I’ve been on Lemmy for about 2 weeks now, and I’ve noticed a trend:
The VAST majority of posts that mention AI in any manner are some dig or criticism or some other negative commentary, and the rare ones that have anything positive to say about it almost always have negative whatever-Lemmy’s-version-of-karma-is.
I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.
When people say “AI,” I assume they are talking about the large corporate Neural Networks that get branded as “AI” for marketing purposes.
I hate these because they’re a grift. They’re funded and maintained by a handful of ultra-rich idiots who saw no value in learning social sciences nor the humanities, and thus have failed to learn from history. The people pushing for mass adoption believe in a variety of unscientific pseudo-religious conspiracy beliefs about AI gods and devils leading humanity.
I hate that the cost of these cults are being foisted onto the rest of society by way of government and corporate contracts.
I hate that mass media is rapidly degrading in quality in order to justify the purchase of said contracts.
I hate that the people making important decisions that affect my life and well-being — doctors, the people who develop my software, my government representatives, news reporters, lawyers — are not just willing, but actively excited at the prospect of turning off their brains and letting black boxes controlled by opaque corporations make the decisions for them.
I hate that despite 3+ years of hype and 10+ years of public access, the only people who have demonstrably benefitted from it are Nvidia, scammers, and people who don’t want to use their brain.
But mostly, and this is the clincher, I hate that we are literally destroying the earth to run these machines. Even if every other problem disappeared overnight, this should be an argument killer. We only get one home, and we are setting fire to it. I don’t care if it improves the lives of millions of humans, because it is hastening the death of hundreds of billions of lifeforms.
I hate that people ignore this or conveniently forget it or are just apathetic about it. I hate that this argument just carries little to no weight for most fence-sitters. I hate that people treat feeling emotional about the destruction of our only home as being irrational. I hate ecoterrorism being excused by marketing babble and shitty faux-skeptical wishy-washiness.
Because it’s built on the creative collective works of everything that’s ever been put on the Internet with no attribution or compensation for people who’s authored works were stolen. Maybe that’s why?
I don’t see why that’s an issue. Creatives won’t even have to make anything creative anymore, AI can just be used to make things the they would have. That will save them so much time, enough that they can go do cheap labor for 18 hours of the day, like a good slave.
This is not a direct answer to your question.
I’ve heard 2 really great takes about LLMs & GenAI, that have stayed with me - though I don’t have the best wording for them anymore.
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As AI is trained on previously created data, it fundamentally looks backwards. Human creativity creates new things and inherently looks to the future.
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AI is trained on the vast corpus of human works and synthesizes that info into a median response. You will never get exciting and bold insights, just bland and inoffensive responses.
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Using ai to make it solve complex problems, analyse things and summarise objective outcomes is fantastic.
Unfortunately making it slop out is easier and TikTok-brained people are keen on making it poop slop. That’s why the consumer level ai makes me bit grossed out as well.
Its a tool. Great tool. Like photoshop and excel. But it can be also abused to steal, manipulate and destroy what have been built so far by humanity in seconds.
And the second one just makes it even worse this invention is made by Americans so “it has to be profitable” cancer all over it. That’s why it sucks now. Its capitalism driven not humanity. Even open ai changed to for profit “for undisclosed reasons”. The thing doesn’t work now unless you throw lots of bucks on it.
Its going to be better and way more useful at some point. But not anytime near until America’s upcoming economical crash. American capitalism is one of the worst thing happened to human kind and until its controlled nothing ever coming out from country is going to be beneficial to human kind. That’s why it sucks big time now.
First, you made that classic blunder. You wrote “AI” without defining it, as if it was meaningful. We always see people do bait-and-switch arguments surrounding this topic. Always. So, if you want a meaningful answer, you need to actually provide a definition…
Are you asking why people hate ChatGPT? If so, you should ask that.
Second, you made a mistake. You think people hate AI when the hate is reserved for the assholes getting rich by fucking us all over as they destroy our communities, clean water, and affordable electricity. Remember, it’s the people who do horrible things who need to be stopped.
I’m on Lemmy because I’m anti capitalist and generally support progressive policies such as circular economic practices and sustainability. I’m against AI because it goes against everything I mentioned. The gains aren’t worth the cost.
Because we’d rather have national forests, clean water, job opportunities, a sustainable future and liberty than live in morodor with the eye of Sauron staring at us all the time
Pro:
- It’s good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it’ll give you an answer immediately that’s tailored specifically to your question.
Con:
- Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that’s hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It’s like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.
Pro:
- It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.
Con:
- People who use it for this are getting dumber. It’s growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that’s no longer true these systems are breaking down.
Another Con:
- It’s fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.
Pro:
- It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.
Con:
- The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don’t even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.
I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.
I’m not completely against it. I do recognise its threats to privacy, the planet, and intellect though. The average person trusts it too much.
Personally, I do not use it that much. I do however use it to help with research. I find being able to ask a question quite useful as a jumping off point for further research. I do not rely on it to answer correctly, simply to aid in pointing me in the right direction. Then I go off and do more specific research.
I have been moving from windows 10 to linux mint recently, it was quite useful in aiding with this at times. Not all the time, just at the right times. If there were a particular issue I was struggling with it could help point me in the right direction, though I would not trust it to simply spit out the right advise and commands to type to fix an issue without researching exactly what those commands did, how that would potentially help fix the issue and how to revert if it messed something up. I have seen many examples where the advise it gave was terrible and potentially destructive because I researched the advise it gave, had I of not it would have really messed things up. It must be used responsibly.
People are all to quick to talk into their phones, get a response and trust it to be all knowing. Their queries are forever recorded and logged to their personal identity without and option to opt out. I use privacy orientated search engines with ai functionality such as duckduckgo and ecosia. Ecosia makes it very easy to verify the sources of information given from their ai, also they put in efforts to be as green as possible. Very respectable.
So no, I am not against ai. I am against the usual way in which the average person uses it and the way the majority of companies are using it to exploit people and the planet to turn a profit.
Because it’s not really ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. It’s basically fast computing. And stealing data from other websites.
Because it’s lame, and sucks shit
You do realize that the vast majority of people hate LLMs right? They are power, water resource hungry worthless things that have yet to prove any worth to the human race.
Instead of staring at a bug for six hours until I have a literal panic attack, I can ask copilot for help after I can’t find a solution after an hour.
It helped my autistic ass get back to my hobby and love. But I am looking into switching to a local llm instead of one from the data center.
Nuclear power can make energy.
Nuclear power can eradicate the planet and leave areas uninhabitable for untold years, and those it doesn’t vaporize are altered for the rest of their lives. And sometimes they aren’t aware until years after.
AI has good uses when applied carefully, such as in medical research.
AI is also being used as a reason to replace workers, it consumes massive amounts of energy, it creates sound and infrasound destroying environments around it, it consumes massive quantities of drinking water from surrounding areas, and is ultimately spurring on a society of wealthy ruling class who view humans as cattle, out in the open, and no one is stopping them.
Is it any wonder why people hate these things? But yes, a tool is a tool. It’s the people using it that hate should be properly directed towards. Unfortunately, those same ruling class epstein elites dismantled education over decades, so it’s harder for people in this day and age to think dialectically. It’s easier to think in black and white, in extremes, just like media would have you believe, just as the culture wars have taught us for decades.
Those detriments listed can also be mitigated. AI can be powered with clean energy, and cooled with closed loops. They’re not, but they could be. AI isn’t to blame, it’s greedy, negligent corporations that are using AI.
Until there’s an energy surplus, any clean energy used for AI could could be used for something else that displaces fossil fuel use. If someone wanted to make a data center that sat on the ocean floor and uses the heat differential from thermal vents and ocean water, that would be an exception, but no one is proposing that.
You’re right. We should ban AI, video games, Christmas lights, television, and anything else that uses energy in a way you don’t approve of until there’s an energy surplus. No argument here.
Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/
And for what? Not having to hire artists? A chat bot that will tell you to kill yourself? What problem of mine does AI solve?
The same problem Christmas lights and video games solve: none. It’s totally useless! Ban them all.
I’ve learned there’s no good that can come from admitting you use AI - you’ll only get an angry mob after you. That’s why I’ve never used AI and never will. It’s evil! Evil I tell you! Hit it with a banhammer, quick, before it gets away! Don’t let it lay it’s eggs!
Leaded gas, asbestos, DDT, freon… all technologies who’s advantages did not out weight their disadvantages. AI falls into the same category. What exactly does AI do for you? Does it outweigh the energy cost and health cost for the people living near the datacenters?
Yep, you’re right. It’s toxic and no one should use it.
Me? Nothing. I’ve never used it and I never will use it. I’ve heard the angry mob comes after you with insults and argument if you even admit to thinking about using it, and I have no need of all that hate in my life. So I’ve never used it, and will never use it.
Bro didn’t make it to the last paragraph. Those attention spans though.
I’m not sure what you mean. I read the last paragraph, then read it two more times to be sure I didn’t miss anything. What are you insinuating?Nevermind. I get it, you’re criticizing me for reiterating the conclusions.
I like computers and now can’t easily afford to do the projects I’m interested in. I get very little value from AI and it destroyed my hobby. It also is a massive bubble that will hurt the majority of the world once it pops. It’s dumb.
You’re describing the effects of data centers, not AI. AI doesn’t change the prices on computer components, nor is it in any way a bubble. I think you’re describing corporations buying up components for their data centers, which they intend to use for AI, but that isn’t attributable to AI itself. It’s like saying authors are to blame for trees being cut down to make paper - completely ignoring that books can be digital.
i can’t speak for everyone, but a lot of people are outraged that they have been replaced or soon will be. Millions of people will be unemployed. This is bad, because we are a consumer-based economy, and we’re losing even more consumers.
After decades of low pay for most workers, this is the very last thing we need.





