Because a lot of current "AI" is a solution in search of a problem, being shoved into every product and hyped up as the next revolution, at a great expense. Even without the obvious environmental and financial impact, it is a huge nuisance. So people are upset and annoyed by it.
You could ask the same about pop-up ads, invasive apps, spammers, scammers, mandated age verification, Amazon's treatmeant of employees, and so on. No one would defend bad choices made by powerful people.
Personally I'm so anti Ai because there's so much pro talk. Imagine if anything wrong in your life, some insufferable, rich, out of touch jackass said "have you tried hitting it with a hammer? Here, try this hammer. It's great. Hammers will solve every problem in your life!"
Hammers are fine. They have a purpose. I use them when I need them. I don't need EVERY HAMMER MAKER TO PROSYLTIZE HAMMERS AT ME. They don't actually want to make my life better. They just want me to use THEIR hammer so they can make more money. It's not about solving a problem. It's just the latest product in a greedy aristocratic society.
Technical people have been through many hype cycles. Cloud, machine leaning, big data, blockchain, and now 'AI'. We are just tired of marketing people lying and overhyping technology.
The cloud did not save us money, it costs more to run in Azure, AWS, GCP.
Big Data was social media companies trying to justify sucking up every scrap of data they can.
Machine learning was trying to make algorithms appear smarter at spotting trends and being more reactive.
Blockchain has turned into a massive scam platform with crypto currency and nfts. Any regular database with an Audit table will outperform them.
'AI' is shaping up to be a justification for lot of job losses for little to no gain as shown by articles from Gardner and The Register
Coding tools by 'AI' companies are reintroducing flaws that we have solved because they are trained on Stack Overflow questions not answers.
Creative 'AI' tools do a bad job at producing acceptable output without hyper specific instructions to not have an extra arm or finger.
AI crawlers are slamming every webpage online in the hopes to update models with the latest data even though the data is unchanging.
People don't like that generative AI is based on stolen content. People don't like that it's being forced into everything. People don't like that it isn't even good at most of the things it tries to do. People definitely hate it's attempts at 'music' and 'art.' People don't like it's immense energy costs. People don't like that it might render them, and everyone else, unemployed. People don't like that they're owned by oligarchs.
Oligarchs invested trillions in the hope of firing us all and no longer paying us wages. You need to get some class consciousness.
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Do you realize how much money they invested in the slave trade?
Or the Opium trade?
Or Epstein's Island?
Just because it CAN make money, doesn't mean it should.
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Oh, my sweet summer child.
"They" didn't invest trillions of their own money in it. They invested a few million, built up some hype, and got other people to invest more, so now their millions are billions. And they are smart enough to sell before it all collapses.
They make their billions even though it's garbage. Heck, they make billions because they know it's garbage before everyone else does.
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
I think a lot of it is the neverending push to put it everywhere by the billionaires that are counting on it to make them the first quadrillionaire. AI-first browsers, AI search, AI assistants, AI support, AI therapy, AI cameras, AI birdfeeders, AI healthcare, AI price manipulation at the grocery store, you can't buy memory because AI, false arrests because of faulty AI facial recognition, etc. Then add in the surveillance factor where we are being turned into a fascist police state.
The pushback is because they aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are turning everything they touch into shit, releasing stuff that's clearly not ready for the real world in an effort to stay ahead of everyone one else in the contract race.
I'm not sure which corner of the internet you roam, I hear both voices very vocally in favour of and against AI.
actually, i'm gonna make a second comment from a more personal perspective because my main gripe with it (you know, other than the blatant abuse of the copyright system, the cult-like atmosphere of the companies pushing it, and the rush to build datacenters on cheap land which uses up local resources in the process) is that it has shown that i was much more alone in my previous jobs than i thought.
i work with tech people, and i like them have my own home server with a bunch of stuff on it. i like to tinker with it, write little scripts that do useful and fun things, build things just to explore programming languages, etc. the people around me didn't really understand, they were all in on smart homes and stylish dashboards, and i've never been about that but at least they're solving problems so i'm interested in how they do things. then i got laid off.
when you don't have a job, time moves at a different pace. you can absorb news on more of a macro scale. and reading tech news left me so confused. all these people around me were letting the language models spit out crap code. they gave up on what i thought was the most interesting part of the job, actually solving the problem in elegant and efficient ways, and instead are just dictating. people are using ai to read emails that someone else used ai to write, they're burning thousands of kWh to iterate through a hundred different broken implementations of the same thing rather than thinking about the problem. they're using so many tokens that companies are going into the red. they are entrusting their systems to agents that promptly delete important parts.
as i said in another thread, it's like being in the cycling club because you love cycling, having to leave because of an injury, and when you get back everyone has switched to cars because they're faster.
like, i've tinkered with machine learning models since like... 2015? we did neural nets and classifiers in university. i think statistical modelling is cool tech. i also think that "if we just put enough data into this markov chain it will become sentient" is one of the dumbest things ever said.
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
3D Televisions; Facebook Metaverse; Trump Inaugurations; NFTs; the original Segway; Pets.com; Theranos; Beanie Babies; Fyre Festival; Enron…
All epic failures that made a few already filthy rich people a little more money before destroying the lives of many others.
Most people aren't super involved with AI, and basically use it passively. In the same vien, up until fairly recently, social media was generally seen as a good thing because people enjoyed it and it wasn't common knowledge (not that evidence didn't exist) all the negative impacts it had. Thats not to say social media, or generative AI shouldn't exist, but the topic is more complex, and most people don't engage with that complexity and simply do whats easiest or what marketing tells them to do.
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Investors throw money at stupid stuff all the time. Tech in particular tends to be volitile and speculative. I mean, right before AI, it was NFTs, and before that, "the metaverse", and befors that blockchain. All of these were said to be gigantic new technologies that would revolutionize every industry and every aspect of life, and each had billions (trillions?) of dollars invested in them. Each of them lasted about a year before their value collapsed and they were realized to be overpriced dead-ends and empty marketing.
Easy answer: because so many people are anti-AI, and so few are pro-AI.
It's like the old joke:
You know how, when geese fly in a V shape, sometimes one side of the V is longer than the other?
You know why that is?
There's more geese on that side
In addition to everything else people have mentioned here:
because the internet is more representative. among normal people the pro-ai ratio is like 15-18%, and with the current political situation most of the pro-crowd is on the u.s. right, meaning that they're waaaaaaay disconnected from normal people.
those of us old enough to remember the dot-com boom are seeing a very familiar pattern.
Investing trillions in garbage is what makes the world go around.
I personally don't like it because it's a combination of unreliable and bland that I just don't want anything to do with. I have no valid use for it that a search engine can't do anyway.
Then there's all the planet-burning/economy-wrecking stuff that I'm not all that keen on either.
Because generative AI is absolute garbage, and the investors are dumbfucks.
Depends where you look, "the Internet" isn't one unified place. Social media forms bubbles easily, and social media like Reddit or the Fediverse is practically designed that way - minority voices get downvoted, blocked, banned, and so forth. So unless a forum is taking significant effort specifically to ensure diversity of opinion you're going to end up with things drifting to some sort of extreme.
My god, you poor idiot.
People don't like change. Especially when powerful nefarious people are behind it and they don't feel like they have a say in what's happening.
a lot of people i know irl including me like ai,
Yeah, no offense but you certainly write like someone who likes AI. I'll give you that.
Odds are you like AI because it makes you feel like you can do things that you couldn't in the past due to a lack of talent or skills.
however when i use reddit or youtube or whatever i see a dozen ai bad content. why is that?
Because AI sucks, both in terms of the quality of what is produced as well as the effort by which people use it to produce "content".
It's primary real use is for fraudulence and con artistry. Furthermore, it's a direct affront to humanity and culture. It is the for-profit technological strip mining of all of human knowledge, art and creativity for the benefit of the ultra wealthy investor class, in spite of the rules regarding intellectual property that they themselves created. It's also intellectually lazy, often wrong, and making us all stupider. Finally, it is an exploitative technology that is being used to replace and subvert human workers.
In other words, generative AI is practically indefensible. There's almost nothing good to say about it, so what do you expect people to say?
surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage
Are you familiar with the concept of an investment bubble?
The basic idea is that investors at large end up putting waaaaay too much money into a speculative asset, to the point where its market value greatly exceeds its practical/intrinsic value to the economy itself. We've seen this happen countless times in modern human history, from real estate bubbles, to the ".com bubble", to Dutch tulips.
In capitalism, value is subjective. You might value something a lot more than I do, or vice versa. But it's also possible for things to be generally overvalued or undervalued by society as a whole.
Regardless how any of us feel about AI (for or against), it is objectively overvalued by investors. Anthropic was recently valued at nearly a $1,000,000,000,000, roughly the same market value as massive giants like Samsung or Walmart, despite being a company that has only ever lost money.
because AI is primarily being used against workers of all kinds, accelerates climate change, provides cover for nations to use violence, and gives state bureaucracies excuses to screw us over by having supposedly "neutral" AI make decisions
People invest in AI because they think they will make money on it someday. And some of them will, and some have.
I've used AI and I've had good and bad results. I do feel like AI is a net negative to humanity. It could be a net positive, but it's doing so much bad stuff it's hard to see the good.
The question is... do you just like AI as a concept? Or maybe you use ChatGPT or something like it? Or are you one of the ones actually paying for it? I think that's an important distinction. I use it sometimes, but I've never paid for AI. I can say I'm anti-AI because I don't like what it's done to computer and game console prices. Or that I support artists. I can say I'm not anti-AI because I have ChatGPT on my phone and have used it to make things occasionally. I don't hate it, I hate what people do with it. I don't pay for it, but I can see the utility sometimes.
A good example of how I feel about it is the phone OpenAI is planning on making. I feel like on top of charging you for the phone, and on top of your cell bill, they will charge you to use the phone itself because it's AI. And I think that's horseshit. Even if they don't charge at first, they'll hook you and ask you to pay later. But they won't give you a refund if you don't. You just paid for a paperweight. Because what's so bad about using an iPhone (or Android) for ChatGPT? Why do they need a whole phone? Because they want locked-in customers.
It's cheap "labor" that pushes KPIs and looks impressive to investors. It's got the same upsides as slavery (the model most of those bastards want to go back to), without the costs being obvious, or the labor itself being able to rebel - instead, the disenfranchised and the 'little people' are the only ones left to fight, and we don't have enough money or energy to do so. Until there are riots in the streets, the AI-loving klepto-pedo-fascists win.
Loud minority. This is the case for a lot of things. Pro AI people don't go around posting content. They are busy living their lives.
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