Been around long enough to know that we are being sold on a lie that's real purpose is extracting wealth at the fastest rate possible from the lower 99% while providing unknown risks and low likelihood of benefits to most of the population. The only "AI" that currently works well is a very fast database searcher. It is better than a human at that task but requires humans to create the database and all the information in it first in order for it to work. The only "AI" that seems to be possibly "thinking" for itself is hopeless, wrong, and/or very destructive.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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AI is very harmful to the environment, it destroys communities because of data centers, it killed the price of gaming and consumer computing, and it's being used to layoff a shit ton of people.
I use AI daily for my job because it's required, and I do use it outside of work too, but it's too powerful, too dangerous, and I wish it didn't exist. The way companies abuse it in the name of profit is too damaging for our world.
i can't speak for everyone, but a lot of people are outraged that they have been replaced or soon will be. Millions of people will be unemployed. This is bad, because we are a consumer-based economy, and we're losing even more consumers.
After decades of low pay for most workers, this is the very last thing we need.
Because it's trendy and it's a new thing people can feel outraged about together. And when you really drill down into the arguments, the problem is invariably with the way technology is used under capitalism rather than technology itself.
I somewhat agree with you, the tech is amazing. But I also think that the current shape of "AI" is what it is due to a massive unsustainable investment directed in the vast majority by ill intent. The technology would not be what it is today without it being used for what is hated for. If you "fix" the hated parts then it becomes something entirely different to what it is today, if anything at all.
I think that the perspective that the tech is is hated because its trendy looses weight very rapidly when you realize that it would probably just not exist if not for the insane power-hungry assholes that are shoving it down our throats every damn day.
I don't really agree. I use this tech for coding, doing translations, speech to text transcriptions, extracting data from PDF documents, and none of these use cases would be different if the tech wasn't commercially driven. I also disagree that it wouldn't exist if it wasn't developed under our current dominant economic system. AI research has been around for a long time, and has been done extensively in socialist countries like USSR.
Its not that it wouldn't exist, its that the current form is shaped by the profit incentive. The fact that is a useful technology doesn't mean that the AI we are being forced to use is like that due to a capitalist mode of production. Coding help may be useful to a point, but its only so thanks to a massive level of compute power that wouldn't be available under a reasonable mode of production.
I wholeheartedly diasagree with the idea that a socialst world would have gone with this as a priority to the point of making it something like what we see know. Would it be developing it? For sure! Would it have anything related to its current most extended use cases? No way.
The whole trope that LLMs need absurd levels of energy use has not been true for a while now. People latched on to this idea because early models were hideously inefficient, as is the case with pretty much any new technology. Today, you can run local coding models on your laptop that surpass the capabilities of frontier models needing whole data centres to run just a year ago. You no longer need an inordinate amount of computing power to run any of this stuff, and performance gains haven't stopped. There's no indication that we're close to any sort of a limit here.
Also, nowhere did I say that a socialist world would have developed it in the same fashion. I'm merely pointing out that it would have been developed, and there would have been many existing use cases which I listed which have little to do with commercial incentives. I get the impression that you're conflating hype with the actual legitimate use of which there are plenty already.
Finally, there is really nothing stopping people from developing this technology in open source fashion. And that's the way to decouple this tech from commercial incentives going forward. There are already open models to build on, and that should be leveraged to develop completely open alternatives which are community driven.
Well hardly anyone here would claim that LLMs and machine learning are bad tech.
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I have ADHD and OCD, which means writing reports, proposals, and even simple emails is very difficult for me in a number of ways. For the last year or so, I tell ChatGPT what I want to say and I work to polish or complete what it gives me, and out comes exactly what I wanted.
I'm not able to do that stuff myself. I'm just not mentally able to do it by myself. I strongly support ChatGPT and will continue to use it as long as I can.
I agree, though, that the data centres are helping destroy the Earth. I don't know how to reconcile that.
AI as an accessibility tool can be prettt cool.
If it was being sold as an accessibility tool, I would champion it.
But the greedy fucks are selling it as a replacement for expertise.
I've spent decades teaching everyone who will listen "the computer can help, but it does so without any understanding".
But all the tech bros had to do was secretly pass one call in 100 to some random human worker in the 3rd world, and half of everyone is convinced that computers are smarter than humans, now.
The real source of my frustration is that most people are idiots, lol. And I should know that by now.
Anyway, I'm glad you have a tool that helps, and that you aren't attributing godlike properties to it, or selling it hard to idiots as something it isn't.
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I think most of the hate is because of it being touted as better than humans and shoved down everyone’s throats.
As for AI itself , it’s just a tool like any other. Use it wisely.