If LLMs used very little RAM and processing power, was light weight even for Mythos or Sol, would people be as opposed? Like no data centers, no memory shortages, like it was able to run on a calculator with the same performance.
Any good thing is ruined once it’s co-opted by capitalism.
AI and LLMs (In my very very personal and completely subjective opinion) is the coolest shit humanity has ever invented and under the right system would’ve been unanimously celebrated.
But noooooooo, capitalism had to go and fucking turn a miraculous tool for human creativity and knowledge into a relentless driver of layoffs, corporate slop and copyright theft because some greedy fucks want more money for themselves than they know what to do with.
But, well, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.The trouble is that intellectual property laws are so far behind technology that there’s basically no way to implement this technology without fucking over the creators of IP.
This song says it perfectly:
We made AI so we could do the fun stuff
While it could do the dumb stuff
But now it does the fun stuff
And we’ve become the dumb stuffIt’s taking all the interesting and fun creative work, leaving people to make sure all the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted.
The hardware and power shortages piss me off in particular because I’m a computers guy. But I also have friends who are writers and digital artists so I hate it for how it impacts them too. So ‘as much’? No, but it’d still be hated.
edit: also I play TTRPGs so i hate it for polluting image aggregators too
Yes, because of the way its used, the way its presented, and how bad it is.
Different people would hate it for different reasons tho
The most common use for AI seems to be Nazi/Fascist/Republican propaganda. Basically anywhere you go is an endless number of bots pushing to defend neo-nazis, tell people that Trump totally isnt a pedophile, make posts about “If he had just complied he would have lived” etc etc etc.
The subset of people who recognize this, would hate AI because its really only good as a propaganda mill.
The next set would be because of the way its being pushed to replace workers, AI doesnt actually make the remaining workers jobs easier, and it doesnt do work more efficiently, its just another excuse to cut headcounts, make a shittier service and charge more for it.
Finally is because its A) Very often wrong and B) Being used to replace actual critical thinking.
Its a growing problem, especially in academia. Students are coming into college or high school with absolutely no idea how to do actual research, how to write a paper in a logical way, how to follow basic logic chains etc. And there is so much bad information being produced by AI now that its becoming harder and harder to find actual good information. For every doctor telling you to vaccinate kids, there are a dozen AI driven videos that have some person being confidently wrong about everything to do with vaccines.
Are there still students who didnt cheat their way through high school with AI? yes.
But they are becoming more and more rare.
And given how wrong AI usually is (AI is very good at being confidently wrong), this means that we have a whole generation growing up who cant tell the difference between “Measles can kill you if you dont get vaccinated” and “Shooting gay people is a fun weekend activity”
It would probably be hated even more as all of those points would be magnitudes higher in volume than they are today. It’s what is wanted by corporations, a cheap surveillance tool that closely monitors everyone to keep everyone in line. There are multiple dimensions to this issue. I think AI should have stayed in R&D for a while longer. It is so half baked, but unfortunately trusted as an “expert” by people who may not be familiar with hunting down primary trustworthy sources. Though that last point is nothing new. I think it should have never been used for things like scanning private/personal files or to accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit. These companies are buying their own bullshit and are trusting/betting on AI to reduce the most costly component of their company, the labor force. It’s all just smoke and mirrors though, always has been. It’s not like these things are gods among us, but they are sold that way. In the end, not matter what, with the current state of AI or if they were cheaper to use computationally, the bubble will burst. At least when that happens, maybe some of the left overs can be repurposed for actual useful things for society, but I don’t have my hopes up at the moment.
It would still be anti-labor and a force multiplier for confident stupidity.
Resource intensive is one thing, theft is another. Pay all the artists for using their art and we’ll begin to talk about whether destroying the planet further is worth it.
The question has already been asked yesterday. It makes people lazy and stupid, that’s my main issue.
And it makes people who were already stupid think they’re smart.
Nothing quite like arguing against a second-hand LLM conversation in your area of expertise, being proxied by someone who doesn’t understand what either you, or it are saying.
LLM the technology is interesting and impressive. the way companies are shoving it into everything and trying to sell it as a replacement for employees is awful. The way the AI companies are behaving is awful.
AI is great! it just needs a little work on the IP theft, the environmental impact, the dopamine addiction, the cornering of the component market, the reliability, the hidden system prompts, the non-determinism, the push to have everything in the cloud, the enshittification, the empowerment of the billionaires, the reduction in user’s cognitive abilities, the lack of real-world use cases, the reliability, the spying on humans intimate thoughts, the overblown marketing, the bubble impact on the world economy, and the reliability. Other than that, it’s just fine! Trust me, bro!
It’s great! Except for the several teen suicides
This is pretty much my thoughts as well. My unsolicited rant:
The technology is good and anyone who says it’s “just autocorrect” are wrong. Having said that, I agree that LLMs are useful really for nothing more than low-risk, personal research and/or signposting to other sources. It’s in no way a replacement for a human (unless your definition of what a human does is that it’s just a thing that produces words at you - in which case, you’re probably a middle manager - very myopic, regardless). It’s also not appropriate for anything financial, professional, or confidential. Here, the first L in LLM is a hindrance. Local, small language models are more appropriate and cost-effective here.
Anyway. I don’t “use AI” like some people but over the last year I’ve used my access to Proton’s Lumo (already included in my subscription) a handful of times and been pleased with the results. The way that I see it is that all the LLM libraries are trained almost entirely on Reddit or websites that stole their content from Reddit anyway, so use it like you would Reddit: “LGBT horror movies before 2000,” “Summarize and cite criticisms of Camille Paglia,” “Was Bioshock 2 well-received at launch?” All very low-stakes. Doesn’t really matter. Could’ve been a Reddit thread, but it’s likely that any response there would’ve been a middleman for an AI answer anyway.
Anyway. More: Call it cope but I’ve been developing a theory/outlook that the internet as a thing is basically dead and that the Pandora’s Box of LLM tech, which can produce a basically infinite amount of what was once the internet’s currency (read: information, but really: text), has killed it. The Fediverse is utopian but I don’t think anyone here really believes it will ever be anything more than a cluster of fringe communities. Having said that, I justify good LLM use (like mine, lucky that) as being the “New Game Plus” mode of the internet. Everything is already there, everything’s unlocked. There is no challenge. It’s kind of cheating and you’re not really supposed to play the game like that. But at the same time, there is no going back to the real beginning, I just have the option of nostalgically re-creating it by going to old.reddit or postfixing before:2022 to all my
GoogleDDG searches. Fun, and game-ish in it’s own right, but also artificially limiting for no reasons beyond that./rant
Could’ve been a Reddit thread, but it’s likely that any response there would’ve been a middleman for an AI answer anyway.
Except a large part of the reason that people used reddit is that you tended to get decent information. The big/good answers would often be some dude who is waay to into football having a 6 post page about who the GOAT player is.
Now, AI is basically so prolific, that a lot of what AI is being trained on…is other AI. Its slop badly reproducing slop, and the answers that AI gives you are either wrong, or are driven largely by somebody making 50 AI chatbots to swarm reddit with their opinion (or more often, to sell their product).
cluster of fringe communities
I was already sold on it, you don’t have to keep buttering me up on the idea.
When everything is so searchable and indexable, obscurity is almost a feature
The problem is it’s designed to bullshit you. Why would I trust a foundational problem?
It’s also designed to eliminate your job and leave you for dead.
My buddy works for the government in contracts and he’s mid level. Anyways he has like 5 people directly under him, and they’re younger, were low 40s they’re like upper 20s. He said sometimes he gets things written for multimillion dollar contracts that are fucking crazy because they use AI sometimes. He’s like “I don’t care if you do, but for the love of God read it once or twice”.
I would still hate it for being jammed into everythibg it doesn’t need to be and being a shittier version of searches that used to work and being completely unreliable.
So slightly less.
There are 3 reasons people hate AI right now:
- Being used poorly and mostly resulting in slop, or malicious/unethical/deadly uses, and psychosis
- Being forced down the public’s throat and put into places where it adds no value, job losses, quality drops, plagiarism
- Datacenter/environmental concerns, part prices
So switching to local AI fixes problem 3 (mostly). But we also need the hype bubble to pop so number 2 goes away. Unfortunately the first problem will be hardest to fix and right now requires the public backlash as new norms are being formed and bad actors need to be called out.
That said, I think we’re about 1 to 3 years away from the bubble popping and everything starting to balance out to where AI is treated more like just a tool rather than a genie in a box. The hype will fade out and one or two of the big players will die, but at this point I don’t think generative AI use is going away
Qwen 3.6 27B has similar capabilities to Claude Sonnet 4.6 for coding, but uses about as much power for inference as playing a game on the gaming PC running it, compared to Sonnet that probably runs on like 8 B200s in a data center. If people were mostly just running open weight models on gaming PCs with no tech bros involved, I don’t think we’d be seeing the same level of outrage.
There would still be many questions around ethical training and output reliability (depending on the task being asked), but yeah the major problem is that they’re using it to steal our natural and electronic resources and sell them back to us for something we don’t really need, that doesn’t really do what they’re convincing normies it does. The problem is that if you don’t understand what it’s actually doing, it appears very impressive.
In other words, it hits real hard if you’re stupid
“AI” is the wrong term, and I hate that it’s been implanted. These are prediction models.
Prediction models can be extremely beneficial. Think of weather forecasting, for example. Being able to predict power usage across a grid to prevent failures and increase efficiency and properly deploy resources. Even LLMs can be useful to give you a starting point for discovering information that you are short on. (Don’t trust implicitly, double check, but you’ll have new search terms to use.)
Remember, too, that the publicly available models are relatively weak. Specialized models with well-curated training data are going to be much better at doing their specific prediction. And we’re still in the beginning of this era. It’s going to be crazy in ten years.
With regard to resource intensity, it’sy understanding that creation of images and video is what demands the most computing power. And that kind of usage sucks all the way around.
I’m very anti-AI but it’s mostly because of the impact it’s having on the capitalistic west. People are going nutty mode over it, and it’s unhealthy across a huge variety of variables.
However from a purely pragmatic take on usefulness, yours is fairly based.
Same here. The way it’s being deployed and used and trusted by certain portions of the general public is troubling. There’s a great potential for good, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going that way.
Generating text uses just as much energy…
Often for less time and fewer tokens, though. Not that it makes things any better…
It’s designed to be scalable. You can already run basic models on home hardware, but available resources determine speed and power.
If you could get today’s results on 1/10 the RAM/electricity, that would be good, but the big companies would just scale up to use the same resources anyway.
