Lemmy loves artists who have their income threatened by AI because AI can make what they make at a substantially lower cost with an acceptable quality in a fraction of the time.

AI depends on being trained on the artistic works of others, essentially intellectual and artistic property theft, so that you can make an image of a fat anime JD Vance. Calling it plagiarism is a bit far, but it edges so hard that it leaks onto the balls and could cum with a soft breeze.

AI consumes massive amounts of energy, which is supplied through climate hostile means.

AI threatens to take countless office jobs, which are some of the better paying jobs in metropolitan areas where most people can’t afford to live.

AI is a party trick, it is not comparable to human or an advanced AI. It is unimaginative and not creative like an actual AI. Calling the current state of AI anything like an advanced AI is like calling paint by numbers the result of artistry. It can rhyme, it can be like, but it can never be original.

I think that about sums it up.

Because I like to live on a habitable planet more than I like your ability to prompt a defective and stylisticly pathetic essay for your college class.

Scientists have estimated that the power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023, partly driven by the demands of generative AI. Globally, the electricity consumption of data centers rose to 460 terawatt-hours in 2022. This would have made data centers the 11th largest electricity consumer in the world, between the nations of Saudi Arabia (371 terawatt-hours) and France (463 terawatt-hours), according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach 1,050 terawatt-hours (which would bump data centers up to fifth place on the global list, between Japan and Russia).

If your phone could do the ai trash, it would still be morally bankrupt and devoid of any humanity. But it’s done on 5 gpus that eat as much energy as your entire household.

The real usefulness of ai technology is probably limited to 1% of what it is now. Signal processing, protein folding, translation and transcription are all fine and well. But it is 99% spam and so I’ll judge the technology on that.

LLMs and image generators are incredible inventions to be sure, but my main opposition to them is related to the very real negative outcomes of flooding our society with computer generated drivel.

• Small time artists are fucked. Anyone and everyone who could make money from small commissions is now out of a job, period. Even though generators will never be as good as real artists, the fact is that most people don’t care and the generation is good enough. Oh yeah and real artist who are continuing to do real work regardless now have to live in a world where they can and will be accused of using the bots even when they aren’t.
• Internet search is fucked. Search for an image and you’ll have to sift through AI sites for the real thing, search on a topic and you’ll be inundated with language model slop. Search music on sites like Spotify and certain genres are now swamped by “artists” who make an album a week of generated trash, making the already difficult problem of discoverability that much worse.
• People with certain kinds of susceptability to addiction are fucked. There are now countless people who feel that they are in love with a chat bot, because they suffer from modern loneliness and have tricked themselves into seeing a Mechanical Turk as a real person. There are also people who have turned a chatbot into an abusive cult figure, people who’ve amplified delusions with them, and other terrible mental health related outcomes that will only keep getting more common.
• The fact that these text generators are so easily confused for thinking machines means that a genuinely alarming number of people are now offloading their ability to think critically to the bots. An entire generation of students are graduating high school and college right now having learned literally nothing. Those systems weren’t perfect before but this is definitely worse.

There’s more stuff but I’ll end this by saying that I’ve use an LLM to help me write code and it’s pretty good at doing repetitive writing that has to strictly follow a certain format. Still need to understand code in order to read and troubleshoot its output though, which is why everything the so-called “vibe coders” make is so sloppy.

It is the coolest invention since the Internet and it is remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness.

No. It isn’t. First and foremost, it produces a randomised output that it has learned to make look like other stuff on the Internet. It has as much to do with consciousness as a set of dice and the fact that you think it’s more than that already shows how you don’t understand what it is and what it does.

AI doesn’t produce anything new. It doesn’t reason, it isn’t creative. As it has no understanding or experience, it doesn’t develop or change. Using it to produce art shows a lack of understanding of what art is supposed to be or accomplish. AI only chews up what’s being thrown at it to vomit it onto the Web, without any hint of something new. It also lacks understanding about the world, so asking it about decisions to be made is not only like asking an encyclopedia that comes up with answers on the fly based on whether they sound nice, regardless of the answers being correct, applicable or even possible.

And on top of all of this, on top of people using a bunch of statistical dice rolls to rob themselves of experiences and progress that they’d have made had they made their own decisions or learned painting themselves, it’s an example of the “rules for thee, not for me”. An industry that has lobbied against the free information exchange for decades, that sent lawyers after people who downloaded decades old books or movies for a few hours of private enjoyment suddenly thinks that there might be the possibility of profits around the corner, so they break all the laws they helped create without even the slightest bit of self-awareness. Their technology is just a hollow shell that makes the Internet unusable for all the shit it produces, but at least it isn’t anything else. Their business model, however, openly declares that people are only second class citizens.

There you are. That’s why I hate it. What’s not to hate?

I work in the education space and my biggest worry is the next generation losing the ability to critically think.

Just like how Gen X is much better at mental math than Millennials because the invention of pocket calculators / calculators on phones made math trivial; I think AI is going to trivialize critical thinking. We (as a Millennial) still had to hunt for a correct answer to our problems, which forced us to question possible answers we found and used our critical thinking skills to determine if it was a valid answer or not. With AI though, you type in your question and it’ll spit out an answer. For easy questions - it’s great. But for anything a little more nuanced, it struggles still. So if we don’t develop our critical thinking skills on easy questions, I wonder how we’ll do on the harder questions

I myself despise capitalism, and would not like to see the current global ecological disaster worsen because some stupid-ass techbros forcing their shit on everyone.

Lots of good points in the replies here, but I want to make the perhaps secondary point that the automation of thought is generally just bad for you. Dgmw AI (even LLMs) has its uses, but we’re already seeing the atrophying effects on some people, and in my experience as a teacher I have seen a number of people for whom chat bot dependency has become a serious problem on a par with drug addiction. I dread to think what’s going to happen to these people when we enter the ‘jack up the prices’ phase of the grift, let alone the ‘have you considered product/voting X may solve your problems’ phase, which is currently only being held back by engineering difficulties.

When you say it’s remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness, what do you mean?

ignoring the hate-brigade for a moment.

lemmy users are probably a bit more tech savvy on average.

and i think there’s frustration among those people who actually understand how modern “AI” systems work under the hood, often with a far better real-world understanding than many of it’s loud proponents. and they tire of being told they “don’t get it”. when they actually do get it. better than the person telling them they don’t, but they’re utterly drowned out in the mindless hype train.

and the thing fueling the hype train are dishonest greedy people who are not only happy to over-extend the grift at the expense of responsible and well engineered “AI” technology.

but, and this is the real crux of it, keep the amazing true potential of “AI” technology in the hands of the rich & powerful. rather than using it to liberate society.

OK remember like 70 years ago when they started saying we were burning the planet? And then like 50 years ago they were like “no guys we’re really burning the planet”? And then 30 years ago they were like “seriously we’re close to our last chance to not burn the planet”? and then in the past few years they’ve been like “the planet is currently burning, species are going extinct, and we are beginning to experience permanent effects that might not snowball into an extinction event if we act right now?”
But sure, AI is really cool and can trick you, personally into thinking it’s conscious. It’s just using nearly as much power as the whole of Japan, but you’re giggling and clapping along, so how bad can it really be? It’s just poisoning the air and water to serve you nearly accurate information, when you could have had accurate information by googling it for a fraction of the energy cost.

I hate AI because I’m a responsible adult.

What’s cool about it? How does it actually resemble conciousness?

If you think that AI closely resembles a conscious flesh and blood human being you need to go outside more. That is a dangerous line of thinking and people are forming relationships with a shoddy simulacrum of humanity because of it. AI is still in it’s early conception and it’s only a matter of time before someone’s grok waifu convinces them to shoot up a school.

current AI is absolutely not better than sci-fi AI, not by a long shot.

I do think LLMs are interesting and have neat potential for highly specific applications, though I also have many ethical concerns regarding the data it is being trained on. AI is a corporate buzzword designed to attract investment, and nothing more.

The short answer is copyright theft, energy consumption, and job displacement. While all those issues are 100% correct, there is also a huge unspoken factor of “you must be against it otherwise you are a brainwashed idiot” because, let’s be honest, the hive mind is real.

Most of the modern no-AI luddites fail to understand that AI has been around for decades in various forms and this is just the last, most visible incarnation. It is here to stay, and it will grow as well. At this rate of adoption, in a few years it will be as normal as having a mobile phone (they weren’t around only 20 years ago).

My humble prediction is that all the concerns around AI will be addressed with time by better hardware, better cooling mechanism, better energy production, different jobs that will leverage AI instead of competing with it, and surely also the copyright will find a new balance (just like MP3, Napster, and Spotify did not kill the music industry).

By the way, AI doesn’t spy on you. An AI model is immutable once it’s trained. The software using the model is spying on you, but that’s true for any scumbag-driven software you use. It is essentially the same typing your secrets in Google Docs or in ChatGPT.

What you’re calling AI is a mass marketing ponzy scheme. LLMs are not even actual AI. Beyond that issue, its development is in the hands of capital exclusively, and it will only exist to serve capital interests which come at the expense of the lower and working classes by necessity given what corporations (which are essentially unregulated in current climates) are designed to do. What you’re calling AI will only be used to hurt human lives and worsen living conditions for all of us (before you nitpick, I think enabling the 0.1% and their hoarding pathology hurts them too). I personally believe you’re already aware of that and are cynically trolling, and despite that I’m giving you the honest truth and factual reality of this subject because there is nothing good about being a techno-fetishist sociopath who thinks the answer to humanity’s problems is to make humanity itself obsolete, even if it’s ‘cool’. You clearly got the wrong fucking message from Terminator.

This is why when actual AI emerges I can only hope it’ll be in the hands of a public or collective development process and designed with an intent of progression and cooperation in mind.