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It's all aspirational isn't it?
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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I know friend, I’m addressing the people you are speaking for, regardless of who amongst us here agrees with them. I apologize for the confusion
This comes up a lot.
Are you familiar with the story of The Lorax?
To summarize briefly, a billionaire creates a comfortable scarf, made from felled trees. He aggressively markets this fashion item to the point where it becomes a worldwide sensation, and all the trees are felled in the pursuit of manufacturing more scarves. In the end, without any trees, there is no more fresh air to breathe. Ah but, worry not, the billionaire rises to the occasion, and graciously begins selling the populace canned air so they can survive.
In this story, do you consider the many objectively good qualities of the scarf to be relevant in any way? How comfortable it is? How warm? How stylish? Would you dismiss the pleas of environmentalists for being too narrow minded in their denial of these many clear benefits?
This comes across a bit condescendingly. I obviously think that destroying the environment is a bad thing.
But I think you're misreading my point entirely. I'm not advocating for AI wholesale or saying the ends justify the means, so I don't see how the Lorax is relevant here.
We’re currently in the beginning of the story, the alarm is sounding, and instead of firmly rejecting it, we find ourselves trying to balance the discussion by reminding ourselves of the many positive things people like about AI
Everyone agrees destroying the environment is bad, just like everyone agrees Hitler was bad. But when we find ourselves in modern parallels of these situations it seems like decisive action is often derailed for the sake of nuance.
I apologize for any condescending air, I am not accusing you of vehemently supporting the scarf industry. I think this discussion is just a bit tough to keep grounded as we shift between addressing each other, ideas in general, and the people we know who hold them. I appreciate your posts and bringing forward the perspectives you’ve encountered and your thoughts about them
I think The Lorax comparison is warranted for LLMs, hyping the race for AGI, and AI as marketing/branding, but the AI umbrella includes a lot of Machine Learning that's just practical, applied statistics.
A lot of ML applications aren't anymore resource intensive then using Lemmy. So I think the discussion about harms v. benefits of ai-- beyond hypers and doomers-- often diverges from conflating "AI" with these AI companies that are all-in on LLMs vs AI as a field that contains an over-hyped, over-invested, resource-intensive, subcategory bubble that needs to pop already as well as subcategories that make it easy and efficient to classify and cluster data.
I agree, I think the conflation of machine learning, which has existed and benefited us for decades, with “AI” is an unfortunately effective marketing strategy. In fact most of the “benefits of AI” being discussed above are just classic machine learning applications being rebranded as AI purely for the sake of allowing the media to have headlines like “AI cures cancer!”
Right like in this metaphor we’re now lumping scarves in with jackets (classic style, normal manufacturing and impact on the environment) and saying that jackets are good so we should be careful when addressing the field of clothing as a whole. I think the critical thing to understand is that clothing is not under the scarf umbrella, it’s the other way around. It’s not a condemnation of pants to oppose the scarf industry, regardless of how desperately the scarf industry wants to inherit the legacy of pants