The resources used are but one of the problems with the modern uses of AI. Others include:

• Copyright and privacy. AI companies use copyrighted content and private data to train their models. Many companies have terms or user agreements that give them permission to use or sell any data on their systems. They collect data where they can, without regard for ownership, copyright or privacy.
• Fakes. We cannot trust what we see or read. Of course fake news and misinformation has been a problem for years, but genAI has turbocharged it, and now even video is becoming unreliable. We cannot trust anything anymore. Even appreciation of real art suffers because artists get accused of using AI even when it was hand made. Although the impact on politics is the biggest threat.
• Companies force employees to use it, even when employees don't want it and it hurts the quality of their work. AI is often used as an excuse to fire people.
• The AI bubble dominates the economy. This cannot end well.

There are also legitimate and useful ways to use AI, and many of them could be very valuable, but that's not what the industry or society is focusing on right now.

AI would probably be more acceptable if all of these issues were addressed.

Yes. Cause the resource intensity isn't the main problem people have with it.

It's the theft.

Absolutely not, I hope.

The impact on the minds and the constant push for the thing for all the wrong reasons are enough for me to keep hating it.

I think its hated because its about building dystopia. We literally see the datacenters coming up now that is necessary for global high tech dystopia and people still think it's about chat bots.

Because they spent a lot of social media money to make people dumb and distracted.

Well if that was the case tech bros would just strap 1000000 calculators together, call it mega AI and proceed to claim it is the next best thing that ever happened to humanity and billionaires would fund them. It is these opportunistic vultures that enshittify everything and make them anti-human.

Slop is still slop, and if it was cheaper and less intensive in those ways it would simply be producing way more slop.

It will always be resource intensive since companies are in a dick measuring contest of who can sink the most resources into it. If it was lighter they word simply do more of it

Where I think the bulk of the hate comes from is less the tech, but more the political and business elite pushing this tech.

These people are going full mask off trying to delete those they deem the lower class, so much so they are blinded in how much they require people outside the LLMs to maintain society.

LLMs as they are now, are basically the Golden Calf scenario all over again; it is ungrateful people build a statue to claim superiority and mock that which put them in good places.

Would be even more. The main harm of AI comes from malicious actors being able to ruin the internet forever with practically undetectable bot spam costing cents to run. Also taking jobs in art, where automation was never possible as efficiency is not what art is valued for.

it would reduce it quite a bit. the whole house of cards economic thing not being a thing would help to.

The main problem for me is that it's so confident in it's tone, like that idiot friend who just makes stuff up, but totally believes it. So there's no clue (like you would get with a normal person) that the thing has no clue if what it just wrote is true or not. I could bear it more if it said "I'm not sure, but..." But then if did that then none of the idiot CEOs would buy it, so here we are...

No because dead internet theory and it literally makes humans dumber.

Lower reading comprehension. Less able to write or even explain something.

Lower attention.

Lower proficiency in just about anything ai can do. Lower critical thinking.

There is a ton of research on this.

Ai also tells people they are always right and gives them bad advice. Sometimes fatal advice.

LLM the technology is interesting and impressive. the way companies are shoving it into everything and trying to sell it as a replacement for employees is awful. The way the AI companies are behaving is awful.

No, it would be less hated. Maybe only detested instead of loathed.

it’s one segment of the problem but not all of it by far

Any good thing is ruined once it's co-opted by capitalism.
AI and LLMs (In my very very personal and completely subjective opinion) is the coolest shit humanity has ever invented and under the right system would've been unanimously celebrated.
But noooooooo, capitalism had to go and fucking turn a miraculous tool for human creativity and knowledge into a relentless driver of layoffs, corporate slop and copyright theft because some greedy fucks want more money for themselves than they know what to do with.
But, well, that's just, like, my opinion, man.

The problem is it’s designed to bullshit you. Why would I trust a foundational problem?

Yes, because of the way its used, the way its presented, and how bad it is.

Different people would hate it for different reasons tho

The most common use for AI seems to be Nazi/Fascist/Republican propaganda. Basically anywhere you go is an endless number of bots pushing to defend neo-nazis, tell people that Trump totally isnt a pedophile, make posts about "If he had just complied he would have lived" etc etc etc.

The subset of people who recognize this, would hate AI because its really only good as a propaganda mill.

The next set would be because of the way its being pushed to replace workers, AI doesnt actually make the remaining workers jobs easier, and it doesnt do work more efficiently, its just another excuse to cut headcounts, make a shittier service and charge more for it.

Finally is because its A) Very often wrong and B) Being used to replace actual critical thinking.

Its a growing problem, especially in academia. Students are coming into college or high school with absolutely no idea how to do actual research, how to write a paper in a logical way, how to follow basic logic chains etc. And there is so much bad information being produced by AI now that its becoming harder and harder to find actual good information. For every doctor telling you to vaccinate kids, there are a dozen AI driven videos that have some person being confidently wrong about everything to do with vaccines.

Are there still students who didnt cheat their way through high school with AI? yes.

But they are becoming more and more rare.

And given how wrong AI usually is (AI is very good at being confidently wrong), this means that we have a whole generation growing up who cant tell the difference between "Measles can kill you if you dont get vaccinated" and "Shooting gay people is a fun weekend activity"

The trouble is that intellectual property laws are so far behind technology that there's basically no way to implement this technology without fucking over the creators of IP.

This song says it perfectly:

We made AI so we could do the fun stuff
While it could do the dumb stuff
But now it does the fun stuff
And we've become the dumb stuff

It's taking all the interesting and fun creative work, leaving people to make sure all the t's are crossed and their i's are dotted.

There are 3 reasons people hate AI right now:

1. Being used poorly and mostly resulting in slop, or malicious/unethical/deadly uses, and psychosis
2. Being forced down the public's throat and put into places where it adds no value, job losses, quality drops, plagiarism
3. Datacenter/environmental concerns, part prices

So switching to local AI fixes problem 3 (mostly). But we also need the hype bubble to pop so number 2 goes away. Unfortunately the first problem will be hardest to fix and right now requires the public backlash as new norms are being formed and bad actors need to be called out.

That said, I think we're about 1 to 3 years away from the bubble popping and everything starting to balance out to where AI is treated more like just a tool rather than a genie in a box. The hype will fade out and one or two of the big players will die, but at this point I don't think generative AI use is going away

Yes.

Like trains and bike lanes, people only love the environment enough to oppose investment in those specific things, their own environmental impacts from voting for roads to nowhere are irrelevant to them.

Therefore it’s only logical that people hate data centers and AI because they primarily concentrate wealth at the top. The valuations around AI are justified by the devaluation of college. To preface, I understand that wages and valuations are different metrics, but those with wealth have their net worth increase by 12%-ish per year. Maybe more, maybe less, but that’s about the edge of the pareto frontier that the market demands as a return. Lately it’s been way higher.

So we see frankly easy paths to a better living than 99% of the planet via careers CS, and very livable careers like environmental sciences becoming devalued. The goal of the AI companies is not to obsolete software engineers, it’s to satiate the demand for them and augment the leftovers with enough instant-knowledge and quasi-reasoning that they can replace 95% of other white-collar careers. Now the AI companies have a business market corner, to participate in the economy at all, you must first be trained through AI.

This hard pivot and devaluing of both the compensation and enjoyment of work has led people to oppose the build out of AI.

I’m generally a big optimist economically. I think simultaneously the environmental effects are overblown and not as wasteful as other water usage. Lawns and golf courses, for instance are wastes and paper mills are far more polluting for their economic output. But yeah, I’m kind of “with” the faux-environmentalists on stopping the build out.

The environmentalists have unfortunately been very unsuccessful historically, but the data center bans are here and growing without opposition. This is clearly about more than environmentalism.

If we’re truly approaching a post scarcity world, let’s see it! Throw the average person a bone! Let’s see a dignified life be made MORE achievable. Let’s see it! I dare them. They won’t though. So let the bans from the people roll in, and when the country falls behind on the AI race, investors will cry for deregulation, but everyone will know this was their fault all along.

It would still be anti-labor and a force multiplier for confident stupidity.

Qwen 3.6 27B has similar capabilities to Claude Sonnet 4.6 for coding, but uses about as much power for inference as playing a game on the gaming PC running it, compared to Sonnet that probably runs on like 8 B200s in a data center. If people were mostly just running open weight models on gaming PCs with no tech bros involved, I don’t think we’d be seeing the same level of outrage.

The hardware and power shortages piss me of in particular because I'm a computers guy. But I also have friends who are writers and digital artists so I hate it for how it impacts them too. So 'as much'? No, but it'd still be hated.

edit: also I play TTRPGs so i hate it for polluting image aggregators too

I would still hate it for being jammed into everythibg it doesn't need to be and being a shittier version of searches that used to work and being completely unreliable.

So slightly less.

"AI" is the wrong term, and I hate that it's been implanted. These are prediction models.

Prediction models can be extremely beneficial. Think of weather forecasting, for example. Being able to predict power usage across a grid to prevent failures and increase efficiency and properly deploy resources. Even LLMs can be useful to give you a starting point for discovering information that you are short on. (Don't trust implicitly, double check, but you'll have new search terms to use.)

Remember, too, that the publicly available models are relatively weak. Specialized models with well-curated training data are going to be much better at doing their specific prediction. And we're still in the beginning of this era. It's going to be crazy in ten years.

With regard to resource intensity, it'sy understanding that creation of images and video is what demands the most computing power. And that kind of usage sucks all the way around.

Resource intensive is one thing, theft is another. Pay all the artists for using their art and we'll begin to talk about whether destroying the planet further is worth it.

There are still more major problems and risks than I can count on my hands

If it were truly actually accurate maybe not... but the issue is it is a syncophancy machine being obtusely oversold as capable of multitudes of things it cannot intrinsically do accurately or as well as a person with critical thinking and is being trained on fallible data sets that include human error and now hallucination from LLMs.

If it actually were capable of doing everything the people selling you on AI are trying to get you to believe it would be an incredible tool, but it isnt, and it isnt being treated as a tool.

I think it also does us a disservice as human beings because we are at risk of losing the ability to do our own problem-solving and process of logic bedause it can be offloaded to something else and that imho can manifest as a learned helplessness.

I suspect yes. Even if you take these considerations out of the equation, AI is largely still just a glorified plagiarism machine being shoved down our throats.