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.

I’m a graphic designer.

The entire point of AI as it exists in the western imperialist world is to cut out workers, labor rights, and the means of production by automating jobs, capturing processing power to replace brain power, and essentially to funnel money from consumers to those who control AI. Those companies are using our materials, our work, our capital, and our attention to train their models, and NONE of it is meant to make our material conditions better. What do we get from it now? Text that sounds like a middle manager, and that’s factually correct as often as one. Images that look like shit, and that are making people dumber. Cars that disable their AI at the last possible moment specifically to avoid responsibility, and that doesn’t work well-enough to be road legal under ideal circumstances. Search engine answers that show nothing but that AI has automated being confidently wrong on the internet. Entire towns that no longer have water or electricity, but do have constant jet noise, diesel pollution and markedly higher temperatures.

We aren’t even at a stage where anyone but Nvidia is actually getting anything out of it. Budgets aren’t being saved because companies are using AI, they’re just spending the money on AI instead of for actual work. It’s a cult. It’s operating as a cult, and for some reason, no one is treating it as if it’s a cult except “Rationalists”, who are balls deep in it because it’s a cult.

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.

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.

anything produced by AI is slop

except for me I’m special, when I tell chapGTP to make cool shit it’s because I’m a genius with good taste

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:-

Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, and generally, people that are part of this space along with the general more libre-focused FOSS community are focused on the ethical, environmental and socio-economic effects of Generative AI than most. Currently, it is that this ‘AI’ space is dominated by big tech companies that are not too kind to open source anyway such as Alphabet Google, Microsoft-OpenAI and Claude, and currently, these affect the internet in the English-speaking space the most, which whatever your position is on the tech itself, you agree that there must be ‘something’ done to stem the tide that comes from in general, big tech takeover of our digital space and AI is a part of their destructive practices. These capitalist companies only exasperate the issue anyway, there is some (hotly debated) would-be benefits, especially in programming spaces and generally the LLM part, I don’t have an educated guess so I am not making one but until I personally think, that the veneer of AI / LLMs as this tech brought from the most complex data-centers of multibillion dollar companies into a technology that everyone can understand what it’s useful and what isn’t, and generally democratizing it. I don’t personally use a lot of AI / LLMs, but being in the programming / writing space will make me bump into it and so I eventually learn some quirks and details through that.

We all contributed to the training data, now they’re selling us our own work back to us?

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.

I think one under considered point is that no one would care about the drawbacks of AI if they felt like they lived in a country with actual leadership and a real vision for a better future. I think most of us fee like we live in a country full of vampires who are desperately running low on human cattle to feed on.

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.

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.