I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix.
I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the prompt, not the AI output.
And I hate the AI companies, not so much because AI is solely in the hands of a few companies, but because they're trying to make it appear so inevitable and once-in-a-lifetime-get-on-it-now-or-be-left-behind-forever that everyone is losing their minds and chasing it like lemmings.
I'm against all of it. I actually care about people. Computers are tools; that's all. When the tools make it harder to connect with other humans in a human way, when the contact turns into this weird unnatural garbage where I can't hear the heart of the person on the other side, then computers are bad tools that need to stop being used. (Yes, you could have "corporate speak" that had the same problems, but at least that came at the speed that humans can type. AI lets it flow far faster, fast enough that it drowns out actual human communication. That's a huge loss.)
[0] I don't see a lot of people using LLMs to learn a new topic, but I had a really great experience by walking through some math I wanted to know, forcing it to go slowly, and writing code and test cases for each concept to make sure it wasn't hallucinating. There are no "choose your own adventure" textbooks like this, and there are no professors who would be that patient with me in office hours. I don't think it will work well for unmotivated learners.
- the job market is harder now, apparently because of AI - environmental concerns due to data centers - the ethical issues with scraping people's copyright data to power AI - slop overwhelming the Internet, fake videos all over tiktok that seem real - safety issues like AI psychosis
The world is hard right now, and a lot of the things that make it hard seem to intersect in all sorts of ways with the way AI is being developed, run, and used.
If you solve one of those issues, you still haven't solved the other ones.
Also missed is the pushback against AI art: the further devaluation of talent, and an associated loss of meaning many people have. I think this is probably still downstream of it threatening jobs though, since people would not react as violently if they could truly treat art as a hobby instead of as a profession.
I feel like American society is particularly vulnerable to this, where nobody opposes anything that doesn't affect them personally, which means that resistance to any gradual erosion of liberties is always tiny. You can pass anything you want as long as you do it slowly, because resistance will always be limited to a small segment of the population at a time.
It's very "first they came for the communists".
Personally, yes.
I'm against anything that seems poised to devalue human life
It's non deterministic by its nature. Without good frameworks and safeguards it's unpredictable. We know that much for certain.
But it's worse than that. We don't know all the attack vectors for prompt escapes yet at all. That's barely been figured out.
And the psychological toll of working in slop heavy environments is CLEARLY VERY BAD.
So ... we raced a technology out the door without even minimal research into how to do that safely or effectively. As an industry we just shot ourselves in both knees and made the case for a regulatory blow back of epic proportions. And like... That sucks. Complete failure of leadership across the entire industry. Short term gains for short term losses followed by long term losses.
You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
Perhaps being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's nouveau AI revolution tinted my glasses.
But I remember a distinct air of optimism, that humanity was working towards some breakthrough in the fundamental secrets of consciousness.
Let me be frank, it doesn't matter how well the machine works if it is weaponized against people.
If it systematically degrades our humanity.
I am a pacifist, so I believe in the inherit value of living things. I expected something graceful and beautiful, with unquestionable value to the people interacting with it.
Instead Silicon Valley produced slave-humunculi, stunted aberrations of "intelligence". This entire movement is basically a two-faced insult to life.
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That being said, for all the things LLMs are capable of, you could pay a living, breathing person to do, more efficiently, faster, and for cheaper.
So the entire effort was for... what?
If I run Claude at home and it is now source of info and trained to be effective right wing propagandist (most subtle then grok) with no one except new CEO being able to change it, I am scared of it.