i'm anti-ai but. man.

Submitted by twovests in technology

On Bluesky at least, the anti-AI voices are some of the most corrosive bad-faith loud assholes in the room during any given discussion. Any issue will have its share of opportunistic sanctimonious people using a righteous foundation to enjoy the act of verbally abusing others, that's been true forever. Lots of people have political opinions just because it lets them abuse others. That's normal.

But there's an unproductive king-of-the-hill style scramble to be the most absolute anti-AI voices there. It's a collective effort to force people into unproductive, ludicrous, or impossible positions like "Don't use an operating system past 2021", "If someone finds a bug using AI you should not patch it", etc.

This has a clear and deleterious effect on the anti-AI movement, and so I'm sure a non-zero amount of these people are bad-faith pro-AI actors. (AI is, after all, a tool that allows you to be loud and stupid at zero cost to yourself.) But I have no way of gauging where that is on the 1% to 99% scale. If I sucked down salami salts suicide-style and saw that Pearly Gates Saint I wouldn't be surprised if he told me 90% of those guys who annoyed me were bots.

I'm cool with the people who are right and annoying. I'm right and annoying all the time. But a lot of these people are wrong and abusive.

You might think someones contradictory- or unworkable- opinion might just be an artifact of the 300 character limit. But asking someone to clarify or elaborate is more easily interpreted as a gotcha. I think it's unreasonable to expect one open-source project to fork and maintain all their dependencies and it doesn't make me pro-AI to say that!!

It feels a lot like being plural. I am plural, but I wouldn't publicly identify as so, because I find a lot of the plural community to be very annoying. (See this very long essay on the matter.)

So,

I am basically anti-AI, no amount of annoying or verbally-abusive people can change that. I have nuance on the matter but that's not the point of this post. The point is that I increasingly want to dis-associate myself with the anti-AI people.

tldr: It seems increasingly embarrassing and hazardous to call oneself "anti-AI"

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twovests OP wrote

i might need to touch grass. but i just touched grass. it's not doing any good

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twovests OP wrote

I like the local anti-AI scene because everyone in the real world seems more normal and calm about everything

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devtesla wrote

this is true of every scene. there's a lot of the online scene who are actually good offline

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nomorepie wrote

"If I sucked down salami salts suicide-style and saw that Pearly Gates Saint..." Beautiful. Please never stop posting

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twovests OP wrote

Well if I sucked down salami salts suicide-style I'd never post again, except for funny 9/11 drafts scheduled on Tumblr for the next 200 years

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twovests OP wrote

I'm inserting typos into jbo application and messages on purpoise so that people don'ty thin lI'm a Robot so maybe I AM goiung to SLUCK dowwn those slamai sluts

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toasthaste wrote

It makes me crazy because there are lots of really scary significant issues, present and likely future, with AI, and those get barely any airtime from the average anti-AI type that I see around. Just wasting so much energy on misinformation and weird fucking purity tests that cannot possibly matter. Mass surveillance and weapons! The stuff that needs that kind of focus is the huge horrible advances that have come and are still coming to mass surveillance and weapons!!!! I want to scream and tear my hair out every single day

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twovests OP wrote

Yeah.

I do think there is a moral quality to the individual use. I don't think it bears repeating all the Reasons LLMs Are Bad. But on top of that, Elon Musk's Grok is being used to kill school children, generate child porn, and push Hitler-praising propaganda to the nazis on X. I think we can talk about the evils which come of an individual using Grok, compared to those of an individual using Claude, compared to those of someone abstaining.

On that topic, I think the way we measure these things is out of wack. Just in terms of technologies people use, young queers in the US practically mandate the use of Meta to be included in their social circles. That's bonkers evil genocide-blind Hitler Youth shit with harms a thousand times more than someone having a blast chatting it up with an LLM. Maybe there's something to be said about resisting a new bad technology intruding into our lives.

And I think we've seen pretty conclusively that purity cultures are wholly counterproductive to anything good, and it just makes for a chilling effect that prevents potential good-actors from doing anything useful, turning them into fertile doormats for everyone else. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that we're still doing purity culture stuff but man.

This is all a bunch of words from me to say that I completely agree. The proportionate attention we assign to these things is all out of wack.

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