Ask Lemmy

I’m against AI for two main reasons: it’s a giant plagiarism machine built on the theft of the labor of millions, and it has disastrous environmental consequences in the form of rapid, giant data center deployment. (No, I am not impressed by whining about how all the internet uses data centers, build out and energy consumption remained modest until about 4 years ago). These are fundamental problems with the current implementation of the technology and I see no realistic way to change that, so I don’t see myself ever using it even if I did find it useful, which I don’t.

The only thing I’ve ever cared to have an “AI” do for me is answer incredibly niche questions that would take ages to figure out on my own, or require tracking down really obscure books, etc. But the nature of LLMs being ‘guess the next statistically most likely word’ means that it’s never going to be good for that. I can read on my own, I can write my own emails, and since I’m not a programmer I’m not stupid enough to fuck with code I don’t understand to do something a solution probably already exists for, if all the unmaintained vibe coded garbage hasn’t drowned it out. I don’t want a machine deciding what search results to show me, so I don’t use it as a search engine. I guess if I did more work with data it could maybe format it for me when I needed to make changes, but that would require trusting it not to randomly change parts of the data (which I don’t). So yeah, useless for me.