The Western obsession with creating a "general" artificial intelligence will be its own undoing. It will stop itself when it eventually is forced to recon with the material realities of building infinite data centers and scraping infinite data from infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters. Task-specific AI will eventually win out, simply because it's actually real and not an imaginary god machine.

All websites and services I managed are filled with poisoned data, text or images. At least 15% of my total processing power is spent on generating the poisoned text thata, but I'm glad to do it. Take more action people, not only "protest"

I've been emailing/calling the politicians who are supposed to represent me and letting my voice be heard about my opinion on everything. From local permitting for datacenters right up to my senator letting them know how I'd like to see them vote on various tech bills and legislation I'd like to see sponsored.

I've been discussing it with the people in my life trying to advise them of the downsides to AI and pushing them to solving their problems through other means.

I've been pushing against it at work and in the open source projects I'm a part of to reduce use in them all where and how I can.

I've been helping to campaign some (mostly by being very vocal in my communities) for politicians I know don't instantly lose all rational thought when they hear the words "AI".

And, I've been doing as much as I can to make my family and friends more independent of the price spikes being caused by datacenters. Not full prepper but things like replace my old gas powered dryer with an electric one I can feed from solar panels and such (yes, I dry outside when I can too but I'm in an area where they'll get rewashed outside more than dried). We've all started picking up more hands on skills like sewing and things to help each other out (I'm the furniture repair man and gardener)

And on a fun note. I've been reviving my hobbies with friends that don't rely on tech so when they finally do force everything into rented cloud computing I'll shrug and roll to attack that dragon with my level 1 Paladin (yes, bad decisions were made by the party)

I helped an AI project fail at work. TBF, it failed on its own, but I talked mad shit about it.

I also go out of my way to remove AI integrations from windows, browsers and other apps for my staff.

The best I can do against AI is prevent their crawlers from accessing my work. I've built iocaine for this purpose, and it's happily serving an infinite maze of poison to all the crawlers, and they ain't getting through. A number of other people and organizations also use it, and that gives me warm, fuzzy feelings.

I also wrote about surviving the crawlers, and helped a couple of friends have a li'l fun with them. That's actually quite fun.

I also helped our twins ween their teacher off of ChatGPT: she's otherwise a great teacher, but she's been using ChatGPT to give them homework. It had so many mistakes, typos! So they started to quietly correct the exercises with red pen, and handing the homework in, with the questions corrected too. Other kids saw that too, started doing the same. Then it spread to other classes. Two months later, none of the teachers use ChatGPT (or any other "AI") anymore, and the word of them being laughably crap spread to households that otherwise wouldn't be aware. New kid came to town, "you guys know about chatgpt?!" - he stopped talking about it by the end of the week.

Sometimes being openly, vocally very AI-hostile pays off. So I'm going to continue doing that.

I'm refusing to use it. I'm pushing back on people trying to force me to use it (like my boss was trying for a while). And I'm pushing back against friends who pass slop off on me expecting praise for their ability to tell someone else kinda/sorta what to write/draw/whatever.

Badmouth it behind its back. It's the only real thing that I got left to feel. Woops, I accidentally started singing.

But in all seriousness, what I am doing is to question people when they make it apparent that they blindly use LLMs. I ask questions such as

1. Is there any cognitive/intellectual/emotional downside to getting an answer to your question in a heartbeat?
2. How does that smart little device work behind the scenes? Is it a computer? (Leading question into number 3.)
3. How do the data centers affect local populations? The environment?
4. Why is it "free" of cost to you?
   Etc.

Nothing. People want AI the same way they want TV and advertisements.

Also, software companies have been destroying software engineering for the past 20/30 years. I only focus on good stuff that I enjoy, small projects that still have a meaning to me and are useful. I'll write tools in Zig or Rust for fun, but that's all.

Once I retire, I'll go live in a cave or in the mountains and forget that it ever happened. Computers were magical machines to improve our life, but people don't deserve them obviously and they don't care about any of it.

I'm not doing anything about "AI" because "AI" doesn't exist.

As far as the many, disparate technologies that are called "AI", I judge them each on their own merits like any technology. But it's important to be aware that capitalism ultimately develops and uses all technology for violent control. There's nothing special about "AI" in this respect.

Lastly I resist any technology that's actively oppressive whether people call it "AI" or not. It's difficult to talk about precise tactics because every technology is different with its own applications. For example, a company like Palantir should be stopped from infiltrating and exploiting our data on a mass scale. Similarly we should try to stop the automation of war and genocide. Etc. However these problems are nothing new and people have been trying to develop tactics for a long time.

Sadly I'm pretty hopeless when it comes to individual action because of the insane amount of money involved. I had lost all hope earlier this year, but now there are more and more articles talking about how the math doesn't math for these companies' financials, so I'm now sonewhat hopeful that this would eventually put an end to all this.

I haven’t heard of anyone trying to sabotage any data centers so not enough.

I am purposely checking in terrible code to github to make copilot worse.

Yeah, that's totally why. Yeah.

THANK YOU for actually being someone in this community proactively wanting to mobilise others against AI instead of merely complaining about it! I really hope more anti AI communities will start to shift toward this type of discussion.

Anyways, something I do to fight gen AI is at my school, I keep a constant pressure against any AI generated content whenever possible. For example, when the school puts up AI generated posters seeking middle school camp counselors, I attach aggressive messages such as “cut the slop” and the “we need to kill ai artist” meme and immediately put more on if any are removed in order to keep up the pressure. Eventually the posters are removed entirely. (The posters are still readable and retain their original utility, but instead of making the school walls uglier, they constantly serve as a warning.)

Brandolini's law 🍿.