I’'m curious about the strong negative feelings towards AI and LLMs. While I don’t defend them, I see their usefulness, especially in coding. Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers? Or is it the theft of training material without attribution? I want to understand why this topic evokes such emotion and why discussions often focus on negativity rather than control, safety, or advancements.
If you don’t hate AI, you’re not informed enough.
It has the potential to disrupt pretty much everything in a negative way. Especially when regulations always lag behind. AI will be abused by corporations in the worst way possible, while also being bad for the planet.
And the people who are most excited about it, tend to be the biggest shitheads. Basically, no informed person should want AI anywhere near them unless they directly control it.
Because so far we only see the negative impacts in human society IMO. Latest news haven’t help at all, not to mention how USA is moving towards AI. Every positive of AI, leads to be used in a workplace, which then will most likely lead to lay offs. I may start to think that Finch in POI, was right all along.
edit: They sell us an unfinished product, which we build in a wrong way.
- Useless fake spam content.
- Posting AI slop ruins the “social” part of social media. You’re not reading real human thoughts anymore, just statistically plausible words.
- Same with machine-generated “art”. What’s the point?
- AI companies are leeches; they steal work for the purpose of undercutting the original creators with derivative content.
- Vibe coders produce utter garbage that nobody, especially not themselves understands, and somehow are smug about it.
- A lot of AI stuff is a useless waste of resources.
Most of the hate is justified IMO, but a couple weeks ago I died on the hill arguing that an LLM can be useful as a code documentation search engine. Once the train started, even a reply that thought software libraries contain books got upvotes.
Not to mention the environmental cost is literally astronomical. I would be very interested if AI code is functional x times out of 10 because it’s success statistic for every other type of generation is much lower.
chatbot DCs burn enough electricity to power middle sized euro country, all for seven fingered hands and glue-and-rock pizza
Because the goal of “AI” is to make the grand majority of us all obsolete. The billion-dollar question AI is trying to solve is “why should we continue to pay wages?”. That is bad for everyone who isn’t part of the owner class. Even if you personally benefit from using it to make yourself more productive/creative/… the data you input can and WILL eventually be used against you.
If you only self-host and know what you’re doing, this might be somewhat different, but it still won’t stop the big guys from trying to swallow all the others whole.
Reads like a rant against the industrial revolution. “The industry is only concerned about replacing workers with steam engines!”
You’re probably not wrong. It’s definitely along the same lines… although the repercussions of this particular one will be infinitely greater than those of the industrial revolution.
Also, industrialization made for better products because of better manufacturing processes. I’m by no means sure we can say the same about AI. Maybe some day, but today it’s just “an advanced dumbass” considering most real world scenarios.
You should check out this https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
Read ‘The Communist Manifesto’ if you’d like to understand in which ways the bourgeoisie used the industrial revolution to hurt the proletariat, exactly as they are with AI.
The industrial revolution is what made socialism possible, since now a smaller amount of workers can support the elderly, children, etc.
Just look at China before and after industrializing. Life expectancy way up, the government can provide services like public transit and medicine (for a nominal fee)
the data you input can and WILL eventually be used against you.
Can you expand further on this?
User data has been the internet’s greatest treasure trove since the advent of Google. LLM’s are perfectly set up to extract the most intimate data available from their users (“mental health” conversations, financial advice, …) which can be used against them in a soft way (higher prices when looking for mental health help) or they can be used to outright manipulate or blackmail you.
Regardless, there is no scenario in which the end user wins.
For slightly earlier instance of it, there’s also real time bidding
AI is theft in the first place. None of the current engines have gotten their training data legally. The are based on pirated books and scraped content taken from websites that explicitely forbid use of their data for training LLMs.
And all that to create mediocre parrots with dictionaries that are wrong half the time, and often enough give dangerous, even lethal advice, all while wasting power and computational resources.
Because of studies like https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622:
Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI’s codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant.
Seems like this is a good argument for specialization. Have AI make bad but fast code, pay specialty people to improve and make it secure when needed. My 2026 Furby with no connection to the outside world doesn’t need secure code, it just needs to make kids smile.
They’re called programmers, and it’s faster and less expensive all around to just have humans do it better the first time.
Have you talked to any programmers about this? I know several who, in the past 6 months alone, have completely changed their view on exactly how effective AI is in automating parts of their coding. Not only are they using it, they are paying to use it because it gives them a personal return on investment…but you know, you can keep using that push lawnmower, just don’t complain when the kids next door run circles around you at a quarter the cost.
Automating parts of something as a reference tool is a WILDLY different thing than differing to AI to finalize your code, which will be shitcode.
Anybody right now who is programming that is letting AI code out there is bad at their job.
No argument there.
Have you had to code review someone who is obviously just committing AI bullshit? It is an incredible waste of time. I know people who learned pre-LLM (i.e. have functioning brains) and are practically on the verge of complete apathy from having to babysit ai code/coders, especially as their management keeps pushing people to use it. As in, they must use LLM as a performance metric.
congratulations on offloading your critical thinking skills to a chatbot that you most likely don’t own. what are you gonna do when the bubble is over, or when dc with it burns down
but you know, you can keep using that push lawnmower, just don’t complain when the kids next door run circles around you at a quarter the cost.
That push lawnmower will still mow the lawn in decades to come though, while your kids fancy high-tech lawnmower will explode in a few months and you’re lucky if it doesn’t burn the entire house down with it.
There is no AI.
What’s sold as an expert is actually a delusional graduate.
Don’t forget problems with everything around AI too. Like in the US, the Big Beautiful Bill (🤮) attempts to ban states from enforcing AI laws for ten years.
And even more broadly what happens to the people who do lose jobs to AI? Safety nets are being actively burned down. Just saying “people are scared of new tech” ignores that AI will lead to a shift that we are not prepared for and people will suffer from it. It’s way bigger than a handful of new tech tools in a vacuum.
I can only speak as an artist.
Because it’s entire functionality is based on theft. Companies are stealing the works of ppl and profiting off of it with no payment to the artists who’s works its platform is based on.
You often hear the argument that all artists borrow from others but if I created an anime that is blantantly copying the style of studio Ghibili I’d rightly be sued. On top of that AI is copying so obviously it recreates the watermarks from the original artists.
Fuck AI
You can’t be sued over or copyright styles. Studio Ponoc is made up of ex-Ghibli staff, and they have been releasing moves for a while. Stop spreading misinformation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16369708/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15054592/
Wasn’t there the same question here yesterday?
Yes. https://infosec.pub/post/29620772
Seems someone deleted it, and now we have to discuss the same thing again.
According to modlog it was against Rule#2
Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers? Or is it the theft of training material without attribution?
Both.
Especially in coding?
Actually, that’s where they are the least suited. Companies will spend more money on cleaning up bad code bases (not least from a security point of view) than is gained from “vibe coding”.
Audio, art - anything that doesn’t need “bit perfect” output is another thing though.
There’s also the issue of people now flooding the internet with AI generated tutorials and documentation, making things even harder. I managed to botch the Linux on my Raspberry Pi so hard I couldn’t fix it easily, all thanks to a crappy AI generated tutorial on adding to path that I didn’t immediately spot.
With art, it can’t really be controlled enough to be useful for anything much beyond spam machine, but spammers only care about social media clout and/or ad revenue.
and also chatbot-generated bug reports (like curl) and entire open source projects (i guess for some stupid crypto scheme)
But but, now idea man can vibecode. this shit destroys separation between management and codebase making it perfect antiproductivity tool
Not much to win with.
A fake bubble of broken technology that’s not capable of doing what is advertised, it’s environmentally destructive, its used for identification and genocide, it threatens and actually takes jobs, and concentrates money and power with the already wealthy.
It’s either broken and not capable or takes jobs.
You can’t be both useless and destroying jobs at the same time
It can absolutely be both. Expensive competent people are replaced with inexpensive morons all the time.
Have you never had a corporate job? A technology can be very much useless while incompetent ‘managers’ who believe it can do better than humans WILL buy the former to get rid of the latter, even though that’s a stupid thing to do, in order to meet their yearly targets and other similar idiotic measures of division/team ‘productivity’
In corporate world managers get fired for not completing projects
it’s not ai taking your job, it’s your boss. all they need to believe is that language-shaped noise generator can make it work, doesn’t matter if it does (it doesn’t). then business either suffers greatly or hires people back (like klarna)
And yet AI pulls through and somehow does manage to do both
taking a couple steps back and looking at bigger picture, something that you might have never done in your entire life guessing by tone of your post, people want to automate things that they don’t want to do. nobody wants to make elaborate spam that will evade detection, but if you can automate it somebody will use it this way. this is why spam, ads, certain kinds of propaganda and deepfakes are one of big actual use cases of genai that likely won’t go away (isn’t future bright?)
this is tied to another point. if a thing requires some level of skill to make, then naturally there are some restraints. in pre-slopnami times, making a deepfake useful in black propaganda would require co-conspirator that has both ability to do that and correct political slant, and will shut up about it, and will have good enough opsec to not leak it unintentionally. maybe more than one. now, making sorta-convincing deepfakes requires involving less people. this also includes things like nonconsensual porn, for which there are less barriers now due to genai
then, again people automate things they don’t want to do. there are people that do like coding. then also there are Idea Men butchering codebases trying to vibecode, while they don’t want to and have no inclination for or understanding of coding and what it takes, and what should result look like. it might be not a coincidence that llms mostly charmed managerial class, which resulted in them pushing chatbots to automate away things they don’t like or understand and likely have to pay people money for, all while chatbot will never say such sacrilegious things like “no” or “your idea is physically impossible” or “there is no reason for any of this”. people who don’t like coding, vibecode. people who don’t like painting, generate images. people who don’t like understanding things, cram text through chatbots to summarize them. maybe you don’t see a problem with this, but it’s entirely a you problem
this leads to three further points. chatbots allow for low low price of selling your thoughts to saltman &co offloading all your “thinking” to them. this makes cheating in some cases exceedingly easy, something that schools have to adjust to, while destroying any ability to learn for students that use them this way. another thing is that in production chatbots are virtual dumbasses that never learn, and seniors are forced to babysit them and fix their mistakes. intern at least learns something and won’t repeat that mistake again, chatbot will fall in the same trap right when you run out of context window. this hits all major causes of burnout at once, and maybe senior will leave. then what? there’s no junior to promote in their place, because junior was replaced by a chatbot.
this all comes before noticing little things like multibillion dollar stock bubble tied to openai, or their mid-sized-euro-country sized power demands, or whatever monstrosities palantir is cooking, and a couple of others that i’m surely forgetting right now
and also
Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers?
it’s you getting swept in outsized ad campaign for most bloated startup in history, not “backlash in media”. what you see as “backlash” is everyone else that’s not parroting openai marketing brochure
While I don’t defend them,
are you suure
e: and also, lots of these chatbots are used as accountability sinks. sorry nothing good will ever happen to you because Computer Says No (pay no attention to the oligarch behind the curtain)
e2: also this is partially side effect of silicon valley running out of ideas after crypto crashed and burned, then metaverse crashed and burned, and also after all this all of these people (the same people who ran crypto before, including altman himself) and money went to pump next bubble, because they can’t imagine anything else that will bring them that promised infinite growth, and they having money is result of ZIRP that might be coming to end and there will be fear and loathing because vcs somehow unlearned how to make money
Dunning-Kruger effect.
Lots of people now think they can be developpers because they did a shitty half working game using vibe coding.
Would you trust a surgeon that rely on ChatGPT ? So why sould you trust LLM to develop programs ? You know that airplane, nuclear power plants, and a LOT of critical infrastructure rely on programs, right ?
