cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/uncommon/p/1236478/a-lot-of-anti-ai-people-seem-very-illogical-in-their-concerns-and-how-they-address-it-an
Before I lay my opinion here, let me say that I know that most closed-source AI companies have terrible business ethics and some of the AI companies seem to be corrupt. But that doesn’t change my opinion about how people choose to deal with AI dangers that they have opinions about in illogical manner.
I understand that AI companies keep saying bullshit to bump their stocks price which feels dumb for the vast majority of tech power users.
I also understand that garbage journalism is increasingly trying to collect clicks from Anti-AI people even if they downright don’t provide facts but rather keep pushing conspiracy theories and uniformed opinion pieces.
Yet, I find it weird how people deal with their perceived AI dangers and concerns.
IMO, AI is a technology and you can’t ignore technologies like they were never invented. You deal with them and react to their developments accordingly.
You can basically just regulate it(by your country government) and adopt to it as a person.
For me a lot of Anti-AI people seem to act like conspiracy theorists in terms of how illogical they are.
I wish I could tell them that:
- Protesting in front of for profit AI companies is useless, pushing your government to regulate them is more productive;
- Not everything touched by AI is rotten and blessed by the devil. furthermore, not everyone should become Anti-AI as you are. If a open source project used AI it does not mean that it will collapse on itself and be full of bugs and security holes for example. Some open source projects use it and they seem to be doing great, other don’t and it’s ok. If a company decided that AI might fit a use case they need they won’t necessarily go bankrupt and fail because of this;
- Thinking about the creation process of any media piece rather than the quality of it seems also stupid. To give an example about how this harms the artists, take a look at David Revoy comics. He get accused of being AI artist Every time one of his comics get posted on social media(Reddit and other social websites) or chat spaces(despite being one of the rare artists who create open-source comics);
- Creating AI free spaces without a need does not benefit anyone. A good example to show my point is the memes community on Lemmy. The community banning AI doesn’t benefit anyone and doesn’t really have any point than labelling it as “AI free” space without any need.
Overall, I think it would be more logical for Anti-AI people to be risk oriented rather than technology oriented in their concerns and to understand how to really address them strategically and practically rather than waste their time and energy in acting on a theatre for no one.
This posts clanks.
In all seriousness, I wouldn’t hate AI as much if it wasn’t forced down my throat literally everywhere all the fucking time.
I started to dismiss AI apologists that merely urge us to differentiate between ethical use and abuse. They give examples of how AI is used in medicine or for climate research and while I don’t necessarily disagree the truth is that AI is a net negative for society by a long shot. About 99% of AI use is malicious at worst and wasteful at best.
The very few decent use cases of LLMs can be dismissed for the sake of simplicity for the argument that AI sucks and needs to be stopped.
At some point it’s more practical to burn down an entire infested crop field rather than trying to salvage the remaining 1% that are still good and waste precious time and resources. If we’re too gentle with regulations and bans we’ll never get rid of the mold. Just burn it all down and start from scratch. You’ll reach your goal of ethical AI use much sooner this way.
Fun fact: the AI used for actual science like medicine or climate research is not the dumb obnoxious LLMs being shoved in our faces. They are purpose designed to operate on domain specific data types rather than on generic natural language. AI idiots love to point out the utility of these uses, but always fail to mention how they are a different sort of technology that’s barely related to LLMs they seem to want everywhere.
You seem to be using AI and LLMs interchangeably as if they were synonymous terms but they’re not.
This right here is why I can’t take people complaining about AI seriously. 99% of the time, what they are complaining about is LLMs; but they’re too stupid to understand the difference, and too blinded by irrational hatred to learn.
Okay but have you considered: Fuck AI?
Right? If it was just used as a little tool like widgets or maybe similar to browsers like Google Chrome, I could get over it. But it wasn’t like that.
I agree with this sentiment. But to be fair, I do use AI tools for writing analysis in my novels as a human editor is far beyond my budget. I just don’t let it write for me.
you don’t know a damn thing about ai do you
lemmings have knee jerk idiotic takes about everything all the time - just look in the active posts
now you’ll call me an ai apologist and genocide supporter because that’s the other things lemmings do when you question their feelings
Take it easy buddy.
IMO, AI is a technology and you can’t ignore technologies like they were never invented. You deal with them and react to their developments accordingly.
This is a fallacy. There have been multiple times that humanity decided they didn’t want a new technology and it was effectively suppressed:
- Human Cloning
- Green Energy
Well let’s see, we have a new technology that:
- Is made possible only through massive amounts of plagiarism and IP law violation, the same IP law that corporations weaponized against regular people for decades but are okay with breaking it now because they think they will benefit from this breaking of IP law.
- Takes this massive body of stolen works and regurgitates average output from it.
- Allows idiots to generate massive amounts of outputs that everyone else has to sift through and figure out what to do with, overwhelming anyone unfortunate enough to be subjected to it and creating a maintenance nightmare.
- Makes it easier than ever to generate fake videos, voice clips, and scams.
- Is being used as an excuse by scumbag CEOs to lay people off and force the remaining employees to take on extra work.
- Is central to a new push for heavy global surveillance by the epstein class because of its ability to search through massive amounts of data, even if the results can often be incorrect.
Logically, there are a lot more downsides than upsides to this technology. Tools can bleat “it’s just a tool” all day long, but then so are torture devices.
I don’t underatand why vibe code cannot be formed with basic coding standards and commenting. If people are prompting otherwise, they’re doing it wrong. How does the code become shitty? I always carefully prompted and read it all and used comments and I’m an engineer but not a software dev. Do people just have it spit out crap and use it anyways?
Quit down voting him because you don’t agree with his opinion, THAT’S THE ENTIRE POINT OF THIS COMMUNITY.
On an unrelated note, I completely disagree with your clanker-ass post OP, which means it’s a great post. Excellent work, never speak to me again.
I might have to make a community called “downvote unpopular opinions” with the specific purpose of posting unpopular opinions so that they can be downvoted.
OP’s opinion is a popular one. Everybody just loves AI irl
Is down voting for reasons that aren’t popularity or agreement related allowed?
Assuming this is the same beep that removes artist credit from posts and rage baits, then yeah that’s fair. Though I honestly don’t know if it counts as rage baiting if it’s in a community specifically intended for posting things people don’t like.
But hey, I’m not a cop or a mod so ¯\(ツ)/¯
I’m a simple person, i see weak rhetoric built on shaky foundations of faulty premises…i downvote.
Possibly also get into an internet slap fight with a troll…you know…an honest days work.
You definitely picked the right community, fuckin slopper
Thank you bro. I know.
Creating AI free spaces without a need does not benefit anyone.
Why exactly do we have to bear all the low effort slop posts in the selfhosted community? There’s so much spam coming in. I’ve tried, just for shit and giggles, to install a few projects. And they all don’t work.
And then all our instances are being hammered with crawlers. And we have Anubis and worse, Cloudflare popping up everywhere, wasting a bit of my battery… Making the Fediverse dependent on a big, nasty, central company.
And our mods and admins are having a bad time, too. They need to delete all the fresh accounts promoting some nonfunctional bullshit. Or we’d be an advertising platform in no time. Reportedly in some places of the Fediverse, we already got most newly created accounts be advertising bots.
So… This seriously a good thing? Or are we maybe at the receiving end of something which just isn’t so nice for us?
But with the memes community: We have so many of those… I’m sure you’d be able to find one which allows AI images.
I don’t get what is your point/ counterpoint here.
My statement that you quoted specifically states opinion and mentions an example.
What you are talking about in your server is literally not something mentioned at all in my whole post.
Yet after you talked about your server you returned to talk about the memes community without offering anything there.
What is your point exactly?
Being negative towards AI is very logical from a Fediverse perspective. I gave some examples, why that is.
Generative AI produces artificial ‘art’ pretty much by definition. It’s a capitalist weapon that’s the end-goal of the algorithmic fuckery that companies like spotify, netflix etc promote, consistently producing increasingly inane beige crap so they can stop offering you a choice and start telling you what they want you to consume without the annoyance of having to use actual artists for actual art. Nothing truly original, dangerous or challenging can be produced via gen ai and all we’ll end up with is art that’s the equivalent of listening to an Imagine Dragons elevator music tribute band on endless repeat whilst data centre’s destroy what’s left of the natural world.
Fuck your opinion OP. Good job, upvoted.
It’s hard to push your government to regulate when the quickest way to a candidate’s ear is money. The elective process has been subverted by the very big businesses the government should be regulating here. Every few months we get to see some new Congressional hearing with someone in Tech spouting lies in front of the policymakers whose pockets they line.
Good point, but what is the alternative?
I’ll tell you on my minecraft server.
Joking aside, that’s the question people are going to have to ask as the government increasingly is co-opted and laws stop protecting people and instead protect business’ ability to step on people. You’re telling people not to take ineffectual means of resistance, but I can tell you from experience those reps who have been bought out might as well be brick walls when it comes to their constituents.
Because we’re not just witnessing companies pumping stock. Long standing institutions have been dismantled, rights curbed, and whole economies upended.
Lots of downvotes. Which means a large percentage of people agree with you.
Thinking about the creation process of any media piece rather than the quality of it seems also stupid.
the way any piece of media is created is directly responsible for its quality, it’s impossible to consider one without considering the other. people make things good by thinking about them, spending time on them, focusing on the details. ai cannot make art because the part where making art happens is exactly the part that ai eliminates
I am confused.
Your comment seems to be againest my opinion, yet your logic seems to support me.
If AI created a low quality art, then it’s a low quality art. It’s creation proccess didn’t matter in your opinion about the art piece.
ai cannot create high-quality art, for the reason I explained above. therefore if art is made with ai, it will be low-quality. if it is low-quality, I will have a bad opinion of it. therefore the way it’s made will have affected my opinion.
if you can’t follow that type of simple syllogism, I can understand how outsourcing your thinking would be appealing
AI art had won awards.
In theory, nothing is preventing AI art from being high or low quality.
Which simply voids the comment/Opinion I am replying to.
Which means both AI and human artists can create high quality or bad quality art.
So the question now, if you saw high quality piece of art that you suspect it’s created by AI, will you focus on the quality or the creation process?
Imagine actually thinking that technical competence is the only component of how people evaluate art
So the question now, if you saw high quality piece of art that you suspect it’s created by AI, will you focus on the quality or the creation process?
Both obviously. Like the scribblings of an average preschooler are more artistically relevant than any A"I" generated image for the simple fact that the preschooler is a sentient being with thoughts, feelings, some intentionality, trying to achieve some goal or do something in this actual physical world.
And it is an indictment of Western culture IMO that people are so fucking uneducated and uncurious that they don’t even have enough critical ability to develop a theory of art beyond technical competence.
It depends on what criteria you use for high quality. In the case of art, I would consider that creativity and novelty are important factors for high quality, and GenAI, by its nature, can’t be novel or creative. The fact that it has won awards tells more about the contests than about the art itself.
GenAI computationally generates stuff based on its training data and it cannot go beyond that training data in significant ways. For tasks that require this kind of “mediocrity” and predictability, like for example language translation, it’s competent. For tasks that require creativity or intuition, it sucks.
The sad thing is that is being pushed as a replacement for everything, which it’s clearly not.
I’m “anti-AI,” I guess, but don’t think, in general, it should be regulated. It’s very clear the regulations being pushed are to create a “moat” for the big AI companies. There should be anti-trust, financial, environmental, corruption, etc regulations (or better yet, get rid of the whole capitalism thing), but that’s not AI-specific.
Whenever I notice an open source project becoming much more buggy, and have looked at the commits, I see that they have obviously started using AI (either “co-authored by Claude,” or common AI indicators). Admittedly, this is biased sampling, but as a software engineer myself, I haven’t found a way to use AI to produce results that I’m satisfied with.
I, personally, think the creation process of media is very important. The techniques used for brush strokes, the cinematography tricks, and most importantly, the thoughts and emotions that goes into/produced the piece. Art is a conversation, and “AI” art is just a statistical amalgamation of whatever its been trained on. As a novelty, I guess AI “art” can be somewhat interesting.
I personally like AI-free spaces. IDK how practical it is to enforce, but I like knowing there was thought put behind stuff I see and think about. I’ve lately been gravitating to online spaces that seem to have less AI, so I’m not just scrolling past a bunch of slop or whatever.
To give an example about how this harms the artists, take a look at David Revoy comics. He get accused of being AI artist Every time one of his comics get posted on social media(Reddit and other social websites) or chat spaces(despite being one of the rare artists who create open-source comics)
Hold up. This is super illogical. Dave Revoys art was scrapped for training datasets, just like every other artist who had their work used without consent to produce cheap imitations of their work. You’re cherry picking pretty hard to focus on his harm while ignoring the harm caused to the entire field of those making a living from producing media. Artistic labor was stolen all to make a product which can reproduce then in mass.
We already called them starving artists. Who pays for a commission now when you can instead pay pennies to Google for a similar product. The harm of being falsely accused of using AI is dwarfed by the artists who had their livelihood decimated.
One factor is “AI” has become synonymous with OpenAI UIs or maybe Gemini apps, and similar corporate junk, to the general public.
…Along with their terrible repercussions. Altman is, literally, a sociopath.
You’re preaching to the choir here. I’ve been playing with LLMs since GPT-3 in 2020, GANs before that, as an intense hobby and for work, and the anti AI “hysteria” is depressing to me.
But if OpenAI all the average person has exposure to, I can’t really blame people for it. It does smell like shit. It does seem like everything it touches is the devil! It’s everywhere. Why wouldn’t they ban it from communities, then?
Same if David Revoy posts on Twitter. Social media is a toxic engagement farm, so of course it’s going to boost the anti AI accusations; if he doesn’t like it, unfortunately he shouldn’t post there.
And it’s not reasonable for people to learn a bunch of technical textbook stuff of how they work and what kind of resources they consume or what it was actually designed to do before all these grifters blew it up. Laymen were never supposed to in the first place.
EDIT:
I will say:
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…I expect better from the Fediverse. TBH, this place has a huge “bandwagoning” and extremism problem in general, exacerbated by people reposting stuff from corporate social media. Part of it is structural too, as Lemmy’s structure is killing small communities. Anti AI is just the latest manifestation.
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My big fear is that Big Tech is going to weaponize the AI Haters into banning local ML. This would be akin to the anti-social-media supporters banning the Fediverse and Reddit because “only Facebook and X are safe.”
That’s where the red line should be, IMO: don’t shoot down open source machine learning if you want any digital freedom in the future.
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I don’t think people are ready for the job losses that are coming due to AI. It’s going to be everyone, in every industry
Hey, fuck yo-
Oh, it’s in /c/unpopularopinion. sigh. upvote.
