Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.
To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
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Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#12I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively.
Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).
Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#13Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#14I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#15First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment" GUYS PLEASE The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing? There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown.
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#16I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
Real “I am persecuted for my genius” energy.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#17First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment" GUYS PLEASE The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing? There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Yeah, it's weird, nobody's saying "we should make all the data centres use closed loop cooling even if it's more expensive for them!", but a lot of voices are yelling "AI uses water!", referring to the same thing.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#18I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#19[deleted]
Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
#20This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.