this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Okay sure but in many cases the tech in question is actually useful for lots of other stuff besides repression. I don't think that's the case with LLMs. They have a tiny bit of actually usefulness that's completely overshadowed by the insane skyscrapers of hype and lies that have been built up around their "capabilities".
With "AI" I don't see any reason to go through such gymnastics separating bad actors from neutral tech. The value in the tech is non-existent for anyone who isn't either a researcher dealing with impractically large and unwieldy datasets, or of course a grifter looking to profit off of bigger idiots than themselves. It has never and will never be a useful tool for the average person, so why defend it?
There's nothing to defend. Tell me, would you defend someone who is a threat to you and deprives you of the ability to create, making art unnecessary? No, you would go and kill him while this bastard hasn't grown up. Well, what's the point of defending a bullet that will kill you? Are you crazy?
I am an average person, and my GPU is running a chatbot which currently gives me a course in Regular Expressions. My GPU also generates images for me from time to time when i need an image, because i am crappy at drawing. There are a lot of uses for the technology.
Okay so you could have just looked up one of dozens of resources on regex. The images you "need" are likely bad copies of images that already exist, or they're weird collages of copied subject matter.
My point isn't that there's nothing they can do at all, it's that nothing they can do is worth the energy cost. You're spending tons of energy to effectively chew up information already on the web and have it vomited back to you in a slightly different form, when you could have just looked up the information directly. It doesn't save time, because you have to double check everything. The images are also plagiarized, and you could be paying an artist if they're something important, or improving your artistic abilities if they aren't. I struggle to think of many cases where one of those options is unfeasible, it's just the "easy" way out (because the energy costs are obfuscated) to have a machine crunch up some existing art to get a approximation of what you want.
Regarding energy use see my other reply. It's like if you scold people for running their microwave 10s too long. Watching 2 hours of Netflix is a lot worse. go read up here