I appreciate your point about personal responsibility for AI output and viewing it as a tool. However, I’m not sure how other things being bad for the environment too negates AI being bad for the environment. How does the level of outrage around an issue correlate to the factual severity of it? Also, AI is bad for the environment and it’s pretty clear

Unlike AI, Bitcoin wasn’t being so rabidly adopted and the (US) government wasn’t issuing EOs to prevent regulation.

Naw fuck AI

Coding landed on the right solution pretty early with this: Use whatever tools you want, but you’re responsible for what you publish.

This is not the case, there is an abundance of evidence to the contrary.

That is an approach being taken by some, but it's not coding specific and it's certainly not a standard, by any means.

Also people have never cared about the environment.

Some people do, just not the ones who stand to benefit from the decline normally, and those just happen to be the ones who can meaningfully make a difference.

Running an existing model isn’t any worse for the environment than gaming,

If you ignore the difference in scale and significantly different usage profile, sure?

How many gamers do you think you'd need to equate to a 24/7 data centre serving models, or even a mostly local setup running multiple GPU's at max capacity for a full work day, every day ?

and training them produces tools that can be useful as a coding package, like numpy for language.

Being subjectively useful isn't a good argument against environmental impact, unless you have a good example of something so useful it could practically be compared to the impact.

Yeah, everything is bad for the environment,

Not technically true, but in modern society i kind of agree in general.

but I didn’t see this level of outrage about bitcoin and people still like to pretend plastics recycling works.

The outrage is different because the surface area is different, crypto was semi-niche and didn't have the possibility to actively replace people.

More people are potentially impacted by this so you see more complaints (of varying levels of subjective legitimacy and accuracy).

Plastic recycling is an entirely different conversation but it's always been a scam for the most part, people believe because that's what they are told, repeatedly, and they have no reason to think otherwise unless they look in to it.

People aren’t actually mad at AI as a tool. People are mad about shabby work and increased spam. People are mad at losing their job when some jackass CEO fires them and being stung along when they apply for a new job.

Absolutely agree.

If we were brutally honest and insisted that AI has had little substantive effect on the economy (which is what the data actually says)

Citation? because to my (admittedly amateur) knowledge a large proportion of the US stock market is tied up in shenanigans to do with LLM's and the related resources.

Unless you mean the effect of the outputs that have come from LLM's, in which case , sure, it's probably not much of an impact overall.

CEOs and politicians would be forced to take responsibility and be held to account for their stupid decisions.

That has such a vanishingly small likelihood of happening, there is a huge fucking list of significantly worse shit from recent history and actively ongoing that is being ignored because money.

I highly doubt that "CEO makes line go up for quarter by axing 3/4 of still-needed staff, because they have no idea what they are doing" is getting anyone more than a kickback slap on the wrist.

We should definitely still be trying though, I’m just managing my expectations.

Best I can tell, this anti-AI crap is a distraction and excuse not to talk about workers rights, education, and good democratic systems.

"anti-AI crap" is a broad category, but i agree there is a lot of "Look over here" going on.

That's not LLM specific though , it's the norm at this point.

If someone creates a destroy-the-world button, is only the person who pressed it responsible for the destruction of the world? That's an absurd example, of course, but the point is that you can't just classify something as a "tool" and then leave all outcomes of the existence of that tool as a matter of personal responsibility, that's just cessation of thought. You have to actually think about who is empowered by a tool and in what way. And if a "tool" largely and greatly empowers fakers, grifters, political actors with little respect for truth etc. and the value for most people is largely nil to negative, then I'd say the "tool" is very much part of the problem.

It seems weird to suggest that the supposed legitimacy of the AI hype bubble is caused by anything other than people with a lot of economic and political leverage using that leverage to will something that doesn't really exist into existence. Which isn't that hard given the people they need to convince of its existence are some of the gullible people on Earth, and they do have a product that, while not what they claim it is, does have the veneer of it being that. If a company's shareholders are convinced that AI can replace many of the company's workers (or are convinced that the other shareholders are convinced that it can), then the executives can fire thousands of people and it will just increase the shareholder value. Sure, it will sabotage the long-term health of company, but by that time the locust will have had their payday and moved on to the next grift.

Now of course, this sort of thing has been happening since long before LLMs and the like were a thing, but a key difference is that before, there's been at least some connection between the executives' and shareholders' fortunes and the company actually doing something, given workers at least some leverage to gain and enforce their rights. But now the existence of AI allows them to keep up the pretence that workers have no leverage at all for a good while, so so much for workers' rights. It's not actually AI doing this of course, but the existence of a strategic weapon is still a problem even if the weapon is never deployed and even if it's just a box of firecrackers and pinball machine parts. And that's putting aside all the ways AI is being used as a tactical weapon, undermining education and democracy.

well put