I’m curious to get a general pulse on how people here view the rapid evolution of AI, specifically on lemmy. On one side, there’s growing interest in local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools. On the other, there seems to be a growing list, I can’t keep track of, that are seen as major concerns. I’m not here to pick sides or be biased in one corner. Im genuinely curious what people have to say about AI in general. And maybe it will help me and other get a better handle on how we perceived it in our ever changing world.
The small help it gives does not equal the vast evil done to the environment, communities, and actual makers and creators.
to be fair im kinda feeling this with everything. ai, social media, plastic everything.
Actually, yeah. That’s a really good point.
Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.
And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.
Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.
Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?
Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?
Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.
local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools
Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.
“Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.
I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.
I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.
Ethical training data could exit, but I don’t think public domain/creative commons/licensed are quite good enough (almost no one who contributed knew what AI would become until recently, and some of those people are still alive). Although that’s better.
A truly ethical training dataset for AI would be one that everyone who created the training data opted into. And I don’t mean their employer or photography sharing platform signed a license deal, I mean they personally opted in. If AI is so great, I’m sure plenty of people will be happy to contribute their art, photos, writing, code, social media posts, etc. All the pro-AI people can just band together and make their own dataset to use.
That doesn’t solve all the other issues with generative AI, but it would make a huge difference.
Ethical training data could exit, but I don’t think public domain/creative commons/licensed are quite good enough (almost no one who contributed knew what AI would become until recently, and some of those people are still alive).
I get what you’re saying, but that is sort of a failure of imagination on the part of the licensor, in my opinion…
While I can understand some people being surprised by how their explicitly public domain or cc0 works are currently being used, this is inherently part of the risk you take when you opt into giving your work an extremely permissive license in the first place.
If you put something out there and tell the world “you can use this freely, forever, for whatever you want”, you are committing to all kinds of potential uses, known and unknown, within the scope of that license.
Contributing someone into the public domain is a nice thought for sure, but it’s also not something to take lightly because you really don’t know what it might one day be used for, and you are relinquishing a lot of your (legal) rights.
I think it’s ethically indefensible, but because of the environmental impact of data centers.
I don’t disagree with that.
But a magical, new, clean, and infinite fusion power source could be invented tomorrow, and AI would still be deeply exploitative of human labor.
So, to me at least, in addition to the environmental impact, the cultural and social impact can’t be overstated. It’s all bad.
As far as the ethical concerns go for “local” models how do you feel about individuals using it for non-commercial use? A toy/hobby/assistant for their own home use? I personally have been enjoying “playing” with it, but I do agree in that I hate how they’ve come to obtain the training data. I hate the companies that create it and profit off of it, but personally I don’t feel too guilty using it as a toy/hobby if it’s a model that was released for free to be used on your own hardware.
This is my biggest concern for sure.
Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it
Fuckin A
Fuckin Amen
everyone i work with that uses it to generate text has lost the ability or patience to read anything, even very light text written by a human.
at best they skim, but mostly they demand in-person conversations so they can be spoon fed the contents of the documentation.
gone are the days of “this meeting could’ve been an email” because they won’t (or can’t) read the email.
so yeah, i hate it but am required to use it for work. which makes me hate it more.
Broadly speaking, fuck AI
AI itself is not bad.
But the unregulated industry, breaking laws all the time, people in charge are literal super villains, mass surveillance, producing even more idiots that I have to depend and interact with, …
Take it away, it is not doing anything we want it to actually do. I only want robots/computers for one thing, and that is to do chores around the house. It doesn’t do that, so I am out.
I responded but I think I like yours better.
If we’re really, really lucky, the crash might take a few more industries with it, which could buy us a bit more time with regards to the climate collapse. If we’re rather unlucky, it’s just mindlessly accelerating suffering.
There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.
Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.
Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.
It can’t analyze either
They did pretty well with the protein folding. Similar special purpose uses are fine. LLM’s and image/video generation can suck satans rotting arsehole.
yeah, but the protein folding AI is a totally different kind of technology from what OP is talking about. AlphaFold has nothing to do with Ollama or whatever.
vaguely related: I kinda think society should scrap the term “AI.” I mean, my washing machine has an “AI” setting that… senses the amount of laundry in the load? Lol. Sure, we’ll call that AI. “AI” is such a mess of a term that it’s practically meaningless.
Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.
If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.
The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.
It reminds me of early 90s PCs…
Everyone was convinced if you “knew how to computer” that’s all you needed. Every school bought a shit ton, and kids would get an hour a day to just dick around and play games.
None of the adults understand any of it, so we grew up learning to be thech support for the people teaching it to us.
AI will eventually end up like PCs, it won’t be a magic solution, but it will drastically cut down on available jobs and transfer wealth to the wealthy.
The smart move is to sit it out till someone actually makes it profitable, then we could dump billions into it now. We can’t beat China because their companies actually have to compete with each other.
We should wait till the dust settles over there, then dump the money on copying what they do. Just manufacturing whatever chips design they settle on.
Racing R&D with zero manufacturing just isn’t logical.
Currently, it’s a skill amplifier. You can’t code for shit and rely solely on it, it will give a shit product. You know how the whole codebase works and use it as needed? It will speed you up drastically while maintaining the quality you want.
Agents are a nightmare. They introduce a variable completely uncontrollable by you to your project, which will make you lose track of how everything works, resulting in a shit product.
I see its future on more optimized models that can run well locally on lower hardware, not those that use entire datacenters to power it. The big AI companies still do not generate profit and are doomed to fail in long term, but AI itself isn’t going away.
We’ve been using AI for decades and while generative AI is widely despised and mostly deserving of that despite, lumping all AI together while calling out the harms is doing a disservice to a lot of useful AI techniques and tools.
Well, they did that on purpose, no? To defect criticism.
To distinguish them I would call the other stuff machine learning, which is what we already called it before, and the LLMs as AI, since that’s what the common people think of when they say that word.
“Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions.”
In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.
The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren’t) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.
Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a “truth machine”. A speaker I heard put it simply: “AI cheats.” It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.
I feel like it’s making people dumber. I keep getting screenshots of Google ai summary from people as if that’s the answer and they’re confident in it. I keep finding those are not correct. For me, ai has created more work because I can no longer trust my colleagues statements.
malicious compliance - take what they say as accurate then pass the buck back when shit hits the fan
“Rapid Evolution” = recursing the same algorithm to juice ever diminishing returns out of the parlor trick at ever greater costs.
Its shit and I’ll be glad when it gets flushed.
Unfortunately. It won’t.
We can’t produce enough power and water to run all the AI data centers so everyone gets their own personal clanker.
I see the day where AI is reserved for more important things like medical research.
Politicians are starting to distance themselves from the AI industry so they can get re-elected. When the AI friendly politicians are voted out we might see some changes.
Afaik, the only companies making a profit are the chip makers.
Investors are not getting their money back. Not one AI company is making more than the spend on AI. Sooner or later, investors will see the industry for what it is, a pyramid scheme.
Companies started re-hiring humans because they are cheaper and do a better job than clankers.
There is a growing public backlash on AI data centers. Once the population puts two and two together they will realize the best way to get rid of AI data centers is to not use AI.
