There are some good uses, but that is outweighed by the vast amount of problems it is causing and will continue to cause as generations are raised with it existing from their birth.

I have a dirt cheap VPS running about 30 or so services all made by AI. They automate lots of meanial tasks and help me save money.

Tasks I would never care to do, can now be done for me. It’s a suboptimizers wet dream. The cost of personally tailored software is now really low.

I want my job security back!

But yeah, I get it. LLMs and image gen was hella fascinating at first. No shame in greeting something new with curiosity.

It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, AI can be used to quickly find solutions to problems you might not have been able to solve and I’ve heard that AI can be used in some cases to help people who are disabled. I’ve been using free AI services occasionally for personal use and they can be pretty good for the most part, sometimes it seems like the AI knows exactly what I want while other times, it either seems to ignore part of my prompt or just have no idea what I need from it.

On the other hand, people are losing their jobs, it’s destroying the economy, people have already used it to spread misinformation and malware, it’s being used both to create and to promote scams, it’s possibly damaging the environment with all the water the data centers use, they’re all trained off of stolen data, and there’s probably a lot of other issues that I’m either forgetting or just not aware of.

All in all, it’s hard to promote the use of AI but I understand it’s usefulness. I will never pay for an AI service and when I use the free ones, I always use them with an ad-blocker so they don’t get any monetization from my usage.

Generative AI can get fucked. I’ll never use it.

The “AI” tools that are used for stuff like folding proteins and other beneficial work like that get a pass. Everything else should be relegated to the wastebin of history just like Facebook/Insta/Twitter, etc…

I mostly don’t care and as much as people flip out about it I odn’t think it’s any more relevant than, VIRTUAL REALITY, or BIG DATA or a BLOCKCHAIN.

or any of the other hype machines that come around every couple of years and then fizzle out into nothingness.

well. was it trained ethically? no. has it been deployed ethically? no. but, has it made our lives easier? also no

As a writer and reader, I hate LLMs.

I hate the way they were built. I hate that my past writing has been used for LLM training. I hate that specific people I know have used LLMs to try to replicate something I personally had been doing, and they didn’t give a damn if the result was shitty. I hate that I can’t use some of my favorite punctuation and phrasing patterns anymore without people thinking my writing is AI-generated, because surprise, that’s what happens when AI is trained on text written by people like me. I hate that I can’t fully prevent anything I share publicly from being used for AI training, although I’m damn well going to try. (Hey nonconsensual AI crawlers, enjoy trapping yourselves in Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth honeypot after I publish my next blogging project.) I don’t want my writing to contribute to this BS.

I hate that the writing communities where I first shared my writing as a teenager are (a) now populated with a fair amount of obvious AI slop and (b) scraped for AI training. I hate that self-publishing spaces are inundated with AI slop. I hate that websites that previously paid writers are now paying less, or not at all, or using the writers’ work to train/build AI. I hate the way my search results are filled with articles “written” with AI instead of humans. I hate that I can’t trust that information is accurate from sources I might have trusted in the past, just because I don’t know who was using AI for “research” with less caution than I would want.

I hate the way people reply to me with AI slop text and don’t even check it over it first in work-related situations. I hate many, many other things about how it’s impacted my career that I won’t get into here.

I hate the way so many people no longer respect the art form I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I hate knowing how little people care about good information, creativity, or any consideration other than speed of “production.”

I hate that I can’t even avoid AI by disconnecting from the internet. I hate that I can no longer trust that books were written by a human, depending on where I get them. I hate the way certain apps constantly remind me of all this BS, because they just had to make a really prominent AI button instead of a normal or (better yet) removable button. I hate that my friend’s goddamn washing machine has an AI setting, even though it has nothing to do with LLMs, because the world can never stop reminding you about AI.

Believe it or not, I too was once somewhat excited about AI. I thought AI would free me from the boring tasks so I could spend more time lovingly creating and appreciating art. Silly me.

I was in the same boat as you - one of the earliest to get on Copilot (bing chat at the time) and ChatGPT, and I also played a lot with craiyon/dalle mini. I thought it was fun, and even regrettably used it for roleplay. I started to become skeptical around 2024 as well but I found it really difficult to stop using it. I was quite heavily addicted in a way, and it was really difficult to stop myself. It also completely wrecked my ability to independently think and be creative.

Now that I’m out of it, I am pretty strongly anti-genAI, and I see such little use for it. I’ve always enjoyed art and have been taking a lot of time lately to improve mine, and I am doing it for personal enjoyment but I also notice that I’m finding it particularly hard to be seen online or get commissions, and I think the saturation of AI is partially related to that. I also see it doing more in IT spaces, which is particularly scary as that was my strongest subject and what I want to go into as a career.

My mother has even started offloading parenting to it, asking it “how to deal with [me]” which really hurts, and I see more and more people just getting consumed by AI psychosis.

I really hope the situation with AI can change for the better soon somehow, it can’t be sustained like this

It has its uses. It’s just ruined by the bad apples of people who’ve long have had malicious intent where if you put anything that was intended for a good purpose in front of them, they’d ruin that for everyone.

For example, when there are things I do not know about like objects, I can take a picture of it, direct and show ChatGPT by asking what it is and it’ll tell me. It’s convenient to talk to an LLM to understand phrases, slang, slurs and their history about them in real time. I also have enjoyed using it to fix and enhance images that my phone’s piss-poor autofocus fucks up on with some images.

I think what really ruins AI is that, select people and companies are way too heavily reliant. It is not a solve-everything tool. It is not something you go to about everything, like mental therapy. It is not something you should be using to cheat on homework, to have it help you with getting by in colleges and school that rely on your own problem solving skills to navigate.

I see AI as a sign I probably shouldn’t be patronizing a store/restaurant/what-have-you.

I’m also of the opinion that any use of AI to replace artists is a total waste and of zero or negative value.

I think it’s a tool, but a tool that has been weaponized. I think “AI” (I use quotes because we are really talking about LLMs primarily) have some fantastic applications for automation, things like dictation, pattern recognition, etc.

But unlike non-AI tools that can do similar tasks (linters, non ai machine translation, dictation, hell even search engines at this point) AI does the task with the confidence of an expert, speaking in a confident voice, to people who generally don’t know if the information is accurate. It’s being sold as a knowledge hub, when in reality it is a tool, one that can be wrong and does not think. And the marketing is agressive. They want you to forget how to think for yourself so you have to pay a subscription for thinking.

AI psychosis is real, I’ve seen it happen in real time with my coworkers. The quality of our new hires has gone downhill because none of them seem to know how to solve a problem. I often hear “Claude thinks this” in response to issues that are just barely above basic level. There is no longer a desire to find knowledge or puzzle out a problem when it can be cognitively offloaded to the llm. There is danger in the very service that the llm provides - reduction in friction in your daily life also equates to a reduction in learning. Which sucks because noodling out complex problems with an llm as a rubber duck can actually be a great learning experience in situations where a product expert isn’t around to bounce off of. But it comes with the caveat of knowing how to check the answers and having the curiosity to delve into those answers and dig through them yourself. Without that crucial step you are just offloading your brain to the computer to think for you and you learn nothing.

And I can’t blame the AI psychosis on stupid people. It’s being marketed as an all knowing infallible assistant. Yet tangibly many every day people find their lives made worse for it. AI has been shoved into everything when it isn’t even as good as the thing it is replacing, or it fails more often.

Then we get to the actual generative functions of ai. Generative art, be it picture or text, is trained without permission or compensation, on the work of millions of artists, with the goal of making those artists obsolete. As an artist I’ve seen every single artistic industry be hit with this, from stock photography to furry porn to high budget movies. And much like the previous use cases of AI replacing currently existing software, it’s replacing artists with less quality products. AI art is recognizable because it is homogenized by default. And sure it’s tweakable, but by default it is recognizable as this uncanny homogenized “good enough” picture to get an idea across. And much like everything else it’s being used as a way to capitalize on industries, because at the end of the day the only reason to use generative ai for art is to make it faster and cheaper. Every single person that uses it that I’ve seen has used it for the same reasons. “I don’t have time to learn x” or “I need an idea out now” or “I can make more by doing this”. Its because art has become completely monitized. People don’t create for the sake of creation now, it’s for a job, or for a deadline, or for clout. Artists who love their craft and are not bogged by deadlines or bills are overwhelming against AI in general, as artists are some of the most vocal anti generative AI crowd.

When we look at all of this, AI is a tool that has some great localized use cases, especially in pattern recognition, dictation, language, etc. but it’s been coopted as a brain subscription by the people in charge of training it and selling it to us. It’s been shoehorned into every aspect of our lives, made everything more expensive, made people dumber, collectively destroyed the lives of artists off the backs of their work, and enshittified almost every single industry.

The tradeoffs aren’t worth it.

Edit: also forgot to add the privacy nightmare that comes from AI surveillance

I’m usually not against “tools” but I have a hard time finding something useful with LLMs.

The only good usage of LLMs is to optimize algorithms in complex code. Something like “move this variable and your application will be 100x faster.” But even for that case, we could have alternatives that do not involve LLMs.

That’s it, everything else is bad and useless:

• mega companies profiting from piracy without being sued
• AI companies who publicly declare that they want us to give up our brains and become slaves
• layoffs (it’s never officially because of AI, but it’s always a manager thinking that he can fire people or not hire new guys because Cursor is good enough for the peasants)
• employees have way more work without being compensated
• making people stupid
• making students more lazy than they are, and allowing them to cheat (cheating required some dedication, not it’s free for all)
• artists in all fields are being fucked and may not live from their art
• replacing customer service with chatbots that prevent people from getting answers
• bots everywhere
• spamming forums (look at what happens right now on Lemmy)
• DDoS and attacks on web sites
• enabling script kiddies to shit on the internet
• hallucination and lies
• actually, LLM are 100% hallucinating all the time, the fact that they are coherent is a statistical side-effect
• data centers, pollution, pissing people off when they live around one data center
• generated images, it’s really creepy for some reason (even for a simple restaurant menu)

The examples I gave are real and I have experienced them first hand, it’s not an anti-AI crusade. For the first time in my life, I don’t see how a technology can be useful.

…My honest opinion?

Generative AI is little more than a thoughtless, low-effort way for lazy people without real talent, skills and discipline to exploit the hard work of others, often in a futile attempt to make money by fooling people into buying slop or hiring people who aren’t qualified.

It is the biggest gift to fraudsters and liars in human history, and is already an extremely dangerous tool for social engineering, hacking, con artistry, surveillance and mass manipulation. In just a few short years of the AI bubble it has already eroded the basic utility of the internet and muddied the waters of factuality and objectivity.

AI hasn’t changed the way I work, nor has it changed the media that I want to consume. I’m not interest in things made using AI, and I avoid anything that seems to be. If anything it has made me appreciate genuine human artistry more than ever, and it has made it clean who in society values culture and who doesn’t. Generative AI use is a mark of shame to me, and I will never knowingly support someone who has used it.

To make matters worse, it is hurting people’s livelihoods and ruining a bunch of hobbies. That’s to say nothing of how it is destroying the environment and creating an extreme risk of economic collapse.

To me it’s so obviously destructive to human culture and democratic society that I honestly can’t believe people aren’t pushing back even more strongly than they are. People are just starting to realize how lame and toxic generative AI is, and are starting to hate what it represents, though still not enough for my tastes.

It sucks, and people who use it are pathetic.