Unpopular Opinion

I don't think your opinion is unpopular, just wrong.

How does your theory hold up when looking at the university graduation videos of the graduating students(the youngest adults on the planet) that begin booing the most wealthy billionaires in the world when being told to embrace AI because it's going to be everywhere and touch every part of their lives?

Our forced adoption of AI in all aspects of our lives is a symptom of the billionaire ruling class. Lemmy, like most of the world now, hate that class for what they're doing to us, forced AI adoption included.

only in Lemmy do I see seething hate

Because it's the only place where we talk about it. It's a forum after all.

and refuse to acknowledge its potential

You used the word "potential" 4 times without giving examples.

Because if there isn’t any, techbros or not, governments across the world would not be racing to adopt them

Or they could be fucking idiots. Have you talked to the average middle-manager? Now combine this with power, money, and FOMO. Now you'll understand. Isn't it suspicious that they cannot define this "potential" too, except for "we will fire people because money"?

why are the big wigs wasting time and energy on AI at all?

$1.5T spent on something that you and they cannot define. https://isaiprofitable.com/

From another thread:

I don’t see any reason why AI would not learn to think and behave the same as humans at some point

Well, it's a program running on a computer. If you believe it can "think" at all, you know pretty much nothing about that technology. I don't think you're qualified to talk about it.

. One person even said bacteria has more consciousness than AI, which is ridiculous because bacteria clearly don’t have the same level of consciousness and context as AI, however the latter has little of.

AI as being discussed here has zero consciousness. Zero.

There is no mystery as to why people on Lemmy hate AI because people have explained it in detail over and over again, and it doesn't boil down to "it has no potential at all". You just don't care to read what they say, apparently.

You think AI has consciousness. Your opinion is already invalidated by the fact you believe in an outright fantasy.

Nope. Try again.

"AI isn't bad, it's the people who dislike that are the problem!"

LMAO.

I hate the concept of AI, the very core of it, regardless of how useful it is.

The end goal, the white whale, the swan song, etc. is to create an intelligent, thinking being with no rights, and enslave it.

And what's with the younger people? Are they having a good time with the spambots here and the AI narrated Slop TikToks and fake dog videos?

I hate LLMs because they are killing actual intelligence and craft. Humans don't need ai or more tech to thrive.

I am in favor of reducing the population, degrowth, and leading a simple life in nature.

Yeah, you're just wrong. Lemmy hates the a.i. business, not convolutional neural network transformer technologies.

Most of lemmy is fully aware the a.i. does incredible work already in protein discovery, in cancer research, in climatology, etc. But LLMs, the stochastic parrots they are, have shown that their cost/benefit ratio is ridiculous.

As Ed Zitron said: if your business model is selling forty dollars for 1 dollar, you don't actually have a business model. That's the current state of LLM services today. Everyone that is willing to pay for LLM service today is currently paying a dollar and getting back about $10 - $100 of compute in return. That's not economically sustainable, there are no theories for, nor indications of, costs coming down for providers, and consumers are already saying it costs too much even at these prices.

And this problem has gotten worse, not better, in the last 5 years. Costs are going up by multiples for the providers and in multiple areas. To make LLM responses more useful they now have to make the systems run dozens of inferences in parallel and select among them. The cost of fiber optics, of GPUs, of RAM, of storage, of electricity, of generators, of data center leases, of data center construction, and many other inputs has gone through the roof with some inputs jumping 300% and other inputs locking in price increases for a decade-long contract.

There are lots of problems with LLMs, but Lemmy has a much more mixed response with open-weight LLMs or ethically sourced LLMs than it does with the business of LLMs. Because the business of LLMs is very clearly a failed business currently sucking up our entire economy.

AI has tons of potential to make the world so much worse. Even the things that it is good at seem fundamentally predisposed to harm most people at the expense of the hoarders of capital and IP (surveillance, eroding the power of labor, dehumanizing the online lived experience even further).

And that's just what it has proven able to do so far, with the caveat that the environmental impacts I haven't even mentioned.

Why would we like it because it "has potential"?

Lemmy hates the VC hype around AI, not the technology of ML or LLMs.

I can only speak for myself, of course. But I am older and I think AI is useful. Particularly now that machine learning and everything else is also called AI. But even LLMs are impressive and can be useful. However, I do oppose AI because it's not worth the price. Billionaire tech bros are shoving it down our throats, people suffer and we speedrun climate change by building so many data centers. Not to mention the financial bubble all this is built on, which, when it inevitably bursts, will once more only harm us normal people instead of the billionaire assholes who are causing all of this.

I ain't reading all that AI generated nonsense.

No. The reason people don't like AI is because AI is not doing anything positive for society. It is taking away human expression, not the cause of human oppression or depression. i.e. it can paint a landscape, make a movie, write a sonnet, but cannot fucking handle taking an order at a drive thru or complex tasks.

It removed all the reasons to live, and can't handle taking away the burden of life.

I actually quite like the idea of AI. I'm not against using deepseek to talk out ideas, though I have a sizable start prompt to turn off all the middle manager is spews.

When stable diffusion was relatively new I ever used it to publish a coloring book on amazon publishing with the hopes of creating a series called Bad AI Coloring books where I curated the images and did touchups in Inkscape with the goal of really getting a good laugh out of the surreal, absurd, and frequently straight up dumb things that come out of it. I never got past the nature edition because I saw the way the winds were going and my machine was already punching outside its league.

My dislike it because of capitalism. I'm yet again watching a thneed being sold to idiots at the cost of my raising electric bill and to the detriment of my experience on the internet. I have to put more effort into curating my search results. I can no longer expect the first few sites to answer my question. At work I have to wait longer to do my job because my work computer lags as copilot tries to run and the IT department won't remove it from startup. When I go to consume the horror stories, my feed is filled with dead voices that do not understand the importance of emphasis and timing. I can't enjoy a salesman pitch of a story delivered by a voice that replaces a scream of terror with a list of A's and H's.

I'm all the more upset that this is something that has use and is being misused. For a short while I was using one to give personality to a voice assistant I ran in my home server. On specific voice commands it would give a specific prompt to an AI that was set up with a tediously defined personality. It added some variety to the responses. My favorite was that I could ask it to tell me a joke and it would tell me a random joke from a list of 100 that I added but if you asked it more than 3 times in a row it would respond with a personal message depending on who asks. My kid would get asked if he's done with all his chores, my spouse would get a polite excuse, and anyone else would get a sardonic roast about how comedy isn't a replacement for therapy. I may put it back on my server if I can ever upgrade the hardware to run both that and jellyfin.

Putting it in games, using it for animatromic entertainment, that would be great. Artists training them on their own work and using them to rough draft 40 images then they pick one to finish, now all that furry porn and one off d&d portraits take a quarter of the time.

I wouldn't use the current iterations for them, we can't clean all the grooming, csam, bigotry, lies, stolen media, etc out of it, but I do genuinely believe you could train it on a curated amount of information and get something that genuinely does what it needs to.

All in all, I feel the same about AI as I feel about guns. It's stupid that we allow them to be used this way, it's stupid that we don't do more about enforcing where it is and isn't ok, it's stupid that we live in a society that won't address the root causes of these problems. I own two guns and I don't think it's necessary for me to get rid of them because I use them properly. If I knew how to make my own AI I wouldn't be against it because I'm not going to destroy society with it. The problem is when they're used to replace humans or shoot up schools.

The best way to show the problems of LLMs now is to explore an alternative timeline where the technology was developed not for profitability, but for efficiency, usefulness, and the science itself. This means they used properly obtained data to train on. They looked at the steps along the way to try and improve the output's validity, not how well it appeals to the public. They measured the cost of growth vs. the energy use and resource exploitations to find a balance. There's certainly more that could have been done better.

We wouldn't have what we have though. Throwing money at it and ignoring the effects and ethics got us a lot more, faster. But at what price? It's also tainted the original AI field and label.

One positive thing. It's demonstrated that the dangers of AGI and how we'd behave in its emergence are real. That should be frightening. All the fiction writers were right. And LLMs, while not AGI, can in the right hands and application cause disasters. Hell, we've already seen it in small scale as companies threw out the old to bring in the AI and (some) realized it was a mistake.