I’ve been on Lemmy for about 2 weeks now, and I’ve noticed a trend:
The VAST majority of posts that mention AI in any manner are some dig or criticism or some other negative commentary, and the rare ones that have anything positive to say about it almost always have negative whatever-Lemmy’s-version-of-karma-is.
I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.
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
The penultimate one makes no sense though. Also, most of the items in your list are not really about AI, they are about capitalism.
And who owns the giant public AIs that are doing all the damage? Capitalists.
You won’t find nearly as many people in here shitting on running a local version of some small model in your own house to take care of your own needs. Obviously somebody’s going to complain because somebody will complain about fucking everything…
But all of the capture and devour capitalism is at the heart of every public AI right now.
Of course. But then the issue is not AI is it? It’s like always capitalism. Like the first ever AI research and development happened in the USSR. They hoped that by striving to create intelligence/consciousness we would learn more about ourselves and what it even means to be intelligent and conscious.
AI is not evil, it’s not bad or destroying the world. Capitalism is destroying the world.
What they are calling AI is not evil in itself. But it is being used as a weapon against the environment, artists, progress, education, and internet discourse. That is where the hate comes from.
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.
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.
ruins the planet by polution
AI on its own doesn’t ruin the planet or cause pollution, if corporations are ruining the planet to train AI models the issue is corporations not AI
I like computers and now can’t easily afford to do the projects I’m interested in. I get very little value from AI and it destroyed my hobby. It also is a massive bubble that will hurt the majority of the world once it pops. It’s dumb.
You’re describing the effects of data centers, not AI. AI doesn’t change the prices on computer components, nor is it in any way a bubble. I think you’re describing corporations buying up components for their data centers, which they intend to use for AI, but that isn’t attributable to AI itself. It’s like saying authors are to blame for trees being cut down to make paper - completely ignoring that books can be digital.
AI training needs data centers. The companies wouldn’t be buying up components without this gold rush.
And books need paper. Trees wouldn’t be cut down if authors quit writing. Therefore, AI and authors are evil.
(You can train AI without data centers and you can write books without printing them.)
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.
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.
Gosh yes.
You do realize that the vast majority of people hate LLMs right? They are power, water resource hungry worthless things that have yet to prove any worth to the human race.
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?
First, you made that classic blunder. You wrote “AI” without defining it, as if it was meaningful. We always see people do bait-and-switch arguments surrounding this topic. Always. So, if you want a meaningful answer, you need to actually provide a definition…
Are you asking why people hate ChatGPT? If so, you should ask that.
Second, you made a mistake. You think people hate AI when the hate is reserved for the assholes getting rich by fucking us all over as they destroy our communities, clean water, and affordable electricity. Remember, it’s the people who do horrible things who need to be stopped.
This is not a direct answer to your question.
I’ve heard 2 really great takes about LLMs & GenAI, that have stayed with me - though I don’t have the best wording for them anymore.
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As AI is trained on previously created data, it fundamentally looks backwards. Human creativity creates new things and inherently looks to the future.
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AI is trained on the vast corpus of human works and synthesizes that info into a median response. You will never get exciting and bold insights, just bland and inoffensive responses.
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Keep in mind that the people against AI are usually very vocal about it, while the ones who use it stay quiet
Because of that, it’s easy to get the wrong impression about how most people actually feel
