I get some of the surface level reasons, and those annoy me too. Cramming AI into everything is dumb and unnecessary.
However, I do feel that at a deeper level, it has a lot of useful applications that will absolutely change society and improve the efficiency and skills of those who use it. For example, if someone wants to learn to code, they could take a few different paths. There are the traditional paths, just read or go to school and learn to code that way. Or you could pay for a bootcamp or an online coding education platform. Or, you could just tell an AI chatbot you want to learn to code, and have them become your teacher, and correct any errors you make in real time. Another application is in generating ideas or quick mock ups. Say I’m playing a game of d&d with friends. I need a character avatar so I just provide a description to the AI and it makes it up quick. It might take a few prompts, but it usually does a pretty good job. Or if I have a scenario I need to make a few enemies for, I could just provide the description of those enemies and have a quick stat block made up for them.
I realize that there are underlying issues with regard to training the AI on others work, but as someone who is a musician myself, and a supporter of open source as often as possible, I feel that it’s a bit hypocritical for people to get upset about AI “stealing” work with regard to code or other stuff that people willingly put out there for free for others to consume. Any artist or coder could “steal” the work of others for inspiration for their work, the same as an AI does, an AI is just much more efficient about it. I do think that most of the corporations that are pushing some new AI feature or promising the world or end of the labor force is full of shit, and that we are definitely in some sort of an AI bubble, but the technology itself is definitely useful in a lot of ways, and if it can be developed on a more localized and decentralized scale (community owned AI hubs anyone?), it could actually be a really powerful and beneficial technology for organizations and individuals looking to do more with less.
Kills the planet
Steals from artists
Widens inequality
Puts people out of work
Reinforces prejudices
Makes us stupid
Makes everything generic
Blows up the economy
Supports oligarchs
Can’t be trusted, hallucinates and lies
Overhyped & overpromised
Can’t generate outside of its training data
Is creating obscene surveillance state
Used in weapons to kill
Made computer components expensive
Ruined the internet with slop
Replaces human interaction
Just annoying
As a thought experiment I considered all of these points and here are my thoughts.
Got me there. That stupid datacenter crap where they need 1000tb of ram and zillion 5090RTXs and an entire nuclear power plant just to generate a chocolate chip cookie recipe needs to fucking go. Self-hosted ai isn’t that bad though. You can still argue that running a self-hosted koboldcpp on a 10 watt raspberry pi ALSO destroys the planet but so does all technology. Imagine living with no A/C, no deodorant, no running water, no toilet paper, just to make the earth livable for an additional 100 years or whatever. Fuck that. I chose to not have kids so I’m still doing my part which is more than what the majority of the population can be arsed to do.
I don’t really understand this argument despite being the most common anti-ai argument. What type of art is ai really capable of replacing humans on? Hentai and video game 3d model textures? It’s useless at making 3d models even to the most fanatic of ai worshippers. I can watch porn on pornhub for free and would never and have never commissioned a human artist to make porn pictures for me. Am I stealing from hentai artists by not commissioning them for their work and choosing other means of looking at boobs?
Buying textures for your hand made 3d models only supports the corporation selling them and the original artists get very little if anything at all. Using ai to circumvent spammy price gouging for 3d model textures seems like a better way to fight back to me. Another point is that copyright trolls are always harassing random youtubers over bullshit claims which DOES destroy livelihoods. Using ai to create a unique illustration that isn’t registered in a copyright strike database when you REALLY weren’t going to pay a $20 license for some spammy corporate licensed art either way really seems like a legitimate use of ai to me.
Another thing is memes even. I would 100%, absolutely, positively, never ever in a million years commission a human artist for the hundreds of dollars it usually costs to make an illustration for a meme in a shitpost I was trying to make. Yet people get out their torches and pitchforks anytime someone uses ai in a shitpost. I just don’t get it. It’s the “pirating software STEALS money from developers” argument all over again. Is it REALLY stealing if you WEREN’T going to pay for whatever it was otherwise? In 2018 the average person online was practically up in arms over how unfair copyright law is and everyone dropped it to hate ai instead. Seems a little too convenient is you ask me. I think a lot of people have been played.
Employers using ai to screen out the applicants that aren’t desperate enough and are therefore less likely to submit to abnormally cruel or illegal terms could be an example of this. Employers in America generally have too many freedoms in the first place. We aren’t going to get out this downward spiral of wages not keeping up with costs of living without doing some stuff that would be really unpopular to all the powerful people in charge of it all. I’m not sure that they need ai to continue colluding together to treat us all like trash. It will eventually devolve into all-out violence if no one forces them to stop ai or not.
Also facial recognition cameras, more about that further down.
I don’t have any good supporting or opposing arguments for this one because I don’t know of any strong examples. Ai is 1000% shittier than a human at any given task for 0% of the cost which is enough to keep an american corporation satisfied for most purposes at least in theory.
I’m not going to be like “provide examples or it doesnt count” because it’s lame and stupid when people do that but my best guess for this one is its talking about how ai can be used to reinforce white nationalist ideology online in bot swarms and stuff. An ai can generate pro christo-fascist propaganda just as much as it can generate pro-democracy propanganda. I wish we could harass christian nationalist type people online with ai but it seems to be only the bad guys doing it. Go on reddit and say anything positive about marijuana in any context besides “my grandma is dying of cancer and marijuana allows her to not be in pain”. You will have people telling you to grow up and stop being a piece of shit. Meanwhile, you can speak out in support of bombing poor people in the middle east and no one bats an eye. Why can’t we harass the piece of shit people with ai? I guess you got me on this one. It only is used for spreading christian nationalist ideology for some reason. But this COULD change.
A few days ago I used a self hosted ai to help write a python script to run object recognition on the cctv cameras for my home network and it only took an afternoon. It would have taken longer to do this if I truly had to figure out and research every little detail and function name myself but I still could have done it. Sure there was some incorrect stuff in it but fixing that was still faster than doing it from scratch. I used the time I saved to also program a graph that shows the temperature history on my weather station. Does this mean I am stupid?
100% true. In 2014 or so, you could find anything you wanted on the internet. Now every single webpage is one big nothing-burger. Would corporate enshitification alone have brought things to this point even without ai? Maybe so, maybe not. The point stands.
It definitely provides a coverup excuse for the systematic price gouging of essential microchips and computer components, sure.
This is true. Using non self-hosted ai even without paying for it does support oligarchs. Look at Grok for example. It’s a blatant fascist ideology propaganda machine. The other bots probably do the same thing but more subtle. I bet if you asked chatgpt about marijuana, transgender rights or atheism it wouldn’t be supportive of it. Yet if you asked chatgpt to run an online bot harassment campaign to tell transgender people and marijuana users how big of a piece of shit they are, there would be little pushback and it would say things of suspiciously higher quality than it was the other way around. They’d probably quietly and temporarily switch it over to the paid model for that one to make it generate higher quality hate speech without charging you for it. I’m not going to try it though.
Sure. You can’t trust posts on the internet either. Sometimes I find it easier to do my research and differentiate between bad advice and not bad advice than it is to just start from nothing, but most of the seriously potentially useful stuff is usually banned from ai models anyway.
I guess. See “Puts people out of work”. 1000% worse for 0% of the cost is a no-brainer to an american corporation. To cut down on backlash they probably have to pretend replacing customer support roles with bots is “actually better”.
Some self hosted ai models are compatible with being connected to a websearch which means all the non-self hosted ones also have that. Then you have ai shifting through ai slop articles trying to guess which information is useful and which isn’t. The thought of making an ai sift through another ai bot’s poop is funny to me.
This is the objectively worst part about the advent of ai. Ai powered facial recognition allows law enforcement to have an easier time tracking down and harassing the types of people that the dominant ideology (the christian nationalists) want removed from society. The fascists established a full-on 1984 and we fuckin’ let them. For this one reason alone, I believe the world would be better of if ai were never a thing.
Violence wasn’t invented until the first gun was invented after all. Not really. Maybe when the next american civil war happens, the good guys can have ai guided rockets or whatever too.
I already elaborated on this, but yes. Spamming ai datacenters all over the place just to prevent houses from being built there to keep costs of living high means they have to fill them with overpriced video cards. To give credit where credit is due, this isn’t all on ai. Chip companies are purposefully scaling back production so they can make more money while doing less work. Meanwhile, the government is massively cutting back on medicaid because they think we are all worthless losers who don’t work hard enough and deserve to either die in prison over unplayable medical debt or live through suffering because there is lots of suffering in the bible and republicans want to make America more like the bible. It is an unreasonably cruel, unreasonably unfair double standard.
I guess. Imagine getting swatted because you told your ai “friend” you were considering fleeing to a blue state and getting an abortion. Although religious fucknuts report their friends over this too.
If you get on any ai and give it a prompt like: generate a sensationalist shitpost of a news article titled “Why you should sell all your possessions and work 120 hours a week at your job instead and never take vacation because you deserve to live like that”. The result is just an average modern news article.
Finally someone with a balanced view on AI. That was a rare wall of text. Worth the time though.
Again, this is a lot of hyperbole.
Is AI killing the planet, or is capitalism and addiction to fossil fuels? If AI was 100 renewable and run based on community consent, would it still be “killing the planet”?
In what way does AI “steal” in any way more significantly than an artist uses another artist for inspiration or a coder uses another open source project for their code?
How does AI widen inequality worse than it has been already, and is that solely the result of AI or is it just a product of capitalism?
I could go through the entire list, but you get the idea. A lot of the “evils” of AI are actually just symptoms of deeper systemic issues that have nothing to do with AI itself.
Thanks for your reply. Here are my rebuttals:
Capitalism was already killing the planet, but the rush to invest in AI has demonstrably accelerated it.
No. But thats not the scenario we are in.
Because artists are people with consciousness and feeling and the capability for novel thought. AI is not. Believing it’s doing the same thing as human thinking is being suckered by the hype.
Even the people creating AI know it’s not “thinking”. They call AI that actually “thinks” AGI and believe they will someday create it by pushing AI further, as long as we give them all of our money (trust me bro).
This is a big one, but without guardrails it’s inarguably poised to hurt working people and enrich the powerful, which therefore drives further inequality (which yes, was already bad as a product of modern capitalism). And those guardrails are not in place, and will not be put into place if we just follow along as they want us to.
But AI is being used as a tool by humans to generate the images. It won’t do anything on its own.
What it has done is allow people to get inspiration out of their head and into the physical world with a much lower barrier for entry than ever before.
There are still people who don’t consider digital artists to be real artists because they use digital tools instead of physical ones. The hate for people using genAI is basically the same thing.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of genAI, but this one in particular has always seemed silly to me.
If you tried to digest every piece of intellectual property ever created by humans for free, they would lock you up. But OpenAI and Meta get to do it, and sell you a subscription to the AI they created with it - Making Zuck and Altman richer than God by destroying the ability for artists to make a living, and making every bit of art created from now on a shitty derivative pasted together by an AI from the memory of human art. It’s an episode of Black Mirror.
Not all genAI is OpenAI and Meta. There are ethically trained image generation models.
People are conflating all generative AI with tech giants, which is a critique on capitalism, not the technology.
The technology is actually quite amazing with regards to image generation.
Which ones are those?
The one Adobe offers is trained on licensed works.