I don’t think people hate AI per se - they hate big tech, and what big tech is doing with it. That’s a legitimate gripe, but it’s not the same thing as the technology being bad.

AI used well can be genuinely useful. I’ve dropped a couple of examples in other threads I won’t rehash here, but the short version is: there are real world uses for this tech (world modelling, medicine, robotics).

Hell I built clinical notes pipeline that takes the tedium of charting from 15-20 mins down to about 3, with a policy gate that rejects LLM output before it ever reaches me if it fails criteria I defined. None that looks anything like the slop-firehose corporate rollout most people are reacting to.

https://lemmy.world/post/42920187/22058968

https://lemmy.world/post/44188294/22635793

Worth noting too: taking a black-and-white position on anything is just less cognitively expensive than arriving at a nuanced one. That’s not a character flaw, that’s called “being human”. But that doesn’t mean the nuanced position is wrong.

PS: The electricity/water data centre stuff is maybe more complicated than the headline takes suggest. This might be worth actually reading before treating it as settled.

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about

YMMV and ICBW

Chatgpt, list all instances where OP is trying to subvert people’s points with logical fallacies, & burn a couple hundred extra Wh while you’re at it, thanks. I’m sure it’d take less energy for me to do it, but nah

This book is probably more worth ur time than this post: https://ia801605.us.archive.org/29/items/aiboba/aiboba.pdf It’s An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi

Mostly anti-intellectualism and ego, as far as I can tell. Also, conflating someone’s business practices with a technology.

Judging by the comments, I would say that most Lemmy users are aware of the downsides of LLMs. The average GPT user probably hasn’t heard of half the points mentioned in these comments.
Judging by the downvotes, I would say that many Lemmy users are also very passionate about it. The average GPT user might think of LLMs like any other tool.

Unfortunately, I get the feeling that Lemmy isn’t a suitable place for having a serious conversation about AI in general (not just LLMs). I would love to have that conversation, but this just isn’t the place for it, as you can see. The people here seem to be too focused on LLMs, how they’re developed and how they’re forcibly implemented in places where they provide zero value etc. AI in general is such a broad category, and this kind of biased conversation misses 90% of it.

When you say AI, people hear LLM, and that’s a genuine problem. When people say they hate AI, they probably aren’t thinking of things like image search, optical character recognition, automatic categorization of the events of your bank account, signal processing in audio and video, image upscaling, frame generation, design of 3D structures, route planning etc. There’s so much you can do with AI, but Lemmy users rarely mention those.

Because it sucks balls, just like anyone that approves of it.

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

Replaces human interaction

Just annoying

I have split opinions on it. The massive data centers that use so much power, hardware, space, etc are problematic. They get used as a replacement for human ingenuity, scarf down every bit of data the can, aggregate it together in a way that even the owners don’t fully understand. They get manipulated to give answers that suit the owner’s wishes and fuel divisions in public discourse.

I take significantly less issue with locally run small model systems that you can put on your own machine. They’re not continually running/training and are generally treated more as a hobby toy, not some replacement for human understanding.

Reading through this thread and your responses gives the strong impression that you just want to argue while at the same time aren’t very well informed on the matter. Where you do respond its mostly whataboutism rather than actually addressing the comment you are responding to.

Your post asks “Why do people hate AI?” and then goes on to validates many of the commonly heard reasons people have for hating AI. You end with a suggestion that if we could develop AI into something else in the future, it might be good.

So it seems you already understand why people hate AI and are promoting an agenda rather than asking a genuine question.

@rabiezaater@piefed.social @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

generating ideas

LLMs don’t generate ideas, stricto sensu. They do, and I find it useful for esoteric (gnosis through chaos magick) purposes, output names and words unbeknownst to the user (this is how I, as an ESL person, learned some words I didn’t know before).

But if we consider hard determinism, do we as biological automatons, though?

learn to code

As someone who codes since my childhood, I wouldn’t suggest relying on LLMs for that. They could be used to output a descriptive text about some function or library, but you must know LLMs are statistical machines, the output text is a chain of “which token is the most probable next?”, an auto-completing only slightly “better” than, say, Gboard’s auto-complete. They “hallucinate” precisely because they rely on statistics and randomness.

Again: extremely useful as an “Ouija board”, not very useful for blindly relying for learning something, definitely not reliable for “vibe coding”.

Wanna learn how to code? Do the Elliot Alderson (Mr. Robot TV series) approach: find an existing “Hello world” project/source-code, tinker with it, change things here and there, try to compile/run, Google the exception that the compiler/interpreter thrown at you, change more things, break things, then fix the things you broke… This is exactly how I did. Let go of any hurry and you’ll likely going to master it eventually.

d&d […] I need a character […] it makes it up quick

Yes, this is one of the use cases where LLMs can thrive, as a dice with hundreds of billions of sides.

You may want to roll real dices, convert the number into the respective letter (A=1,B=2,…) then append it as a source of real entropy, because the randomness you get from LLMs is likely to be pseudorandom.

Ideally, you’d tune (using a RTL-SDR) to a blank radio frequency and digitize the (true noise) spectrum into ASCII, and voila: free randomness, straight from the Cosmic Womb to your computer!

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

Totally agree with you in this regard. Throughout the history, humans relied on other humans’ “ideas”. Most of the novelty stemmed from “what if I were to take this flamey thing that consumed the tree I used to sit on, and put it under this food?”, mashing up existing things. If we really were to appeal, evolution is that, merging two genetic sequences in an approximate manner while trying to replicate, still I don’t see humans accusing newborn of “stealing genetic work from their ancestors”.

definitely useful in a lot of ways, […] if […] developed on a more localized and decentralized scale

I totally agree in this regard, too.

To answer the main question: IMHO, people hate AI because it has been pushed and used by corps to further enshittify this world. I’m not Anti-AI, but I’m not pro-AI either. There can be nuance from both.

I don’t, not in general.

There are good and bad uses of AI. For example I used AI to generate my profile picture here on Lemmy (would you have noticed?). In general the creation of art is one of the best uses of AI I can think of; it doesn’t have serious consequences if it goes wrong, and it can easily be reviewed by a human whether it looks as it should.

But using AI to make actually meaningful business decisions without any human review at all? Using AI for customer service? Any company that does that deserves VERY negative consequences.

I don’t agree with talking points like “AI companies should be required to pay copyright holders of their training data” or “AI is bad because of the environmental impact” or “AI is bad because of RAM prices” or “AI companies should be legally responsible for any mistakes the AI makes (such as libel or encouraging users’ suicide)” or such things; I think all of these are nonsense.

I believe in general that AI gets too much attention in the media. It’s really not that impactful.

AI is great, LLMs are a waste. This has been the case for years before LLMs.

LLMs which the current hype calls AI are the equivalent of a scammy car salesman. To your example of have AI teach you to code - AI is awful at coding. It produces code that is the average of a junior developer’s output. It will look awesome from the outside because it will often mostly work at first, but in reality it’s going to be an unmaintainable mess. An experienced engineer could use one and produce a good outcome, in some cases may be faster than without and in others slower - but the experienced engineer requirement is a must. What this means is your AI teacher by itself is a junior engineer, whose output wouldn’t be trusted by themselves. That’s the level you’ll reach and may even learn and pick up terrible habits that’ll set you back.

It will do all that and consume a ridiculous amount of resources for it compared to following a YouTube course.

I imagine a similar case is true for most industries, people who work in the industry see the absolute garbage coming out of it in large quantities and have to listen to people from the outside who don’t know what good looks like in that context keep saying “oh you are now redundant cuz look how good ai is”.

Meanwhile, it is trained on data stolen from the people who are now losing their jobs because the idiotic decision makers are on the side of believing how good the output looks like. AND there is more, it’s doing it wasting a massive amount of resources, which drives up the prices for everyone (think all electrical devices needing computers, electricity prices). But what what money are they using for it? Oh yes! The money generated out of thin air by the corporations generating this massive AI bubble, which is most likely going to end with a crash that will decimate the market (and therefore the investments and pensions of people). And if the past is any indication, the government will prop the companies up with tax money - so people will pay for it twice.

What do you mean when you say AI?

Are you talking about all the different areas of research or just LLMs?

Well, you dismissed the lack of ethics of it all. Just because you do open source doesn’t mean everyone else does. And open source often acknowledges contributors, unlike LLMs. You can’t consent for other people.

It’s hideously destructive. Wastes electricity, wastes water, plays merry hell with anywhere the damned data centers pop up.

It’s unregulated and has already killed people. Multiple stories have come out where an LLM has encouraged suicide. Plus various dangerous outputs like the bleach as cake ingredient thing. Because…

It isn’t intelligent, it’s just a parrot. I’ll start paying attention when it can successfully count letters in words. So would you trust a random parrot that told you about something you know nothing about?

It doesn’t do a quarter of what it says. Translation should be its bread and butter and it can’t really manage that. There’s a reason the tech bros that hyped crypto are hyping this. Because they don’t actually know what it can or can’t do.

It’s approaching max efficacy for current techniques. More data is better in machine learning, but it’s finding the limit and it’s way closer than the scammers want to admit.

It’s destroying jobs before it can handle them. I’ve tried to use it before. I spent as much if not more time fixing its output than if I had done it myself. It gets to do my boilerplate sometimes now.

It’s making worse workers. All that time agonizing over a problem was spent learning how to do it at all. Now it shits out worthless garbage that the person doesn’t know what it does or how to fix it. Job security for me I guess.

It could be a useful technology, but the delusion that it’s capable of becoming AGI distracts from all the things it could be capable of if big companies actually tried to use them instead of the lazy implementations they’re chasing.

Edit: I also forgot that it entrenches racism and other bad behavior. If your corpus is full of racist shit, you get a racist robot. And racist assholes make it harder to fix that because they won’t acknowledge that such things are bad and that this badness can be taught* to robots.

Source: Data engineer

It will change society. It won’t improve skills.

Studies already show the opposite at play. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

If the LLM could teach you how to code, but couldn’t do the coding for you, it would be a tool for improvement. But it isn’t used that way. Instead of saying “teach me how to code this”, people are more inclined to say “code this for me”.

On top of that, they’re controlled by corporations who are not in the slightest bit interested in your welfare, privacy or economic success. They will invade your privacy, fuck over the environment, fuck over people and load their LLMs with propoganda and barriers that serve their political and social interests.

And as a bonus, they’re a nightmare for the environment.

Having said all of that. I agree, they are going to fundamentally reshape society. But it’s like the industrial revolution. Yeah, we ended up with a more efficient society, but it didn’t make people freer, it further entrenched wealth in the hands of the wealthy, whilst fucking up the environment. That’s what LLMs are going to do.

We could do them differently. That implementation isn’t inherent in their nature. But we won’t do them differently, because the people pushing it want the shitty outcome, because it’s not shitty for them.

AI makes children stupid. AI is mostly used for making AI slop. AI is being used by governments to manipulate public perception. AI is being used to engage is scams. People are using it to cheat. AI is being used to offset critical thinking.

AI is being used by corporations to engage in mass layoffs to save a buck. AI is being used by police stations and federal agencies to identify people, with minimal success (misidentification). AI is being used to deny health claims without review. AI customer service is dogshit.

I was a futurist like you once. I wanted AI based on how the movies presented it. However, the reality is LLMs are being used not for human improvement, but instead for the purpose of creating a permanent underclass with few at the top.

TL;DR: fuck AI.