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To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

musings.martyn.berlin

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Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#31

Post by Silagi »

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#33

Post by declan_roberts »

ronbenton wrote: post #7

>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it. In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

I've never seen a technology hated as much as AI currently is outside of tech. However, most people aren't moralizing about it, they just hate it.

Turns out you can have strong opinions about things without it being an issue of morality.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#34

Post by hrideshmg »

mlyle wrote: post #15
217 wrote: post #8

First 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.

I was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations.

Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.

cmiiw to think along these lines though.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#35

Post by brabel »

ronbenton wrote: post #7

>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it. In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing with AI... and so many more! I personally use it a lot for coding (though I still try to do some manual work so I don't just forget everything), translations, quick queries about things, in the computer (specially CLI commands, AI is just incredibly good at it - no matter the CLI, seemingly) and in the physical world (e.g. what's the name of that thing you turn on a tap to open it - English is not my first language), it even helped me a lot figure out legislation in two different countries, where finding and understanding the law was next to impossible by myself (and it gave me links to everything so I could check by myself).

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#36

Post by sleepofreason »

It seems unlikely at this point, given the real or perceived utility of using modern AI models, that people are going to stop using the technology. Also, given the huge amount of capital that's gone into the industry at this point, it would likely have a pretty negative effect on the global economy if they did. If you feel like it's causing a lot of harm and you're more passionately morally opposed to it than most, perhaps the thing to do is to focus on devising methods to lessen the harm. I think that would be very valuable to society.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#37

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

I don't feel like an outcast when I'm outside of the bubble of this community and outside of an environment like a workplace where people have to demonstrate enthusiasm for AI because they fear getting penalized for not using it.

That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#38

Post by CurtMonash »

There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.

But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#40

Post by ambicapter »

derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.
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