I refuse to use AI as a tool for anything other than making tools.

I can’t write LISP but I use AutoCAD. I use an LLM to write LISP routines.

I spent MONTHS looking for a way to catalog my plant collection. Tried a dozen open source projects and none did what I wanted it to do. So I used Claude to make a simple database website…and it was able to add a ton of pipe dream features.

Nothing I make is for sale and I don’t claim it as my own. They’re tools for ME to use. And the important part is that once the tool is done, the LLM gets closed.

Currently, it’s a skill amplifier. You can’t code for shit and rely solely on it, it will give a shit product. You know how the whole codebase works and use it as needed? It will speed you up drastically while maintaining the quality you want.

Agents are a nightmare. They introduce a variable completely uncontrollable by you to your project, which will make you lose track of how everything works, resulting in a shit product.

I see its future on more optimized models that can run well locally on lower hardware, not those that use entire datacenters to power it. The big AI companies still do not generate profit and are doomed to fail in long term, but AI itself isn’t going away.

• How come the most memory-inefficient ML model we have ended up being the most powerful one. Can we rewrite the universe so modern advanced AI is based on network inference or ensemble models or sth
• How come AI has taken over the economy, and it doesn’t seem like a bubble (or at least not the crypto type of bubble)
• I’m a bit surprised that the most predominant use of AI/LLM seem to be… as a search engine wrapper. Thankfully ChatGPT is getting better at it, their default model has a built-in search engine integration now. This is kind of important since the company is getting big enough that their model bears social responsibilities…
• I have an asshole-ish work environment where the head honchos only cares about professionalism and efficiency… so I have no shame using AI for work. They don’t deserve my best tbh
• In terms of actual usage for my work, AI outputs can be anywhere from very good to very bad in an instant, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart…
• It’s surprisingly helpful as a primer to help me with things I’m not good at; researching niche information, finding resources
• For personal usage, I’m still hoping that there is a way to work AI into some type of a home automation loop… I haven’t found that sweet spot yet. Maybe it’s just my lack of skill at the moment. Hopefully I can hook together some shitty models with search engine skills (on my own SearXNG) as a semi-useful agent

It works for basic tasks like correcting grammar, sorting lists, etc, but it makes too many mistakes when you try to use it for a complex task.

Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.

Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

“Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.

I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.

On one side…

On the other…

I’m a shameless local LLM shill. I have one loaded right now, experimenting with it.

I also thought Sam Altman was a psychopath before that was the popular opinion, and have never subscribed to OpenAI or even used their free UIs. Not once. Not even the “original” GPT 3.5.

I don’t plan on ever doing it. I will rail against them.

In other words, the sides aren’t mutually exclusive.

One can hate “AI” with a burning passion, using the term AI pejoratively. And be passionate about local ML.

First of all, it isn’t going away. Stop telling yourself that lie. If you hate it, then compare it to herpes or mosquitoes. Not going away. People love to talk about sensational things like bubbles or how it will end humanity. Stop being hysterical. It is software. You don’t have to use it, you don’t have to like it, but be informed. Saying it will go away is about as ignorant as saying the internet is a fad and smartphones are on the edge of failing out of the market. You just sound like a Luddite.

In the end, it is a tool. It can be used for stupidity, waste and nonsense, or it can be used for something good.

You can use a hammer to build something or you can murder someone with it. Any tool can be misused.

It is terribly inefficient in its current form. It needs to be refined just like any other technology. We used to have cars that got single digit mpg. Now you can buy a cheap car that gets 30+, a hybrid that can crack 50 or straight electric. Like anything, it will improve over time.

Society did not revert to riding horses, we did not give up mobile phones for land lines and ai isn’t going away. There is solid historical precedent to demonstrate this. You can be the old man yelling at the clouds, but it won’t do anything but make you look silly.

LLMs were fascinating and I very rarely use one if I can’t find information online for the life of me.

I hate what OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok etc are doing to get the training data. Whatever I put only is likely scanned and gobbled up by some AI Agent. I am an Artist. Uploading art has always been uncomfortable to me, now with scraping I truly hate it. i am glad there are services like Glaze and Nightshade, but there are some shitheads working on cracking these. I worry about missing legislation. I worry about the security breaches. I am not sure if they are mere marketing, but regardless, it shows how capable AI Agents are, and how much damage they can cause.

“Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions.”

In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.

The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren’t) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.

Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a “truth machine”. A speaker I heard put it simply: “AI cheats.” It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.

Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but, IMHO, most of the problems I see being voiced by anti-AI (actually, anti-LLM) people, seem to have less (if anything) to do with the tech per se and more to do with capitalism’s and corporations’ usurpation of it.

I mean, if LLMs were something exclusively made and maintained by, say, a not-for-profit academia (as in a “Libre and Open Science” kind of academia where scientists are working for the entire Earth rather than working for profit/egoistic goals), like the Machine Learning field kind of already was back in the dawn of perceptrons, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be experiencing this whole dystopia, no?

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

My opinion is well… I’m sure it may have some use, but I see it pushed in the dumbest and least useful ways. It is fundamentally incapable of creating art in any shape or form. Use it to summarise things? I don’t trust it enough to correctly summarise the text. Use it to write/reply to emails? I’d myself just feel insulted if someone sent me a generated email. Why should I expect someone to read a text I didn’t even bother to write?

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.

Its shit and I’ll be glad when it gets flushed.

it’s sort of mixed.

overall i hate how it’s being made, advertised, brainwashing people, used for fake images/propaganda, reducing signal to noise ratio with meaningless slop, environmental concerns etc.

OTOH there’s some genuinely great things (imo) being made because of it. like people making drivers for long obsolete hardwares, reverse engineering proprietary blobs. maybe it isn’t something very advanced technically but it’s still something i find very interesting. most recently i saw someone got iOS 7 running on a HTC HD2 (leo), 17 years after that phone first released.

i still don’t use llms yet other than short testing back a few years ago, but i might start using them soon. i really want to get volte working on my phone, i don’t know how to reverse engineer the vendor’s IMS implementation, and i’ve seen people with not much knowledge get it working on their phones with llm help.

maybe i’m justifying immoral things… idk. something to think about.