this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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The hate on this game is where anti-AI becomes Butlerian Jihadism. I hate that AI is being shoehorned into where it shouldn't be and shoved down our throats like bloatware to hurry up and justify the trillions of dollars mindlessly invested in it. But to deny indie and solo devs this tool is cruel.
Also, I find this mindless anti-AI hate ironic when there's a big heading in the side panel here listing Approved Bots. Forums prior to Reddit didn't allow bots. For a reason. Maybe look into that first?
Tell me you don't know Dune without telling me:
You haven't the slightest clue what the BJ was about if you equate it with non-violent expression of opinions, denying indie devs a tool and call it mindless hate.
To catch you up, the premise as outlined by the Reverend Mother:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
The people using thinking machines that were targeted by the Butlerians weren't indie devs, nor solo devs, nor other "small people". It also wasn't a harmless creative tool.
They were technocrats using it to enslave people.
I think it's quite understandable that people would resent enslavement. That's not mindless hate, that's a quite natural desire to be free. You wouldn't call abolitionists "mindless whip-haters" either, would you?
And the result wasn't a few people speaking out against these users of thinking machines, but a century of bloody revolt until they had destroyed not just the AI, but also all other machines with even simple logical components.
The vast difference in both scale and nature between this criticism of a particular kind of thinking machine we don't like (GenAI) being used in making programs for a thinking machine we do like (computers) and a slave revolt turned all-out war of annihilation against calculators makes this comparison just plain bizarre.
Tell me you know Watsonian Dune but don’t know Doylist Dune without telling me. To catch you up:
I was being satirical. And so was Frank Herbert. The Butlerian Jihad and resulting mentats and navigators, groomed from childhood by what are essentially cults and turned into things either barely resembling humans or not resembling humans at all, using endless amounts of drugs like spice and sapho juice along with other ghastly techniques because it was now morally wrong to use computers is a critique of overzealous revolutionary movements that turn into religions.
The Dune universe is a grotesque dystopian future. And the Butlerian Jihad forced humanity to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. I see the same thing happening today with the current jihad against the machines bubbling up.
Separate comment because separate point:
First off, there's a significant difference between anti-GenAI and anti-Bot. The term AI has been thoroughly diluted, to the point that we need to infer from context just which kind of AI is the subject. In this case, it's GenAI, which isn't the same as deterministic bot logic "AI". As for the bots in question:
So I'm not sure what your point is. None of these are GenAI, and all of them have long stopped operation. Sentiment shifts over time, and I guess it shifted against them at some point. The section is thus clearly a legacy holdover from a time when the topic wasn't as present in people's mind.
If you want to hold the fact that we used to think differently about one thing than we now think about another thing against us, that's just a non-starter of an argument.
Clutter, spam. If your threads are paginated and linear, bot spam makes it even harder to follow conversations, particularly if it's spamming ads, which was rather unpopular at the time.
In a tree-structured format where you can collapse comments and branches you don't care for, novelty bots are less disruptive.
Additionally, utility bots have been a thing on some forums too. It was never about "computer bad". We just didn't want to deal with bad computers. We also didn't want bad humans.