this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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That's exactly the problem all the data scraping, all the plagiarism, all the water and energy to make this, just to be what can be done in photoshop with a modicum of skill.
Yeah pretty much. Dunno why everyone thinks this is a pro-ai post.
Because you're defending the person who kept prompting the water and energy wasting machine over and over to get the look how they wanted to instead of being moderately competent with photoshop. Just because someone put a lot of time and effort into refining a prompt doesn't take away from the fact that prompting the water and energy wasting machine is wasting water and energy.
It's very "boys will be boys" coded.
The entire problem is that llms are trillions of dollars dropped into a money pit, wasting water, pumping carbon into the air at a faster rate than ever to do exactly what a 14 year old with a cracked copy of Photoshop could do.
Edit: adding some more
Preface: anyone who's really mad just read the last three sentences. I promise this goes somewhere.
I think the Lemmy party line is a bit naive about AI. The issue isn't the energy or the water, not inherently. It can be built and run just fine in ways that don't waste all these resources. That said, the issue is that it isn't and the reason is unrelated to the tech itself, it's because a small number of people, who also don't understand it at all, are locked in a winner-take-all death race to create a worker exploitation machine. "AI" isn't intelligent but it's a very powerful set of algorithms that we need to understand and maintain some level of control over within the working class. People need to know what it is and isn't capable of and probably want to be proficient at using it. It's not brilliant and going to replace everyone tomorrow but it's also not always a worthless slop factory, it's a secret third thing that we're still working to understand the potential of.
Lemmy likes to hate AI blindly and everyone is mostly justified in that feeling but it needs to be directed productively if we're not going to just play into the hands of the people we're at war with. The luddites lost the last war by way of the wealthy redefining what they stood for to turn society against them in the long run. They weren't anti technology idiots, they were anti exploitation organizers, wildly ahead of their time. To just write off AI entirely is to fall into the former camp. To seek to understand and control it for the working class is to fall into the latter I think.
I broadly agree with your analysis, the luddite comparison is apt and I think you'll find that quite a few people on here do in fact understand they were anti exploitation, not anti tech. And yeah the root problem of all this can be boiled down to "capitalism requires profit at all costs" but I'm so frustrated with the absolutely correct answer being "because capitalism" but with no real actionable plan at the present moment to actually mitigate the harm beyond, "end capitalism and share resources fairly"
I don't think lemmy users are necessarily naive, I think that most of us are tired of everything collapsing around us and are looking for literally anything that can give us even some modicum of relief from the horrors.
I also don't hate AI because it's new technology, hell I found a lot of the early experiments by people online into neural networks and training them. I enjoyed the CaryKH and Jabrils and CodeBullet videos building small neural networks to race cars around a track or play flappy bird or get massive high scores in tetris and 3Blue1Brown and Numberphile and Computerphole videos breaking down how the math and computer science theory worked. I hate that it's only use has been to flood the internet with randomly generated garbage at best, and is now just a tool of mass misinformation on a scale unprecedented in a time of economic instability in a deeply divided world where there are dozens of countries with enough nuclear warheads to end the planet 30 times over.
Unfortunately we can't wait for that secret third thing to reveal itself. We can't sit around hoping that letting the capitalists run rampant will bring us that secret third thing before our air becomes unbreathable, our climate is inhospitable, and our lakes and rivers and aquifers are tainted with toxic chemicals and heavy metals.