Comment by stavros
3 days ago
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
Speaking just for myself:
I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix.
I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the prompt, not the AI output.
And I hate the AI companies, not so much because AI is solely in the hands of a few companies, but because they're trying to make it appear so inevitable and once-in-a-lifetime-get-on-it-now-or-be-left-behind-forever that everyone is losing their minds and chasing it like lemmings.
I'm against all of it. I actually care about people. Computers are tools; that's all. When the tools make it harder to connect with other humans in a human way, when the contact turns into this weird unnatural garbage where I can't hear the heart of the person on the other side, then computers are bad tools that need to stop being used. (Yes, you could have "corporate speak" that had the same problems, but at least that came at the speed that humans can type. AI lets it flow far faster, fast enough that it drowns out actual human communication. That's a huge loss.)
With personal computing, we were promised a bicycle for the mind. Instead, we have panopticon, attempts to eliminate the professional class and bullshit accelerators to help the lazy and careless slide by and create more aggravating work for the people who care.
I feel the same. You're not alone.
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No need to be so dismissively pathological. If you disagree, that's one thing, but this reads as 'look at this sad, crazy fool' when this is a pretty understandable reaction to feeling alienated by the way in which LLMs are being forcefully pushed in both personal and professional domains and the oft ensuing breakdown in human to human communication. 'Who does this technology serve?' is a valid question and 'not us' is a valid answer.
Sure, the poster's feelings may stem from a 'wider set of technology/tooling', but that doesn't necessarily take from the point. People are sensing that LLM technology is being used as an accelerant for further alienation, whether attributed perfectly to the specific technology or not.
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It’s not a simple A or B. There are plenty of reasons to be against AI, and they can depend on where you live or how you are affected by it. The citizens who just got told they’ll be left without electricity because it’ll be rerouted to a nearby data centre have good reason to be against it. As do the people affected by their noise. People concerned with the environmental impact, the rising prices of consumer hardware, the consolidation of power, their use for surveillance, propaganda, killing, discrimination, the proliferation of AI psychosis, carelessness and loss of skills, loss of jobs without a safety net, erosion of online discourse, increased distrust of scientific papers… The list goes on and on.
Honest answer: nobody knows. You will need to create a poll large enough of people representing all society and ask the questions. Most people in tech (I include myself here) just speculate and project their own bias on the entire population.
For me, I'm very enthusiastic about it's use for programming, mathematics, and as a teaching assistant[0]. I'm very worried about it being used for automated surveillance, terrible customer service, and deceptive targeted advertisements. I'm unconcerned about slop and alignment issues. I'm very much in favor of local models (democratization), just like I'm a fan of Wikipedia for making so many topics available to everyone for free.
[0] I don't see a lot of people using LLMs to learn a new topic, but I had a really great experience by walking through some math I wanted to know, forcing it to go slowly, and writing code and test cases for each concept to make sure it wasn't hallucinating. There are no "choose your own adventure" textbooks like this, and there are no professors who would be that patient with me in office hours. I don't think it will work well for unmotivated learners.
Obviously, young people coming up into a world full of guys like him telling them that AI is going to eat their jobs and refusing to hire them for reasonable wages are not really in favor of specifically that in particular.
Yeah but as far as potential goes, "AI will take your job" isn't that much worse than "you'll be working 12 hours in an Amazon warehouse with a 2 minute pee break for minimum wage".
I feel like American society is particularly vulnerable to this, where nobody opposes anything that doesn't affect them personally, which means that resistance to any gradual erosion of liberties is always tiny. You can pass anything you want as long as you do it slowly, because resistance will always be limited to a small segment of the population at a time.
It's very "first they came for the communists".
I feel like it's a mix of so many things it's hard to know the answers to any of these questions.
- the job market is harder now, apparently because of AI - environmental concerns due to data centers - the ethical issues with scraping people's copyright data to power AI - slop overwhelming the Internet, fake videos all over tiktok that seem real - safety issues like AI psychosis
The world is hard right now, and a lot of the things that make it hard seem to intersect in all sorts of ways with the way AI is being developed, run, and used.
If you solve one of those issues, you still haven't solved the other ones.
I don't think AI safety/psychosis/alignment issues are on most people's minds. All of the other ones are basically downstream of AI furthering wealth inequality. Job market for obvious reasons. Environmental concerns are mostly downstream of the fact that cities are suddenly accommodating data centers while they didn't care about promoting growth of infrastructure before, and citizens are asked to foot the electrical/water bills. (People would not care about environmental impacts as much if they weren't immediately impacted, say the DCs were built in Africa).
Also missed is the pushback against AI art: the further devaluation of talent, and an associated loss of meaning many people have. I think this is probably still downstream of it threatening jobs though, since people would not react as violently if they could truly treat art as a hobby instead of as a profession.
> are people against AI
Personally, yes.
I'm against anything that seems poised to devalue human life
AI to me is very dangerous. And we're throwing it into mission critical shit with reckless abandon. And the operative word there is RECKLESS.
It's non deterministic by its nature. Without good frameworks and safeguards it's unpredictable. We know that much for certain.
But it's worse than that. We don't know all the attack vectors for prompt escapes yet at all. That's barely been figured out.
And the psychological toll of working in slop heavy environments is CLEARLY VERY BAD.
So ... we raced a technology out the door without even minimal research into how to do that safely or effectively. As an industry we just shot ourselves in both knees and made the case for a regulatory blow back of epic proportions. And like... That sucks. Complete failure of leadership across the entire industry. Short term gains for short term losses followed by long term losses.
For one thing, we were promised AI and we got... a chatbot. So it pretty much starts with the lies and scams.
You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
What kind of AI were you expecting that wouldn't be "a chatbot"?
It's hard to say.
Perhaps being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's nouveau AI revolution tinted my glasses.
But I remember a distinct air of optimism, that humanity was working towards some breakthrough in the fundamental secrets of consciousness.
Let me be frank, it doesn't matter how well the machine works if it is weaponized against people.
If it systematically degrades our humanity.
I am a pacifist, so I believe in the inherit value of living things. I expected something graceful and beautiful, with unquestionable value to the people interacting with it.
Instead Silicon Valley produced slave-humunculi, stunted aberrations of "intelligence". This entire movement is basically a two-faced insult to life.
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That being said, for all the things LLMs are capable of, you could pay a living, breathing person to do, more efficiently, faster, and for cheaper.
So the entire effort was for... what?
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For one thing, I would've expected it to actually have intelligence. All we currently have is a stochastic parrot without any intelligence or ability to reason.
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Imo, tech leaders managed to make themselves seem odious so much, that I am scared of any additional power they will get.
If I run Claude at home and it is now source of info and trained to be effective right wing propagandist (most subtle then grok) with no one except new CEO being able to change it, I am scared of it.