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

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.

I really don't understand how people can be so blinded by hopium that they cannot see the blindingly obvious consequences of allowing this insane tech to co-opt our planet, at the behest of the most powerful and evil people to ever live.

There may be use cases for this tech but it not worth it to sacrifice the entirety of our natural world to be ground up and processed to feed this behemoth. It is purely wishful thinking that this will solve everything and they are willing to pay ANYTHING to try it. They are gambling with the planet and it's like 2% chance they win, otherwise life dies.

We were told 15 years ago, that we had a decade to change course to prevent CATASTROPHIC heating of the planet and degradation of the environment. Instead of doing really anything about that, we have exponentially increased out energy needs and fuel/water usage. Now with ai, we are doing it all over again in the span of a few years. Please explain with mathematics, how we get out of this trap of thermodynamics and not all die from heat? How does ai save us? Does it get us closer in any way? Or is it so that the elites can goon a little harder and try to fill the void inside them with yet more money?

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.

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.

Because it’s a technology wielded by the most powerful to harm the rest of us.

Im an AI engineer and even I hate AI. When I say AI, I mean LLMs specifically. It definitely has its use cases. LLMs are pretty good at parsing unstructured data, and generating boilerplate code, but that's about it. Every other use case is a combination of buzzword bingo and slop generation.

AI, uses a tremendous amount of energy, produces an ungodly amount of heat and noise, and pollutes potable drinking water. The overreliance on LLMs for everything is lazy at best and sloppy at worst. LLMs are being applied in scenarios where I could have built a deep learning model that would fit comfortably on a laptop from 2018, and doing a worse job at predictions at that.

Ignoring the fact that they were trained on a ton of copyrighted data, which was labeled for dollars a day by humans in poorer countries, and regularly gets basic information wrong. Yeah, it fucking sucks. And the only people who stand to benefit from it are about a half dozen tech companies who are taking contracts with the US government to track citizens both online and IRL.

Under capitalism, LLMs are used purely for the benefits of the capitalist class, spying on all of the working classes and enabling immense repressions. It isn't a tool without any and all merit, but under capitalism it will always be used against our best interests.

Someone asked this 2 days ago so I'll just paste what I wrote there.

It's being pushed into situations where having a black box of probability is not what you want. Support bots as an example, you want the same outcome for the same problem. Not a different outcome because someone didn't put a question mark.
You don't want the bot being able to hijack an account because it was asked in the specific way. See Facebook support bot.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/metas-ai-support-bot-instagram/

You don't want a chat bot to tell airline customers they can do something when the airline has a FAQ section specifically saying no you can't.
See Air Canada support bot.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

You don't want AI bots hallucinating court cases to justify a case. Many news articles on this.

It's used as a workforce reduction mask.
Businesses are using AI rollouts to lower the number of front line employees. Only for the tool to fail.
See Oracle firing 21,000 people to boost ai numbers.
https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/23/21000-oracle-jobs-vanish-amid-big-reds-big-bets-on-ai/5260086

It's oversold:
When Gardner says only 30% of AI deployments work as sold after asking over 700 IT executives. Why are people still treating it as anything but a broken tool?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/07/only-28-of-ai-infrastructure-projects-fully-pay-off/5221652

For a black box of probability it is terrible at maths. There has been instances of AIs failing high school math tests.
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-ai-struggle-math-problems.html

edit: sources as I grab them on mobile.

Because we’re mostly not bots.

Someone else can give a more comprehensive answer, but here are a couple bullet points:

• Models trained by violating copyright
• AI data centers using tons of water and power, driving up costs for local residents
• AI data center noise pollution
• "Slop" results (uncanny valley pictures, incorrect answers given confidently, etc)
• Companies using AI as an excuse for anti-worker actions (notably massive layoffs)
• Concern over how much of the largest companies valuation is tied to AI hype (because it affects everyone's retirement accounts)

Because I and some associates spend years traveling, collecting , and documenting some very specific information on an uncommon family of animals, their care in aquaria, and ecological curiosities. We had a website which hosted all the documented info, a small but active community of people with this niche interest. A few minor ads and affiliate links kept the site running, and allowed our few naturalists to go to more places and document rarer species. Now LLMs have stolen all our content and google shows all of our information in its AI searches as if it owns it and never links the information to the community that lovingly curated it. Our website had to be taken offline forever because all our traffic is just scrapers.

So please, tell me how AI stealing everything we worked hard on for years and selling it to you is considered a good thing?

Techbros ruin everything.

I have no problem with AI use for science, health, and uplifting humanity like figuring out optimal ways of doing things, minimizing waste.

Currently, it's just another disingenuous ploy to make rich people even richer forcing it on everyone at an expense of climate and human livelihoods.

And finally, are consumer AI really "intelligent" like its touted or is it marketing lies for making the lines go up?

Platforms themselves are self-selecting. I'm speaking for myself here. I am on Lemmy because I dislike the power that big tech has gotten to control content, policy, news, and global perceptions. As such, I self host and use federated technologies where possible. The vast majority of AI tools are controlled by the same centrally controlled big tech companies that I'm here to avoid. There are self-hosted AI tools or there, but basically every AI tool was trained using scraped data, and, for instance, my Searx-ng instance was flooded by so many bots that I had to make it harder to use for myself just to keep the bots out. My blog? Constantly scraped, killing my bandwidth. A lot of foss projects used to have bug bounty programs and accepted code from any contributor to wander in, but are now closing off due to AI slop code contributions. So, the type of person you'll find here probably hates AI if they're like me. Also, I work in tech and have to bite my tongue every time a co-worker "helpfully" sends me a Copilot Slop answer to a question when I was asking for a judgment call or an opinion.

I'm curious why this question gets asked on lemme so often.

I don't hate AI, I hate how much it's shoved down my throat every day. If it was used in appropriate use cases and not injected into everything because profits then I wouldn't care so much.

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.

Because we are a bunch of people that tend to at least try to keep ourselves informed.

There's more negative consequences of AI than there are positive, at least from my perspective.

Because it is a massive financial scam built on a lame cult.

It's a hammer being sold as a replacement for builders. I don't hate AI, rather than all of stuff that's called "AI" these days is being sold as something more than it is.

Just listen to Jensen, the token salesman, of Nvidias fame.

If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed

This is what I hate. The mad greed of these companies; the blatant disregard of everyone that these CEOs are displaying; the blind rush without a thought about consequences. "AI" is just the latest fad that got ruined by good old capitalism.

I can’t answer for anyone else but I hate it because it makes us stupider, it degrades human knowledge as a whole, it contributes to climate change and is helping to dissolve culture by isolating us into fewer and fewer shared spaces

I detest that a pretty limited and inefficient technology became a functional deity. Whatever cost is paid upfront to serve it is just, whatever resource it needs is reserved, whatever it produces should be spread uncritically low and high. Like all copium for the masses, it becomes a prosthetic device people become dependent on in their lives, and whatever I choose it or not, it becomes projected onto me too, making the products and aftermath of GenAI boom a part of my daily live and a tax I now pay.

From a power/economics perspective, it's a cover for the biggest companies and most punchable CEOs to take our shared knowledge, skills and means of compute from us and sell them back to us as a subscription, while pissing in the community well they just eroded.

As a consumer I play around with local machine learning-based tech to OCR pages, create transcripts, extrapolate images and frames in video. I haven't found a usecase for rented GenAI in my workflow but I usually don't cringe at people using it as long as they don't take pride in using it (and it happens a lot, oooff). I despise rich companies and people masturbating around the topic, firing people in droves, enshitifying everyithing and taking ever more power.

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.

Me, personally, a couple of reasons:

Without wanting to sound like a pretentious twat I think art made without a soul is the antithesis of art.

People ask dumb questions that a quick web search would answer.

The blurring between what is real and what isn’t.

Capitalism suggesting that there might only be two or three “non-human entities” controlling the entire internet soon.

The fear of another economic bubble.

It making people stupider.

The fokken poes that is an anagram of my user name being involved. Plus all the other bros too.

Fear of something that has the power to potentially go beyond thought.

The absolute ease of facilitating surveillance.

Terminator franchise

Etc

It is the dot com bubble all over again, we all know the internet completely transformed the world but during that hyperphase anything with .com was getting money tossed at it.

We are in the same phase with AI. It will likely completely transform tech and medicine and a number of other fields. However 90% of what is being pushed right now is not good uses for it. They are masking the real costs for it. We are likely going to end up with an oversupply of datacenters just like all the unused dark fibre we had in the .com age. It will eventually transform into more useful things but "most" not "all" of it is hype right now.

Lots of good answers, but I'll throw another in: pollution of the Internet with slop. I'll search for e.g. what good flashlights with 'n' features are and there will be hundreds of near-identical listicles that are clearly hallucinated. I'll try to look at a local restaurant's menu and it will bring me to a fabricated webpage with ai generated images of food (with Wonder brand Hont Doug bundts yesterday!) and a menu that is very obviously factually incorrectly.

There have always been low-effort fake listicles and bad information, but it used to be easy to avoid the couple links per search or to refine the search to be specific enough to rule them out. Now I'm not convinced there aren't websites that generate poor quality content on the fly based on whatever I just searched.

A question to the OP: After reading all of these comments, varying from emotional reaction to well reasoned assessment, all valid whether positive or negative, has this experiment helped you answer your question or changed your views on AI at all in retrospect? There's nothing I can add that hasn't already been said in one way or another by someone else, but I'm cruious if this is just a bait thread or you're actually posing this question in good faith with a mind open to change.. If it's the latter I want to know your nuanced opinion.

I dont hate AI, I hate the people who are pushing it on us. I hate thier ultimate goal.

Pro:

• It's good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it'll give you an answer immediately that's tailored specifically to your question.

Con:

• Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that's hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It's like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.

Pro:

• It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.

Con:

• People who use it for this are getting dumber. It's growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that's no longer true these systems are breaking down.

Another Con:

• It's fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.

Pro:

• It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.

Con:

• The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don't even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.

I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.

The heads of the AI companies have been saying how many jobs their products will replace.

If you tell most people that there was an exciting new technology that would replace them at their company and every other company and make their experience and qualifications obsolete I'm guessing most people wouldn't be very happy about that.

I don't hate AI, I hate the overuse of AI in places where it's not suited for. I hate the as-a-service model every Western AI vendor enforces. I hate the people seeing AI as a get rich quick scheme and not as a technology to be leveraged intelligently and meaningfully.

Why are there so many people on Lemmy asking this same question over and over again. This has got to get over ten now in the last week.

I'm on Lemmy because I'm anti capitalist and generally support progressive policies such as circular economic practices and sustainability. I'm against AI because it goes against everything I mentioned. The gains aren't worth the cost.

Ask yourself, what value does it add?

For my part, the short and stupid answer is that AI destroys the environment, screws over the working class on so many more levels than just taking jobs away and risks making people intellectually lazy and even more inept at social interactions.

There is a more indepth walk through of these reasons, but I don't really have the energy to write a novel that nobody is gonna read anyway.

Fyi: I used to be open minded when it came out because I don't like passing judgement before knowing a bit more about a controversial subject. The deathnail for me was when I heard of the costs to the environment and how unsustainable AI is right now. We already have enough shit in this world that's destroying us. Why on earth are we adding one more?

Because it's built on the creative collective works of everything that's ever been put on the Internet with no attribution or compensation for people who's authored works were stolen. Maybe that's why?

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.

1. As AI is trained on previously created data, it fundamentally looks backwards. Human creativity creates new things and inherently looks to the future.

2. 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.

Capitalism

Because it's lame, and sucks shit

Because it's not really ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. It's basically fast computing. And stealing data from other websites.

When people say "AI," I assume they are talking about the large corporate Neural Networks that get branded as "AI" for marketing purposes.

I hate these because they're a grift. They're funded and maintained by a handful of ultra-rich idiots who saw no value in learning social sciences nor the humanities, and thus have failed to learn from history. The people pushing for mass adoption believe in a variety of unscientific pseudo-religious conspiracy beliefs about AI gods and devils leading humanity.

I hate that the cost of these cults are being foisted onto the rest of society by way of government and corporate contracts.

I hate that mass media is rapidly degrading in quality in order to justify the purchase of said contracts.

I hate that the people making important decisions that affect my life and well-being — doctors, the people who develop my software, my government representatives, news reporters, lawyers — are not just willing, but actively excited at the prospect of turning off their brains and letting black boxes controlled by opaque corporations make the decisions for them.

I hate that despite 3+ years of hype and 10+ years of public access, the only people who have demonstrably benefitted from it are Nvidia, scammers, and people who don't want to use their brain.

But mostly, and this is the clincher, I hate that we are literally destroying the earth to run these machines. Even if every other problem disappeared overnight, this should be an argument killer. We only get one home, and we are setting fire to it. I don't care if it improves the lives of millions of humans, because it is hastening the death of hundreds of billions of lifeforms.

I hate that people ignore this or conveniently forget it or are just apathetic about it. I hate that this argument just carries little to no weight for most fence-sitters. I hate that people treat feeling emotional about the destruction of our only home as being irrational. I hate ecoterrorism being excused by marketing babble and shitty faux-skeptical wishy-washiness.

Because we’d rather have national forests, clean water, job opportunities, a sustainable future and liberty than live in morodor with the eye of Sauron staring at us all the time

I don't hate AI. I use AI. I criticize AI, because it's a tool and it's being misused.

I criticize how people and specially companies use AI....

Been around long enough to know that we are being sold on a lie that's real purpose is extracting wealth at the fastest rate possible from the lower 99% while providing unknown risks and low likelihood of benefits to most of the population. The only "AI" that currently works well is a very fast database searcher. It is better than a human at that task but requires humans to create the database and all the information in it first in order for it to work. The only "AI" that seems to be possibly "thinking" for itself is hopeless, wrong, and/or very destructive.

It's an exploitation tool with no benefit to actual people.

Its a massive theft machine destroying the earth in an attempt to eliminate labor value with no benefit to anyone in the long run other than the ultra rich. AI isn't for you, its for rich people to get richer so they dont have to pay humans to do work.

Fuck AI. LLMs can be interesting but the atmosphere that is "AI" is a net bad on society.

This isnt even mentioning how fucking boring and generic its output is.

I'm not completely against it. I do recognise its threats to privacy, the planet, and intellect though. The average person trusts it too much.

Personally, I do not use it that much. I do however use it to help with research. I find being able to ask a question quite useful as a jumping off point for further research. I do not rely on it to answer correctly, simply to aid in pointing me in the right direction. Then I go off and do more specific research.

I have been moving from windows 10 to linux mint recently, it was quite useful in aiding with this at times. Not all the time, just at the right times. If there were a particular issue I was struggling with it could help point me in the right direction, though I would not trust it to simply spit out the right advise and commands to type to fix an issue without researching exactly what those commands did, how that would potentially help fix the issue and how to revert if it messed something up. I have seen many examples where the advise it gave was terrible and potentially destructive because I researched the advise it gave, had I of not it would have really messed things up. It must be used responsibly.

People are all to quick to talk into their phones, get a response and trust it to be all knowing. Their queries are forever recorded and logged to their personal identity without and option to opt out. I use privacy orientated search engines with ai functionality such as duckduckgo and ecosia. Ecosia makes it very easy to verify the sources of information given from their ai, also they put in efforts to be as green as possible. Very respectable.

So no, I am not against ai. I am against the usual way in which the average person uses it and the way the majority of companies are using it to exploit people and the planet to turn a profit.

AI is great. AI under capitalism is awful.