AI doesn't exist. This is like asking an atheist why they hate god.
If you're talking about LLMs and the like, they're unpopular on Lemmy because tech people are over represented here and tech people understand how these technologies work and why all the hype isn't just false, but malicious.
It's a masterclass in externalities: local communities face the consequences of the resource consumption by the data centers.
Job loss: were all told the "knowledge market" is where you deserve a good salary. AI threatens a lot of that work. Blue collar factory work will go as soon as AI can be properly integrated with nimble robotics that aren't quite there yet. With how disgusting our society is (in the US) there will be no consideration for the people who can no longer find work.
Wealth built on theft and gambling: people like Altman become fabulously wealthy with a system that makes 0 profit and has been built off of the stolen works of millions of people.
Capacity to manipulate: we've had enough trouble with bad faith actors on the Internet with real people. Now we're going to have an endless army of "intelligent" actors that will be weaponized against populations worldwide to secure the position of the ultra wealthy over all of our governments.
I didn't before much, but now I REALLY don't have a positive outlook on our future because of this...
No one has convinced me how it is good for the general public. It seems like it will benefit corpos and governments, to the detriment of the general public.
It's just another thing they'll use to fuck over the average person.
It COULD help the average person, but we'll always fuck it up before it gets to that point.
You could build an app that teaches. Pick the curriculum, pick the tests, pick the training material for the users, and use the LLM to intermediate between your courseware and the end users.
LLM's are generally very good at explaining specific questions they have a lot of training on, and they're pretty good at dumbing it down when necessary.
Imagine an open-source, free college course where everyone gets as much time as they need and aren't embarrased to ask whatever questions come to their minds in the middle of the lesson. Imagine more advanced students in a class not being held back because some slower students didn't understand a reading assignment. It wouldn't be hard to out teach an average community college class.
But free college that doesn't need a shit ton of tax money? Who profits off that? we can't possibly make that.
How about a code tool that doesn't try to write your code for you, but watches over what you're doing and points out possible problems, what if you strapped it on a compiler and got warnings that you have dangerous vectors left open or note where buffer overflows aren't checked?
Reading medical images is a pretty decisive win. The machine going back behind the doctor and pointing out what it sees based on the history of thousands of patient images is not bad. Worst case the doctors get a little less good at doing it unassisted, but the machines don't get tired and usually don't have bad days.
The problem is capitalism. You can't have anything good for free because it's worth money. And we've put ALL the money into the tech and investors will DEMAND returns.
I don't hate AI, LLMs are incredibly powerful tools that have an incredibly wide range of uses. The technology itself is something that's very exciting and promising.
What I do hate is how they're being used by large corporations. A small handful of big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, etc) decided to take this technology and pursue it in the greediest ways possible:
They took open source code, built on top of it, and closed it off so they could sell it
They scrapped all the data on the internet without consent and used it to train their models
They made their models generate stuff based on copyrighted works without permission or giving credit, thus basically stealing the content
But that wasn't enough for them so they decided to train their models on every interaction you have with their LLM services, so all your private conversations are stored and recycled even if you don't want that to happen
They use the data from the conversations that you've had with the chatbots to build customer profiles about you that they sell to advertisers so they could send you hoards of personalized ads
They started integrating their LLMs into their other products as much as they could so they could artificially increase their stock prices
They aggressively campaign for other companies to buy and integrate their models so both parties could artificially increase their stock prices
In order to meet their artificially induced demand, they're sucking the life out of the electricity grid, which is screwing over everybody else
They're also taking over the hardware industry and killing off consumer electronics since its more profitable for manufacturers to sell to AI companies than to consumers
They're openly bribing, lobbying, and campaigning governments to give them grants, tax breaks, and keep regulations at a minimum so they could do whatever they want and have society pay for the privilege
They're using these LLMs to cut as many jobs as possible so they could penny pinch just a little more, hence the massive waves of recent layoffs recently. This is being done even if the LLM replacements perform far worse than humans.
All of this is being done with zero regard to the environmental damage caused by them with their monstrous data centers and electricity consumption
All of this is being done with zero regard to the harmful impacts caused to people and society. These LLMs frequently lie and spread misinformation, they feed into delusions and bad habits of mentally unwell people, and they're causing great damage to schools since students could use these models to easily cheat and nothing can be done about it
When you put all of this together, then it's easy to understand why people hate AI. This is what people oppose, and rightfully so. These corporations created a massive bubble and put our economy at risk of a major recession, they're destabilizing our infrastructure, destroying our environment, they're corrupting our government, they're forcing tens of thousands of people into dire financial situations by laying them off, they're eroding our privacy and rights, and they're harming our mental health... and for what? I'll tell you, all of this is done so a few greedy billionaires could squeeze a few more dollars out of everything so they could buy their 5th yacht, 9th private jet, or 7th McMansion. Fuck them all.
To add to your good points, I'm a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like "this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we're on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence" or "90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years" it annoys me because its not real, and it's always someone selling something. Today's AI is the same tech they've been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore's Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.
The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it's the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.
What a fucking waste of resources.
What's real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it's not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).
Anything the billionaire cabal pushes on us I automatically hate. Don't even need to know what it is. If they are pushing it you know there is some nefarious shit under the hood.
It's built on 'slave' labor, illegal use of content and additionally using unbelievable amounts of power so the environmental concerns go right out of the window at a time where we should do everything to not do that.
Also, AI, even if it's the currently established term has absolutely nothing to do with neither intelligence nor sentience but is being sold as AGI (overpromised).
This has caused huge masses of investment to gather which will pop at some point, causing all of us massive issues due to the missteps of a few.
...additionally using unbelievable amounts of power so the environmental concerns go right out of the window at a time where we should do everything to not do that.
Residential retail electricity prices in September were up 7.4%, to about 18 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the most recent data from the Energy Information Administration.
That's on a national basis too. If you happen to live in an area with a lot of data centers, your energy costs have probably risen more than that.
my take on the problems of AI from what i can remember:
Destroying the environment/Draining water(is that only chatgpt?) faster
Increasing ram prices
costs Jobs
Training On everything without respecting the original license/creators
does not respect robots.txt
sometimes not reliable source of information
destroying creativity/oversaturating the market
its not that reliable to replace as your assistant due to hallucination so its better to research the answers the AI gives you.(i hate how sometimes i feel like its easier,safer,less ethical and faster to ask AI then to look up the answer or maybe thats just me)
Censoring Topics (is that only palestine genocide topics and is that also only chatgpt?)
ofc am not stopping anyone from using AI,but the ethics is the elephant in the room with AI as listed.
Am concerned about the labor displacement it may cause--though I am skeptical it will be as widespread as currently feared. I think many of the companies that have cut workers already will end up regretting it in the medium term.
Am convinced that the massive, circular investment in this technology has produced an economic bubble that will burst in the coming years. Because we have so little insight into private credit markets, we don't know to what degree retail and commercial banks will be exposed, and thus can't anticipate the potential damage to the broader economy.
Am fatigued (but unsurprised) that the US government is not considering thoughtful regulation that anticipates the disruption that AI is likely to cause.
Am cognizant of its current limitations.
Do not currently believe that AGI is imminent or even guaranteed. I think elites peddling this notion may be captured by highly motivated reasoning. In some cases, it seems like a bit of a belief system.
I don't hate AI (specifically LLMs and image diffusion thingy) as a technology. I don't hate people who use AI (most of the time).
I do hate almost every part of AI business, though. Most of the AI stuff is hyped by the most useless "luminaries" of the tech sector who know a good profitable grift when they see one. They have zero regard for the legal and social and environmental implications of their work. They don't give a damn about the problems they are causing.
And that's the great tragedy, really: It's a whole lot of interesting technology with a lot of great potential applications. And the industry is getting run to the ground by idiots, while chasing an economic bubble that's going to end disastrously. It's going to end up with a tech cycle kind of similar to nuclear power: a few prominent disasters, a whole lot of public resentment and backlash, and it'll take decades until we can start having sensible conversations about it again. If only we would have had a little bit of moderation to begin with!
The only upside AI business has had was that at least it has pretended to give a damn about open source and open access to data, but at this point it's painfully obvious that to AI companies this is just a smoke screen to avoid getting sued over copyright concerns - they'd lock up everything as proprietary trade secrets if they could have their way.
As a software developer, I was first super excited about genAI stuff because it obviously cut down the time needed to consult references. Now, a lot of tech bosses tell coders to use AI tools even in cases that's making everyone less productive.
As an artist and a writer I find it incredibly sad that genAI didn't hit the brakes a few years ago. I've been saying this for decades: I love a good computerised bullshit generator. Algorithmically generated nonsense is interesting. Great source of inspiration for your ossified brain cells, fertile grounds for improvement. Now, however, the AI generated stuff pretends to be as human-like as possible, it's doing a terrible job at it. Tech bros are half-assedly marketing it as a "tool" for artists, while the studio bosses who buy the tech chuckle at that and know they found a replacement for the artists. (Want to make genAI tools for artists? Keep the output patently unusable out of the box.)
AI is only looks good if you're an outsider to the profession. The moment you're even an amateur, you'll see all of its faults. It's just a plagiarizing machine with a built-in contextual search function (any AI model that runs as an actual contextual search instead of a wannabe assistant with a flattering personality?), that can make some crappy looking and weirdly specific clip art, stock music with funny-sounding gimmicks, and buggy code you'd better plagiarize from public domain licensed code from Github.
The technology is way too resource intensive for the benefit it gives. By resource, I mean environmental and technological. Have you seen the prices of DDR5 RAM? Microsoft is actually working to bring TMI 1 back online. TMI = Three Mile Island as in a full sized nuclear reactor that has been retired from service since 2019. The only reason why they are not bringing TMI2 back online is because IF F$%KING MELTED DOWN IN 1979.
Add to that Micron exited the consumer market to provide memory to the AI market only... What the actual F#$k?
Now the bubble has formed and the people that shoved tens of billions into it are trying to fill that bubble by any means necessary. Which means the entire population of this country are constantly bombarded by it for purposes it is ill suited to.
When, not if, this bubble pops it's going to be a wild ride.
At some point, we should legislate that all non production tech buisnesses have to be energy positive- as in 'wanna build a data center? Its got to have more solar/ wind etc, tha it uses or its unpermitable.
Hate not so much for AI in and of itself, my ire is the resource use for one. We were already draining aquifers that took thousands of years to fill and now we're burning even more for datacenters (DCs).
To top it off, America's western deserts are the best place for DCs. No natural disasters, stable and predictable weather, tectonically inactive. Every time I've had to pick a primary or backup DC, I'd hit one in Las Vegas or somewhere out west. (This experience was pre-AI.)
These DCs are burning power and causing higher bills to consumers, which is just fucking obscene. States should legislate that DCs have to bring at least some of their own, dedicated renewables, and pay a premium to the power company for the extra stress and maintenance on the grid. These costs should not touch customers, residential or business.
Maybe even worse is the economic aspect. Have a look at the current Buffett Index, the ratio of the total United States stock market to GDP. We topped 200% for the first time, ever. For comparison, the Great Depression and Great Recession were around 120-130%. This "extra" stock market valuation is all due to AI speculation.
So for all the other whining lemmy does about AI, it's the ecosystem and economic disasters it's creating that we'll all remember when the bubble pops.
AI is trained on the Internet. Look at the bullshit on the Internet. AI will take some random schmoe's bullshit opinion and present it as hard fact.
That, and it just re-introduced the problem of being able to see search results without visiting any of the resultant websites. The last time, sites ended up burying answers down the page to avoid being able to see results in search previews. Making everything shittier. What kind of response is there going to be to AI summaries? Everything will undoubtedly get even shittier as sites try to get people to visit and not just read the AI summary. Hello even more obfuscation. We're taking the greatest method of spreading information around the globe ever devised and just absolutely filling it to the brim with bullshit.
Huh… so it’s getting its advice scrape from Reddit. Now it makes sense where it’s getting the idea of telling teens to die by suicide. That place is a shithole where intelligence goes to die.
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