AI isn’t inherently unethical. The very premise of saying such a thing is flawed.

Is it unethical to use AI to find new drugs and medical treatments? To use it for physics research? What about regular research? Writing code?

Where do you draw the line?

Also, AI was used to design the current crop of fusion reactors and the full potential of that is only just getting started. If it turns out that AI solves all the issues and generates a working fusion reactor design, it’ll make every one of your arguments moot. Because that one achievement will be worth everything. It would “save the world” so to speak (from an energy/emissions standpoint).

Chatting with an LLM is less impact than driving a car. Think about that for a second before you say using it is unethical. It’s literally more negative for the world for someone to drive a car every day to work than it is to ask an AI to find something on the Internet or write a program in Python.

Or perhaps your underlying complaint is more about capitalism than it is about AI?

Put it into perspective:

• Everyone doing their laundry uses more water than all data centers combined. Golf courses also use vastly more water.
• Data centers use about 1-2% of global electricity.

People driving cars pollutes more as does global shipping, regular old consumerism, etc. The environmental impact of data centers is negligible in the grand scheme of things.

Now that AI is making open source software the most secure software ever written (the hard way, hehe), not using it to scan your stuff is now considered worst practices and basically idiotic negligence. No company that uses software or anything with firmware can afford to ignore it anymore.

There’s no way out of it. Accept the new AI reality and push for good regulations. Example: If we made it so that all AI data centers had to be powered via renewable energy on site that would allay most of the energy use/environmental concerns.

The anti-AI sentiment here is ridiculous. They were asking a legitimate question!

I just use ollama locally but I keep meaning to setup OpenRouter because I like to play with larger models that my hardware can’t handle and I’d like to be able to pick the best deals 🤷‍♀️

When I think, “AI slop” I think of things like fully automated tweets, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, etc that are literally created from prompts like, make sure to post about topic X at least once a day. OMG, that shit is toxic waste as far as I’m concerned.

…but cover images? Who TF cares‽ If the story is successful, they’ll replace that image with something superior made by a real artist. In the mean time, they were never going to pay an artist anyway so it’s not like it hurt artists.

Having said that, there’s one very specific industry that has already been completely destroyed by AI: Stock images. Getty? Nobody pays for that anymore when they can just generate something with AI. But how upset can we be when stock image companies are such highly exploitative corporate entities?

For me, it’s like someone vibe coding an alternative to Photoshop with minimal effort. Like, yeah, I’m sure it’s missing loads of features and has tons of bugs but it hurts Adobe (a proper villain) so let’s go! Haha.

Ah, “the fruit of the poisonous tree” anti-AI sentiment. I think it’s a ridiculous stance, but I understand.

Don’t ever let anyone hear you speaking to your phone or check a weather forecast! That’s AI and by using it, you’re just contaminating the world.

Also, if you catch COVID and end up in the hospital, make sure to refuse all the treatments that are drugs discovered by AI. That’s literally generative AI, BTW. Same exact tech as LLMs. Pharmaceutical companies are building data centers left and right to find more drugs like those COVID treatments. Don’t let them put one near you!

At first I thought the term, “AI slop” was funny. Now I think it’s generally bad. Slop (aka awful writing/art/code) existed long before AI. Now people are starting to call reasonably well-made stuff “slop” just because AI was used at some point in the making of the thing. That’s unreasonable and it’s actually really bad for the anti-AI crowd’s image.

Just last night (on a Discord server) someone claimed they flagged a story as “AI” because the cover image may have been created with AI. When I opened the story to check it, it was full of so many grammatical errors and just generally bad writing I thought to myself, “there’s no fucking way this is AI!” Also, WTF does the cover image have to do with the story at all? Its entire purpose is to just draw attention to the story. It’s irrelevant.

By reporting that story as AI, that person just lowered the trustworthiness of all “AI” labels and anti-AI sentiment in general.

Well shit.

This will be featured in a future video: How to turn a minor fender bender into a deadly accident and a prison term.

You can simulate “ADHD brain” with drugs and conditioning, similar to how PTSD alters people’s brain chemistry.

The human brain is plastic/adaptive and can change, depending on the cost/benefit of action/reward conditioning. Just like how people with ADHD can see some improvement with training, a neurotypical brain can see some ADHD-like changes with the same sort of (anti?) training. That’s what I’m suggesting is happening in this AI study: People were rewarded for using the AI initially (dopamine response) but then that reward (easy way out) was taken away, and they performed more poorly as a result.

It stands to reason that their reward center was trained to behave like an ADHD brain in that it could tell there was not going to be an easy way to gain a reward from the activity, so it didn’t bother putting in the necessary resources to achieve the outcome it would have accomplished if they were never given AI in the first place.

The usual dopamine response was overridden, thus behaving like an ADHD brain.

It sounds like it’s messing with the reward center of the brain which is what ADHD is all about.

I don’t think it’ll happen like Radium or Asbestos because those rely on scarcity. They’re physical things that can be physically controlled.

AI models aren’t like that. In less than a minute anyone can download the latest models. In under an hour, they can have all the latest models sitting on their PC. Right now, there’s a shortage of memory and GPUs which makes them prohibitively expensive for the average person but that won’t always be the case!

Ten years from now, everyone’s phones will have enough capabilities to run models that currently require a PC with a 32GB GPU.

What we could do is force AI companies and software to put warnings in the chat interfaces like cigarette cartons: “WARNING: Using LLMs for just ten minutes increases the likelihood that you will have trouble completing difficult mental tasks afterwards.” (That was in the news this morning)

We also definitely need international treaties that prevent countries from allowing AI to make the decision to kill people or destroy infrastructure. Though honestly, we’re already in a state where countries are willing to kill hundreds of people just to assassinate a single target (e.g. US and Israel bombing an entire building because they think their target is inside).

These are small potatoes, though, compared to what AI could do to capitalism and inequality. The rate at which it is advancing is faster than people/jobs can keep up. It’s like half the population is ferriers and suddenly everyone was just given a free car.

LLMs give people ADHD?

No, no. You’ve got the wrong idea.

Will AI completely ruin a zillion people’s ability to think (beyond what social media already accomplished)? Quite possibly!

I’m just saying there’s nothing we can do to stop it at this point.

You’re about to head down a long, lonely road as normies start using and accepting AI more and more into their lives while you scream into the abyss. I’ve been there with fossil fuels, copyright, software patents, and Linux.

People saying “Just use AI!” Is about to live rent free in your head as your most-hated phrase. Just like, “stop driving gas guzzlers!” Or, “stop bitching about Windows and just install Linux already!” Lives in so many others.

At least most people don’t think of AI as a core part of their identity (e.g. pickup trucks) 🤷

What isn’t AI? What are you even talking about?

BTW: I don’t work for any AI companies and I don’t believe the hype for one second that they’re building extinction-level AGI. What they’re building is general-purpose “intelligence” that’s OK-ish at some things, great at others (that don’t make them much money, LOL), and fucking terrible at anything that requires reliable truth (on the first try, LOL).

(And we do all the fancy shit, looping, custom harnesses, orchestrations, handovers, savepoints, post delivery pipelines, autoremediation, blablabla, context, graphs blabla)

Yeah that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s just coding stuff and I think everyone is learning a hard lesson right now that there’s really two ways to do AI (for code):

1. You let the AI write all the code. Using those techniques you mentioned to try to keep it from fucking up too much.
2. You use the AI to fix/write a little bit of the code at a time. Manually. As in, someone who knows software architecture really well tells the AI to write a function or two or maybe even a whole module and that’s it. They do this repeatedly until their task is complete.

#1 is a very expensive way to do it but it seems to work, albeit with a huge learning curve and a much longer horizon before you get something stable. Even then, what you get can be a giant fucking mess that’s really, really hard to understand.

#2 is much safer and works quite well, IMHO. When the AI fucks something up, it’s only a tiny little thing that’s easy to fix. This method really is just a way for developers to improve their productivity.

With #2, it only takes a small amount of tokens to have the AI help you troubleshoot as well. At least, that’s been my experience.

Having said that, the places where we are seeing the most growth in AI is small shit. For example, at my work they implemented an agent that scans customer complaints and filters out false positives. I work for a huge company that has a zillion products/services and the AI has tool calls into our ticketing systems to check if there was an outage at the time the customer complained. It’s not that smart, but it’s smart enough to tell if a ticket about system X was opened when system X had an outage. It can even tell if the customer was complaining about something relevant to the outage.

Stuff like that runs 24/7 and eats up bazillions of tokens, but only on our local hardware (we have thousands of enterprise GPUs). At other companies, they’re doing similar things and slowly realizing they can replace OpenAI/Anthropic API calls with local ollama stuff.

Even if your token bill is $10,000/month for a service like that, it’s still cheaper than paying an entire team of humans to perform the same function.

That is the growing use of AI automation I was talking about.

It’s too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.

On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that’s actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It’s actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).

Let’s say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone’s computers be scanned regularly for AI models?

No. It’s unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won’t be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.

As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is “slop”, it really does do useful stuff! It’s just most of the useful stuff doesn’t make the news. It’s boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it’s supposed to have or follows the correct format.

AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who’s not using AI for that is an idiot. It’s just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.

There’s fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We’d be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn’t good for a lot of things.

We can regulate its use but that’s not really “regulating AI” as much as it is “regulating capitalism” or “regulating people”. Because the AI isn’t just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.

What we need isn’t “AI regulation” is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.

Individuals using AI are a tiny drop in the bucket. Think bigger: Businesses and government.

There’s government agencies racking up token usages to the point where Google had to build an entire data center on Christmas Island (the place with the cool crabs) and that still won’t be enough! And that’s just one government!

Companies are using AI in automations now and it’s working so well that they’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month (on tokens) just on that one automation.

These usages are where demand is growing. Not regular people or even developers using AI to help them write code.

Given the monumental difference between those two figures, investors across the world of finance are taking it as a sign that demand for AI is much lower than previously thought

No. Demand for OpenAI’s services is lower than they thought.

Every day, the open weights models get smarter and cheaper and new competitors are coming online every few weeks. They cost a fraction of what OpenAI charges.

Demand for AI products and services is continuing to grow at a break-the-world pace. It’s just these big “AI first movers” are in trouble because it’s too easy to copy what they do. They expected an enormous “first mover advantage” (which is a real thing) but it turns out that AI is trivial to train and replicate (just have to scrape the Internet and scan a lot of books).

In other words, it’s turning out that “first mover” is a disadvantage in this (AI) industry.

Compared to slavery‽ Yeah… No.

Hey, if the shoe fits…