I work in software. Just in day to day:

• lazy people are now using AI to slop out meaningless drivel at me rather than taking five minutes to articulate an actual thought
• shit is frequently broken because people surrender their thinking to the LLMs, don’t understand what the agents are doing, and don’t check the work output

Broadly:

• the industry is built on theft and whitewashing of human effort
• fraudulent valuations and circular dealing
• the frontier AI companies are all run by lying sociopaths
• and yet the global economy now hinges on a handful of AI or AI-adjacent companies
• many corporate types are now convinced they don’t need real human labor anymore, and treat the working class accordingly
• AI is an incredible force multiplier for scamming/spamming
• hyperscaler data center build out is mathematically impossible, environmentally ruinous, and harmful to your health
• LLMs are literally making us stupider

There are a lot of software developers on Lemmy.

AI is being pushed as a software development tool. It tends to remove the fun part of our jobs (coding, debugging, optimizing) and relegates us to the shitty parts (code review).

We don’t like that.

It is antisocial and nihilistic technology that makes my hobbies worse and less accessable

Why do we need to justify our options? It is OK to not like a technology that is killing the world? A technology where we have movies of it taking over the world and murdering the human race. A technology that has yet to turn a profit despite trillions of dollars funnelled into it.

Please mention your background and usage of AI with your answer.

No, why don’t you justify your want for destroying the planet and species.

Because it got enshittified and politicized by Tech Bros.

If you wanna tell me about the usefulness of LLMs, you are preaching to the choir. I was playing with GTP-J 6B finetunes in 2022. I am quantizing some weights as I type.

However, you can’t look at me with a straight face and tell me everything is okay in this space. It’s a nightmare, a giant scam that is going to implode.

As Lemmy is a refuge for people who see how caustic mainstream social media is, folks here are particularly sensitive to the issues surrounding “AI” too.

In other words, Lemmy literally selects for enshittification sensitivity.

It’s legitimately no different than cryptocurrency and NFTs, but this is the techbro scam that finally stuck after flinging shit against the wall over and over.

The training data sources are built destructively, without any consent from the artists, writers, programmers, anyone whose data is pulled into these models. The information these things spit out usually has so many inaccuracies - search engines are fucked, software is built without understanding a damn thing it actually does, poor translations of documentation are made public, the list goes on.

On top of that, data centers are one of the biggest environmental nightmares we’ve ever seen. Why are we pushing these so hard in the middle of a goddamn climate crisis?

There’s genuinely not a single thing it actually does well, and the only reason it genuinely took off is because investors in the same 5 companies are patting each other on the back.

It’s also worth mentioning how chatbots built off this stuff are designed to always be extraordinarily friendly and confirming to the user. It’s such a massive factor contributing to AI psychosis, to the point that there people who legitimately believe these lines of code are sentient and conscious. Meanwhile we’ve already seen just how easily these closed source models can be tweaked to spit out pure propaganda, making them an extremely valuable political tool - it’s no wonder fascists love this shit so much.

Several legal, environmental and social reasons I can tell

because that’s trending, and possibly there’s money involved with people keeping that stance. there are serious issues with ai but in typical liberal fashion, they don’t propose any serious solution except complaining about it in social media.

It’s because we are adults, so we already have better skills than a general LLM. We learned to read, write, and research in school. While I personally didn’t go to art school, many people did, and they developed skills that allow them to make better art than a general use art AI.

To us, AI is just wasting our time, because it does what we can already do but worse.

Children are in an unfortunate trap, where they need to spend years producing work that is worse than the LLM to eventually be able to develop the skillset to surpass the LLM. Buying into the idea that it makes your work faster or easier is a trap. You’ll be permanently dependent on it.

Most lemmy users live in countries which are run for a rich few, rather than the general public. Technology, including AI, is also used to benefit the rich, often at the cost of the rest of the population. Unfortunately this leads to people hating the technology rather than the political system.

There was a recent survey where they pointed out how people in English-speaking countries are most concerned about AI (because it is used against the people there) while people in the Global South are most positive about it (because it is used to benefit them). Here’s the summary chart:-