I mean, take your pick. This is a place where a lot of us…

• are leftists who disagree with extractive, anti-human economic systems
• left Reddit because they insisted on controlling how people could connect to each others ideas
• like the open collaboration of open source, which is getting wrecked by AI
• like open access communities like wikipedia, which are also getting undermined by AI
• dislike copyright law, which is being selectively ignored here because the people violating it are rich (on paper)
• are marginalized people, who tend to be disproportionately effected by AI decision-making

Ai:

• ruins the planet by polution
• is used to influence political discourse, erase facts and history.
• is a tool brought to you by people who at the very least don't want the masses to be free (look up palantir owner)
• is being pushed with the end goals to have a tool of mass surveillance and control.
• makes people abandon their ability to think critically (or in general really)
• is used to violate copyrights by it's very design. If you think artists have been undervalued so far just you wait. They don't want creative people anymore.

Take your pick, it's war and you're in it.

Platforms themselves are self-selecting. I'm speaking for myself here. I am on Lemmy because I dislike the power that big tech has gotten to control content, policy, news, and global perceptions. As such, I self host and use federated technologies where possible. The vast majority of AI tools are controlled by the same centrally controlled big tech companies that I'm here to avoid. There are self-hosted AI tools or there, but basically every AI tool was trained using scraped data, and, for instance, my Searx-ng instance was flooded by so many bots that I had to make it harder to use for myself just to keep the bots out. My blog? Constantly scraped, killing my bandwidth. A lot of foss projects used to have bug bounty programs and accepted code from any contributor to wander in, but are now closing off due to AI slop code contributions. So, the type of person you'll find here probably hates AI if they're like me. Also, I work in tech and have to bite my tongue every time a co-worker "helpfully" sends me a Copilot Slop answer to a question when I was asking for a judgment call or an opinion.

Because I and some associates spend years traveling, collecting , and documenting some very specific information on an uncommon family of animals, their care in aquaria, and ecological curiosities. We had a website which hosted all the documented info, a small but active community of people with this niche interest. A few minor ads and affiliate links kept the site running, and allowed our few naturalists to go to more places and document rarer species. Now LLMs have stolen all our content and google shows all of our information in its AI searches as if it owns it and never links the information to the community that lovingly curated it. Our website had to be taken offline forever because all our traffic is just scrapers.

So please, tell me how AI stealing everything we worked hard on for years and selling it to you is considered a good thing?

Because we’re mostly not bots.

Someone else can give a more comprehensive answer, but here are a couple bullet points:

• Models trained by violating copyright
• AI data centers using tons of water and power, driving up costs for local residents
• AI data center noise pollution
• "Slop" results (uncanny valley pictures, incorrect answers given confidently, etc)
• Companies using AI as an excuse for anti-worker actions (notably massive layoffs)
• Concern over how much of the largest companies valuation is tied to AI hype (because it affects everyone's retirement accounts)

Im an AI engineer and even I hate AI. When I say AI, I mean LLMs specifically. It definitely has its use cases. LLMs are pretty good at parsing unstructured data, and generating boilerplate code, but that's about it. Every other use case is a combination of buzzword bingo and slop generation.

AI, uses a tremendous amount of energy, produces an ungodly amount of heat and noise, and pollutes potable drinking water. The overreliance on LLMs for everything is lazy at best and sloppy at worst. LLMs are being applied in scenarios where I could have built a deep learning model that would fit comfortably on a laptop from 2018, and doing a worse job at predictions at that.

Ignoring the fact that they were trained on a ton of copyrighted data, which was labeled for dollars a day by humans in poorer countries, and regularly gets basic information wrong. Yeah, it fucking sucks. And the only people who stand to benefit from it are about a half dozen tech companies who are taking contracts with the US government to track citizens both online and IRL.

i don't particularly enjoy having to constantly question what's real and what isn't anymore.

i don't particularly enjoy having humanity's well of information undermined by disinformation factories.

i don't particularly enjoy every space i had to express myself creatively and experience others expressing themselves creatively being drowned out in mass-produced incoherent slop that i cannot possibly connect with.

i don't particularly enjoy that climate change has now been rapidly accelerated for the sake of a tool that's completely unreliable at doing anything it's marketed to do and has done irreversible damage to the very fabric of our society.

do you?

I can’t answer for anyone else but I hate it because it makes us stupider, it degrades human knowledge as a whole, it contributes to climate change and is helping to dissolve culture by isolating us into fewer and fewer shared spaces

Techbros ruin everything.

I have no problem with AI use for science, health, and uplifting humanity like figuring out optimal ways of doing things, minimizing waste.

Currently, it's just another disingenuous ploy to make rich people even richer forcing it on everyone at an expense of climate and human livelihoods.

And finally, are consumer AI really "intelligent" like its touted or is it marketing lies for making the lines go up?

I really don't understand how people can be so blinded by hopium that they cannot see the blindingly obvious consequences of allowing this insane tech to co-opt our planet, at the behest of the most powerful and evil people to ever live.

There may be use cases for this tech but it not worth it to sacrifice the entirety of our natural world to be ground up and processed to feed this behemoth. It is purely wishful thinking that this will solve everything and they are willing to pay ANYTHING to try it. They are gambling with the planet and it's like 2% chance they win, otherwise life dies.

We were told 15 years ago, that we had a decade to change course to prevent CATASTROPHIC heating of the planet and degradation of the environment. Instead of doing really anything about that, we have exponentially increased out energy needs and fuel/water usage. Now with ai, we are doing it all over again in the span of a few years. Please explain with mathematics, how we get out of this trap of thermodynamics and not all die from heat? How does ai save us? Does it get us closer in any way? Or is it so that the elites can goon a little harder and try to fill the void inside them with yet more money?

Game communities I used to love browsing have become inundated with low-effort, vibe-coded crapware. It's now 20 times harder to find anything good. Hardware is 20 times more expensive. My insurance company is using AI to deny me medical help. A skill I spent 25 years developing suddenly is full of morons who think they know as much as I do because they can have Claude vomit out something resembling software.

There is A LOT to hate.

There's a variety of reasons, but the biggest is that Lemmy as a whole is FAR more class-conscious than the average populace, or even that average internet user, and generative AI has been developed by the wealthy and powerful, as a tool to oppress everyone else.

Ask yourself, what value does it add?

Because we are a bunch of people that tend to at least try to keep ourselves informed.

There's more negative consequences of AI than there are positive, at least from my perspective.

I like computers and now can't easily afford to do the projects I'm interested in. I get very little value from AI and it destroyed my hobby. It also is a massive bubble that will hurt the majority of the world once it pops. It's dumb.

Because it’s a technology wielded by the most powerful to harm the rest of us.

Because it is a massive financial scam built on a lame cult.

Mostly because it was trained on everyone's stolen data but then the elite are gatekeeping it. Combined with mass theft of public funds in order to fund their AI and the billionaires end goal to create a dystopian tech overlord society.

Also when the AI hallucinates it's extremely annoying.

Me, personally, a couple of reasons:

Without wanting to sound like a pretentious twat I think art made without a soul is the antithesis of art.

People ask dumb questions that a quick web search would answer.

The blurring between what is real and what isn’t.

Capitalism suggesting that there might only be two or three “non-human entities” controlling the entire internet soon.

The fear of another economic bubble.

It making people stupider.

The fokken poes that is an anagram of my user name being involved. Plus all the other bros too.

Fear of something that has the power to potentially go beyond thought.

The absolute ease of facilitating surveillance.

Terminator franchise

Etc

I detest that a pretty limited and inefficient technology became a functional deity. Whatever cost is paid upfront to serve it is just, whatever resource it needs is reserved, whatever it produces should be spread uncritically low and high. Like all copium for the masses, it becomes a prosthetic device people become dependent on in their lives, and whatever I choose it or not, it becomes projected onto me too, making the products and aftermath of GenAI boom a part of my daily live and a tax I now pay.

From a power/economics perspective, it's a cover for the biggest companies and most punchable CEOs to take our shared knowledge, skills and means of compute from us and sell them back to us as a subscription, while pissing in the community well they just eroded.

As a consumer I play around with local machine learning-based tech to OCR pages, create transcripts, extrapolate images and frames in video. I haven't found a usecase for rented GenAI in my workflow but I usually don't cringe at people using it as long as they don't take pride in using it (and it happens a lot, oooff). I despise rich companies and people masturbating around the topic, firing people in droves, enshitifying everyithing and taking ever more power.

Someone asked this 2 days ago so I'll just paste what I wrote there.

It's being pushed into situations where having a black box of probability is not what you want. Support bots as an example, you want the same outcome for the same problem. Not a different outcome because someone didn't put a question mark.
You don't want the bot being able to hijack an account because it was asked in the specific way. See Facebook support bot.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/metas-ai-support-bot-instagram/

You don't want a chat bot to tell airline customers they can do something when the airline has a FAQ section specifically saying no you can't.
See Air Canada support bot.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

You don't want AI bots hallucinating court cases to justify a case. Many news articles on this.

It's used as a workforce reduction mask.
Businesses are using AI rollouts to lower the number of front line employees. Only for the tool to fail.
See Oracle firing 21,000 people to boost ai numbers.
https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/23/21000-oracle-jobs-vanish-amid-big-reds-big-bets-on-ai/5260086

It's oversold:
When Gardner says only 30% of AI deployments work as sold after asking over 700 IT executives. Why are people still treating it as anything but a broken tool?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/07/only-28-of-ai-infrastructure-projects-fully-pay-off/5221652

For a black box of probability it is terrible at maths. There has been instances of AIs failing high school math tests.
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-ai-struggle-math-problems.html

edit: sources as I grab them on mobile.

A question to the OP: After reading all of these comments, varying from emotional reaction to well reasoned assessment, all valid whether positive or negative, has this experiment helped you answer your question or changed your views on AI at all in retrospect? There's nothing I can add that hasn't already been said in one way or another by someone else, but I'm cruious if this is just a bait thread or you're actually posing this question in good faith with a mind open to change.. If it's the latter I want to know your nuanced opinion.

Lots of good answers, but I'll throw another in: pollution of the Internet with slop. I'll search for e.g. what good flashlights with 'n' features are and there will be hundreds of near-identical listicles that are clearly hallucinated. I'll try to look at a local restaurant's menu and it will bring me to a fabricated webpage with ai generated images of food (with Wonder brand Hont Doug bundts yesterday!) and a menu that is very obviously factually incorrectly.

There have always been low-effort fake listicles and bad information, but it used to be easy to avoid the couple links per search or to refine the search to be specific enough to rule them out. Now I'm not convinced there aren't websites that generate poor quality content on the fly based on whatever I just searched.

Under capitalism, LLMs are used purely for the benefits of the capitalist class, spying on all of the working classes and enabling immense repressions. It isn't a tool without any and all merit, but under capitalism it will always be used against our best interests.

I don't hate AI, I hate the overuse of AI in places where it's not suited for. I hate the as-a-service model every Western AI vendor enforces. I hate the people seeing AI as a get rich quick scheme and not as a technology to be leveraged intelligently and meaningfully.

First, you made that classic blunder. You wrote "AI" without defining it, as if it was meaningful. We always see people do bait-and-switch arguments surrounding this topic. Always. So, if you want a meaningful answer, you need to actually provide a definition...

Are you asking why people hate ChatGPT? If so, you should ask that.

Second, you made a mistake. You think people hate AI when the hate is reserved for the assholes getting rich by fucking us all over as they destroy our communities, clean water, and affordable electricity. Remember, it's the people who do horrible things who need to be stopped.

Why are there so many people on Lemmy asking this same question over and over again. This has got to get over ten now in the last week.

You do realize that the vast majority of people hate LLMs right? They are power, water resource hungry worthless things that have yet to prove any worth to the human race.

The heads of the AI companies have been saying how many jobs their products will replace.

If you tell most people that there was an exciting new technology that would replace them at their company and every other company and make their experience and qualifications obsolete I'm guessing most people wouldn't be very happy about that.

I'm curious why this question gets asked on lemme so often.

I don't hate AI, I hate how much it's shoved down my throat every day. If it was used in appropriate use cases and not injected into everything because profits then I wouldn't care so much.

For my part, the short and stupid answer is that AI destroys the environment, screws over the working class on so many more levels than just taking jobs away and risks making people intellectually lazy and even more inept at social interactions.

There is a more indepth walk through of these reasons, but I don't really have the energy to write a novel that nobody is gonna read anyway.

Fyi: I used to be open minded when it came out because I don't like passing judgement before knowing a bit more about a controversial subject. The deathnail for me was when I heard of the costs to the environment and how unsustainable AI is right now. We already have enough shit in this world that's destroying us. Why on earth are we adding one more?

This is not a direct answer to your question.

I've heard 2 really great takes about LLMs & GenAI, that have stayed with me - though I don't have the best wording for them anymore.

1. As AI is trained on previously created data, it fundamentally looks backwards. Human creativity creates new things and inherently looks to the future.

2. AI is trained on the vast corpus of human works and synthesizes that info into a median response. You will never get exciting and bold insights, just bland and inoffensive responses.

Put the AI critique aside for a moment. Many people on lemmy dont like algorithms managing their feed. There's probably a big overlap between people who are pervasively sensitive to dark algorithms and people who perceive AI as a dark algorithm parlor trick .

It's an exploitation tool with no benefit to actual people.

Nuclear power can make energy.

Nuclear power can eradicate the planet and leave areas uninhabitable for untold years, and those it doesn't vaporize are altered for the rest of their lives. And sometimes they aren't aware until years after.

AI has good uses when applied carefully, such as in medical research.

AI is also being used as a reason to replace workers, it consumes massive amounts of energy, it creates sound and infrasound destroying environments around it, it consumes massive quantities of drinking water from surrounding areas, and is ultimately spurring on a society of wealthy ruling class who view humans as cattle, out in the open, and no one is stopping them.

Is it any wonder why people hate these things? But yes, a tool is a tool. It's the people using it that hate should be properly directed towards. Unfortunately, those same ruling class epstein elites dismantled education over decades, so it's harder for people in this day and age to think dialectically. It's easier to think in black and white, in extremes, just like media would have you believe, just as the culture wars have taught us for decades.

It's a hammer being sold as a replacement for builders. I don't hate AI, rather than all of stuff that's called "AI" these days is being sold as something more than it is.

Just listen to Jensen, the token salesman, of Nvidias fame.

If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed

This is what I hate. The mad greed of these companies; the blatant disregard of everyone that these CEOs are displaying; the blind rush without a thought about consequences. "AI" is just the latest fad that got ruined by good old capitalism.

I don't hate AI. I use AI. I criticize AI, because it's a tool and it's being misused.

I criticize how people and specially companies use AI....