Money quote:
Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.
Money quote:
Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.
There isn’t propaganda against AI, it’s totally grassroots because companies are overselling it.
No it isn’t. There is 100% propaganda and media targeting communities to spread it.
The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed to be toxic towards it. People who are influenced cannot see it, outsiders can though. It’s like seeing right wingers talk about immigrants. They’ll never be able to see how their news and media influence them. That is their truth and it’s as true to them as hate towards AI is towards lemmings in places like c/technology
Look at the articles posted, the headlines, the appeals used, the comments. It has all the markers of an Astro turf campaign.
By who? Your conspiracy theory makes no sense. Why would anyone want to do that.
You really can’t imagine why corporations and political groups who spend billions paying people to manufacture narratives and flood feeds might hate the idea of ordinary people suddenly having their own free, on-demand content factory, fact-checker, and megaphone?
That’s on both sides of the political spectrum. These AI tools are not just Google chat. You can build with them rapidly. Is it some revolutionary thing? No
But can it be a game changer in some areas? Absolutely.
They moved rapidly with the media on this. Compare headlines for AI to any other yellow journalistic topic. They’re identical
In favour of AI absolutely, against it, no I can’t. What group would want to disvalue AI, after all most of the big tech companies are developing their own. They would want people to use AI, that’s the only way they make a profit.
You keep providing these vague justifications for your belief but you never actually provide a concrete answer.
Which groups in particular do you think are paying people to astroturf with negative AI comments? Which actual organisations, which companys? Do you have evidence for this beyond “lots of people on a technically inclined forum don’t like it” because that seems to be a fairly self-selecting set. You are seeing patterns in the clouds and are insisting that they are meaningful.
Lemmy is pretty consistent with the people I know IRL in terms of opinions on AI.
Not where I am. I haven’t met anyone irl that has any spite with AI. They think it’s interesting. Have tried it a few times. But nobody is out there saying fuck AI.
No, I’d definitely agree that AI sentiment overall is pretty negative. I am not such a hardliner, but they are definitely out there. I don’t see it as astroturfing at all, to even suggest this is ironic because LLMs are the ultimate astroturfing tool. The institutions capable of astroturfing do support AI and are using it. What institution or organization are you accusing of anti-AI astroturfing, exactly? This question requires an answer for that claim to be taken seriously.
IMO the problem is not LLMs itself, which are very compelling and interesting for strictly language processing and enable software usecases that were almost impossible to implement programmatically before; the problem is how LLMs are being used incorrectly for usecases that they are not suited for, due to the massive investment and hype. “We spent all this money on this so now we have to use it for everything”. It’s wrong. LLMs are not knowledge stores, they are provably bad at summarization and as a search interface, and they should especially not be used for decision making in any context. And people are reacting to the way LLMs are being forced into all of these roles.
People also take strong issue with their perceived violation of intellectual property and training on copyrighted information, viewing AI generated arts as derivative and theft.
Plus, there are very negative consequences to generative AI that aren’t yet fully addressed. Environmental impact. Deepfakes. They’re a propaganda machine; they can be censored and reflect biases of the institutions that control them. Parasocial relationships, misguided self-validating “therapy”. They degrade human creativity and become a crutch. Impacts on education and cheating. Replacement of jobs and easier exploitation of workers. Surveillance.
All of these things are valid and I hear them all from people around me, not just on the internet.
You’re probably debating a tool.
Honestly, probably lol
That was the initial impression of it. Now that we’ve had more experience with it and learned that it can’t be relied on, perception has changed. It is oversold and the costs are not worth what we are getting out of it.
I fed AI all my Lemmy posts and asked it for a portrait of the artist. Not bad, down to my 6 fingers.