Asklemmy

There's a lot of anti-AI propaganda coming from the same AI corporations and governments trying to push for regulations that will grant them a monopoly on this tech and limit the development and usage for people. Many brought up multiple reasons why they dislike AI, the same arguments could be used for other technologies and services but personally i've never seen anyone here on lemmy picking a fight against military data centers or videogames industry for causing pollution.

The most upvoted comments hint at big techs being a problem but seem to fail to acknowledge that issues caused by "AI" are mostly caused by the corporations and evil characters behind these.

I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.

The internet has gotten a lot worse at nuance. People don't know how to have a perspective other than pro or anti for controversial things, and if you're going to think of AI as a brand with a team then the team it seems associated with is big tech fascists, a group Lemmy's userbase will naturally regard as an enemy. Similar story as with cryptocurrency, it's seen as a brand, and associated with all the negative things that are done with it. Technologies are seen as themselves having a moral stance.

I mean, take your pick. This is a place where a lot of us…

• are leftists who disagree with extractive, anti-human economic systems
• left Reddit because they insisted on controlling how people could connect to each others ideas
• like the open collaboration of open source, which is getting wrecked by AI
• like open access communities like wikipedia, which are also getting undermined by AI
• dislike copyright law, which is being selectively ignored here because the people violating it are rich (on paper)
• are marginalized people, who tend to be disproportionately effected by AI decision-making

Ai:

• ruins the planet by polution
• is used to influence political discourse, erase facts and history.
• is a tool brought to you by people who at the very least don't want the masses to be free (look up palantir owner)
• is being pushed with the end goals to have a tool of mass surveillance and control.
• makes people abandon their ability to think critically (or in general really)
• is used to violate copyrights by it's very design. If you think artists have been undervalued so far just you wait. They don't want creative people anymore.

Take your pick, it's war and you're in it.

Platforms themselves are self-selecting. I'm speaking for myself here. I am on Lemmy because I dislike the power that big tech has gotten to control content, policy, news, and global perceptions. As such, I self host and use federated technologies where possible. The vast majority of AI tools are controlled by the same centrally controlled big tech companies that I'm here to avoid. There are self-hosted AI tools or there, but basically every AI tool was trained using scraped data, and, for instance, my Searx-ng instance was flooded by so many bots that I had to make it harder to use for myself just to keep the bots out. My blog? Constantly scraped, killing my bandwidth. A lot of foss projects used to have bug bounty programs and accepted code from any contributor to wander in, but are now closing off due to AI slop code contributions. So, the type of person you'll find here probably hates AI if they're like me. Also, I work in tech and have to bite my tongue every time a co-worker "helpfully" sends me a Copilot Slop answer to a question when I was asking for a judgment call or an opinion.

Because I and some associates spend years traveling, collecting , and documenting some very specific information on an uncommon family of animals, their care in aquaria, and ecological curiosities. We had a website which hosted all the documented info, a small but active community of people with this niche interest. A few minor ads and affiliate links kept the site running, and allowed our few naturalists to go to more places and document rarer species. Now LLMs have stolen all our content and google shows all of our information in its AI searches as if it owns it and never links the information to the community that lovingly curated it. Our website had to be taken offline forever because all our traffic is just scrapers.

So please, tell me how AI stealing everything we worked hard on for years and selling it to you is considered a good thing?

i don't particularly enjoy having to constantly question what's real and what isn't anymore.

i don't particularly enjoy having humanity's well of information undermined by disinformation factories.

i don't particularly enjoy every space i had to express myself creatively and experience others expressing themselves creatively being drowned out in mass-produced incoherent slop that i cannot possibly connect with.

i don't particularly enjoy that climate change has now been rapidly accelerated for the sake of a tool that's completely unreliable at doing anything it's marketed to do and has done irreversible damage to the very fabric of our society.

do you?

Someone else can give a more comprehensive answer, but here are a couple bullet points:

• Models trained by violating copyright
• AI data centers using tons of water and power, driving up costs for local residents
• AI data center noise pollution
• "Slop" results (uncanny valley pictures, incorrect answers given confidently, etc)
• Companies using AI as an excuse for anti-worker actions (notably massive layoffs)
• Concern over how much of the largest companies valuation is tied to AI hype (because it affects everyone's retirement accounts)

Im an AI engineer and even I hate AI. When I say AI, I mean LLMs specifically. It definitely has its use cases. LLMs are pretty good at parsing unstructured data, and generating boilerplate code, but that's about it. Every other use case is a combination of buzzword bingo and slop generation.

AI, uses a tremendous amount of energy, produces an ungodly amount of heat and noise, and pollutes potable drinking water. The overreliance on LLMs for everything is lazy at best and sloppy at worst. LLMs are being applied in scenarios where I could have built a deep learning model that would fit comfortably on a laptop from 2018, and doing a worse job at predictions at that.

Ignoring the fact that they were trained on a ton of copyrighted data, which was labeled for dollars a day by humans in poorer countries, and regularly gets basic information wrong. Yeah, it fucking sucks. And the only people who stand to benefit from it are about a half dozen tech companies who are taking contracts with the US government to track citizens both online and IRL.

I can’t answer for anyone else but I hate it because it makes us stupider, it degrades human knowledge as a whole, it contributes to climate change and is helping to dissolve culture by isolating us into fewer and fewer shared spaces

The anger toward AI is a class-conscious reaction to its use under capitalism: it’s a tool for deskilling work, centralizing wealth, automating surveillance, and devouring energy and water while the planet burns. The scraping of creative works for private profit is a new enclosure of the commons, and the flood of disinformation and slop serves imperialist interests, not working people. The science isn’t the enemy—the capitalist relations that shape its deployment are. A socialist society could put such forces to collective use, but until then, skepticism is a measured response to a technology wielded as a weapon of class power.

Because it’s a technology wielded by the most powerful to harm the rest of us.

Because we are a bunch of people that tend to at least try to keep ourselves informed.

There's more negative consequences of AI than there are positive, at least from my perspective.

I don’t “hate” it universally. I see its positives and how it can make certain things easier. My own negative feelings towards it just outweigh the positives at the moment.

If they can figure it out where:

• AI isn’t being developed for autonomous armed military combat
• isn’t sucking up heinous amounts of power and water, especially in places that can’t support it.
• isn’t readily available to the criminal masses to do great harm with.
• isn’t being completely untruthful about the harm it is doing.
• isn’t being forced down the throats of everyone in the business world.
• Isn’t used by, from, around, or even remotely involving children.

The main problems aren’t with the technology, but with governments slow response to properly regulate it and protect society. I guess.

I use it now and then to spot bugs in my code and it is super handy for that. Coming up with code all by itself can be wonky. If non-programmer vibe coding becomes the norm, we are all going back to paper.

Mostly because it was trained on everyone's stolen data but then the elite are gatekeeping it. Combined with mass theft of public funds in order to fund their AI and the billionaires end goal to create a dystopian tech overlord society.

Also when the AI hallucinates it's extremely annoying.

I detest that a pretty limited and inefficient technology became a functional deity. Whatever cost is paid upfront to serve it is just, whatever resource it needs is reserved, whatever it produces should be spread uncritically low and high. Like all copium for the masses, it becomes a prosthetic device people become dependent on in their lives, and whatever I choose it or not, it becomes projected onto me too, making the products and aftermath of GenAI boom a part of my daily live and a tax I now pay.

From a power/economics perspective, it's a cover for the biggest companies and most punchable CEOs to take our shared knowledge, skills and means of compute from us and sell them back to us as a subscription, while pissing in the community well they just eroded.

As a consumer I play around with local machine learning-based tech to OCR pages, create transcripts, extrapolate images and frames in video. I haven't found a usecase for rented GenAI in my workflow but I usually don't cringe at people using it as long as they don't take pride in using it (and it happens a lot, oooff). I despise rich companies and people masturbating around the topic, firing people in droves, enshitifying everyithing and taking ever more power.

Me, personally, a couple of reasons:

Without wanting to sound like a pretentious twat I think art made without a soul is the antithesis of art.

People ask dumb questions that a quick web search would answer.

The blurring between what is real and what isn’t.

Capitalism suggesting that there might only be two or three “non-human entities” controlling the entire internet soon.

The fear of another economic bubble.

It making people stupider.

The fokken poes that is an anagram of my user name being involved. Plus all the other bros too.

Fear of something that has the power to potentially go beyond thought.

The absolute ease of facilitating surveillance.

Terminator franchise

Etc

Someone asked this 2 days ago so I'll just paste what I wrote there.

It's being pushed into situations where having a black box of probability is not what you want. Support bots as an example, you want the same outcome for the same problem. Not a different outcome because someone didn't put a question mark.
You don't want the bot being able to hijack an account because it was asked in the specific way. See Facebook support bot.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/metas-ai-support-bot-instagram/

You don't want a chat bot to tell airline customers they can do something when the airline has a FAQ section specifically saying no you can't.
See Air Canada support bot.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

You don't want AI bots hallucinating court cases to justify a case. Many news articles on this.

It's used as a workforce reduction mask.
Businesses are using AI rollouts to lower the number of front line employees. Only for the tool to fail.
See Oracle firing 21,000 people to boost ai numbers.
https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/23/21000-oracle-jobs-vanish-amid-big-reds-big-bets-on-ai/5260086

It's oversold:
When Gardner says only 30% of AI deployments work as sold after asking over 700 IT executives. Why are people still treating it as anything but a broken tool?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/07/only-28-of-ai-infrastructure-projects-fully-pay-off/5221652

For a black box of probability it is terrible at maths. There has been instances of AIs failing high school math tests.
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-ai-struggle-math-problems.html

edit: sources as I grab them on mobile.