Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.

If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.

Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.

So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.

But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.

> [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.

I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.

I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?

> I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.

Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.

Hmm, okay, then...

Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.

Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...

--

Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]

- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?

- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?

--

[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!

[^2]: Not a typo.

It started well, and then he is suddenly sick because fellow member of the drama group made a poster using AI without consulting him (her?)

Anyways, people looking for drama will find one

First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment"

GUYS

PLEASE

The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?

There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it

There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.

But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.

Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly."

There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.

AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.

Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information.

Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.