It has uses but not to the extent its hawked for. Its overused which is using to much power and driving up computer component prices. I would like to see more work with an os flavor that comes with a os optimized to assist with the os and allow for os addons. I envision specialized ais so like you would have a butler type os that is mainly about communicating with the user and then there would be various specialized ais the butler would speak with and you add them as needed. I hope these can be massively optimized and hardware can be made to more efficiently use them such that typical computer use uses no more power than what a typical laptop does that can do gaming.

The small help it gives does not equal the vast evil done to the environment, communities, and actual makers and creators.

AI itself is not bad.

But the unregulated industry, breaking laws all the time, people in charge are literal super villains, mass surveillance, producing even more idiots that I have to depend and interact with, …

Take it away, it is not doing anything we want it to actually do. I only want robots/computers for one thing, and that is to do chores around the house. It doesn’t do that, so I am out.

Broadly speaking, fuck AI

I feel like it’s making people dumber. I keep getting screenshots of Google ai summary from people as if that’s the answer and they’re confident in it. I keep finding those are not correct. For me, ai has created more work because I can no longer trust my colleagues statements.

If you locally host it, I think it’s fine.

AGI doesn’t exist and is not being developed, but the idiots with all the money and power believe it is. Their stupidity and insistence on feeding all our resources to this stuff is gonna kill us all.

I refuse to use AI as a tool for anything other than making tools.

I can’t write LISP but I use AutoCAD. I use an LLM to write LISP routines.

I spent MONTHS looking for a way to catalog my plant collection. Tried a dozen open source projects and none did what I wanted it to do. So I used Claude to make a simple database website…and it was able to add a ton of pipe dream features.

Nothing I make is for sale and I don’t claim it as my own. They’re tools for ME to use. And the important part is that once the tool is done, the LLM gets closed.

It’s a tool, much like when Google Search first started. LLMs can find things standard ways of doing research cannot. AlphaFold is a useful tool for protein modelling and experimental design, but everything it generates needs validation.

If you have a large dataset you can train to predict things not in the database. But again, everything generated needs to be validated.

Currently, it’s a skill amplifier. You can’t code for shit and rely solely on it, it will give a shit product. You know how the whole codebase works and use it as needed? It will speed you up drastically while maintaining the quality you want.

Agents are a nightmare. They introduce a variable completely uncontrollable by you to your project, which will make you lose track of how everything works, resulting in a shit product.

I see its future on more optimized models that can run well locally on lower hardware, not those that use entire datacenters to power it. The big AI companies still do not generate profit and are doomed to fail in long term, but AI itself isn’t going away.

Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.

And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.

Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.

Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?

Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?

Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.

local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools

Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.

“Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.

I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.

I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.

Broadly speaking? Fuck AI, fuck everyone that uses it, fuck everyone that makes it

There are a lot of things that AI can do better than any human.

Thinking, writing, conversing and art are NOT those things.

Let AI analyze, not create. End the slop.

“Everyone is trying to use a Magnifying Glass to do everything from change flathead screws to preparing food, from levering open crates to surgical incisions.”

In other words: The base algorithms and techniques are very interesting and have valid applications in a narrow range of fields, being useful for pattern recognition, generation, and analysis.

The problem is everything else. Everyone is trying to use that one tool for things it is neither effective nor practical nor appropriate to use it on, and then being shocked when this has widespread negative outcomes for both themselves and everyone around them. Separately but parallel, the drive to find useful applications of it (in areas where there aren’t) is causing companies and individuals to engage in grossly unethical behavior.

Even in the fields where it is most useful, you have to be cautious about not treating it as a “truth machine”. A speaker I heard put it simply: “AI cheats.” It will latch on to the most prominent patterns, not necessarily the ones you want it to analyze.

Artificial intelligence is good at doing boring repetitive tasks or point out things for a human to look at when there is too much data for us to scrutinise.

If you do not have the skill to verify the output you are almost certainly getting garbage out of it.

The fact that they cram AI into everything is because they are throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. Spending millions on a 1% chance that you will make billions makes economical sense if you can afford to lose.