harder to argue due to the other side suddenly treating the discussion as a fight. However by saying “it’s not for me” in a rather roundabout way you shift the focus away from “is it good/bad” and more about whether the other can empathise with your reasoning, and in turn reflect your view onto themselves and maybe realize that they didn’t notice something about their usage and feelings about AI that you already did.
it might sound preachy to those who are ignorant
Am I reading it wrong, or are you saying that people who have a different point of view are ignorant?
Ah, sorry, I didn’t mean ignorant in a general way, but to the critiques on AI/dangers of AI OP referred to in their post. I’ll edit my comment.
That makes sense, thanks for clarification.
If you want to explain your reasons ‘in good faith’ you should be honest, and not adopt other people’s reasons to argue the position you’ve already assumed.
It’s possible their intent is to solicit more concise, well-packaged versions of their existing position(s) that others have spent time honing.
Yeah the wording on this is wrong. The closest adjacent (honest) question would be “how can I appear to be arguing in good faith when I have a predetermined position on this technology?”.
EDIT:
I don’t even like GenAI myself and that’s how this comes off.
If you’re looking for reasons: (1) sustainability / ecology, (2) market concentration, (3) intellectual theft, (4) mediocre output, (5) lack of guardrails, (6) vendor lock-in, (7) appears to drive some people insane, (8) drives down the quality of the Internet overall, (9) de-skills the people that use it, (10) produces probabilistic outputs and yet is used in applications that require deterministic outputs…I could go on for a while.
A discussion in good faith means treating the person you are speaking to with respect. It means not having ulterior motives. If you are having the discussion with the explicit purpose of changing their minds or, in your words, “alarming them to take action” then that is by default a bad faith discussion.
If you want to discuss with a pro-AI person in good faith, you HAVE to be open to changing your own mind. That is the whole point of a good faith discussion - but rather, you already believe you are correct, and are wanting to enter these discussions with objective ammunition to defeat somebody.
How do you actually discuss in good faith? You ask for their opinions and are open to them, then you share your own in a respectful manner. You aren’t trying to ‘win’ you are just trying to understand and in turn, help others to understand your own POV.
Chiming in here:
Most of the arguments against ai - the most common ones being plagiarism, the ecological impact - are not things people making the arguments give a flying fuck about in any other area.
Having issues with the material the model is trained on isn’t an issue with ai - it’s an issue with unethical training practices, copyright law, capitalism. These are all valid complaints, by the way, but they have nothing to do with the underlying technology. Merely with the way it’s been developed.
For the ecological side of things, sure, ai uses a lot of power. Lots of data enters. So does the internet. Do you use that? So does the stock market. Do you use that? So do cars. Do you drive?
I’ve never heard anyone say “we need less data centers” until ai came along. What, all the other data centers are totally fine but the ones being used for ai are evil? If you have an issue with the drastically increased power consumption for ai you should be able to argue a stance that is inclusive of all data centers - assuming it’s something you give a fuck about. Which you don’t.
If a model, once trained, is being used entirely locally on someone’s personal pc - do you have an issue with the ecological footprint of that? The power has been used. The model is trained.
It’s absolutely valid to have an issue with the increased power consumption used to train ai models and everything else but these are all issues with HOW and not the ontological arguments against the tech that people think they are.
It doesn’t make any of these criticisms invalid, but if you refuse to understand the nuance at work then you aren’t arguing in good faith.
If you enslave children to build a house then the issue isn’t that youre building a house, and it doesn’t mean houses are evil, the issue is that YOURE ENSLAVING CHILDREN.
Like any complicated topic there’s nuance to it and anyone that refuses to engage with that and instead relies on dogmatic thinking isn’t being intellectually honest.
I’ve never heard anyone say “we need less data centers” until ai came along. What, all the other data centers are totally fine but the ones being used for ai are evil? If you have an issue with the drastically increased power consumption for ai you should be able to argue a stance that is inclusive of all data centers - assuming it’s something you give a fuck about. Which you don’t.
AI data centers take up substantially more power than regular ones. Nobody was talking about spinning up nuclear reactors or buying out the next several years of turbine manufacturing for non-AI datacenters. Hell, Microsoft gave money to a fusion startup to build a reactor, they’ve already broken ground, but it’s far from proven that they can actually make net power with fusion. They actually think they can supply power by 2028. This is delusion driven by an impossible goal of reaching AGI with current models.
Your whole post is missing out on the difference in scale involved. GPU power consumption isn’t comparable to standard web servers at all.
I really don’t think they do take up a lot more power but more how quickly they’re being built. At least in the US, power usage has been effectively flat, with datacenters and other growing power needs balanced with increasing efficiency…… but a lot of people want a lot of new datacenters at once
And the growth of power usage for ai data centers isn’t really all that high except that we’re structured for zero power growth. This really seems like the other side of the same issue we’ve been having with renewables: no infrastructure investment. We’ve been building effectively zero transmission lines for a couple decades. That equally means we have trouble bringing renewables online and we have trouble powering a data center that pops up. There’s every chance we already have plenty of power for the new datacenters but can’t get it there
You can think that, but you’d be wrong. A ChatGPT search uses 10x the power of a regular Google search.
Google has quietly removed their net-zero pledge from their website:
This stuff isn’t being built with renewables.
For the ecological side of things, sure, ai uses a lot of power. Lots of data enters. So does the internet. Do you use that? So does the stock market. Do you use that? So do cars. Do you drive?
There are many, many differences between AI data centers and ones that don’t have to run $500k GPU clusters. They require a lot less power, a lot less space, and a lot less cooling.
Also you’re implying here that your debate opponents are being intellectually dishonest while using the same weasely arguments that people that argue in bad faith constantly employ.
The fact that a gou data center uses more power than one that does not does not matter at all.
You’re completely missing the point.
The sum total of power usage for all non ai data centers is an ecological issue whether ai data centers use more, the same, or less power.
All data centers have an ecological footprint, all use shitloads of power, and it doesn’t matter if one kind is worse than any other kind.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out in my comment.
If I take a shit in a canoe that’s a problem. Not an existential one but a problem. If I dump another ten pounds of shit in the canoe it doesn’t mean the first pound of shit goes away.
If I dump two pounds of shit in the canoe then the first pound of shit is still in the canoe. The first pound of shit doesn’t stop being an issue because now there are two more.
You can have an issue with shit in the canoe on principle, which is fine. Then it’s all problematic.
But if you’re fine with having one pound of shit in the canoe, and find with three, but not okay with eleven, then the issue isn’t shit in the canoe, it’s the amount of shit in the canoe. They’re distinct issues.
But it’s NOT intellectually honest to be okay with having one pound of shit in the canoe and not being okay with the other two. You can’t point at the two pounds of shit and say: this abominable! While ignoring the other pound of shit. Because it’s all shit.
But it’s NOT intellectually honest to be okay with having one pound of shit in the canoe and not being okay with the other two. You can’t point at the two pounds of shit and say: this abominable! While ignoring the other pound of shit. Because it’s all shit.
Sure, because that’s a terrible analogy.
Gen AI data centers don’t just require more power and space, they require so much more power and space that they are driving up energy costs in the surrounding area and the data centers are becoming near impossible to build.
People didn’t randomly become “anti-data center”. Many of them are watching their energy bills go up. I’m watching as they talk about building new coal plants to power “gigawatt” data centers.
And it’s all so you can have more fucking chat bots.
When a family in the global south uses coal to cook their food, they release CO2. When a billionaire flies around the continent on a private jet, they also release CO2.
Do you consider the two to be equivalent in need or output?
“It’s a machine made to bullshit. It sounds confident and it’s right enough of the time that it tricks people into not questioning when it is completely wrong and has just wholly made something up to appease the querent.”
I know people like this lol
I’m just honest about it… “I don’t find it useful enough and do find it too harmful for the environment and society to use it”
And you then spend longer verifying the information its given you than you would have spent just looking it up to begin with.
In a way aren’t you asking “how can I be an AI vegan, without sounding like an AI vegan”?
It’s OK to be an AI vegan if that’s what you want. :)
Stop trying to make AI Vegan work. It’s never going to stick. AFAIK this term is less than a week old and smuggly expecting everyone to have already assimilated it is bad enough, but it’s a shit descriptor that is trading in right leaning hatred of ‘woke’ and vegans are just a scape goat to you.
Explain how AI haters or doubters cross over with Veganism at all as a comparison?
Explain how AI haters or doubters cross over with Veganism at all as a comparison?
They’re both taking a moral stance regarding their consumption despite large swathes of society considering these choices to be morally neutral or even good. I’ve been vegan for almost a decade and dislike AI, and while I don’t think being anti-AI is quite as ostracizing as being vegan, the comparison definitely seems reasonable to me. The behaviour of rabid meat eaters and fervent AI supporters are also quite similar.
But there are other arguments against ai besides consumption of resources. The front facing LLMs are just the pitch. The police state is becoming more oppressive using AI tracking and identification. The military using AI to remote control drones and weapon systems is downright distopian. It feels like they’re trying to flatten the arguments against AI into only an environmental issue, making it easier to dismiss especially among the population that doesn’t give a shit about the environment.
The way the term is being used here though is to refer to vegans as preachy and annoying; it’s not a pro-vegan term. It’s just not a nice term to use as it ostracizes and belittles people fighting for rights.
Like veganism, abstaining from AI is arguably better for the environment.
That’s not just true of those two things though. I’m looking for a tie that binds them together while excluding other terms. If it’s an analogy what is the analogy?
This is the first time I’ve encountered the term and I understood it immediately.
Congratulations? Does that make it universal? Dude was being a prick when someone didn’t know what it meant.
For me this was the first time hearing it. And it made immediate perfect sense what OP meant. A pretty good analogy!
The fuck is an AI vegan? There isn’t meat and AI isn’t food.
Your bed isn’t really made for a king or queen.
The fuck it’s not.
I get the impression his bed was made for twins.
Oh great the bots are hallucinating.
They’re saying you’re taking things too literally and not thinking about the potential meaning of the sentence.
There is a belief that a lot of Vegans basically preach to others and look down on people who still consume meat. Their use of AI Vegan was meant to utilize that background and apply it to AI, so they don’t want to come off as someone preaching or being a snob about their issues with AI.
It’s called a euphemism. We all know that a vegan is someone who does not use animal products (e.g. meat, eggs, dairy, leather, etc). By using AI in front of the term vegan, OP intimates that they do not use AI products.
I suspect you’re smart enough to know this, but for some reason you’re being willfully obtuse.
~Then again, maybe not. 🤷♂️~
It seems to mean people who don’t consume AI content not use AI tools.
My hypothesis is it’s a term coined by pro-AI people to make AI-skeptics sound bad. Vegans are one of the most hated groups of people, so associating people who don’t use AI with them is a huge win for pro-ai forces.
Side note: do-gooder derogation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation ) is one of the saddest moves you can pull. If you find yourself lashing out at someone because they’re doing something good (eg: biking instead of driving, abstaining from meat) please reevaluate. Sit with your feelings if you have to.
Ah ok. You might be new to language? There’s this thing called analogy
Oh hey, language is supposed make ideas easier to transmit. The term is fucking clunky, using AI is not akin to diet.
Communicate clearer.
OP came up with the analogy. I understood quite well and caught up with it easily. Well done OP!
Baseless slur made up by corporate-pushed mainstream media to normalize giving time and money to the AI companies that paid for their airtime
deleted by creator
Very simple.
It’s imprecise, and for your work, you’d like to be sure the work product you’re producing is top quality.
All current AIs are based on stolen content.
You mean commercial LLMs.
AI as a term includes machine learning systems that go back decades.
If nothing is taken from anyone and no profit is made from a model trained on publicly accessible data - can you elaborate on how that constitutes theft?
Actually - if 100% copy righted content is used to train a model, which is released for free and never monetized - is that theft?
People downloading stuff for personal use vs making money off of it are not the same at all. We don’t tend to condone people selling bootleg DVDs, either.
Publicly accessible does not mean it is free of copyright. Yes, copyright law in it’s current form sucks and is in dire need to get reformed, preferably close to the original duration (14+14 years). But as the law currently stands, those LLM parrots are based on illegally acquired data.
Publically accessible does not mean publically reusable. You can find a lot of classic songs on YouTube and in libraries. You can’t edit them into your Hollywood movie without paying royalties.
Showing them to an AI for them to repeat the melody with 90% similarity is not a free cheat to get around that.
This is in part why the GPL and other licenses exist. Linus didn’t just put up Linux and say “Do whatever!” He explicitly said “You MAY copy and modify this work, but it must keep this license, this ownership, and you may NOT sell the transformed work”. That is a critical part of many free licenses, to ensure people don’t abuse them.
If nothing is taken from anyone and no profit is made from a model trained on publicly accessible data - can you elaborate on how that constitutes theft?
Actually - if 100% copy righted content is used to train a model, which is released for free and never monetized - is that theft?
Cool. So you’re in support of developing a model that financially compensates all of the rights holders used for its training data then?
Sort this one with the girlfriend’s “would you still love me if I was a worm” philosophy. It’s so far outside of reality it’s not worth considering.
Yes, I am. But i don’t expect them to do that.
Good!
I don’t either. But they probably should. And that’s a reasonable position to take.
– and are being used by rich sociopaths to replace the very people that made that content.
Thats on top of the large pile of shit.
What are some good reasons why AI is bad?
There are legitimate reasons people worry about AI. Here are some of the strongest, clearly framed concerns:
1. Bias and unfair decisions
AI systems often learn from biased data and can unintentionally discriminate—against certain races, genders, ages, or socioeconomic groups—in hiring, lending, housing, policing, and more.
2. Lack of transparency
Many AI models act as “black boxes,” making decisions that are hard to explain. This creates problems when the stakes are high (medical diagnosis, legal decisions, etc.).
3. Privacy risks
AI can analyze huge amounts of personal data, track behavior, or identify people through facial recognition—often without explicit consent.
4. Job displacement
Automation threatens certain categories of work, particularly routine or repetitive jobs. Without proper planning, this can increase inequality and unemployment.
5. Misinformation and deepfakes
AI makes it easier to create convincing fake audio, video, or text. This can undermine trust in media, fuel propaganda, and destabilize democratic processes.
6. Weaponization
AI can be used in autonomous weapons, cyberattacks, targeted surveillance, or manipulation—raising serious security and ethical issues.
7. Overreliance and loss of human skills
As AI does more tasks, people may become too dependent, reducing critical thinking, creativity, or expertise in certain fields.
8. Concentration of power
Powerful AI tools tend to be controlled by a few big companies or governments, potentially leading to monopolies, inequality, and reduced individual autonomy.
9. Alignment and control risks
Advanced AI systems may behave in unexpected or harmful ways if their goals aren’t perfectly aligned with human values—even without malicious intent.
10. Environmental impact
Training large AI models consumes significant energy and resources, contributing to carbon emissions.
If you want, I can also provide reasons why AI is good, help you construct an argument for a debate, or analyze specific risks more deeply.
Were you looking for this kind of reply? If you can’t express why you have an opinion maybe your opinion is not well founded in the first place. (Not saying it’s wrong, just that it might not be justified/objective.)
Please, for the love of god, tell me you didn’t write that post with AI, because it really looks like that was written with AI.
Except the first phrase and last paragraph, it was AI. Honestly, it feels like OP is taunting us with such a vague question. We don’t even know why they dislike AI.
I’m not an AI lover. It has its place and it’s a genuine step forward. Less than what most proponents think it’s worth, more than what detractors do.
I only use it myself for documentation on the framework I program in, and it’s reasonably good for that, letting me extract more info quicker than reading through it. Otherwise haven’t used it much.
My question was genuine. I haven’t been an avid user of generative AI when it was first released and decided against using it at all lately. I tried to use it in niche projects and was completely unreliable. Its tone of speech is bland and the way it acts as a friend feels disturbing to me. Plus the environmental destruction it is causing on such a large scale is honestly depressing to me.
All that being said, it is not easy for me to communicate these points clearly to someone the way I have experienced it. It’s like the case for informing people about privacy; casual users aren’t inherently aware of the consequences of using this tool and consider it a godsend. It will be difficult for them to convince that the tool they cherish to use so much is not that great after all, thus I am asking here what the beat approach should be.
I haven’t been an avid user of generative AI when it was first released and decided against using it at all lately. I tried to use it in niche projects and was completely unreliable. Its tone of speech is bland and the way it acts as a friend feels disturbing to me. Plus the environmental destruction it is causing on such a large scale is honestly depressing to me.
Isn’t that exactly the answer you are looking for?
The “environmental destruction” angle is likely to cause trouble because it’s objectively debatable, and often presented in overblown or deceptive ways.
“Good catch! I did make that up. I haven’t been able to parse your framework documentation yet”
You beat me to it. To make it less obvious, I ask the AI to be concise, and I manually replace the emdashes with hyphens.
I haven’t tested it, but I saw an article a little while back that you can add “don’t use emdashes” to ChatGPT’s custom instructions and it’ll leave them out from the beginning.
It’s kind of ridiculous that a perfectly ordinary punctuation mark has been given such stigma, but whatever, it’s an easy fix.
just say that you don’t want to use it. why are you trying to figure out good reasons that somebody else came up with to not use something you have to elect to use in the first place? just say “I don’t want to use genAI”. you don’t need to explain yourself any further than that.
That’s perfectly fine if anyone just doesn’t want to use it, but he’s “strictly against” it and he’s searching for reasons. Pretty irrational IMO. It doesn’t surprise me, it’s the general trend regarding almost any subject nowadays, and you can’t blame AI for that.
and also alarming enough for them to take action.
Is this really an intent to explain in good faith? Sounds like you’re trying to manipulate their opinion and actions rather than simply explaining yourself.
If someone was to tell me that they simply don’t want to use generative AI, that they prefer to do writing or drawing by hand and don’t want suggestions about how to use various AI tools for it, then I just shrug and say “okay, suit yourself.”
I want my creations to be precisely what I intend to create. Generative Ai makes it easier to make something at the expense of building skills and seeing their results
I just mentioned to a friend of mine why I don’t use AI. My hatred towards AI strives from people making it seem sentient, the companies business model, and of course, privacy.
First off, to clear any misconception, AI is not a sentient being, it does not know how to critical think, and it’s incapable of creating thoughts outside from the data it’s trained on. Technically speaking, a LLM is a lossy compression model, which means it takes what is effectively petabytes of information and compresses it down to a sheer 40Gb. When it gets uncompressed it doesnt uncompress the entire petabytes of information it uncompresses the response that it was trained from.
There are several issues I can think of that makes the LLM do poorly at it’s job. remember LLM’s are trained exclusively on the internet, as large as the internet is, it doesn’t have everything, your codebase of a skiplist implementation is probably not going to be the same from on the internet. Assuming you have a logic error in your skiplist implementation, and you ask chatGPT “whats the issue with my codebase” it will notice the code you provided isn’t what it was trained on and will actively try to fix it digging you into a deeper rabbit hole then when you began the implementation.
On the other hand, if you ask chatGPT to derive a truth table given the following sum of minterms, it will not ever be correct unless heavily documented (IE: truth table of an adder/subtractor). This is the simplest example I could give where these LLMs cannot critical think, cannot recognize pattrrns, and only regurgitate the information it has been trained on. It will try to produce a solution but it will always fail.
This leads me to my first point why I refuse to use LLMs, it unintentionally fabricates a lot of the information and treat it as if it’s true. When I started using chatGPT to fix my codebases or to do this problem, it induced a lot of doubt in my knowledge and intelligence that I gathered these past years in college.
The second reason why I don’t like LLMs are the business models of these companies. To reiterate, these tech billionaires make this bubble of delusions and fearmongering to get their userbase to stay. Titles like “chatGPT-5 is terrifying” or “openAI has fired 70,000 employees over AI improvements” they can do this because people see the title, reinvesting more money into the company and because employees heads are up these tech giants asses will of course work with openAI. It is a fucking money making loophole for these giants because of how many employees are fucking far up their employers asses. If I end up getting a job at openAI and accept it, I want my family to put me into a god damn psych ward, that’s how much I frown on these unethical practices.
I often joke about this to people who don’t believe this to be the case, but is becoming more and more a valid point to this fucked up mess: if AI companies say they’ve fired X amount of employees for “AI improvements” why has this not been adopted by defense companies/contractors or other professions in industry. Its a rhetorical question, but it makes them conclude on a better trajectory than “the reason X amount of employees were fired was because of AI improvement”
If you were wondering if chatGPT can do a sum of minterms here’s one I derived on the fly, I’ve attached screenshots of the conversation we had…
This really is a problem with expectations and hype though. And it will probably be a problem with cost as well.
I think that LLMs are really cool. It’s way faster and more concise than traditional search engines at answering most questions nowadays. This is partly because search engines have degraded in the last 10 years, but LLMs blow them out of the water in my opinion.
And beyond that, I think you can generate some pretty cool things with it to use as a template. I’m not a programmer but I’m making a quite massive and relatively complicated application. That wouldn’t be possible without an LLM. Sure I still have to check every line and clean up a ton of code, and of course I realize that this is all going to have to go to a substantial code review and cleanup by real programmers if I’m ever going to ship it, but the thing I’m making is genuinely already better (in terms of performance and functionality) than a lot of what’s on the market. That has to count for something.
Despite all that, I think we’re in the same kind of bubble now as we were in the early 2000s, except bigger. The oversell of AI comes from CEOs claiming (and to the best of my judgement they appear to be actually believing) that LLMs somehow magically will transcend into AGI if they’re given enough compute. I think part of that stems from the massive (and unexpected) improvements that happened from GPT-2 to GPT-3.
And lots of smart people (like Linus Tordvals for example) point out that really, when you think about it, what is intelligence other than a glorified auto-correct? Our brains essentially function as lossy compression. So I think for some people it is incredibly alluring to believe that if we just throw more chips on the fire a true consciousness will arise. And so, we’re investing all of our extra money and our pension funds into this thing.
And the irony is that I and millions of others can therefore use LLMs at a steep discount. So lots of people are quickly getting accustomed to LLMs thinking that they’re always going to be free or cheap, whereas it’s paid for by the bubble money and it’s not super likely that it will get much more efficient in the near future.
“There are emerging studies about AI induced psychosis[1], and there is a possibility to go psychotic even if one doesn’t have pre-conditions to become one. I would like to be cautious with the danger, like with cigaretes or Thalidomide. You never know how it might be dangerous.”
