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

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.

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?

Because we’re mostly not bots.

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)

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?

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 marketing lies for making the lines go up?

Game communities I used to love browsing have become inundated with low-effort, vibe-coded crapware. It’s now 20 times harder to find anything good. Hardware is 20 times more expensive. My insurance company is using AI to deny me medical help. A skill I spent 25 years developing suddenly is full of morons who think they know as much as I do because they can have Claude vomit out something resembling software.

There is A LOT to hate.

I really don’t understand how people can be so blinded by hopium that they cannot see the blindingly obvious consequences of allowing this insane tech to co-opt our planet, at the behest of the most powerful and evil people to ever live.

There may be use cases for this tech but it not worth it to sacrifice the entirety of our natural world to be ground up and processed to feed this behemoth. It is purely wishful thinking that this will solve everything and they are willing to pay ANYTHING to try it. They are gambling with the planet and it’s like 2% chance they win, otherwise life dies.

We were told 15 years ago, that we had a decade to change course to prevent CATASTROPHIC heating of the planet and degradation of the environment. Instead of doing really anything about that, we have exponentially increased out energy needs and fuel/water usage. Now with ai, we are doing it all over again in the span of a few years. Please explain with mathematics, how we get out of this trap of thermodynamics and not all die from heat? How does ai save us? Does it get us closer in any way? Or is it so that the elites can goon a little harder and try to fill the void inside them with yet more money?

Ask yourself, what value does it add?

There’s a variety of reasons, but the biggest is that Lemmy as a whole is FAR more class-conscious than the average populace, or even that average internet user, and generative AI has been developed by the wealthy and powerful, as a tool to oppress everyone else.

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