Because it got enshittified and politicized by Tech Bros.

If you wanna tell me about the usefulness of LLMs, you are preaching to the choir. I was playing with GTP-J 6B finetunes in 2022. I am quantizing some weights as I type.

However, you can’t look at me with a straight face and tell me everything is okay in this space. It’s a nightmare, a giant scam that is going to implode.

As Lemmy is a refuge for people who see how caustic mainstream social media is, folks here are particularly sensitive to the issues surrounding “AI” too.

In other words, Lemmy literally selects for enshittification sensitivity.

There are a lot of software developers on Lemmy.

AI is being pushed as a software development tool. It tends to remove the fun part of our jobs (coding, debugging, optimizing) and relegates us to the shitty parts (code review).

We don't like that.

Several legal, environmental and social reasons I can tell

I'm disabled and used to make book covers for indie authors. Now everybody uses AI for that and I can't find another job.

I work in software. Just in day to day:

• lazy people are now using AI to slop out meaningless drivel at me rather than taking five minutes to articulate an actual thought
• shit is frequently broken because people surrender their thinking to the LLMs, don't understand what the agents are doing, and don't check the work output

Broadly:

• the industry is built on theft and whitewashing of human effort
• fraudulent valuations and circular dealing
• the frontier AI companies are all run by lying sociopaths
• and yet the global economy now hinges on a handful of AI or AI-adjacent companies
• many corporate types are now convinced they don't need real human labor anymore, and treat the working class accordingly
• AI is an incredible force multiplier for scamming/spamming
• hyperscaler data center build out is mathematically impossible, environmentally ruinous, and harmful to your health
• LLMs are literally making us stupider

If the people building and hosting models won't build them from ethically sourced data and won't host them without disrupting or negatively impacting the communities they are hosted in (noise pollution, power and water rates increasing, layoffs, diesel generators, etc) then I won't use them and would advocate against their use.

I don't expect the tech to go away but you can make a hammer from stolen resources and use it to harm individuals and communities or you can build it from ethically sourced material and use it to build things people need. If there's an ethically sourced model quantized to run on commodity hardware locally without contributing to further wealth inequality, theft, and community disruption I won't have the same moral objections to using it as I would for any of the current corporate owned llms.

It is antisocial and nihilistic technology that makes my hobbies worse and less accessable

Why do we need to justify our options? It is OK to not like a technology that is killing the world? A technology where we have movies of it taking over the world and murdering the human race. A technology that has yet to turn a profit despite trillions of dollars funnelled into it.

Please mention your background and usage of AI with your answer.

No, why don't you justify your want for destroying the planet and species.

Most lemmy users live in countries which are run for a rich few, rather than the general public. Technology, including AI, is also used to benefit the rich, often at the cost of the rest of the population. Unfortunately this leads to people hating the technology rather than the political system.

There was a recent survey where they pointed out how people in English-speaking countries are most concerned about AI (because it is used against the people there) while people in the Global South are most positive about it (because it is used to benefit them). Here's the summary chart:-

It's unethical on so many fronts I'd assume you're a psychopath if you don't understand.

It's legitimately no different than cryptocurrency and NFTs, but this is the techbro scam that finally stuck after flinging shit against the wall over and over.

The training data sources are built destructively, without any consent from the artists, writers, programmers, anyone whose data is pulled into these models. The information these things spit out usually has so many inaccuracies - search engines are fucked, software is built without understanding a damn thing it actually does, poor translations of documentation are made public, the list goes on.

On top of that, data centers are one of the biggest environmental nightmares we've ever seen. Why are we pushing these so hard in the middle of a goddamn climate crisis?

There's genuinely not a single thing it actually does well, and the only reason it genuinely took off is because investors in the same 5 companies are patting each other on the back.

It's also worth mentioning how chatbots built off this stuff are designed to always be extraordinarily friendly and confirming to the user. It's such a massive factor contributing to AI psychosis, to the point that there people who legitimately believe these lines of code are sentient and conscious. Meanwhile we've already seen just how easily these closed source models can be tweaked to spit out pure propaganda, making them an extremely valuable political tool - it's no wonder fascists love this shit so much.

lmao, honestly from what i've seen lemmy is very much pro slop -- and it's been quite disheartening. i've mostly just stayed on mastodon lately cause i don't have the bandwidth to fight with people who say "but local models!" ... nah fuck that. LLM's are a racist, fascist, anti-human, anti-social, anti-intellectual, regressive, inefficient, ecoterrorist, counter-revolutionary, class traitor technology. Even with open weights / open models ran locally, it still only reduces peoples capacity to learn, create and build community. It still pushes us as a society apart. There are technologies that can be up lifting and constructive, but this isn't one. There is no reason to chase more lines of code, or more pages in a book -- instead chasing to better understand, better communicate, better organize together. Every "leftist" person on lemmy who is pro local llm's, is just excited about the technology and that leaves very little room for organizing and utilizing this unique time where there could be a non-partisan reason to organize against the oligarchs and fascists who are in power in much of the world right now.

I dabbled with AI usage for a while, ran some local models, would try whatever was the current best for when there was a project that I didn't really want to put the effort into learning about--and I found it was just always regressive and annoying. I'd brick hardware, or my context would get so big that the output would continue to become more sloppy. I started just going back to reading documentation, and it was just always easier. It was always easier to just grep for whatever I needed. Whenever I'd go back to simply trying to understand the problem and just fucking read, I'd feel almost like a haze being lifted. I think this is the point where I realized, most complaints that people have with software etc are already solved issues that most "tech" refuses to implement or has enshitified. So instead of just solving the problem in a predictive / deterministic way, we are instead being sold a technology that will burn incredible amounts of fuel, will requires incredible amounts of resources all to what--search through my email? More slowly than what was developed in the 70's would. Then I read 'Blood in the machine' and 'End times fascism', watched 'ghost in the machine' and read more most and articles... The sheer mass amount of violence and suffering created is unimaginable.

I think my stance is mostly, even without the ethical issues -- what use would this technology even have? Why would I want a computer to do the learning and creating, when I could instead enjoy the work of my friends, and enjoy creating something for others; while building a community. and community is the #1 way to curb fascism. also my computing is more and more evolving into something more similar to permacomputing. My music and art taste has always been more into finding & connecting with artists locally, or at least artists who I can actually interact with and understand. Outsourcing these things to a machine would not bring any joy.

because that's trending, and possibly there's money involved with people keeping that stance. there are serious issues with ai but in typical liberal fashion, they don't propose any serious solution except complaining about it in social media.

No idea.

But not everybody is against ai. I am not. I am about regulating and find ethical approach to AI, which is pretty substantially different. I use ai.

But those advocating against will always have a louder mouth. And it will be useless anyway, since ai is here to stay.

I've been a software engineer for over thirty-five years, with a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, and a Master's in Machine Learning. I love AI, and can't help but point out how silly all the hate is - even though it gets me nothing but downvotes. People say it's unethical, but what IS ethical? Certainly not the rare earth electronics built in polluting factories we use AI on, nor the likely dirty electricity used to power them. LLM are wonderfully powerful, useful things and I think they should be embraced - at least until Capitalism itself falls, and our civilizations along with it.

I dont need a reason to not like something. For instance, I have never met you IRL or interacted with you online AFAIK, but I dislike you alot.