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It's all aspirational isn't it?
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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It's because AI is such a huge umbrella of things, some of it genuinely useful and others just a pure detriment to the world, and the discourse has become so vitriolic that there isn't room for nuance or discussion.
For example, I have a friend working in bioinformatics and a huge number of people in his field love AI. It's incredibly useful for their research. These aren't out of touch boomers, they're multi-doctorate holding, cutting-edge researchers with intimate knowledge of both neural nets and their field of expertise and they find AI (typically not the commercial-facing generative AI, but sometimes that, too) useful for what they're doing. It's anecdotal, but the actual experts I've talked to have said it sped up their work and opened new avenues of research.
That said, it's pretty obvious all of the absolute fuckery that is coming along with these companies; the slop, the job loss, the enshittification, the privacy nightmares, the theft of art and literature, the literal damage it's doing to people's ability to think–I could go on. It's easy to find reasons to be against AI in totality.
If you go into AI spaces, the vast majority of fans aren't fans of the slop or companies, either. They're mostly just optimistic that the improvements of AI will be so destabilizing that we all have to remake basically all of our systems and we'll only be left with the benefits. If AI figures out a cure for every disease, healthcare is going to be destabilized, but you'll still have every cure. If AI takes every job, you can't really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?
Again, it's anecdotal, and at this point I'm fully atop my soap box, but my experience has been that people who are AI "fans" actually hate the companies and the way that AI is being used. What they're hoping for is the world that comes after 'the big breakthrough' that breaks all the systems.
I think there's room for nuance. For the record, I'm a writer and game dev every time I see someone pop into my social media talking about using AI to write or make a game (or replace human creativity in any real way), I wanna beat them to death with my laptop, but when I see a new application for AI in cancer research, or a nearly century old math conjecture proven, I do feel a little optimistic, too.
Why are we assuming that if we acquire the knowledge of how to cure a disease that the cure will be made accessible to all?
Why are we assuming anything positive would happen for the vast majority of humanity? Is our allegiance to the tech billionaire’s verbatim propaganda completely predicated on optimistic vibes?
It is extremely important for everyone to understand that intelligent people are not necessarily less likely to be deceived. In fact, without specialized training, a more intelligent person may in fact be better at compartmentalizing their beliefs, and have a very robust ability to internalize false beliefs without letting it decay their ability to function within their field of specialization.
Indeed, if we observe cult recruiting tactics, being an extremely capable high achiever often just puts a bigger target on your back, attracting more robust efforts to indoctrinate you into the fold.
All of which is to say, you are not immune to propaganda, regardless of being a phd researcher.
We had an absolute flood of reporting about “ai” breakthroughs across different fields of science. There have been countless examples of these stories being investigated, and it turns out the “breakthrough” was either unrelated to AI or blatantly fabricated. I myself work in one of these cutting edge industries and I personally know of two major international companies who have heavily marketed and sold “AI” systems, complete with public press releases detailing the breakthroughs, when in reality the systems are literally and totally unrelated to anything AI. In one case they simply affixed an “AI” sticker to an existing device without changing the programming or capabilities whatsoever.
Just be careful out there friend. This whole affair is rotten to the core. Have optimism that we can protect one another from what’s coming. Don’t be optimistic that the billionaires are simply waiting until the right moment, when they are satisfied with the power they have amassed, to finally share their prosperity with us
We aren't. I was answering the point of the OP about why there is such a divergence in beliefs. Just illustrating what the other side thinks as I've seen it. To your question, though, I don't think it will. I think it'll be about the same distribution it currently is.
Again we aren't. I know that I wouldn't trust the billionaire salesman's pitch. But I would argue that having zero access to a medication is worse than having some access to it, though. There's definitely room for a conversation about an unequal distribution of resources to be had, but I don't know if that can be blamed on AI, specifically.
Couldn't agree more. Being educated doesn't preclude being stupid.
I mean, these examples aren't really a mark against AI so much as the industry and the state of research, isn't it? Fabricating research, lying about AI use, or scamming is kinda just... people, right?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for skepticism. Most AI is just garbage and not useful, and even less of it is useful for actual research, but the idea that there is nothing good being developed at all, that it has zero benefit, strikes me as the inverse of the pure, unadulterated optimists have where they think that a total system collapse from 'the big breakthrough' wouldn't be absolutely catastrophic for a ton of people, too.
I just think it is more complex than the current discussion around AI. That's all.
I know friend, I’m addressing the people you are speaking for, regardless of who amongst us here agrees with them. I apologize for the confusion
This comes up a lot.
Are you familiar with the story of The Lorax?
To summarize briefly, a billionaire creates a comfortable scarf, made from felled trees. He aggressively markets this fashion item to the point where it becomes a worldwide sensation, and all the trees are felled in the pursuit of manufacturing more scarves. In the end, without any trees, there is no more fresh air to breathe. Ah but, worry not, the billionaire rises to the occasion, and graciously begins selling the populace canned air so they can survive.
In this story, do you consider the many objectively good qualities of the scarf to be relevant in any way? How comfortable it is? How warm? How stylish? Would you dismiss the pleas of environmentalists for being too narrow minded in their denial of these many clear benefits?
This comes across a bit condescendingly. I obviously think that destroying the environment is a bad thing.
But I think you're misreading my point entirely. I'm not advocating for AI wholesale or saying the ends justify the means, so I don't see how the Lorax is relevant here.
We’re currently in the beginning of the story, the alarm is sounding, and instead of firmly rejecting it, we find ourselves trying to balance the discussion by reminding ourselves of the many positive things people like about AI
Everyone agrees destroying the environment is bad, just like everyone agrees Hitler was bad. But when we find ourselves in modern parallels of these situations it seems like decisive action is often derailed for the sake of nuance.
I apologize for any condescending air, I am not accusing you of vehemently supporting the scarf industry. I think this discussion is just a bit tough to keep grounded as we shift between addressing each other, ideas in general, and the people we know who hold them. I appreciate your posts and bringing forward the perspectives you’ve encountered and your thoughts about them
I think The Lorax comparison is warranted for LLMs, hyping the race for AGI, and AI as marketing/branding, but the AI umbrella includes a lot of Machine Learning that's just practical, applied statistics.
A lot of ML applications aren't anymore resource intensive then using Lemmy. So I think the discussion about harms v. benefits of ai-- beyond hypers and doomers-- often diverges from conflating "AI" with these AI companies that are all-in on LLMs vs AI as a field that contains an over-hyped, over-invested, resource-intensive, subcategory bubble that needs to pop already as well as subcategories that make it easy and efficient to classify and cluster data.
I agree, I think the conflation of machine learning, which has existed and benefited us for decades, with “AI” is an unfortunately effective marketing strategy. In fact most of the “benefits of AI” being discussed above are just classic machine learning applications being rebranded as AI purely for the sake of allowing the media to have headlines like “AI cures cancer!”
Right like in this metaphor we’re now lumping scarves in with jackets (classic style, normal manufacturing and impact on the environment) and saying that jackets are good so we should be careful when addressing the field of clothing as a whole. I think the critical thing to understand is that clothing is not under the scarf umbrella, it’s the other way around. It’s not a condemnation of pants to oppose the scarf industry, regardless of how desperately the scarf industry wants to inherit the legacy of pants
I feel like these are such divergent types of machine learning that they have nearly nothing in common with the generative AI used in chatbots and code generators (especially that used to predict disease). Even if they may use some of the same underlying technologies and theory.
Which is why the overloading of the word AI to mean literally all of it is frustrating. So I guess I don't have a problem with using machine learning to target narrowly defined problems to gain new knowledge, versus outsourcing all of our thoughts and actions to chatbots and AI agents.
Couldn't agree more. It makes me yearn for the days when AI meant NPC pathfinding in games, but deep in my bones I know that's where the problem started. My personal conspiracy theory is that basically every AI marketing department intentionally muddies the water to make the conversation more difficult so people can't just decide to massively regulate LLM services.
Agreed, except I'm not frustrated by AI being overloaded-- it makes sense to me that a well-known, two-letter acronym be highly inclusive-- it's frustrating that market dominance and marketing can just take over that acronym. LLM is a more accurate description than AI, but it would hurt their sales if most people understood it's a statistical model and didn't mistake it for a kind of intelligence.
I'm starting to think that those of us who understand this will probably fair better by forfeiting the semantics battle and making the distinction between LLM-AI and ML.
I'm now picturing a future where the word AI truly becomes universally hated, and LLM lovers start calling it ML again:
Or we all just call it applied statistics, that ought to take the magic out of it, since normal people consider statistics to be boring and mundane and certainly not intelligent.
In reality, yes, but in common discourse people mean LLM slop and image/video generation because that is what is being marketed to the general public. The acronym has been coopted by techbros.
TL;DR: AI isn't just LLMs. Hell, LLMs aren't even bad. Big AI (aka capitalism) is where the problems lie. If you're gonna be mad, be mad at the right thing - capitalism, enshittification, copyright abuse, surveillance, hype, influencers.
It's still the same bad thing as it always was, just wearing a shinier hat now.
Agree. And let me screed about it even more -
By common discourse, I think you mean "...by chronically online experts". As backed by...what? Vibes in echo chambers?
A surprising number of people who speak confidently about AI appear not to understand the thing they're criticising.
We've seen this shit before and we never learn.
30 years ago, everyone knew that MSG was bad and video games caused increased violence. Both turned out to be manufactured consensus - speculative letters and mouse-injection studies boosted by "experts" into public panic.
I'd wager a dollar that most rabidly anti-AI people don't grok that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (yes, that recent) was awarded for machine learning in protein folding - cracking a 50-year-old problem with real applications to drug discovery for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
I use AI (image analysis, folding, STT, clinical audits...yes, even LLMs) every day. They're useful. But the online discourse around AI has become cartoonishly one-dimensional.
AI = GPTs = slop = bad is a category error, perpetuated either in partisan bad faith or simple lack of examination.
And just to tank the down votes even more -
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
The rich send out AI bots to hunt us down and exterminate us, now that they no longer need us for labor.
Hahaha, I mean yeah, there's definitely some horrible 'what if' scenarios out there. I won't presume to know anywhere near enough to make anything more than a guess at it, but I've seen some polar opposite takes on what would happen.
My big question is "why would they do that?" Like, if money no longer matters and you have infinite labor, why does killing everyone else even matter? There are more resources than anyone could ever use in our solar system that would be trivial to get with infinite robots. Fixing climate change (or at least reversing course) becomes a matter of setting aside some of your infinitely reproducing robots to make efficiency improvements.
The constraints humans have dealt with since evolving just cease to exist if robots can be made to replace labor. Like, the moment a robot can do what a human can do, the entire concept of what even matters as a species completely goes out the window. I'm not saying billionaires will suddenly turn heel and become good if that happens, I'm saying that everything billionaires have been chasing since the invention of currency ceases to have meaning if it does.
Nuance about AI? On Lemmy? On FuckAI? What? GTFO.
PS: I work with AI in health care; it's really useful to me. In my personal life, I'm also a fan of self hosting local models. I'd like to think there's room for nuanced discussion but there usually isn't, because wagons have been circled and frankly, people have pegged their identities to x or y. There are better things to do than argue with the righteous on the interwebs.
Anyway, I liked your post, fellow meat popsicle. I recommend using a Thinkpad for hitting with - more satisfying thump.