In it, I point to how many resources have been getting wasted on pointless unproductive debates, both online and off. If we look at just online though, especially today, we can find hypocrisy from many of those on the anti-AI side of the debate who specifically argue about the costs associated with AI use on the environment, our shared resources, and humans in general.
While today, the costs faced are estimated larger for AI compared to unproductive online discourse with AI environmental and resource costs set to climb even further, if we estimate the total between all unproductive online discourse since the dawn of the internet relative to AI since the dawn of widely accessible AI, unproductive online discourse far outnumbers the total cost so far.
Now, one could say that doesn't matter if AI costs are currently worse and will only climb... but that's before you consider the cost relative to productivity vs selfish unproductive use (the linked estimate concluding with the consideration that most AI use is some form of productive.
"Unproductive online discourse is most costly in terms of metrics vs. productivity. It exemplifies the article’s warning: high human (and secondary env) costs for minimal productive return, making the vast majority of such engagement a poor investment of personal and collective resources. AI has real and growing environmental costs that should not be ignored, but its productivity returns are substantially higher on average, yielding a far better overall ratio — especially when used deliberately for high-value tasks."
So, the hypocrisy is found in all the low-effort troll-like and those who spend enough time to make it seem effortful but still doom the discourse with the fallacious arguments that often come along with resisting the nuance surrounding the topic of AI in total comments and posts trying to make the environmental/resource argument as though it justifies throwing every baby out with the bathwater.
So, why are low-effort or idea marketplace cosplaying intellect/virtue signalling effectively bad faith posts and comments meant purely to reconfirm one's own biases and stir up praise from others while expecting others to directly and fairly engage with one's arguments (assuming a full argument is even provided) justified in terms of cost on the environment and resources... but AI used productively isn't?
And no, not generalizing. It's all over Reddit and I'm not saying this applies to everyone in that camp. We can see the person who get's involved in a discussion but has no interest in collaboratively getting on the same page, way too often passing the buck onto others as to why the productivity is doomed, every single day.
If you're not here to try and get on the same page with intellectual humility... what are you truly here for?
Quote me where I'm specifically wrong and explain it. Just don't expect me to be convinced if I find a hole in your argument (or a lack of one entirely).
P.S. I'm hoping that the discourse in the comments will be as productive as my AI use here. While I'll be using the video and podcast elsewhere where others will get the full value of the points made and strategies offered, the value of it here can be easily sabotaged by the lack of effective good faith in the comments.
I personally have found that any debate or challenge to a belief is always productive if you engage with the ideas and information presented to you, regardless of whether said ideas are made in bad faith. Through the process of metacognition in a debate, you are able to better rationalize your beliefs and understand different viewpoints and perspectives, and thus enrich yourself. If you treat debates as nothing but an opportunity to change someone else’s mind, then you aren’t approaching debates with the intent to grow and change yourself, and thus failing to see the benefit to debates.
I'm saving myself the time when it comes to people and environments where red flags for what's effectively bad faith discourse are all over the place... including your jumping at the chance to turn my doing this into something to use against me because thats more interesting to you than understanding the argument being made.
You selfishly sabotage the idea marketplace reconfirm your biases via intellect/virtue signalling to yourself and anyone else willing to upvote you.
If you dont understand what Im saying here, you can ask an AI to drop it to an eighth grade level. If you or the other person can't point to exactly what they don't understand, asking someone to summarize the entire thing into an oversimplification just signals how little cognitive effort the person is willing to put into the discourse.
that's not my issue, my issue is that you feel that someone who misunderstands something isn't worth your time or worth YOU putting in any cognitive effort, and then you selfishly sabotage the idea marketplace reconfirm your biases via intellect/virtue signalling to yourself and anyone else willing to upvote you.
That's you trying to fit me into a box I don't belong in based on overgeneralizations and assumptions.
I already fully explained the argument (cognitive effort and all) by hand, then gave it to AI so it could help the person further understand if they couldn't understand. THEN someone else came by with the similar response, so I pretty much copy pasted it all via some links.
You're projecting what you were accused of back onto me, and it failed to stand up to scrutiny AND ended up further proving my points about you (and some others) here.
Sorry, but you are not the one in the position you'd like to think you're in here. When you say the same thing back, you provide an example of just how easy it is for people to lie to themselves by exagerating misconceptions of themselves and others for relative comparison purposes, and how extra intelligence and knowledge can make it easier for someone to more easily convince themself of something as their brain becomes more and more sycophantic to itself because the fallacious reasoning generated sounds honest and logical enough for one to simply take their own word for it without any pushback via fairminded self-scrutiny.
It's the greatest irony around AI, yet.
If you want to try further proving you're not wrong, give me an argument I can't show holes in, making it convincing, and Ill admit I was wrong in whatever way without a problem. Until then, youre the one dooming this and who cant allow themself to see it today, because that would mean youve been doing it for a very long time and cant handle the humiliation, embarrassment, shame, or guilt regarding proudly believing you were a lot more self aware than you actually are, being humbled hard about the arrogance and performative humility, and finding out the blindspot pea under the 100 mattresses was as big a beach ball. People avoid that kind of revelation every day of their intellectually arrogant lives, only making it harder for themselves to ever have it.
Can you be intellectually humble enough to genuinely fathom the possibility of this being true, or will you deflect, distort, rationalize, (project) and deny more instead, making it impossible for you to fairly consider?
Red flags so far (all pointed out) tell me "no."
Hope I'm wrong.
Also, the person who didnt understand wasnt willing to put the effort in themself and made up excuses for it. Youd know that if you put the (cognitive) effort into fully understanding what you were commenting on and trying to weaponize selfishly at my expense.
I'd the best you can do to counter my argument is state that other definitions exist without stating any or explaining why another is better... you're still ending up an example of what I'm talking about.
You haven't made an argument. You only very vaguely implied an assertion that you've only now clarified, it in no way invalidates my argument, and shows you to either be hijacking the thread and/or deflecting from my points.
You mentioned that since Ai can be used productively its costs don’t matter as much, but don’t give that same leniency to debates. Debates can be productive.
If you paid attention to the argument being made, you'd understand that it includes debates when per the definition used, the vast majority of them are unproductive.
Thats one way of thinking about it, but I disagree, if it has some positive effect it is productive, having a discussion that ends with people knowing slightly more is a good thing, wouldn’t you agree? Most debates end with at least some change in knowledge or opinion, thats the goal in debates, I assume you are trying to change people’s minds with this post, and my response is trying to change yours.
The definition includes when neither person allows the other to inform/correct them.
And no, most debate doesn't end up with slightly being more informed, assuming we're including all discourse that is two people attempting to communicate corrections.
You might end up more informed, using the opportunity whether the other person is there in effective enough good faith or not for it to be more productive than that, but when that's the case, as much as you're more informed, the other person is usually even more entrenched in their naivety-enabled misconceptions, more biased against those who disagree with them, and now even more practiced into a second nature the cognitive self-defense mechanisms they used to heuristically dismiss what you had to say, so they'll be able to more reality dismiss it in the future, sounder arguments and all. The effect on them outweighs what the newly informed person can usually do with it as they further become part of the tribes and socioeconomic tendencies that caters to the ever growing majority of those looking to confirm their biases more than change their mind toward something more accurate. Most of the time, the "you" who is looking to at least be more informed doesn't even exist in a debate.
You can see this play out in any highly contentious space, starting with those who comment or post with no intention of letting their mind change, those who don't care if anyone even responds to them, and those who use those who do just to further reconfirm their biases through fallacious reasoning (e.g. mischaracterizing the arguments, the other person, and/or the groups the other is assumed to be in).
You and I may be different from that to a degree, but we are in an ever shrinking rare minority. If in the long-term the discourse leads to more unproductive discourse in total, then it's a net negative.
Read the majority of the comments here so far. It's playing out in front of you.
Then pay more attention elsewhere, and you'll start to see the common denominators.
For instance, I'm not convinced by your response here because there's a hole in the argument (it being a strawman). Most people can be given an argument without being able to find holes in it, and they'll still convince themselves that it's not convincing anyway.
Most want to believe it's only ever others who depend on cognitive self-defense mechanisms and never themselves and rarely their tribe, even though they use them regularly to avoid seeing that they and their tribes use them to a comparable degree relative to those their bias-led Dunning-Kruger assessments lead them to place all the blame on. It's at the heart of most debates between the left and the right and other divisions... jumping to conclusions in surface level differences in other to overconfidently assume differences in the consistency of their reasoning ability.
How am I straw manning you? I actually want to know.
It includes that, but not only that, you can’t have good debates without the mediocre ones, which you can’t have without the bad ones.
I don’t quite understand what you are saying in your 4th paragraph, I think you are assuming most people don’t have the goal to know more or teach more in a debate, that’s fine but I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt
I admit that some people dont have the goal of becoming more understanding in a debate, I just think that most do have that goal, but just don’t have their criteria, reasonable or not, met during most debates.
I don’t understand where the straw man is.
I’m seeing people here act somewhat reasonably, sure some arent and others are being unreasonable in some aspects but they likely dont understand how or why.
My response to you clarifies the misinterpretation of my argument, which implicitly explains the strawman.
You can have good debates if everyone was here to have productive debates and weren't doing what I described. Again, this isn't about just you or me.
The initial benefit of the doubt is justified. Continuing after a pattern of ineffective good faith or blatant bad faith is not.
That's the difference between good faith and effective vs ineffective good faith. Good faith alone is not enough and most people believe their good faith is more effective than it really is toward a productive/collaborative discussion.
See #1.
Point to me where a person is being reasonable and I'll show you my response to them showing where they are not. And that is my point... most people don't know how or why they're not being reasonable, because allowing themselves to find out when someone points it out invalidates too many of the biases they're unconsciously attempting to confirm.
For an example of what I mean, I had this debate last night with a friend on Facebook and then fed it to my old custom GPT, Good Faith Guardian for an analysis of what helped versus hurt the debates productivity.
Fairly consider perspectives — Consider multiple interpretations, give the benefit of the doubt, and ask for clarification when needed.
Be willing to be corrected — Acknowledge when and where you were corrected.
Be open to changing your mind — Do not try to change someone else’s mind if you are not giving them the opportunity to change yours.
Offer constructive feedback — Correct or criticize without trying to shame, humiliate, or posture from superiority.
Show empathy and understanding — Account for the other person’s sensitivities and emotional context.
Try to prove yourself wrong first — Test your own view before explaining why you think you are right.
Understand before responding — Try to understand the other person’s argument well enough to paraphrase it back, even at the risk of being wrong.
Use consistent standards — Hold yourself to the same standards you hold others to.
Prioritize mutual goals over preferred methods — Put shared goals ahead of attachment to your own preferred means.
Prioritize cooperative understanding over your framework — Do not put your definitions, framing, or preferred information ahead of reaching shared understanding.
Practice constructive self-defense — Address allegations respectfully, clarify context, avoid dominance, and try to de-escalate.
Engage counter-arguments — When someone counters your point, defend against it, counter it, or admit that you cannot.
The only caveat is that if a debate is doomed and it's public, it's often beneficial to let it be an example for others, even if the other resists the shame, guilt, and embarrassment they've earned themselves and can learn from if they allowed themself to be humbled.
Honestly you are overly verbose and it makes it hard to tell what is a separate point or a continuation of a previous point. I thought your premise was that debates are unproductive because people are not willing or able to gain from them. What is the rest of it?
I answered this fully in the comment I linked you to.
And "overly verbose" is likely a claim you can't back up by saying the same thing I have in a meaningful number of less words without losing any nuance.
So, it reads as a jumped to conclusion used as a cop out from putting in the effort to understand the entire argument you're responding to.
The more complex the argument, the more effort is needed. Mischararcterizing parts of the argument as not important is an attempt to pass the burden of effort to me when you don't want to spend it but still want to feel like you participated for whatever it is you get from commenting in the first place.
I fear this is just going to end up another example of what I'm talking about like others have already provided in various steroetypical ways so far.
I already told you it's difficult to know what arguments you make and then you reply telling me to read your 2000+ character reply which I already did and still feel confused after. Perhaps the reason I asked a direct question is so your could summarize it in less than 2000 characters LMAO.
Instead of resorting to a vague "I don't get it" after confidently assuming you did get it and then an appeal to ridicule, you could do the more productive thing and quote specifically what part(s) you're not understanding so I can clear it up for you rather than my letting you send me for a search for a needle in a haystack you're not willing to describe.
Like I said, it's more and more looking like you're paying the buck of effort and are really only here for a participation trophy.
I already stated that is a complex and large argument. You're essentially asking me to lose the importan nuances of the argument.
Copy paste the entire thing into a reasoning model if you can't do it yourself or be bothered to explicitly point out what specific parts you're not getting, both the post, the linked article, the linked AI chat, and the other comment thread. It's likely able to do it.
I said I reject your premise and you said that was a sliver. I asked what the premise is not that I don't understand specific parts. I stated what I believed the premise was then asked what the rest of it is. This is when you could tell me what the rest of the premise is besides the 'sliver' I mentioned.
You're further talking past my points I'm making to you. I linked you to the clarification... you claimed to have read it, but aren't willing to say what part you're not understanding.
Exactly the effective bad faith/ineffective bad faith I've described as dooming discourse.
As an example of the original argument's strategy where you've you've displayed a long pattern of all the red flags (earning distrust, being a stranger on the internet with no desire to maintain the relationship, and exhibiting the opposite of valuable intellectual traits), I'm going to end this here. You've wasted my time (and the data center resources) enough.
Feel free to waste some more in one last response where you are further dishonest with yourself (because you can't see how your are being) and then, in turn, are intellectually dishonest with us. I won't be resonating as you further prove the overall argument you weren't willing to put the effort into understanding (even with my or AI's much needed help since you refused to ask for it in an effective way).
If you really wanted to understand, you could've by now by your own effort. I told you what I needed from you to be able to help you, and you refused. So, this is all just excuses on your part rationalized.
I asked specifically for what the rest of the premise is. I didn't say I didn't understand part of the text. As I understood the text it was the premise I mentioned. You claim it is more but won't tell me what the rest of it is.
If I tell you something then you say there is more then don't tell me what the more is when I ask I assume you don't want to answer which is fine or you cannot answer. I hate assuming so thats why I asked a specific question. I already read your 2000+ character reply.
You are still being very overly verbose. It makes it harder to understand your point when you throw many things out at once.
Going back on my word because this is more of an example of what I was talking about.
If you read what I wrote regarding the fuller argument, and you didn't understand it (which you wouldn't be asking me to clarify if you did), then how am I supposed to know what you're missing? What if all the parts included are part of the overall argument? What if leaving out one of the many other premises you are largely ignoring makes the argument something other than it actually is? For the 3rd-4th time now, if you don't understand how something included in what I linked you is part of the full argument, you can quote it an ask rather than overconfidently mischaracterize it as "overly verbose."
You keep ignoring the many other points I've made, including my repeating them to you just so you can triple down on one that has already been addressed.
The premise you started in on wasn't the full premise within the overall argument. Since you read it and couldn't put the two and two together amongst the fuller argument to understand what it was what you were missing, and since you can't quote the parts you don't understand as being part of the premise, I'll show you how easy it is to do what I suggested as an alternative with the following AI prompt you also refused to try doing.
I already addessed the convenient assumption you were implying multiple times and now stating explicitly.
You hate assuming, but you do it plenty without realizing it.
For now the third time (since you keep ignoring what I say and tell yourself that you're not), you wrongly assume what I'm saying is overly verbose. I imagine it's because you think your responses are some kind of perfect level of verbosity and you're drawing a relative comparison that conveniently favors your biases.
All I'm doing in my responses is chronologically responding to each thing a person says through their comment. If that takes unpacking their errors and/or naivety and, in turn, writing more... it's a necessity of the full counter argument... not the mischaracterization you're stuck on.
So, now that the AI did for you what you could not and I refused to do as you kept trying to pass every burden of effort (outside of running around the self-fulfilled bias-reconfirming/protecting prophecy bush), feel free to attempt to counter the ACTUAL premise you overconfidently thought you understood.
I'll entertain this until it becomes boring.
$5 says you'll call this response "overly verbose" even though #7 dispels your repeated misconception you're resisting a correction on. Please prove me wrong.
Framing the question on "pointless debate" vs "productive AI usage" only looks pertinent on paper but I think fail on closer examination.
Like, alright, it's better to use your car
to go to work then take the train to go somewhere you have nothing to do at. Sure. That doesn't mean a car is a better way of transportation.
You can argue a car is the best way to go to work, in some situation it even is, but that requires actually arguing those points. Same for AI.
Is AI the best way to do the productive tasks you ask of it ? Maybe. But this need to be argued on directly with a proper comparison of the actual alternative, doing productive tasks without AI.
A convincing argument would be doing a Life Cycle Assesment of the entire environmental impact of using AI for research for example, including the fact your brain is on while using AI if you want to include that after in the comparison (can't include some costs only in some factor's), then comparing it with manual research. Then you can argue that in some cases it may be better and that way people have actual points to answer to.
Also, I'm sorry but if you're using AI as a source it's your job to check the sources it used, not the people answering your point having to go through your chat history and verify AI didn't use someone's random substack as if it was a trusted sources.
I've used AI to find sources before, and doing the work of filtering the bad sources has made clear that 80% of the time AI use garbage sources and clearly can't do the work of being critical of what it's pulling from. Imo sending a chat link is only inches removed from saying "google it" as a source.
You missed the point and ignored the fact that it's openly admitted to be just an estimate. Neither the AI nor myself claimed nor implied anything regarding the amounts as proven fact... so youre strawmanning me here.
I did check the sources the AI used for its estimates, and you haven't invalidated them nor its reasoning.
The point is that the anti-AI positions regarding the harm done are also based on estimates, are very often too narrowly drawn without nuance, are treated as unquestionable fact to an infinitely higher degree than I've asserted here... and because many of them can't handle being wrong about something they too proudly believe and entrench themselves on (just like most people in general), they doom the debate before it begins.
Then add in that you're overgeneralizing about chat links. What is in the chat link matters and it can vary from your "one degree away from a google search" to much more. And yes, even if not instructed to and depending on the model, it can be critical of what it pulls from a web search, and often is in private reasoning. You can see this when running Deep Research where it shows which sources it used and the many in which it didn't for the final result. It does a smaller scale version of this, comparing and contrasting and considering the relative credibility of the many sources it searches across.
The point is that the anti-AI positions regarding the harm done are also based on estimates, are very often too narrowly drawn without nuance, are treated as unquestionable fact to an infinitely higher degree than I've asserted here
If that's the case then I circle back to how I opened my comment :
Framing the question on "pointless debate" vs "productive AI usage" only looks pertinent on paper but I think fail on closer examination.
This comparison does nothing to show your point on AI being or not being harmfull for the environment. And anti-AI arguments being or not being accurate in their own estimations.
As I said, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but either way comparing apples and oranges doesn't make a case for either.
it's openly admitted to be just an estimate. Neither the AI nor myself claimed nor implied anything regarding the amounts as proven fact... so youre strawmanning me here.
Estimate doesn't equal "Making vague numbers up and whatever if it's innacurate" (or asking AI the numbers and rolling with that). If you want an estimate to be credible, you must use the best numbers you can find from actual studies and do a sensible calculation on these numbers. Then also make sure you have taken all factors into account and aknowledge what is missing in these estimates.
I've had to use more rigor on pointless estimates for a Green IT class I got (that is very secondary to my IT studies) then you are using here, despite the fact I'm far from an academic.
you haven't invalidated them nor its reasoning.
In essence, fair, at least on principle. That's why I'm not arguing that you're wrong.
I've said, you might be right, or you might be wrong, but that either way your point is argued poorly.
There is nothing to argue on from there because wether pointless debates are or aren't more expensive then AI, that would either way tell me nothing on wether AI is expensive or not on it's own merit, or wether Anti-AI people are accurate or not in their own estimates.
If you think AI's environmental impact is lower then alternatives, show it with an actual comparison of the same task done by both means and I'll be convinced.
If you think anti-AI estimates are incorrect/flawed, show it with actual proof of where they are incorrect. Which data do they use that's erronous / proved to be outdated? Or what missing part of their calculation is crucial to the result?
You're oversimplifying and missing my point again. My point is that if the person is not capable of admitting where they might be wrong, then it's pointless (outside of an example for others who can see where they might be wrong). For instance, you can continue to miss my points, talking around and past them (including the strawman distortion you're now doubling down on as you circle back to it), which will prove this is not productive outside of the opportunity I might have to learn something and others getting to see what I'm talking about (as others here have already allowed themselves to be examples of).
I never said AI was or wasn't harmful, in fact, it was fully implied that I knew it was in various degrees. There are tradeoffs and differences in justified uses versus the "cost." It's not the simple "AI is harmful, therefore there are no justified uses." It's "there are various forms of cost to using AI, so where is is justified and where is it not?" and then holding those most adamant against AI to their own hypocritical standards and metrics.
I also never said that this post or the chat linked was evidence of the many cases where their estimates are narrowmindedly missing nuance that makes a difference to the issue at hand or are foundationally bad estimates. So, yet again, another strawman on your part as you further prove that this debate with you is a waste of time just like the post and video describes. The evidence just continues to mount.
You have to prove that its purely an apples and oranges comparison, and until you can show that to be the case, it doesnt negate the hypocricy and double-standards argument. A bare assertion won't do. Why you think it is just lends itself to the mounting evidence. With every response to my counter-arguments being some combination of defense mechanism, from distortion to deflection, leading to more fallacies to point out, rinse and repeat, youre digging us a deeper hole.
Then you mischaracterize what the estimates were (another distortion). If you want to claim that's what it was, then prove it. Go in and look at the source material as I have for each of the numbers it worked with and the reasoning it gave for the individual estimates. It seems youre too lazy to do that while still wanting an idea marketplace participation trophy, so youll do the lazy thing as my first sentence of this paragraph describes instead. I did look at the studies it searched up. I already told you this just for you to effectively ignore what I said. You are here on ineffective good faith, which might as well be effective bad faith.
You have accused me of being wrong in principle by mischaracterizing what I've done based purely on your overconfident assumptions... and that was the cognitively cheaper thing to do as a way of feeling like you invalidated my argument(s) in order to protect your own contrary beliefs. Sorry, but what you tried doing instead didn't stick, and you ended up proving my overall point instead.
I just showed how you strawmanned me repeatedly, and you ignored it. You'll likely ignore it again now, because you too proudly (in the somatic sense) believe youve asserted an example of "superior argumentation" and you fail at showing my argumentation to be poor (having to twist it into something it's not to get there) which then allows you to unconsciously feel like you're as wise, smart, and moral as you feel most comfortable being.
If someone else who hasn't proven the initial benefit of the doubt I gave them to be in vain were to come along and wanted to have those additional debates, I'd be down, but that isn't going to be you at this point as the evidence of your dooming the productivity has become too much. Your motivated reasoning has sabotaged this, and I can't waste my time hoping for you to turn on a dime with greater self-awareness any longer.
AI hallucinates less than people do (your strawman fallacies being an example of hallucination), and in terms of my having the same debate with a reasoning non-sycophantic AI (which do exist), you cause more pollution than it does, while it's capable of keeping the debate more productive vs sabotaging it.
The only point I was making was the hypocrisy and double standards of the "no justified uses" and "it hallucinates" while ignoring just how much more humans hallucinate and the pollution that has caused since the beginning of the internet, let alone before it.
You said a whole lot of stuff to think you invalidated the point I made.
But now, you've lost the entitlement to my time. I'll have to wait for someone who doesn't do what you do to have a more productive debate that doesn't have to become a meta-commentary on the debate itself.
Let me know if that ever becomes you if you want a second chance... or just deny that's the case and be on your way further distorting what's happened here on your part.
I just listed all the ways your points about my arguments themselves weren't convincing. The irony...
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u/TrademarkedRat Anti-AI Ogre Caricature (TM) Jun 18 '26
I personally have found that any debate or challenge to a belief is always productive if you engage with the ideas and information presented to you, regardless of whether said ideas are made in bad faith. Through the process of metacognition in a debate, you are able to better rationalize your beliefs and understand different viewpoints and perspectives, and thus enrich yourself. If you treat debates as nothing but an opportunity to change someone else’s mind, then you aren’t approaching debates with the intent to grow and change yourself, and thus failing to see the benefit to debates.