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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#411

Post by afavour »

splittydev wrote: post #254
afavour wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it". You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.

I actually think that's a great comparison but not for the reasons you're making it.

I live in NYC. When the automobile started to get popular the city saw it as the future and went to extreme lengths to accommodate it. Bulldozed houses, split neighborhoods in half to accommodate parkways and highways that formed our inevitable future. Turns out, cars don't scale. Eventually folks did push back and some of the proposed projects never happened[1] but we're still suffering the consequences the ones that did to this day.

Had there been more criticism and more discussion at the outset we might have avoided a lot of problems. I don't think the choice was "cars or horses", it was "how do we implement this new technology?". Trains and trams, it turns out, would have been better. But the automative industry was rich and powerful and persuaded cities to rip up their streetcar tracks. Many parallels to today's AI industry.

[1] https://www.mcny.org/story/cross-manhattan-expressway

> “virtually everyone believed that the private car was the greatest invention since fire or the wheel. Public transportation seemed to be nothing more than a relic of the past.” Wide modern expressways, Moses believed, would save New York as a great city.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#412

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

chasd00 wrote: post #397
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did people hate the computer this much when it became a thing?

I distinctly remember people hating on Google search (and the internet in general) when things got going and how it will dumb everyone down and no one will understand how to use the card catalog at the local library anymore.

Lol, seriously? Or are you trolling?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#413

Post by satvikpendem »

thrw045 wrote: post #262
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #131

I think this is the first article I've seen here which captures my practical concerns with AI, my moral concerns, my economic concerns, and also the emotional "true, profound, and guttural loathing". I hate it so much, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it. It just feels so icky. And the times when I've been fooled into reading AI-generated texts I feel cheated. It's all so cheap and nasty.

I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way. I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there…

That is a specific implementation of image models, not true for all image models. For example Civitai has a lot of realistic models that look like people took them, at least on first glance, as I'm sure with enough pixel peeping you can find discrepancies, point is the "flatness" look is with that specific ChatGPT model.

For example: https://civitai.com/models/2149369/iphone-realism

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#414

Post by Forgeties79 »

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #222
frizlab wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons we…

> Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.

The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now, so a lot of the issues that came with their ownership and special privileges no longer exist. There is no way that is how this is going to go down with Google et al

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#415

Post by saulpw »

bsza wrote: post #325
7tflutter7 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.

Not counting tests, we haven't seen one in action in over 80 years. If we could practice this level of caution with AI, that would be a great start.

We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation.

Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#416

Post by jononor »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #357
KptMarchewa wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.

No. You're not thinking it through well enough. The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business. Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.) The tech isn't goi…

There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#417

Post by satvikpendem »

inglor_cz wrote: post #329
NietTim wrote: post #87

Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.

I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly. It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable. I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the…

It's a type of engagement bait, people like posting things online which they know will rile up reactions.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#418

Post by velcrovan »

bsza wrote: post #306
velcrovan wrote: post #59

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.

It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.

I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#419

Post by tavavex »

NietTim wrote: post #87

Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.

You could ignore the ugly sides in 2018 or 2022, when the tech consisted of fun toys that existed alongside everything else and not instead of it.

In 2026, unless you're wealthy or are one of the few that don't need to use the internet to live, focusing on the ugly sides is not optional. When the ugly parts are coming for your employment, community, ability to own anything, your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society, you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore that, and then pretend like everyone pointing to the oncoming train is just a negative naysayer who's upset because they're bad and like to feel bad and no other reasons.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#420

Post by inglor_cz »

NoGravitas wrote: post #389
inglor_cz wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly. It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable. I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the…

I'll tell. It's you. You personally, and no one else. Not a category of people that includes you. Just you.

I don't particularly care if you hate me, I am more wary about people being hateful in general. It is a dangerous emotion to nurture and channels people towards acting in an evil way.

And the rationalizations tend to be questionable. 100 years ago, plenty of people would tell you that Jews are bloodsuckers who dominate the economy with their greed and enslave regular workers. It isn't exactly the same, but surely it rhymes.

At least today the hated enemy is a bit abstract and not a human. Though the hate can easily extend towards actual people who work on it.

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