I’'m curious about the strong negative feelings towards AI and LLMs. While I don’t defend them, I see their usefulness, especially in coding. Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers? Or is it the theft of training material without attribution? I want to understand why this topic evokes such emotion and why discussions often focus on negativity rather than control, safety, or advancements.
AI is theft in the first place. None of the current engines have gotten their training data legally. The are based on pirated books and scraped content taken from websites that explicitely forbid use of their data for training LLMs.
And all that to create mediocre parrots with dictionaries that are wrong half the time, and often enough give dangerous, even lethal advice, all while wasting power and computational resources.
- Useless fake spam content.
- Posting AI slop ruins the “social” part of social media. You’re not reading real human thoughts anymore, just statistically plausible words.
- Same with machine-generated “art”. What’s the point?
- AI companies are leeches; they steal work for the purpose of undercutting the original creators with derivative content.
- Vibe coders produce utter garbage that nobody, especially not themselves understands, and somehow are smug about it.
- A lot of AI stuff is a useless waste of resources.
Most of the hate is justified IMO, but a couple weeks ago I died on the hill arguing that an LLM can be useful as a code documentation search engine. Once the train started, even a reply that thought software libraries contain books got upvotes.
I can only speak as an artist.
Because it’s entire functionality is based on theft. Companies are stealing the works of ppl and profiting off of it with no payment to the artists who’s works its platform is based on.
You often hear the argument that all artists borrow from others but if I created an anime that is blantantly copying the style of studio Ghibili I’d rightly be sued. On top of that AI is copying so obviously it recreates the watermarks from the original artists.
Fuck AI
Dunning-Kruger effect.
Lots of people now think they can be developpers because they did a shitty half working game using vibe coding.
Would you trust a surgeon that rely on ChatGPT ? So why sould you trust LLM to develop programs ? You know that airplane, nuclear power plants, and a LOT of critical infrastructure rely on programs, right ?
It’s a massive new disruptive technology and people are scared of what changes it will bring. AI companies are putting out tons of propaganda both claiming AI can do anything and fear mongering that AI is going to surpass and subjugate us to back up that same narrative.
Also, there is so much focus on democratizing content creation, which is at best a very mixed bag, and little attention is given to collaborative uses (which I think is where AI shines) because it’s so much harder to demonstrate, and it demands critical thinking skills and underlying knowledge.
In short, everything AI is hyped as is a lie, and that’s all most people see. When you’re poking around with it, you’re most likely to just ask it to do something for you: write a paper, create a picture, whatever, and the results won’t impress anyone actually good at those things, and impress the fuck out of people who don’t know any better.
This simultaneously reinforces two things to two different groups: AI is utter garbage and AI is smarter than half the people you know and is going to take all the jobs.
There is no AI.
What’s sold as an expert is actually a delusional graduate.
Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers? Or is it the theft of training material without attribution?
Both.
My skepticism is because it’s kind of trash for general use. I see great promise in specialized A.I. Stuff like Deepfold or astronomy situations where the telescope data is coming in hot and it would take years for humans to go through it all.
But I don’t think it should be in everything. Google shouldn’t be sticking LLM summaries at the top. It hallucinates so I need to check the veracity anyway. In medicine, it can help double-check but it can’t be the doctor. It’s just not there yet and might never get there. Progress has kind of stalled.
So, I don’t “hate” any technology. I hate when people misapply it. To me, it’s (at best) beta software and should not be in production anywhere important. If you want to use it for summarizing Scooby Doo episodes, fine. But it shouldn’t be part of anything we rely on yet.
Also, it should never be used for art. I don’t care if you need to make a logo for a company and A.I. spits out whatever. But real art is about humans expressing something. We don’t value cave paintings because they’re perfect. We value them because someone thousands of years ago made it.
So, that’s something I hate about it. People think it can “democratize” art. Art is already democratized. I have a child’s drawing on my fridge that means more to me than anything at any museum. The beauty of some things is not that it was generated. It’s that someone cared enough to try. I’d rather a misspelled crayon card from my niece than some shit ChatGPT generated.
Yeah, “democratize art” means “I’m jealous of the cash sloshing around out there.”
People say things like “I’m not as good as this guy on TikTok.” Why do you need to be? Literally, who asked?
Because of studies like https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622:
Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI’s codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant.
Seems like this is a good argument for specialization. Have AI make bad but fast code, pay specialty people to improve and make it secure when needed. My 2026 Furby with no connection to the outside world doesn’t need secure code, it just needs to make kids smile.
They’re called programmers, and it’s faster and less expensive all around to just have humans do it better the first time.
Have you talked to any programmers about this? I know several who, in the past 6 months alone, have completely changed their view on exactly how effective AI is in automating parts of their coding. Not only are they using it, they are paying to use it because it gives them a personal return on investment…but you know, you can keep using that push lawnmower, just don’t complain when the kids next door run circles around you at a quarter the cost.
Have you had to code review someone who is obviously just committing AI bullshit? It is an incredible waste of time. I know people who learned pre-LLM (i.e. have functioning brains) and are practically on the verge of complete apathy from having to babysit ai code/coders, especially as their management keeps pushing people to use it. As in, they must use LLM as a performance metric.
congratulations on offloading your critical thinking skills to a chatbot that you most likely don’t own. what are you gonna do when the bubble is over, or when dc with it burns down
My main gripes are more philosophical in nature, but should we automate away certain parts of the human experience? Should we automate art? Should we automate human connections?
On top of these, there’s also the concern of spam. AI is quick enough to flood the internet with low-effort garbage.
The industrial revolution called, they want their argument against the use of automated looms back.
The capitalists owning the AI thanking you for fighting on their side.
Lots of assumptions there. In case you actually care, I don’t think any one company should be allowed to own the base system that allows AI to function, especially if it’s trained off of public content or content owned by other groups, but that’s kind of immaterial here. It seems insane to villainize a technology because of who might make money off of it. These are two separate arguments (and frankly, they historically have the opposite benefactors from what you would expect).
Prior to the industrial revolution, weaving was done by hand, making all cloth expensive or the result of sweatshops (and it was still comparatively expensive as opposed to today). Case in point, you can find many pieces of historical worker clothing that was specifically made using every piece of a rectangular piece of fabric because you did not want to waste any little bit (today it’s common for people to throw any scraps away because they don’t like the section of pattern).
With the advent of automated looms several things happened:
- the skilled workers who could operate the looms quickly were put out of a job because the machine could do things much faster, although it required a few specialized operators to set up and repair the equipment.
- the owners of the fabric mills that couldn’t afford to upgrade either died out or specialized in fabrics that could not be made by the machines (which set up an arms race of sorts where the machine builders kept improving things)
- the quality of fabric went down: when it was previously possible to have different structures of fabric with just a simple order to the worker, it took a while for machines to do something other than a simple weave (actually it took the work of Ada Lovelace, and see above mentioned arms race), and looms even today require a different range of threads than what can be hand woven, but…
- the cost went down so much that the accessibility went through the roof. Suddenly the average pauper COULD afford to clothe their entire family with a weeks worth of clothes. New industries cropped up. Health and economic mobility soared.
This is a huge oversimplification, but history is well known to repeat itself due to human nature. Follow the bullets above with today’s arguments against AI and you will see an often ignored end result: humanity can grow to have more time and resources to improve the health and wellness of our population IF we use the tools. You can choose to complain that the contract worker isn’t going to get paid his equivalent of $5/hr for spending 2 weeks arguing back and forth about a dog logo for a new pet store, but I am going to celebrate the person who realizes they can automate a system to find new business filings and approach every new business in their area with a package of 20 logos each that were AI generated using unique prompts from their experience in logo design all while reducing their workload and making more money.
GenAI is automating the more human fields, not some production line work. This isn’t gonna lead to an abundance of clothing that are maybe not artisan made, but the flooding of the art fields with low quality products. Hope you like Marvel slop, because you’re gonna get even more Marvel slop, except even worse!
Creativity isn’t having an idea of a big booba anime girl, it’s how you draw said big booba anime girl. Unless you’re one of those “idea guys”, who are still pissed off that the group of artists and programmers didn’t steal the code of Call of Duty, to put VR support into it, so you could sell if for the publisher at a markup price, because VR used to be a big thing for a while.
Gotcha, so no actual discourse then.
Incidentally, I do enjoy Marvel “slop” and quite honestly one of my favorite YouTube channels is Abandoned Films https://youtu.be/mPQgim0CuuI
This is super creative and would never be able to be made without AI.
I also enjoy reading books like Psalm for the Wild Built. It’s almost like there’s space for both things…
This is creepy.
Especially in coding?
Actually, that’s where they are the least suited. Companies will spend more money on cleaning up bad code bases (not least from a security point of view) than is gained from “vibe coding”.
Audio, art - anything that doesn’t need “bit perfect” output is another thing though.
But but, now idea man can vibecode. this shit destroys separation between management and codebase making it perfect antiproductivity tool
There’s also the issue of people now flooding the internet with AI generated tutorials and documentation, making things even harder. I managed to botch the Linux on my Raspberry Pi so hard I couldn’t fix it easily, all thanks to a crappy AI generated tutorial on adding to path that I didn’t immediately spot.
With art, it can’t really be controlled enough to be useful for anything much beyond spam machine, but spammers only care about social media clout and/or ad revenue.
Not much to win with.
A fake bubble of broken technology that’s not capable of doing what is advertised, it’s environmentally destructive, its used for identification and genocide, it threatens and actually takes jobs, and concentrates money and power with the already wealthy.
It’s either broken and not capable or takes jobs.
You can’t be both useless and destroying jobs at the same time
Have you never had a corporate job? A technology can be very much useless while incompetent ‘managers’ who believe it can do better than humans WILL buy the former to get rid of the latter, even though that’s a stupid thing to do, in order to meet their yearly targets and other similar idiotic measures of division/team ‘productivity’
It can absolutely be both. Expensive competent people are replaced with inexpensive morons all the time.
