I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of pro-AI posts on this platform.
Various posts with titles similar to “When will people stop being afraid of AI” or “Can we please acknowledge AI was very needed for X”
Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.
Honestly, the problem when talking about “AI” is how many different things that can mean.
- General AI chats
- Coding agents
- Automated pentesting/vulnerability discovery
- Image/video/music generation
- Grammar checking
- Automated support agents (phone or chat)
- Autonomous weaponry
and so many more. Being Pro-AI could mean you like one or two application of the AI, but be against it in the others. I know very few people that like it for the use of media generation. However, there have been a lot of long time vulnerabilities in very popular open source projects that was only just discovered. That seems like a pretty undeniable use case demonstrating its usefulness.
Then of course there’s governments that want to get their greedy blood thirsty hands on it to create autonomous weaponry. So now if you try to defend AI for a use case like defensively finding program vulnerabilities you somehow also have to defend AI weaponry?
For a generic AI model, it is very powerful and can either be used to grow yourself or abused so your brain doesn’t have to work at all. You can use AI to do the hard work for you, or use it as a personal tutor to guide you into what to learn. People will of course mention hallucinations as why it can’t be used to learn, but you don’t have to take AI at its words. If you were to ask it to create a lesson plan on what you should study for a subject, in what order, and resources are available, you can do all of the actual learning using content the AI has no control over. So what you do with that is going to be up to the person, and opinions on it are going to vary wildly.
Some people argue any use case is not okay given the various concerns of energy and water usage, and where those models sourced their training data. Not to mention if you support AI you must be supporting the AI companies. I agree there are concerns for the environmental impact, and the training data discussion is a long one on its own. However, I do think you can support AI as a technology, and not be okay with the way the technology is being done in regards to environmental impact. And given AI can be done on a local machine, I don’t think it has to be tied at all with the big tech at all.
“AI” is such a wide and immense topic. And what we talk about with AI today will not be relevant come next year with how quickly it is developing. We shall see if some form of Moore’s law applied with the growth of AI as far as efficiency and quality of the AI goes.
I hardly ever see them. I love being able to just set my home feed to subscribed communities.
Its annoying but so is this. There are very anti ai folks on the fediverse and very pro and very nuanced. Myself I see it like smartphones and the www. www in terms of the dot com bubble and smartphones in term of the ick. There is no denying it has uses though and its not going away.
Maybe not everyone thinks the same way you do. Crazy, I know.
This is nothing new actually, the same thing happend during the crypto boom.
There’s slop users (autoclankers) and then there’s researchers or developers actually doing the same stuff they’ve been doing for 5+ years.
I think it just seems that way because there’s always a clash on practically every post.
Some people don’t see the inherent flaw in outsourcing their physical thoughts to a cloud model, or the massive economic bubble they are helping to create.
But some people are doing some genuinely interesting things that would have otherwise been impossible several years ago just because AI and model training research got a huge boost for everyone the past few years.
My personal favorite is a drone that rapidly identifies and counts produce plant quality, output, issues, etc for large farms with some brand spanking new image models, and it costs about as much as maybe a new toolbox. No one wants to manually weed through hundreds of acres to count buds and try to catch problems before its too late. It’s a great upgrade from doing random samples that misses a lot of data.
On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.
It’s like when you throw world and ml users into one post. They both think the other is louder, and also the big dumb lol.
Are these posts with us in the room right now?
https://lemmyverse.link/thelemmy.club/post/49018478
I saw this yesterday.
Not going to see my feed is saturated with them… but at the same time I’ve seen them
I’m not convinced thats pro-AI, just lamenting the state of things.
The kind of people who make hating AI part of their identity are pretty rare in the real world. Lemmy just creates the illusion that this loud minority’s views are way more common than they actually are.
And as always, the “pro-AI” people aren’t as much for it as the haters are against it. It’s not a binary thing between the two extremes. Every real person I’ve talked to about AI has had a pretty neutral view on it and is usually well aware of its limitations. Even the ones who lean heavily on it aren’t as passionate about it than the haters are.
Your view is the exact opposite of reality given the number of AI Data centers that are being delayed and just outright stopped by local communities.
I don’t think the people who don’t want AI data centers in their backyards are motivated by hatred toward AI. It tends to be mostly driven by things like environmental worries and energy and water demand.
“I don’t think people that are motivated to catch murderers are motivated by their hatred of murder. It tends to be mostly driven by things like no liking dead bodies or the fact Susan is no longer around.”
That obvious bad faith you demonstrate there is nothing but a confession about your own character.
One could say the same to you. What you described is inexorably linked to AI. Those things will always be a part of it. If AI was useful, or liked, by the general public – if it served a single useful function they appreciated, they would accept the consequences of its existence.
People like driving in the US. It is destroying the environment. It poisons the water and air. It is expensive and raises taxes, hell most property tax that most people pay in the US goes towards road maintenance for cars, and nearly half of all utility expenses are due to the complexities of car-centric urban design. But people accept that.
People are not accepting of AI. Period. It does not provide enough value for its cost.
NIMBYism is a real phenomenon. People just don’t want stuff like that built near them - including schools. It’s not because they’re against education. You’re projecting your own views on AI onto other people while ignoring all the other possible explanations for their actions. You can say it’s inextricably linked to AI, but you saying that doesn’t make it so. I’m sure some of those people think that, but I’ve seen no evidence that it’s the main driver of it.
While NIMBYISM is real, it’s not happening here. The protests in council meetings are not ‘we don’t want it here,’ it’s ‘we don’t want it anywhere in our state.’ Because the effects of AI are state wide reductions in resources.
I haven’t talked to a lot of people about AI, but I’m extremely skeptical, and my wife, who isn’t usually dialed into this sort of thing, fucking hates it. I’m not sure how that plays out across the general populace, but I’m inclined to think it’s pretty unpopular.
Bots are trying to gaslight to into thinking that slop acceptance is inevitable. It’s just bullshit. Everyone hates slop art. Everyone hates slop music. Everyone hates slop text. Everyone hates forced slop integration.
The only people that like AI are the people that own the chatbots that want to deskill you.
People rarely arrive at these views independently - it’s always influenced by the people and environment around them. Kind of like how cigarette smokers tend to know lots of other smokers, while people who don’t smoke hang out with other non-smokers.
I’m not claiming nobody hates AI or that there’s no valid reasons to oppose it. All I’m saying is that the impression of how widespread that hate is - the one platforms like Lemmy give - isn’t exactly representative of the real world.
Hate is an extreme emotion. Those kinds of emotions are rarely motivated by reason alone, so it often looks more like an ideological stance than a purely rational one. People caught up in strong emotions aren’t exactly known for thinking clearly. There’s a well-known quote about facts not caring about people’s feelings, but I think it’s the other way around: feelings don’t care about facts.
The kind of people who make hating AI part of their identity are pretty rare in the real world. Lemmy just creates the illusion that this loud minority’s views are way more common than they actually are.
Yup, essentially every office worker at my company is pro-ai whereas shop workers have a bit more distain for it.
I got asked to organize shop drawings into categories so that they can feed their LLM data on the different types of products we produce, so long as it’s not someone’s personal information It genuinely doesn’t bother me.
AI hate is such a spoiled white people issue. They just don’t understand the value proposition because they already got their cake and ate it too.
Here in SEA LLMs have been life changing for people yet we should be upset because some corporate logo designer is losing their job?
AI hs already been demonstrated as a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs. It is not a question at this point. At this point, all of the AI-evangelists are either extremwly stupid or fascists themselves.
I have noticed it too. Even ones with discussion on.
Pro-AI people are a small minority in my experience, but are generally overrepresented in the tech geek communities that make up the majority of users on the fediverse. Anecdotally, I think that the vast majority of people are indifferent about AI, some of them may find it to be a novel replacement for web searching, but almost nobody is interested in paying for generative AI (as evidenced by the AI companies hemorrhaging cash). If you were to ask on a more creativity-centric community, you would find that anti-AI sentiment is near ubiquitous amongst the working creative class.
For as many people as there that claim to be pro-AI, you simply don’t see people actively seek out AI-generated art, music, videos, or stories. I would argue that most of the consumers of AI content are people who have been unwittingly duped into reading/watching/listening to it
Even here there’s a significant number of untalented and brainless fools who use unethical corporate AI models as a crutch to compensate for their lack of real-world skills and relationships.
Also, for reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.
Finally, pro-AI people are infinitely more likely to use AI to generate spam and proganda in support of their worldview than people who are against it. Are we supposed to believe people that have AI girlfriends are above using AI to write bogus posts and comments?
AI psychosis is a documented problem.
Also, for reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.
Elon Musk is making his typical wild promises again, this time about AI leading to UBI and abundance for everyone … as he makes money from xAI, of course.
I think the majority of people are pro AI and don’t give it a single thought. Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated and people don’t understand why you would point out that the guitarist had three arms.
I agree. It’s lazy and makes me hate it more. I don’t trust a content user doing it.
It’s usually bots. Unfortunately it’s not easy to moderate them, but if a bot is reported, doesn’t have a bot flag, and says a bunch of pro-ai stuff in addition to the reported activity it’s usually enough evidence to ban. It’s just one of their current tells, I wouldn’t base a ban only on that though. Report when you suspect them though.
The community is pretty split. I know a lot of people are going to think the accoints are bots. Maybe they are.
But ive met people in real life that truely believe in llm ai solving all thier problems. Its not true bur thats what they believe.
If you point out any valid use case for AI, anti-AI people will come down your throat for sucking off Jensen Huang and promoting genocide.
There is also a difference in argument about what will become of AI. Anti-AI argue it is just a fad like crypto, and will die out. Others saying this is just the beginning and the technology will grow and revolutionize various industries.
So even if you don’t like AI and AI datacenters, even acknowledging the fact AI is almost certainly the next massive revolution in technology is enough for people to start going down a rabbit hole.
I know a few people though work who are interested in self-hosting LLMs. There are people in real life who are some amount of pro-LLM.
Most people here are somewhere between neutral and very opposed, so I wouldn’t say the community is split, but there are certainly a range of perspectives, and I can understand where a large chunk of them are coming from, even beyond those I agree with.
It seems like its usually just one person just posting over and over or making alts (I assume, based on the fact they just reiterate the same arguments), rather than a coordinated effort.
I assume, based on the fact they just reiterate the same arguments
I saw someone else make this same argument. Can’t believe you made an alt to post it again.
I have been expecting there to be some softening and some people who use AI for coding on the DL here. It really has gotten significantly more common to at least try out tools like Claude Code. But those people aren’t writing articles like that and I’m not seeing them.
If anything it seems to be the reverse. The two most anti-slop people are developers that are now unemployed due to slop. Anecdotes, though.
I’ve been encouraged to use Claude Code for work, and by a lot of genuinely very talented engineers. It’s absolutely overhyped if you look at twitter tech bros, and absolutely under hyped if you only read Lemmy.
Out of curiosity, why have you been expecting a softening? From what I’ve seen AI tools for coding have gotten worse recently, not better. And companies are now jacking up the prices, to be more in line with costs. I’ve heard people irl complaining they went from $10 per month to $1000 if they were to continue using it the same way. Most have capped themselves or stopped altogether, as with that price it isn’t worth it anymore.
So my personal experience is more people complaining, but I’m interested in your view.
You have a good point that I missed about pricing that will keep many hobbyists away who can’t run something like Qwen Code locally. I don’t think the models have gotten worse although I don’t have data to back that up, but what I do know is a lot of devs in the private sector I know have gotten onboard recently and they had positive experiences with using it for coding tasks.
So given that it is more likely to me that opinion would soften even here. Most people just don’t care that much about the ethical or philosophical problems of LLMs and pragmatism for solving problems they care about will win out.
Thanks for responding. It’s good to get different people’s opinion about it.
Running stuff locally is really cool, I’ve messed about with it. I think the tech is super interesting, it’s just a shame about all the downsides in the way it’s used right now. Unfortunately what I can run is very limited, my most powerful machine has a 4070 GPU with 12GB of VRAM. The lack of VRAM really limits it to very small models which are fun to play around with, but not for anything serious.
I would love to get my hands on something with more VRAM or one of those unified memory ARM systems. However AI has pushed prices for anything like that into the stratosphere.
I like to hear opinions of people who find it interesting; myself I’ve tried Claude and did not like the experience and don’t use it. I have a similar gaming GPU that could run small models but not ones powerful enough to be very interesting.
Companies and programmers who are using it for real world development don’t care about $1000. A good programmer will run a company $10k or even $20k a month for their salary. If they can add even 50% to the output from that programmer they will throw $2000 a month at it and not even blink an eye.
The Anti-AI folks don’t talk to that kind of person much. They’re not running in the same social circles.
Meanwhile, I have a working application I built to replace a shitty corporate android app for a product I own that’s used for my side hustle. Built using an agentic harness using a local opensource LLM. Coding such a thing myself was beyond my development skill level, and it probably would have cost $100k-200k to pay a programmer to rebuild it to the level that it’s currently at now.
Is dbzer0 leaking?
