I don’t hate AI, LLMs are incredibly powerful tools that have an incredibly wide range of uses. The technology itself is something that’s very exciting and promising.
What I do hate is how they’re being used by large corporations. A small handful of big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, etc) decided to take this technology and pursue it in the greediest ways possible:
They took open source code, built on top of it, and closed it off so they could sell it
They scrapped all the data on the internet without consent and used it to train their models
They made their models generate stuff based on copyrighted works without permission or giving credit, thus basically stealing the content
But that wasn’t enough for them so they decided to train their models on every interaction you have with their LLM services, so all your private conversations are stored and recycled even if you don’t want that to happen
They use the data from the conversations that you’ve had with the chatbots to build customer profiles about you that they sell to advertisers so they could send you hoards of personalized ads
They started integrating their LLMs into their other products as much as they could so they could artificially increase their stock prices
They aggressively campaign for other companies to buy and integrate their models so both parties could artificially increase their stock prices
In order to meet their artificially induced demand, they’re sucking the life out of the electricity grid, which is screwing over everybody else
They’re also taking over the hardware industry and killing off consumer electronics since its more profitable for manufacturers to sell to AI companies than to consumers
They’re openly bribing, lobbying, and campaigning governments to give them grants, tax breaks, and keep regulations at a minimum so they could do whatever they want and have society pay for the privilege
They’re using these LLMs to cut as many jobs as possible so they could penny pinch just a little more, hence the massive waves of recent layoffs recently. This is being done even if the LLM replacements perform far worse than humans.
All of this is being done with zero regard to the environmental damage caused by them with their monstrous data centers and electricity consumption
All of this is being done with zero regard to the harmful impacts caused to people and society. These LLMs frequently lie and spread misinformation, they feed into delusions and bad habits of mentally unwell people, and they’re causing great damage to schools since students could use these models to easily cheat and nothing can be done about it
When you put all of this together, then it’s easy to understand why people hate AI. This is what people oppose, and rightfully so. These corporations created a massive bubble and put our economy at risk of a major recession, they’re destabilizing our infrastructure, destroying our environment, they’re corrupting our government, they’re forcing tens of thousands of people into dire financial situations by laying them off, they’re eroding our privacy and rights, and they’re harming our mental health… and for what? I’ll tell you, all of this is done so a few greedy billionaires could squeeze a few more dollars out of everything so they could buy their 5th yacht, 9th private jet, or 7th McMansion. Fuck them all.
To add to your good points, I’m a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like “this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we’re on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence” or “90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years” it annoys me because its not real, and it’s always someone selling something. Today’s AI is the same tech they’ve been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore’s Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.
The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it’s the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.
What a fucking waste of resources.
What’s real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it’s not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).
I don’t hate AI, LLMs are incredibly powerful tools that have an incredibly wide range of uses. The technology itself is something that’s very exciting and promising.
What I do hate is how they’re being used by large corporations. A small handful of big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, etc) decided to take this technology and pursue it in the greediest ways possible:
They took open source code, built on top of it, and closed it off so they could sell it
They scrapped all the data on the internet without consent and used it to train their models
They made their models generate stuff based on copyrighted works without permission or giving credit, thus basically stealing the content
But that wasn’t enough for them so they decided to train their models on every interaction you have with their LLM services, so all your private conversations are stored and recycled even if you don’t want that to happen
They use the data from the conversations that you’ve had with the chatbots to build customer profiles about you that they sell to advertisers so they could send you hoards of personalized ads
They started integrating their LLMs into their other products as much as they could so they could artificially increase their stock prices
They aggressively campaign for other companies to buy and integrate their models so both parties could artificially increase their stock prices
In order to meet their artificially induced demand, they’re sucking the life out of the electricity grid, which is screwing over everybody else
They’re also taking over the hardware industry and killing off consumer electronics since its more profitable for manufacturers to sell to AI companies than to consumers
They’re openly bribing, lobbying, and campaigning governments to give them grants, tax breaks, and keep regulations at a minimum so they could do whatever they want and have society pay for the privilege
They’re using these LLMs to cut as many jobs as possible so they could penny pinch just a little more, hence the massive waves of recent layoffs recently. This is being done even if the LLM replacements perform far worse than humans.
All of this is being done with zero regard to the environmental damage caused by them with their monstrous data centers and electricity consumption
All of this is being done with zero regard to the harmful impacts caused to people and society. These LLMs frequently lie and spread misinformation, they feed into delusions and bad habits of mentally unwell people, and they’re causing great damage to schools since students could use these models to easily cheat and nothing can be done about it
When you put all of this together, then it’s easy to understand why people hate AI. This is what people oppose, and rightfully so. These corporations created a massive bubble and put our economy at risk of a major recession, they’re destabilizing our infrastructure, destroying our environment, they’re corrupting our government, they’re forcing tens of thousands of people into dire financial situations by laying them off, they’re eroding our privacy and rights, and they’re harming our mental health… and for what? I’ll tell you, all of this is done so a few greedy billionaires could squeeze a few more dollars out of everything so they could buy their 5th yacht, 9th private jet, or 7th McMansion. Fuck them all.
When people say “I fucking hate AI”, 99% of the time they mean “I fucking hate AI™©®”. They don’t mean the technology behind it.
To add to your good points, I’m a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like “this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we’re on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence” or “90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years” it annoys me because its not real, and it’s always someone selling something. Today’s AI is the same tech they’ve been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore’s Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.
The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it’s the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.
What a fucking waste of resources.
What’s real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it’s not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).
That’s an exceptional pasta - well-worded!
Do you mind if I steal it?
Go right ahead