I’ve always hated generative AI and everything it stands for.

I was amused by the idea initially. I am in favor of seeing ACTUAL AI someday for no other reason than it would be proof that humans are gods who can create sapience without genetics. I even generated my avatar with AI.

But seeing how it wasn’t much better than chatbots before it, how it does not know anything and uses no intelligence to give you factual responses with 100% accuracy to even be good for information, and how it is taking jobs away from creatives in ways not even fiction thought would happen has made me hate what is currently being called “AI.”

When the money and energy sucking slop that currently is being billed as “AI” is what tech bros are using to rob us now. It is garbage. It will remain garbage. It will suck as much money as possible into the tech bros companies and waste energy to the Nth degree while doing it. It is a the biggest con / scam of this century.

I studied Machine Learning in college and was excited by the developments being made in Neural Networks.

I followed the tech closely the entire time, even today.

But once we got a good working general use LLM then marketing teams went fucking hog wild promising things that the tech wasn’t capable of, just because they knew they could trick idiots into thinking they had created “Artificial Intelligence” -_-

The tech is cool and revolutionary, but Machine Learning is still only capable of doing the things we were using it for before the LLMs got slapped onto them, and the use cases for LLMs are very limited too.

It’s overhyped and an inaccurate name since it isn’t intelligent in any way. A waste of water and electricity for work that can’t meaningfully replace any human work.

Generative AI was vaguely funny when it created trippy, acid hallucination images and incoherent druggy ramblings of text. I know an author who fed their own content into an early LLM (small language model?) and the bizarre, yet undeniably “his” stuff it produced was worth a laugh. I wouldn’t say I “liked” it, but it was kind of amusingly quirky.

What was depressing is how quickly people began to claim AI content was “theirs”. As someone who ran a fiction-creating community, people were so eager to latch on to what AI would spit out that they began to create convoluted things for the early models to “depict”.

When I first saw the game “AI dungeon” it blew my mind. It actually used gpt-2.

Anyway the game later had to get worse to manage cost of servers and seeing them struggle to make it work was just sad to watch.

I remember there being youtube essays going over how this is one of the reasons free AI services open to public are just unmaintainable but then chatgpt/gpt-3 came out and that whole topic was closed to look at this shiny new thing instead.

I like “AI” like I like plastic. Technologically it’s amazing! It allows us to do many things that would have been impossible or very difficult before!It has many different uses! Average people use it terribly! Business people use it for awful things! It is poisoning our reality in a pervasive manner that will persist long after I am dead!

So yes and when it became overly marketable.

I also really enjoyed when “AI” models made distinctly uncanny images rather than “realistic” soulless images. I have an image of a weird-looking baby and a chicken-man screaming at each other and it is distinctly hyper-perceptual. Good times! (update: I found it)

I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.

Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts

I’ve not loved nor hated AI. I’ve been both impressed and irritated by what it can do.

But, one thing has been pissing me off lately. My wife and I often share funny videos throughout the day, and over the past few weeks, about 1/3 of them have been real video, 1/3 of them have been obviously AI (like talking babies), and the other third are deceptive AI. (Something that looks impressive yet believable, until you see the SORA watermark, or find an inconsistency in the background)

There was a time where I could watch a video of a dog doing tricks and just think “that’s adorable!” but now I have to check everything I watch for watermarks, missing teeth, and scrambled text in the background. I have to verify it’s authenticity before I can decide how I feel about it.

I liked it back when I was just making awful-looking images on DALLE just to laugh at them and share them with friends who also thought they were goofy. Now? I don’t like AI.

I liked it when it first hit the scene and still like things about it (more specifically, the potential it could have if implemented correctly), but my distaste for it started when I learned how terrible it is for the earth and which people seem to be the leading the charge with it.

I liked playing with image generators for like a month before learning of these things. Hardly knew thee…

I disliked it from the moment they called a glorified language database and collator “AI.”

AI is literally banning YouTube creators who have been active for years for no reason.

AI can do great things when it’s fed by actual people for a particular fairly narrow purpose, but that’s it.

I’m a musician, and I like to write. I hate it. My husband uses it to help him code (I think; I have zero functional knowledge of his industry) and says it can be used in that capacity in certain ways.

The number of times I’ve heard peers say “I put this into chat gpt and it said…” makes me want to throw up. We think disinformation is bad now? We have no idea what’s coming.

I’m a musician, an artist, and I was even started to get into voice acting so I have hated generative AI from the beginning. These are all things that are insanely difficult to get jobs in and money from and now it is basically impossible. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are genuinely good uses for AI when it comes to science and medicine and I am a strong advocate of those kinds of AI. The problem with AI is that it is being developed in a purposefully disruptive and malicious way. They’re not innovating for the sake of innovation, they are innovating for the sake of making more money and generally making peoples lives worse.

They could make an AI model that artists can use to help in the creative process by making some of the more tedious aspects easier, but they’d rather steal everyone elses art and replace you. They could make writing easier by developing tools that can make putting your thoughts onto paper a more seemless experience that can open the door to those that may struggle with literacy and dyslexia, but they’d rather steal everything you write and replace you. They could make AI tools that can make making music easier by creating tools that make the post processing part easy and basically automated like how Autotune works, but they’d rather steal everyone’s music and make their own as they replace you.

We’ve developed the greatest technology of the past decade and put it into the hands of people that do not care about us and only want to suck as much money out of our pockets as much as possible and manipulate us against each other while we all lose our jobs to the tools that were supposed to make our jobs easier. And now it’s to the point in the US that these companies have invested so much money and infrastructure into it that backing down is not an option anymore without collapsing the entire economy. And all the while they are destroying neighborhoods and peoples lives with their data centers just to maybe one day possibly achieve AGI if it’s even possible with current AI architecture, which it probably isn’t. When OpenAI is prioritizing generated videos and being able to have sex with ChatGPT, that should be a clear sign that they have lost the plot entirely.

Just to be clear this is all aimed at generative AI. AI is an amazing technology that can do a lot of amazing things. The problem is that the companies making generative AI are actively using them to make peoples lives worse just for the sake of money and are barely even hiding it. And yeah I know, that’s capitalism baby. But this feels different. They aren’t competing against each other, they are competing against us, our rights, our freedom, our privacy, and our money. It feels like the corporations stopped fighting each other and turned all their fighting spirit onto the general population.