Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.
Lemmy is unusual in that it has a large portion of users who actually understand the underlying technologies in “AI” branded products. Most forums with a more typical audience do not have that.
We are a self-selected group of tech-savvy ideological refugees. That’s why I stay, I can learn things every day from lemmy. So i think the only thing different here is that many fuckai posts/comments have a factual and germane basis.
"self selected group of ideological refugees" describes the Fedis really well.
We are a self-selected group of tech-savvy ideological refugees.
Which does include dbzer0's explicit rejection of copyright as a source of criticism.
The FuckAI crowd treats this like a settled matter, and they're shocked whenever someone lacks a kneejerk negative response. Artists have been harassed into deleting posts when they thought animating their own paintings might be neat.
It's a moral panic. We must not do thing, because thing is the devil!, and anyone who so much as shrugs is doing the devil's work.
Lemmy understands the technology well enough that we should be able to geek out over this whole new kind of software, independent of hating the corporate bastards who foist it upon everyone.
I hate the greedy cynical corporations behind LLMs, and I hate the hype bubble, and I hate my stupid bosses and their AI FOMO. But I don't hate AI. It's a broad concept much bigger than chat bots. Hurricane modeling AI is damned good, for one example.
Pressure to shove LLMs into everything because it convinced a bunch of vapid know-nothing middle managers and C-suite knobs it was “alive” and that their stock options would skyrocket has unfortunately poisoned the well of “AI”.
But yes, purpose-built ML models that are amazing and useful. And almost no one, in the grand scheme of things, is using them.
They are being used in science and medicine. We just don't hear about them as often.
purpose-built ML models that are amazing and useful. And almost no one [...] is using them
They are in fact everywhere. We just don't advertise their presence because no one cares. This stuff also goes by different names in different fields because people keep reinventing the wheel.
The funny thing is, LLMs can be useful for exactly one thing: certain kinds of linguistic tasks. For example, if you were inventing a fictional language, it's probably pretty good for that.
But using it as a general-purpose problem solving tool is beyond stupid.
They used them to play chess on kaggle, then the press reported the winner 😂
The obsession is so baffling to anyone who's worked in ML (including language model researchers!)
Everyone pretty much hates it
Do you have a source on that? Because I personally doubt that's really the case. Most people probably have mild feelings about it one way or the other, but I doubt it extends as strongly as hate for the vast majority.
Does “everyone” hate AI? I am regularly baffled by people apparently feeding every question that pops into their minds to ChatGPT.
As detailed in a new study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, researchers presented 1,000 respondents with questions and descriptions of products. Surprisingly — or perhaps not, depending on your perspective — they found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular.
“When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions,” said lead author and Washington State University clinical assistant profess of marketing Mesut Cicek in a statement. “We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products.”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai
A Washington State University and Temple University study, published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management and also cited in The Wall Street Journal, titled “Adverse impacts of revealing the presence of ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ technology in product and service descriptions on purchase intentions: the mediating role of emotional trust and the moderating role of perceived risk”, concludes what seems like common sense to many of us: when a company announces that a product is AI-powered, consumers tend to distrust it more and as a result are less inclined to buy it.
https://medium.com/enrique-dans/why-ai-powered-products-are-backfiring-with-consumers-a868bff518b0
If one listens casually to the discourse around generative AI today, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that everyone is clamoring for more AI capabilities and can't wait to use them in their daily lives. But a recent ZDNET/Aberdeen survey into AI assistants shows a clear disconnect between how much vendors are pushing AI assistants and how much users actually want these capabilities -- at least for now.
...
When asked if they would stop using a product if they couldn't turn off or remove AI assistant features, 31% said they would stop using that product (including 28% of Gen Z), with an additional 38% saying they might. With these results, one can even see that for a significant segment of users, AI assistants could actually be a negative when it comes to gaining or retaining customers.
...I would say yes that is a reasonable generalization, not everybody hates AI but to say it is majority popular is a massive stretch.
Do you realize that social media is a bubble, and whenever you see that "everyone thinks the way I do" it's likely a result of you having become isolated among a self-selected group of like-minded individuals?
If "everyone pretty much hates it", why did chatgpt.com become the fifth-most-visited website in existence?
If "everyone pretty much hates it", why did chatgpt.com become the fifth-most-visited website in existence?
AI bot traffic.
Yeah I've never been there. I've been to others, but I've never been there.
Is that a song? It feels quite close to the song.
Kinda got that "I would do anything for love but I won't do that" from Meatloaf vibe.
Side note; it really sucks watching him become a hateful bigot considering his audience is like 80% lbgtqia peeps
Far fewer people hate AI in the general population as a percentage than on Lemmy. Your average person either doesn't care or has found it useful in some way.
Almost all of the people I know hold it in disdain. It's not good at doing anything and the costs are very high.
"Everyone I know" is a very selective group. People tend to gravitate toward other people who share their beliefs and interests.
There's a gradient that goes from legitimate damning criticism of corporate behavior, to vaguely defensible moralizing against the technology itself, to identarian chest-beating as ingroup performance. "Everyone pretty much hates it" is quietly on the far end.
Plenty of folks vocally despise the robot that almost does what you ask. There's an order of magnitude more people who do not give a shit. Maybe they'll be swayed by yet another video of Hank Green yelling at the camera. Maybe they'll skim this month's Ed Zitron novella reiterating the world's most obvious bubble. Maybe they'll become one of those folks going 'Ugh, AI! Right fellas?' and glancing around for approval. But they'll still be vastly outnumbered by the people who see the program do the thing and merely think 'Neat.'
But they'll still be vastly outnumbered by the people who see the program do the thing and merely think 'Neat.'
I think this category is shrinking much faster than the AI ingroup thinks, and most people are moving from this group to the group that defines AI as an adjective that means "shitty and trying to manipulate you while being utterly unhelpful and wasting your time".
It is honestly disorienting that techbros are oblivious to this, especially for kids the meaning of AI in their lives is quickly becoming "the shitty sloppy thing".
Things are at a point where if I walk around on the street and ask random people to "Behave like AI" I am confident most people would start doing shitty interpretations of human behavior with weird glitches and fundamental hallucinations about the basis of the conversation.
This is not what winning looks like for AI....
There is no AI ingroup here. Not a soul on Lemmy will argue spicy autocomplete is-too AGI. But like expanding the word "slop" from the worst nonsense to literally any use, you label anyone who disagrees an oblivious techbro. 'You hate it with us or you're one of them' is effective recruiting for a tribalist movement. But it's not an argument.
You can ask randos to "behave like robots" and they'll do jerky motions and harsh voices. They're not gonna follow up with 'Haha, anyway, let's destroy all machinery.' Joking about when Siri misheard you didn't start the Butlerian jihad.
Ask people what they've done with this. Will it match the cocaine fantasies of Sam Altman? Of fucking course not. But you'll find people who recognized value in this slightly stupid science fiction. The guy who built a two-billion-frame-per-second camera took jabs at the model which wrote all his code - but he still used the thing to do the thing. I was surprised to hear him mention it at all, because y'all have made it such an identity razor, people hesitate to admit when it's worked.
Even talking in terms of winning or losing is deeply conservative. It's software. And it will at least half-ass a bewildering variety of tasks, just by asking, in plain English. You can describe video into existence, and there's an overconfident minority who think that's completely useless, because its wine glasses are half-full.
Do you remember when people hated CGI? Not bad uses. Any uses. Pointing it out became criticism. Now it's just another tool. If anyone's still mad that How To Train Your Dragon didn't rely on puppets, and turns to go 'Right fellas?,' the fellas are long gone.
I think this category is shrinking much faster than the AI ingroup thinks, and most people are moving from this group to the group that defines AI as an adjective that means "shitty and trying to manipulate you while being utterly unhelpful and wasting your time"
Yesterday, my 7yo criticized something by saying it looked like AI.
I mentioned once that i had ripped that shit out of my laptop in passing at work and my boss not only had me delouse all the work machines, the next day SIX cowokers showed up with their personal computers and hopeful looks.
I only have seven coworkers. The last one is a mac runner.
I dislike that the conversation seems to feel like an echo chamber. I'm not saying that it is, just that it has some traits of one.
Commenters who use nuance about how they see AI being used positively get highly downvoted, discouraging further engagement.
Commenters who contribute with name calling or ad hominem get wildly upvoted.
Since I follow other places outside the Fediverse, I agree that the disapproval of genAi in Lemmy is monolithic and repetitive. Mastodon also has a lot of AI-criticism, but perhaps it is more sophisticated, backed up by articles and the like. In other places, there is active research and adoption. For instance, a cybersecurity firm showed that hypnotic suggestion is a very effective jaibreaking tactic against Language Models. https://www.securityweek.com/red-teams-breach-gpt-5-with-ease-warn-its-nearly-unusable-for-enterprise/ Try explaining this to an ML user. Ai-enhanced code editors are big right now, and I have met lots of tech people that are virtually inseparable from their chatbots.
But I rarely use it, unless I have a specific type of situation where search engines are a dead end, I need to provide more context etc. This is a recent post I think provides a more informed view https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/ . More broadly, every single time I read sth about AI on Lemmy, I feel I am witnessing the birth of anti-android rhetoric depicted in Detroit Becoming Human or even Bladerunner. It seems to me like a form of bigotry, and it was a thing that convinced me that the userbase of Lemmy is not exactly healthy. Especially ML. There must be a few of them with multiple socket puppet accounts, or they are all just parroting the same points. Ironic how they are the biggest fans of a (poorly understood) stochastic parrot theory, when they are the same people who have been persuaded that Signal is not a "really private" messenger. There is a couple topics where you see how brain dead these people are, AI is one.
I remember trying really hard to learn to draw for like 10 years and just not being able to. Now I can make fun visuals :)
Yet, simultaneously, I will never get a windows 12 or let my windows 11 connect to the internet because I don't want microsoft forcing it's ai on me, eating my data, stealing my info, and controlling my system against my will for their own clearly profitbased predatory motives.
Also I have made 100s of songs without ai, and now I have some beautiful ai songs and ALSO many songs that have both ai and my own stuff. For me it's an absolutely beautiful symbiosis resulting in lovely things. But I'm not a struggling artist trying to live on streaming revenue fighting ai dilution of the market for streams and being filled with hate from it. I just make music for myself, those who i want to hear it, and because it's beautiful.
I don't use chatGPT at all cuz I think SamAltman is worthless predatory trash.
So idk. There are many ai I think are terrible and avoid. There are some ai I genuinely enjoy and selectively use. I know I wouldn't have the cool pics and songs I do without ai.
intermission
I subconsciously look down on people using ai to code who then have to ask a 'real coder' to fix the scripts; because I really know code. And yet, I have a friend who was unable to learn coding for 20 years who can now make what he always wanted because of ai coding. I think, what sets me apart from haters of ai coding, is that I value the empowerment of people and, instead of laugh at the person who doesnt really know how to code who uses ai, I am very happy for them since they can finally do what they want.
Related:
The majority user base in the comments are anti-ai. But every other week or so I find myself having to block some "ai_porn" this or that community. I dont think I've seen a lot of engagement with those communities (like, I think its just the creator trying to make it happen).
Are they just unaffiliated gooners? Is it techbros trying to normalize it by porn exposure? I dont know, I just know I've had to block several communities for being AI and it's weird.
Everyone pretty much hates it
Time step off your local instance, and smell the pro-side.
I am anarchist, copyright shouldn't exist. But harassment via “nude generation” shouldn't. I feel those generators should keep it to themselves, and not harass people or sue generators. Defamation needs nuance.
What we have now is fascists generating propaganda, which I am 100% against.
more of an ask than a thought, really
While in the shower, one might think of a question. Is that not a shower thought?
It is more of a rhetorical question to me, an observation rather than a direct question but yeah I can see that.
Well there's no "showerasks" community
My co worker loves it and it’s driving me crazy.
I've had three different co-workers hounding me about how great it is. One guy showed me how he had it write an email for him. It took him longer to enter the prompt than it would've taken to just write the email himself.
There are techbros on the fediverse?
A techbro is "someone who likes a technology that I, personally, dislike." Since everyone has different likes and dislikes, yeah, there'll be techbros around. Who exactly those techbros are will vary from person to person.
Well, they'll figure it out if/when the bubble pops, won't they?
I mean I think people on average here are more mature, immaturity stands out here more than Reddit, even if there is the same relative amount or more arguing.
I've studied NNs and GANs in formal education. I do see some promise in AI, but like most people here it is wayyy overhyped for general use.
Edit: clarification
I hate the people that push AI. I hate corporate controlled AI and robots. I will create my own and destroy them all.