Programmer Humor

Because that's all the Fediverse contains.

In this thread, there's people reposting "never slop" doodles, performing ingroup loyalty over thought-terminating cliches. All my efforts to engage with that have made clear they mean never use any AI for anything ever, and then they repeat their chants as empty signalling, or use one of their made-up slurs for anyone who's not virulently against all forms of spicy autocomplete.

There's entire communities for that attitude. Entire instances. It's immediately the dominant tone in any discussion of companies using AI for literally anything. Even if the AI content was removed before a game launched, the fact it was there has indelibly stained the publisher's whole catalog, past and future.

Meanwhile the opposition to that is just... would you relax, please? There's no "boosters" on this service. Nobody's snorting a line and raving about basilisks. Vanishingly few dinguses have sneered 'the future is now, old man!' and they find zero support. Even measured responses to shrill absolutes begin 'now I hate AI as much as the next person, buuut.'

Pro-AI on Lemmy means anything short of kneejerk opposition, on questions like 'can generated images ever be art.' Everyone suddenly developed a crystal clear philosophy on the nature of beauty. Those philosophies don't agree, but the people do, which is... indicative. Especially when you discuss those claims seriously, and any illustrative counterexamples are treated as a personal attack.

Recently someone repeated claims that LLMs cause instant cognitive impairment, and I pointed to the researchers behind the study begging people to stop saying that. Do you want to guess how that went? It wasn't a rational exchange of comparably reasonable positions... and the little numbers showed the crowd was not on my side. Or the researchers' side. They were perfectly happy with their tabloid narrative, thank you very much.

Here's a sadly typical interaction from today. It starts from 'doing math on books doesn't need permission' and 'scanning one de-spined copy is the legal way under copyright law.' The response is six hours of that's shit, fuck off, you simp, it's like wrangling cats, are you high?, irrational shilling, this has never happened before!, you've gulped the kool-aid, you moved the goalposts, I'm talking to cement. That's from one fucking guy. I am doing my damndest to be direct, stay impersonal, and steer the conversation toward the simple facts of the topic. But you can't reason someone out of an opinion they angry'd themselves into.