Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.

Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

“Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.

I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.

My take: Run what you want on your own damn hardware. If you feel the need to make it a ‘service’ in order to run it, think very carefully about WAY more than just the money it will cost you to do so. If you feel the need to take a massive IOU to buy the hardware or LAND to put that hardware, go die in a hole. If you feel the need to reserve the world’s entire manufacturing supply for hardware to put on the land you put out an IOU for, I sincerely hope that you get a pineapple up the ass as you’re getting beheaded in whatever town square.

There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.

Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.

Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.

I think LLMs are useful for some things, but not as useful as people think overall.

I suspect the major LLMs will follow the enshittification trend, prices will go up, and people will abandon them for smaller open weight models

Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

We’ve been using AI for decades and while generative AI is widely despised and mostly deserving of that despite, lumping all AI together while calling out the harms is doing a disservice to a lot of useful AI techniques and tools.

“Rapid Evolution” = recursing the same algorithm to juice ever diminishing returns out of the parlor trick at ever greater costs.

I can see that there is some value in using AI in the workplace, but I am hestitant to use it myself until someone can show that it is not damaging the environment, we have a plan for how to ensure people can use it in a healthy way, and that the content which was used to train it was ethically sourced and/or those content makers were appropriately compensated.

Because I just can’t shake the sense that the tool is fundamentally unethical to use currently.

I think LLMs are going to cause massive change, not all of it good.

Ultimately, I’m an optimist. I think in the long run, LLMs are going to enable us to do amazing things that we wouldn’t have been able to do without it. In the short term… I dunno. It’s going to be a rough transition.

I do think the people who think LLMs are going to keep getting better, leading to either some sort of techno-utopia, or kill us all off maybe don’t really understand how they work and what the implications are.

I also think the people who are categorically against AI are making a mistake out of fear, but that’s pretty understandable.

I don’t really use it personally (other than times I log in on a work computer, look something up, and Google’s AI search defaults). But I also don’t really condemn it as strongly as others seem to, I guess. It depends on how it’s used.

When it’s used to take work done by humans, then regurgitate its own version of that work to replace those jobs, that’s a problem. If actual artists, writers, designers, engineers, coders, etc. can no longer earn a living after being replaced by AI, we run the risk of complete cultural and developmental stagnation.

But I think my main point of disagreement with a lot of the AI conversations happening here revolves around how we look at waste and environmental impact. Not in the sense that AI isn’t still a problem in those aspects, but that it seems like a very convenient boogeyman for people to blame while ignoring the myriad other wasteful aspects of the world we live in.

Basically, with the environmental impact of data centers and energy costs of hardware in general, why do we focus so much on what that compute is used for, as opposed to addressing those issues in a more comprehensive sense? Does it matter if a data center is built for AI or for any other hosting provider? Or if someone runs a local AI model on their PC, is that any more detrimental to the environment than someone who plays video games for several hours each day?

I feel like there are lines that people who claim to primarily care about the environment are afraid to draw, when it’s easier to pin the blame wholly on AI. So if someone says that they used AI to help make their spreadsheets cleaner, to translate a website, or to summarize the content of a book, I don’t really jump straight to blanket criticism. Otherwise I’d have to take the same criticism towards people who host a plex server, who play MMOs, or who run Lemmy instances.

When you realize it’s just a big average sentence machine starts to make a lot more sense when and where to use it. I think it should be used as an exact problem solver not a general one. Government regulations can’t come soon enough because unlike previous tech this one has the ability to deceive and if it gets access to resources we will be in direct competition with the AI.

Sources for a good chunk of my view points: Spanish prime Minister wondering why AI not treated like nuclear tech at a global level interview with him https://youtu.be/p6XvTconhwQ

AI panel debate, Nate soares and Roman Yampolskiy stand out on this discussion about the inevitable risks we are walking towards with very little action. https://youtu.be/OhOmLqR5nN4

I have bigger things to worry about. Like affording food and all my bills.

Let me try to use an analogy.

We’re farmers in ancient times. A shaman tells us that we can increase our crop yields by taking a bunch of kittens and dismembering them alive in the fields. You try it and it actually works. I don’t want to do it and I’m disappointed by your choice.

Well, some dude on youtube said the future is Cyberpunk 2077, and I’m inclined to believe him because he had a lot of likes.