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.
If you don’t hate AI, you’re not informed enough.
It has the potential to disrupt pretty much everything in a negative way. Especially when regulations always lag behind. AI will be abused by corporations in the worst way possible, while also being bad for the planet.
And the people who are most excited about it, tend to be the biggest shitheads. Basically, no informed person should want AI anywhere near them unless they directly control it.
Because so far we only see the negative impacts in human society IMO. Latest news haven’t help at all, not to mention how USA is moving towards AI. Every positive of AI, leads to be used in a workplace, which then will most likely lead to lay offs. I may start to think that Finch in POI, was right all along.
edit: They sell us an unfinished product, which we build in a wrong way.
Many people on Lemmy are extremely negative towards AI which is unfortunate. There are MANY dangers, but there are also Many obvious use cases where AI can be of help (summarizing a meeting, cleaning up any text etc.)
Yes, the wax how these models have been trained is shameful, but unfoet9tjat ship has sailed, let’s be honest.
Because the goal of “AI” is to make the grand majority of us all obsolete. The billion-dollar question AI is trying to solve is “why should we continue to pay wages?”. That is bad for everyone who isn’t part of the owner class. Even if you personally benefit from using it to make yourself more productive/creative/… the data you input can and WILL eventually be used against you.
If you only self-host and know what you’re doing, this might be somewhat different, but it still won’t stop the big guys from trying to swallow all the others whole.
Reads like a rant against the industrial revolution. “The industry is only concerned about replacing workers with steam engines!”
You should check out this https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
You’re probably not wrong. It’s definitely along the same lines… although the repercussions of this particular one will be infinitely greater than those of the industrial revolution.
Also, industrialization made for better products because of better manufacturing processes. I’m by no means sure we can say the same about AI. Maybe some day, but today it’s just “an advanced dumbass” considering most real world scenarios.
Read ‘The Communist Manifesto’ if you’d like to understand in which ways the bourgeoisie used the industrial revolution to hurt the proletariat, exactly as they are with AI.
The industrial revolution is what made socialism possible, since now a smaller amount of workers can support the elderly, children, etc.
Just look at China before and after industrializing. Life expectancy way up, the government can provide services like public transit and medicine (for a nominal fee)
We’re discussing how industry and technology are used against the proletariat, not how state economies form. You can read the pamphlet referenced in the previous post if you’d like to understand the topic at hand.
the data you input can and WILL eventually be used against you.
Can you expand further on this?
User data has been the internet’s greatest treasure trove since the advent of Google. LLM’s are perfectly set up to extract the most intimate data available from their users (“mental health” conversations, financial advice, …) which can be used against them in a soft way (higher prices when looking for mental health help) or they can be used to outright manipulate or blackmail you.
Regardless, there is no scenario in which the end user wins.
For slightly earlier instance of it, there’s also real time bidding
- 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.
Not to mention the environmental cost is literally astronomical. I would be very interested if AI code is functional x times out of 10 because it’s success statistic for every other type of generation is much lower.
chatbot DCs burn enough electricity to power middle sized euro country, all for seven fingered hands and glue-and-rock pizza
There is no AI.
What’s sold as an expert is actually a delusional graduate.
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.
Automating parts of something as a reference tool is a WILDLY different thing than differing to AI to finalize your code, which will be shitcode.
Anybody right now who is programming that is letting AI code out there is bad at their job.
No argument there.
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.
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.
That push lawnmower will still mow the lawn in decades to come though, while your kids fancy high-tech lawnmower will explode in a few months and you’re lucky if it doesn’t burn the entire house down with it.
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
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
You can’t be sued over or copyright styles. Studio Ponoc is made up of ex-Ghibli staff, and they have been releasing moves for a while. Stop spreading misinformation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16369708/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15054592/
Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers? Or is it the theft of training material without attribution?
Both.
Wasn’t there the same question here yesterday?
Yes. https://infosec.pub/post/29620772
Seems someone deleted it, and now we have to discuss the same thing again.
According to modlog it was against Rule#2
Don’t forget problems with everything around AI too. Like in the US, the Big Beautiful Bill (🤮) attempts to ban states from enforcing AI laws for ten years.
And even more broadly what happens to the people who do lose jobs to AI? Safety nets are being actively burned down. Just saying “people are scared of new tech” ignores that AI will lead to a shift that we are not prepared for and people will suffer from it. It’s way bigger than a handful of new tech tools in a vacuum.
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.
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.
and also chatbot-generated bug reports (like curl) and entire open source projects (i guess for some stupid crypto scheme)
But but, now idea man can vibecode. this shit destroys separation between management and codebase making it perfect antiproductivity tool
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’
In corporate world managers get fired for not completing projects
It can absolutely be both. Expensive competent people are replaced with inexpensive morons all the time.
it’s not ai taking your job, it’s your boss. all they need to believe is that language-shaped noise generator can make it work, doesn’t matter if it does (it doesn’t). then business either suffers greatly or hires people back (like klarna)
And yet AI pulls through and somehow does manage to do both
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.
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.
but the flooding of the art fields with low quality products
It’s even worse than that, because the #1 use case is spam, regardless of what others think they personally gain out of it. It is exhausting filtering through the endless garbage spam results. And it isn’t just text sites. Searching generic terms into sites like YouTube (e.g. “cats”) will quickly lead you to a deluge of AI shit. Where did the real cats go?
It’s incredible that DrNik is coming out with a bland, fake movie trailer as an example of how AI is good. It’s “super creative” to repeatedly prompt Veo3 to give you synthetic Hobbit-style images that have the vague appearance of looking like VistaVision. Actually, super creative is kinda already done, watch me go hyper creative:
“Whoa, now you can make it look like an 80s rock music video. Whoa, now you can make it look like a 20s silent film. Whoa, now you can make look like a 90s sci-fi flick. Whoa, now you can make it look like a super hero film.”
It even made “manual” programming worse.
Wanted to google how to modify the path variable on Linux? Here’s an AI hallucinated example, that will break your installation. Wanted to look up an algorithm? Here’s an AI hallucinated explanation, that is wrong enough at some parts, that you just end up just wasting your own time.
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.
