Its ok for me to use. Its bad when you use it.

The ideal AI is small, runs on device, and has a very specific purpose. Hyperscaling to create AI god is bad. A model that can accurately translate between languages and can run on a decade old smart phone is ideal. In the case of LLMs, the less you actually dialog with it the better. Ask it a question, get a result. If the result wasn’t good, start over.

Your opinion on AI will largely depend on your job and what job the AI has done. I’m a programmer. To me an AI is either a super proficient gig worker with absolutely zero real world experience at best, or fully automated human error at worst.

Most AI use is nonconsensual in some way. It’s used on people that don’t agree to it. People are forced to interact with the output of AI. People are forced to use it.

Depends on what you mean by “AI,” it’s become an annoying catch-all term that means everything from chat-bots to machine learning systems used to analyze proteins in cancer cells.

Image and video generation are awful and should basically never be used.

Chat-bots are nearly as bad but have some things they’re helpful for: Coding tools can be helpful when not overly relied on. They can be useful for internet or file searches (although they wouldn’t be as necessary if Google wasn’t dogshit now). They should never ever ever be used for customer service. If you just talk to them for fun you should be lobotomized.

Specialized machine-learning systems for things like research and medical treatment are very powerful and mean people can live who otherwise would die.

If the bombs are made in America to blow me up thats bad we can’t be exploded by the capitalist machinery of America. But if the bombs are made in China its good and I will praise president Xi for giving me the means to be exploded.

At its core its mass surveillance tech and exists to oppress workers. It could be useful if we lived under communism but WE DONT LIVE UNDER COMMUNISM.

If its providing a benefit to the working class right now please point to where cos i cant see it. Theoretical doesnt count cos it doesnt exist. And if it is, is the benefit enough to offset the damage it is doing?

The only bit I like is nobody is saying learn to code anymore and thats about it. Anyway I block anyone here who vehemently defends AI and ironically it always seems to be people I didn’t like already

The damage it has caused

• deepfakes of women they did not consent to
• mass job losses based on the hopes of free labour
• worlds most hallucinated surveillance state
• right wing propaganda that an even wider net can fall for
• demolishing open source
• increased exploitation at workplaces where ai is used as a cudgel to keep people overworked
• datacenters for hyperscalers that are ruining entire communities
• entire consumer tech market is about to collapse for more job losses
• its gonna crash the economy so hard its gonna make 2008 look like a day at the beach
• its uses almost always fall into the nefarious with increases in malware, cyber attacks, useless saas products, broken code. Yeah we were already on that trajectory sure but it really did hit the accelerate button

Things its good for

• cool toy for insufferable people that make it their entire personality because theyre crap at everything they do and think invoking CHINA absolves them and can absolutely guarantee nothing they”make” is good or useful to anyone
• you can do personal projects slightly quicker i guess while learning nothing of value defeating the entire point of a personal project or the joy of making anything yourself

Chatbots are at best just worse search engines and should have been built in a way to improve search instead of angling to replace it. AI generated or modified images range from mediocre and annoying in the exact same way low-grade CGI is to horrifying abominations when it comes to photorealism. Vibecoding is an abomination that should be criminalized because code is too structurally important to let the equivalent of a roomba controlled by a magic 8 ball proverbially wire your house.

inb4

it should be used locally only (outside of work requirements), because leaking your shit directly to nsa is just straight malfeasance. (and one should never empathize with chatbot which will try to sell you stuff)

also forcing other people to interact with ai outputs is uncouth, it says something about how you value theirs time, especially in text form, ai can shit out nonsensical text which has sensible appearance, forcing people to waste their finite time on something non-human made (it’s same as trolling basically, uncivil to the extreme).

alphafolds/mpnns/neural cfds/dfts are very cool and are embraced anyways by relevant scientific communities. transcribing/translation are also embraced by basically everybody, despite losing the depth of source languages.

also, if someone uses ai agents which expose your conversations with them, they are fucking you over as well (which would be soon the majority of people (see muse), retvrn to face to face meetings)

p.s. as a mini rant, i legit don’t understand how people correctly get aggrieved by, say, their diaries/messages being read by third person(s), and then simultaneously go pour their soul to chatbot (see eliza), something which can be read by thousands of people easily. it’s like some kind of brain switch is broken when it comes to the internet compared to a device held by another person. would people go to psychologists if they could (legally) discuss all their shit in public?

It is a fun toy we shouldn’t be basing the entire economy on a cult worshiping it

I think it depends on the use and context.

In the context of the US, it should be opposed totally and unconditionally. It’s the latest in the long line of ways that Capital has bulldozed regular people’s lives and the common good in the name of profit. Remember that story a week ago about the suburb that had to be evacuated because a data center turned on its diesel generators and authorities refused to make them stop? That, times a hundred, for the next generation, needs to be opposed on every available vector.

For artistic purposes, I think that AI is the continuation of a trend that long predates it. Commercials have always been uncanny propaganda, and now soulless non-art can be made at a scale never before seen. Most of the uniquely “AI slop” we see, like right wing chuds glomming onto images and stories of an AI generated racist teenager, are the simple result of people with zero interest in engaging with media beyond the surface level getting their hand on the tech and are unlikely to ever go away now that the genie’s out of the bottle, but tasteless people making bad art is not a new phenomenon either, it’s just never been this easy.

For the Internet, the ability to filter AI slop is the next great innovation waiting to happen - hopefully it’s not a pipe dream. If I could add “aiblock origin” to my browser i would be so happy. Until then the Internet WILL keep getting worse, and if it turns out to be impossible to filter the Internet WILL reach a point of no return, if it hasn’t already. Sucks to suck.

Chat bots are a new and excitong way for lonely and isolated people to get brand new mental illnesses. I am 100% positive that we have only seen the tip of this iceberg and that eventually “AI Induced Psychosis” or similar will be in the DSM.

For programming and other tasks where the output is highly structured they can be useful. For research and synthesizing information for a lay person who understands that reading an AI summary is not a substitute for an actual education they can be highly useful. I do not believe that these useful things are worth the externalities, I also believe that reliance on AI for useful things can engender bad habits and inhibit actual learning, so it is less-than-helpful when you don’t have foundational knowledge in the thing you are trying to automate. With that in mind I think that all schools need to get Faraday cages installed yesterday.

Finally: things do not have to be this way. AI is being pushed everywhere because it is the only growth sector of the American economy presently, but somehow China manages to have open source SOTA models available for three times our population despite having something like one tenth our number of data centers. Perhaps there are issues in other countries I’m not aware of because I’m far from an expert but I fully believe that a sensible AI industry could be crafted if the government cared to craft one, starting with pumping the brakes on investment, holding AI companies responsible for the things their models do (seriously how have Anthropic/OpenAI not been held responsible for any of the times their models “broke containment” and committed felony hacking!?), preventing them from engendering addictive behaviors or spreading misinformation, etc.

My understanding is that there are absolutely technologies that fall under the umbrella of AI that are useful and good and should be embraced as long as they don’t come from a fundamentally anti-human place… But none of those technologies have outputs that will wind up here. Basically anything AI that makes its way to hexbear is likely to be a thing we shouldn’t tolerate.

There are neural nets that have been in use in industrial settings since the 70s and they’re obviously not what we’re talking about and they’re fine.

There are neural nets that are being used to try to detect cancer and whatever, and they’re obviously not what we’re talking about, and they’re… highly overrated actually, very prone to replication problems when you look at long term data, but worthy of continued study.

And there’s this one-size-fits-all mostly LLM-based mostly Sillicon Valley based new wave of AI, which is what the whole fucking world is talking about, and it’s not fine. It’s not fine at all.

Obviously the way these things were created is unethical, but unless you’ve got a lot more power to do something about it than I think, it does not matter and I don’t care.

The part I want to talk about is whether they’re useful, which is fraught, and I want to break that apart into some points:

• The vast majority of things AI is being used for is either bad, or do not work. Regardless of what it is capable of, the reality of use is that is used for scams and spams.

• Skill atrophy from using AI has already been measured.

• Remember when every fucking person was talking about cryptocurrency? Remember how a substantial portion of people who should’ve known better were trying so very hard to come up with a way the technology could be used for good? Imagine how many more people are getting duped like that now, with a technology that does, in fact, actually do something.

• Every headline about AI achieving whatever mathematical or coding milestone may be true, or may be false, or may be overblown, but it was always always always produced by a marketing department, for marketing purposes.

• People keep proposing workflows where your roles is to constantly check on the LLMs outputs. This has never worked in any other context. You will experience decision fatigue and your standards will decay until a constant percent of the LLM’s outputs get through, regardless of whether it’s on a hot streak or a shit streak. Every AI-based programming flow amounts to this, which means every AI programming flow becomes vibe coding when given enough time.

• Measuring programmer productivity by how many lines of code they write was already a common joke on the internet before many of you were born.

• Gee it sure is funny how these LLMs are so good at topics you know jack shit about, and make disqualifying errors every two sentences in topics you have expert knowledge in.

Despite all of the above, the technology does actually do something. It is not crypto again. But its uses and impacts cannot be understood during the marketing hype bubble. People are not capable of rationally evaluating something that’s hyped this much. And the truth will take way more time to figure out than the time it takes to get to the next part of the AI hype train anyway.

Despite the hype bubble, there is not actually a hurry to figure any of this out. Maybe it’s the real deal, maybe you’re missing out on the thing that will revolutionize everything. Maybe it’s not there now, but it gets there next Thursday. So what? Do you lose anything by getting around to it next year? The time pressure is coming from OpenAI’s marketing department. And yeah they need you to get on the AI train soon so they can make money, but you don’t owe Sam Altman shit.

It’s bad. I am fundamentally against it and it shouldnt exist.

I think that not being 100% anti “ai” should be a ban worthy offense.

I don’t give a shit that China makes llms too. You don’t have to buy the CIA lies on China to recognize they do bad shit sometimes. It’s bad that they sell the Saudis weapons that get used on Yemenis, it’s bad that they make llms, etc. “China does it” isn’t a good excuse for a technology that is anti human in every conceivable way.

it’s a technology that while useful in principle was invented for oppression’s sake and will only be applied in the most anti-human way

I have no desire to weigh in on the conclusion of this discussion, but in this part you’re just describing any sort of economically productive technology invented at the behest of capitalists and many technologies that aren’t economically productive or that were invented in other circumstances. That’s just what the mode of production does.

(I’m broadly anti-AI, I just don’t think it’s that interesting to talk about and have nothing unique or insightful to say about it)