Ask Lemmy

My goto is basically since I have to strictly verify all the information/data AI gives me, it's faster for me to just produce this information myself. It's what they literally pay me for.

You are an AI vegan though. Why try not to sound like one?

Personally it's because the harder something is pushed to me by large corporations, the more skeptical I am to begin with.

It is your stance, you don't have to compulsively change other people's minds, let them live their lives and you live how you want. For people that are wanting to listen to you, you can tell them how you feel about AI (or perhaps specifically AI chatbots) in both subjective and objective terms. If you want to prepare research and talking points, I think the most effective thing is to have a couple examples such as the Google AI box putting out objectively wrong info with the citation links leading to sites that don't back up any claim in it. Or how the outputs of comic style image generation tend to look like knock-off Tintin and appear uninspiring and unsettling. How reading generated paragraphs, looking at images and videos of fluffy slop is simply a waste of time for you. Just mix that with all the rest of the shortcomings people have provided and you'll make for a good discussion. Remember, the point is not to change people's minds or proselytize but rather to explain why you hold your opinion.

If it's a decision you make out of conviction and value it is 100% like veganism so I would say embrace it

Live your truth and people will follow. Or not and that's ok too

"it looks like shit from a butt and sounds like shit from a butt, and if I wanted to look at a shit from a butt, I would do that for free"

What is an “extremist view” in this context? Kill sam Altman? Lmao

Welcome to the world of being an activist buddy. Vegans are doing it for a living being with consciousness. Your cause is just too, imo, but just like the vegan who feels motivated and justified in bringing up their views because, to them, it’s a matter of life and death you will be belittled and mocked by those who either genuinely disagree or who do recognize the issues you describe but do not have the courage or self control to change

Start with speaking when it’s relevant. Note that this will not always win you fans. I recently spoke to my physician on this issue, who asked for consent for LLM transcription of audio session notes and automatic summarization. I am not morally opposed to such a thing for health care providers but I had many questions: how are records transmitted, stored, destroyed, does the model use any data fed into it or resultant summaries for seeding/reinforcement learning/refinement/updating internal embeddings/continual learning (this point is key bc the language I’ve seen about this shifts a lot, but basically do they feed your data back into the model to refine it further or do they have separate training and production models that allow for one to be “sanitary”), does the AI model come from the EMR provider (often Epic) or a 3rd party and if so is there a BAA, etc

In my case my provider could answer exactly 0 (zero) of these so I refused consent and am actively monitoring to ensure they are continuing to not use it at subsequent appointments. They are a professional so they’ve remained professional but it’s created some tension. I get it; I work in healthcare myself and I’ve seen these tools demoed and have colleagues that use them. They save a fairly substantial amount of time and in some cases they even guarantee against insurance clawbacks, which is a tremendous security advantage for a healthcare provider. But you gotta know what you’re doing and even then you gotta accept that some people simply will be against it on principle, thems the breaks

i don´t necessarily think sources are needed.

people don´t really care: if an aquaintance asks you you can just tell them it´s not your thing. if an employer asks you, you lose either way. the deranged rants are reserved for close friends :) But if you need some evidence: Look into the environmental consequences (fire up those coalmines for LLM prompts), the several studies that suggest only 60% of all answers are factual, the MIT study that shows how the brain atrophies from using AI and the phenomenon called "ai psychosis"

I tried AI a few times over the last few years, and sometimes I don't ignore the Gemini results from a search when I'm tired or I'm struggling to get good results.

Almost every time I've done either, helpful looking hallucinations wasted my time and made my attempt to find a solution to a technical problem less efficient. I will give specific examples, often unprompted.

I also point to a graph of my electric bill.

I also describe the logon script that a colleague (with no coding experience) asked for help with. He'd used AI to generate what he had to show me and was looking for help getting it to work. Variables declared and never used. Variables storing relevant information but different, similarly named variables used to retrieve the information.

"Its not my cup of tea".

Youre over thinking this

Your question is too vague to give any practical advice. I guess my advice is don't be so vague? There are 100s of subjects within the umbrella term of AI (you're actually talking about tokenized data inferred by LLMs but I digress). A healthy distrust around centralization of all the things is an honest conversation between adults. Using these various LLMs to remove tedious blockers to one's work is perfectly acceptable.

Now if you're coming at this from an envrionmental angle, then have that conversation with your people just as honestly as the centralization conversation. If you're in a position wherein people hang on your advice, being diplomatic for self-preservation reasons is the worst thing you can do.

Is this a work requirement? If not, who cares.

No is a full sentence.

Oh you want to explain. For those that are really interested, there are websites explaining the main points.

You don't need artificial intelligence. We already have intelligence at home.

I just mentioned to a friend of mine why I don't use AI. My hatred towards AI strives from people making it seem sentient, the companies business model, and of course, privacy.

First off, to clear any misconception, AI is not a sentient being, it does not know how to critical think, and it's incapable of creating thoughts outside from the data it's trained on. Technically speaking, a LLM is a lossy compression model, which means it takes what is effectively petabytes of information and compresses it down to a sheer 40Gb. When it gets uncompressed it doesnt uncompress the entire petabytes of information it uncompresses the response that it was trained from.

There are several issues I can think of that makes the LLM do poorly at it's job. remember LLM's are trained exclusively on the internet, as large as the internet is, it doesn't have everything, your codebase of a skiplist implementation is probably not going to be the same from on the internet. Assuming you have a logic error in your skiplist implementation, and you ask chatGPT "whats the issue with my codebase" it will notice the code you provided isn't what it was trained on and will actively try to fix it digging you into a deeper rabbit hole then when you began the implementation.

On the other hand, if you ask chatGPT to derive a truth table given the following sum of minterms, it will not ever be correct unless heavily documented (IE: truth table of an adder/subtractor). This is the simplest example I could give where these LLMs cannot critical think, cannot recognize pattrrns, and only regurgitate the information it has been trained on. It will try to produce a solution but it will always fail.

This leads me to my first point why I refuse to use LLMs, it unintentionally fabricates a lot of the information and treat it as if it's true. When I started using chatGPT to fix my codebases or to do this problem, it induced a lot of doubt in my knowledge and intelligence that I gathered these past years in college.

The second reason why I don't like LLMs are the business models of these companies. To reiterate, these tech billionaires make this bubble of delusions and fearmongering to get their userbase to stay. Titles like "chatGPT-5 is terrifying" or "openAI has fired 70,000 employees over AI improvements" they can do this because people see the title, reinvesting more money into the company and because employees heads are up these tech giants asses will of course work with openAI. It is a fucking money making loophole for these giants because of how many employees are fucking far up their employers asses. If I end up getting a job at openAI and accept it, I want my family to put me into a god damn psych ward, that's how much I frown on these unethical practices.

I often joke about this to people who don't believe this to be the case, but is becoming more and more a valid point to this fucked up mess: if AI companies say they've fired X amount of employees for "AI improvements" why has this not been adopted by defense companies/contractors or other professions in industry. Its a rhetorical question, but it makes them conclude on a better trajectory than "the reason X amount of employees were fired was because of AI improvement"

at work mgmt always brings it up. "we need to use it more!".

I say nothing. I smile and nod. I ignore AI prompts. I ignore emails written by AI. I ignore requests coming in to integrate AI into the product.

nobody has asked me about any of the inaction for the last year so I don't plan on drawing any attention to it by outing myself.

edit: I suppose if anybody does I can just say the AI agent I used failed to alert me to the thing they wanted. 🤣

Depending on how hardcore you are about it, you can't.

Are you getting up in people's face to tell them not to use it, or are you answering why you choose not to use it?
Are you extremely strict in your adherence? Or are you more forgiving based on the application or user?

There are two general points I like to make:

1. Big companies are using it to steal the work of the powerless, en masse. It is making copyright strictly the tool of the powerful to use against the powerless.
2. If these companies aren't lying and will actually deliver what they say they're going to deliver in the timeline they stated, then it's going to cause mass unemployment, because even if (IF) this creates new jobs for every job it destroys, the market can't move fast enough to invent these new careers in the timeline described. So either they're lying or they're going to cause great suffering, and a massive increase in wealth inequality.

Energy usage honestly never seems to be a concern for people, so I don't even try to make that argument.

Here’s a piece I wrote to explain my apprehensive stance on AI to friends and colleagues: https://blog.erlend.sh/non-consensual-technology

A discussion in good faith means treating the person you are speaking to with respect. It means not having ulterior motives. If you are having the discussion with the explicit purpose of changing their minds or, in your words, "alarming them to take action" then that is by default a bad faith discussion.

If you want to discuss with a pro-AI person in good faith, you HAVE to be open to changing your own mind. That is the whole point of a good faith discussion - but rather, you already believe you are correct, and are wanting to enter these discussions with objective ammunition to defeat somebody.

How do you actually discuss in good faith? You ask for their opinions and are open to them, then you share your own in a respectful manner. You aren't trying to 'win' you are just trying to understand and in turn, help others to understand your own POV.

Don’t bring it up unless prompted or posing philosophical questions to family and friends. I once was creating a video for a client that sent me some generated images into the video that he thought were hilarious. I told him sorry, no, didn’t over explain and just said that he would need to hire somebody else if he wants those things. It’s not very hard. I always try to push for human artists and explain not only is it better for the ecosystem but for copyright reasons.

What do you normally say that you're worried sounds like an "Ai vegan"?

There isn't a way to use AI in good faith.

Either you are ignorant of the tech and its negative effects, or you arent.

All current AIs are based on stolen content.

Maybe part of the answer is to not be so strictly against it. AI is starting to be used in a variety of tools and not all your criticisms are valid for all of them. Being able to see where it is useful and maybe you even find it desirable helps explain that you’re not against the technology per se.

For example Zoom has an ai tool that can generate meeting summaries. It’s pretty accurate with discussions although sometimes gets confused about who said what. That ai likely used much less power, might not have been trained on copyrighted content