Ai isn't inherently a bad thing. My issues are primarily with how it is used, how it is trained, and the resources it consumes. I also have concerns about it being a speculative bubble

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.

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.

Its not smart. Its a theft engine that averages information and confidently speaks hallucinations insisting its fact. AI sucks. It wont ever be AGI because it doesn't "think", it runs models and averages. Its autocomplete at huge scale. It burns the earth and produces absolute garbage.

The only LLMs doing anything good are because averaging large data models was good for a specific case, like looking at millions of cancer images and looking at averages.

This does not work for deterministic answers. The "AI" we have now is corporate bullshit they are desperate to have make money and is a massive investor hype machine.

Stop believing the shitty CEOs.

ignoring the hate-brigade, lemmy users are probably a bit more tech savvy on average.

and i think many people who know how "AI" works under the hood are frustrated because, unlike most of it's loud proponents, they have real-world understanding what it actually is.

and they're tired of being told they "don't get it", by people who actually don't get it. but instead they're the ones being drowned out by the hype train.

and the thing fueling the hype train are dishonest greedy people, eager to over-extend the grift at the expense of responsible and well engineered “AI”.

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

I am deeply troubled by the way that AIs slip right past peoples' defenses and convince them of things that are absolutely not true. Not just things like the AI psychosis that some people have been driven into, not just the hallucinations or overly fawning over terrible ideas, it goes so much further than our monkey brains can understand. These things do not think, they do not have feelings, they don't have motivations, they don't have morals or values, no sense of right or wrong, they are, quite literally, word prediction machines that are selecting their responses semi-randomly. And yet, even people who know this to be the case cannot stop themselves from anthropomorphizing the AI. All of our human instincts scream "this is a person!" when we interact with them, and with that comes an assumption of values, morals, thoughts, and feelings, none of which are there. There is a fundamental mismatch between the human mental model and the reality of the software, and that is harmful, even dangerous. We will give benefit of the doubt to them, we will believe their explanations about "why" they "chose" to say or do what they did, and we will repeatedly make the same fundamental mistakes because we want to believe a total lie.

And that's not even getting in to the harm when they are working properly, encouraging us to outsource our thinking and creativity to a service that charges monthly. I'm seriously worried that kids in school now are going to have their learning stunted terribly, it's just so easy to have any and all homework done in a matter of minutes without learning a single thing.

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

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.

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.

1. How Generative AI is framed by the industry is an affront to humanistic values.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/tech-ceos-dont-seem-to-realise-just-how-anti-human-their-ai-fanaticism-is-and-i-think-its-all-because-of-the-enlightenment/

2. It's not even close to consciousness. For those of us who understand how these things work it's almost an insult to make the comparison.

https://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of-llms.html

3. All the other unethical considerations mentioned elsewhere by others (stealing art, water usage, politics).

It's a glorified parakeet

So many places I could start when answering this question. I guess I'll just pick one.

It's a bubble. The hype is ridiculous. There's plenty of that hype in your post. The claims are that it'll revolutionize... well basically everything, really. Obsolete human coders. Be your personal secretary. Do your job for you.

Make no mistake. These narratives are being pushed for the personal benefit of a very few people at the expense of you and virtually everyone else. Nvidia and OpenAI and Google and IBM and so on are using this to make a quick buck. Just like TY capitalized on (and encouraged) a bubble back around the turn of the millennium that we now look back on with embarrassment.

In reality, the only thing AI is really effective as is a gimmicky "toy" that entertains as long as the novelty hasn't worn thin. There's very little real world application. LLM's are too unreliable at getting facts straight and not making up BS to be trusted for any real-world use case. Image generating "AI"'s like stable diffusion produce output (and by "produce output" I mean rip off artists) that all has a similar, fakey appearance with major, obvious errors which generally instantly identify it as low-effort "slop". Any big company that claims to be using AI in any serious capacity is lying either to you or themselves. (Possibly both.)

And there's no reason to think it's going to get better at anything, "AI industry" hype not withstanding. ChatGPT is not a step in the direction of general AI. It's a distraction from any real progress in that direction.

There's a word for selling something based on false promises. "Scam." It's all to hoodwink people into giving them money.

And it's convincing dumbass bosses who don't know any better. Our jobs are at risk. Not because AI can do your job just as well or better. But because your company's CEO is too stupid not to fall for the scam. By the time the CEO gets removed by the board for gross incompetence, it'll be too late for you. You will have already lost your job by then.

Or maybe your CEO knows full well AI can't replace people and is using "AI" as a pretense to lay you off and replace you with someone they don't have to pay as much.

Now before you come back with all kinds of claims about all the really real real-world applications of AI, understand that that's probably self-deception and/or hype you've gotten from AI grifters.

Finally, let me back up a bit. I took a course in college probably back in 2006 or so called "introduction to artificial intelligence". In that course, I learned about, among other things, the "A* algorithm". If you've ever played a video game where an NPC or enemy followed your character, the A* algorithm or some slight variation on it was probably at play. The A* algorithm is completely unlike LLMs, "generative AI", and whatever other buzzwords the AI grifting industry has come up with lately. It doesn't involve training anything on large data sets. It doesn't require a powerful GPU. When you give it a particular output, you can examine the algorithm to understand exactly why it did what it did, unlike LLMs which produce answers that can't be tracked down to what training data went into producing that particular response. The A* algorithm has been known and well-understood since 1968.

That kind of "AI" is fine. It's provably correct and has utility. Basically, it's not a scam. It's the shit that people pretend is the next step on the path to making a Commander Data -- or the shit that people trust blindly when its output shows up at the top of their Google search results -- that needs to die in a fire. And the sooner the better.

But then again, blockchain is still plaguing us after like 16 years. So I don't really have a lot of hope that enough average people are going to wizen up and see the AI scam for what it really is any time soon.

The future is bleak.

AI isn't the solution to everything, despite what some tech companies might want you to believe. Many companies are pushing AI into products where it's not particularly helpful, leading to frustration among users, and that's the sentiment you're picking up.

Specifically, the backlash is usually directed at LLMs and image-generating AIs. You don't hear people complaining about useful AI applications, like background blurring in Teams meetings. This feature uses AI to determine which parts of the image to blur and which to keep sharp, and it's a great example of AI being used correctly.

Signal processing is another area where AI excels. Cleaning audio signals with AI can yield amazing results, though I haven't heard people complain about this use. In fact, many might not even realize that AI is being used to enhance their audio experience.

AI is just a tool, and like any tool, it needs to be used appropriately. You just need to know when and how to use AI—and when to opt for other methods.

BTW even this text went through some AI modifiations. The early draft was a bit messy, I used an LLM to clean it up. As usual, the LLM went too far in some aspects, so I fixed the remaining issues manually.

I will preface this with my usual disclaimer on such topics: I do not believe in intellectual property (that is, the likening of thought to physical possessions). I do not think remixing is a sin and I largely agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's take that "AI training" may largely be fair use. So, I don't think so-called "generative AI" is inherently evil, however in practice I think it is very often used for evil today.

The most obvious example is, of course, the threat to the work force. "AI" is pitched as a tool that can replace human workers and "wipe out entire categories of human jobs." Ethical issues aside, "AI" as it exists today is not capable of doing what its evangelists sell it as. "AI chat bots" do not know, but they can give off a very convincing impression of knowledge.

"AI" is also used as a tool to pollute the web with worse-than-worthless garbage. At best it is meaningless and at worst it is actively harmful. I would actually say machine generated text is worse than imagery here, because it feels almost impossible to do a web search without running into some LLM generated blog spam.

Creators of "AI" systems use scraper bots to collect data for training. I do not necessarily believe this is evil per se, but again - these bots are not well behaved. They cause real problems for real human users, far beyond "stealing jpegs." There is a sense of Silicon Valley entitlement here - we can do whatever we want and deal with the consequences later, or never.

I have long held that a tool, like any human creation, is imbued with the values and will of its creators, and thus must serve both the creator and the user as its masters (The software freedom movement is largely an attempt at reconciling these interests, by empowering users with the ability to change their tools to do their bidding). In the case of "Generative AI" it is very often the case that both the creators and users of these tools intend them for evil. We often make the mistake of attributing agency to these computer programs, so as to minimize the human element (perhaps, in order to create a "man vs machine" narrative). We speak of "AI" as if it just woke up one day, a la Skynet, in order to steal our jpegs and put us out of work and generate mountains of webslurry. Make no mistake, however - the problems with "AI" are human problems. Humans created these systems in order for other humans to use, in order to inflict harm to other humans. "AI slop" was created specifically for an environment in which human-generated slop already ran amok, because the web as it existed then (as it exists today) rewards the generation of slop.

"All of your issues with ai go away if capitalism goes away"

LLMs are a tool. They lack fidelity and frequently generate wrong results but as long as you (human subject matter expert) go through the results they are extremely useful in analysing and summarising large datasets.

But that’s all they are. They don’t create anything new, you can’t use them for learning anything and they certainly don’t ”think”, they just produce nice looking sentences.

Generally, the energy needs and environmental harm they do make their usecases very narrow. But there are some.

As a general tool that pretends to be ”intelligent”, they are completely useless because they’re nothing of the kind.

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.

I think AI is cool, but how people use it can be problematic.

1. Fraud. Its easy to over-represent the capabilities and sell a bullshit tool to people.

2. Spyware. They require shedloads of data to train so AI companies are doing whatever they can to get data on people.

3. Taking Jobs. This is an existential threat to entire professions.

4. Spam. LLMs are a bullshit factory, so spamming and astroturfing are easier than ever.

because this: https://chicago.suntimes.com/consumer-affairs/2025/07/22/comed-electric-bills-hike-ai-data-centers-artificial-intelligence-power-pjm

also because its just a way for big tech to harvest your data while stilling content from creators and destroying the planet

also because instead of actually innovating any more tech companies just jam ai slop in everything

Valid question on a community for questions. Tons of legitimate responses from people mostly hyped for the opportunity to shed light on why they think AI is bad. Which seems to be what OP wanted to figure out. Currently negative 25 for the votes on the post. Seems off.

While I get why people have an anti-AI-sentiment, I don't get at all why people downvote this thread. If someone is asking a legitimate question in an open and polite way, why downvote the question?

A few things:

• It's baked into everything whether we like it or not. I'm so tired of that damn star emoji everywhere, especially when it replaces basic search functionality we already had (looking at you, Amazon)

• It's dependent on other people's work (LOTS of it) which is usually acquired through sketchy means - all that to compete with those original creators

• The slop. Oh, the slop. Slop that's often used as SEO fluff. So you have one bot working to please another. Humans are an afterthought

• I'm legitimately afraid that it'll take away from our understanding of things and critical thinking by relying on it too much. On that same token, once we rely on it and it gets manipulated, so do we.

• It uses a ton of energy to make it happen

Those are just the things I could think of offhand before going to bed. I'm sure there's more.

I have had good experiences setting up agents to do my work for me - saving me up to 10x the time on certain tasks (I own my own business, so I'm using it to extend myself). It does not replace expertise or reviewing work products. And it can take weeks to get an agent to produce usable work products. But for me, AI is a tool to help me be more efficient. 🤷

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

You hit the nail on the head:

Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely anti "AI baked into my operating system and cell phone so that it can monitor me and sell me crap". If that's what being Anti AI is.....to that I say Amen.

Most cases in consumer ai, it's data harvesting gone haywire and it's not being implemented to benefit society.

From what I see, very few people are stupid enough to blanket hate it, but it is overhyped and being used maliciously.

lol, you're getting downvoted just for asking, that should sum up the whole argument.

The hate is real here, and IMO most of it is unjustified. There are a few good points that are made:

• Training data was not ethically sourced. Can't get around that, it just wasn't. It was legal-ish, but it wasn't moral. Image generators especially, the art was not willingly given - but IMO if you aren't taking work out of their hands I don't have a major issue with it.
• Same as your issue, AI is being shoved everywhere embodying the "If you're a hammer everything is a nail".
• Privacy concerns as you've talked about, and security.

That being said, I don't have any issues with using it at home, local LLMs, and I'll even say I use it daily to help with coding. I've been coding for 20 years and I have to admit it does help, if you know when to use it. It has sped me up considerably.