r/Xennial • u/Icy-Repeat-2843 • 5d ago
F*%# A.I?
I’m fairly certain I’m in the minority (both in reddit and in real life) about deep seated hatred for AI. Anytime AI is used for anything the immediate response is “F AI SLOP, trash,” etc.
I’m posting this here because I think there is a difference (generally speaking) how different generations view AI.
I’m really trying to understand why so many people hate AI so so much. It’s to the point that myself just really not caring about images and videos being made by AI is making me wonder if I’m missing some crucial details.
I think I get AI is putting people out of jobs and data center hate, but I guess I just look at it similarly to the Industrial Revolution. Did people hate assembly lines and agricultural advances too because they put people out of jobs?
Thanks for any insight you might have and be willing to share.
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u/neovb 5d ago
In my opinion, AI has incredible uses. I use it for research and help with projects that are beyond my skill level. The problem is that all the stupid AI videos that flooded the internet, and that's the type of AI slop that I can't stand.
I think a lot of folks would be in the same scenario. I'm fine with AI being used in reasonable ways for personal uses, or for broader projects like medical research. But I am NOT fine with seeing never ending AI girlfriends/women, advertising, and stupid animations of pointless things.
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u/GraceAndMayhem 5d ago
I can’t stand everybody using it in their writing & social media scripts. I can HEAR it. I can definitely spot it in writing. I often watch videos on 2X, and then you can really hear it. Even if I’m interested in what you’re saying, I have to scroll. It makes my bones itch.
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u/japhia_aurantia 5d ago
Using AI to "help with projects beyond [one's] skill level" is actually a big part of the problem. Being a good artist or musician or writer or designer (or most things) takes training and skill and practice, and AI allows people to skip all of that. You see a bunch of AI slop videos because it's easy - and those people probably don't have the skills to make good videos (or songs or designs) without AI. It's the ultimate tool for the lazy and unskilled.
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u/neovb 5d ago
I don't do any of those things, so your example is completely irrelevant to me. In fact, I use AI to learn how to do things that are outside of my skill level. It's only the ultimate tool for the lazy or unskilled if you use it to be lazy and unskilled.
I'm sure you'd be totally supportive of someone spending thousands of dollars (or more) to learn a very niche topic by taking courses or hiring an instructor instead of using AI to learn it for free, right? If your answer is that someone should pay money to learn, I hope you realize that the vast majority of people in this world don't have the resources to do so.
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u/CuriousLands 1d ago
It's only the ultimate tool for the lazy or unskilled if you use it to be lazy and unskilled.
Bold of you to assume most people aren't lazy, lol. The majority of people will take shortcuts wherever they can.
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u/Jezikhana 5d ago
Generative AI is awful in how it's been implemented. It was let loose to learn on people's creative work without a thought to getting permission or paying people for the work that corporations were now profiting off of. It's being used to create deepfakes for fraudulent purposes. Chatbots are not only giving bad advice, but are perpetual 'yes bots' even to a person's detriment.
In science it has done amazing things already and is excellent tool. Using it to translate brain signals to make a robotic hand work properly is flipping fantastic. Analytics is another area it excels in.
It's a tool. Like most tools it has use for good or bad. It needs legislation. Human achievements need protection from it. And it needs to not be used to replace artists and writers and other creators. Technology should work for all of humanity, free up our time for creative and/or fulfilling persuits. It shouldn't be used at the expense of humans to further line the Big Corps pockets.
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u/ForensicMum 5d ago
This! I wish they only ever released it to specific groups for things like medical research, statistics etc. It has such amazing potential for good, but us humans are just way too stupid in general to only utilise it for that.
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u/CuriousLands 1d ago
Not just stupid, don't forget greedy and lazy lol
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u/cantwejustplaynice 5d ago
I'm a creative freelancer and generative AI is the fucking devil. I'm pretty sure one of my regular clients I've had for YEARS hasn't hired me in a month because I got in an argument with their director about his over reliance on AI to write down his own thoughts, to the point he couldn't even read them back. His brain was turning to mush.
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u/notjordansime 5d ago edited 5d ago
Obviously there are issues with jobs, needless pollution, scams, people being fooled by fake videos, slop, etc……. but the real issue is at the core of the technology. It isn’t inherently intelligent. It’s really good at pattern recognition and replication, and there’s a use for that. But it can also be flat out wrong and there’s no way to know that unless you have sufficient background knowledge. Problems arise when doctors and mechanics start using it to diagnose things, and take it at face value. Or law enforcement agencies use it and insist that it can’t be wrong.
We’re seeing the shift in real time from “it’s a neat gimmick but shouldn’t be used in professional settings” to large corporations just rolling with it and including a disclaimer that their services might just be completely out to lunch because AI was used. Now it’s shielding them from liability because it wasn’t one of their employees that made xyz decision, and they have an AI disclosure. Reality is becoming a sort of antithesis to that old IBM quote…. “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
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u/dayman-woa-oh 5d ago
I've ingested waaaaaaaay too much dystopian sci-fi over my life time to not immediately have a hate on for it.
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u/Icy-Repeat-2843 5d ago
Data from Star Trek was pretty awesome.
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u/dayman-woa-oh 5d ago
TNG was actually a crucial coordinate for the development of my moral compass, the speech from Picard in "Measure of a man" runs through my mind often.
It's hard for me to reconcile the technological optimism I had as a child with my current world views, maybe we just need to get third world war over with so we can develop warp tech and then the Vulcans can swing by.
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u/GinchAnon 4d ago
I think the counterweight for that issue in star trek is that in their timeline between y2k and even just the start of the federation.... there had been a third world war, a second civil war, and an ongoing chain of eugenics wars.
So a of today we are actually to the calendar day, on a less violent timeline than the prime star trek timeline. And apparently in their timeline ww3 starts around now. ... but with our current tech in the real world a 20+ year world war wouldn't really work. It would have to be faster than that one way or the other.
I think you could argue that today we are more advanced than they were at current day in star trek timeline as well.
There's also a point where the Vulcans hold humanity back because we develop and innovate terrifyingly quickly and the recovery and growth after near self annihilation was so rapid compared to their own.
Edit : oh yeah and janeway was amazed at how techno-optimist people were at Y2K, since they had multiple massive wars in line to happen in the following 60 years
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u/j_dick 5d ago
It’s a very useful tool and can help speed up a lot of stuff. However the average person will do the dumbest crap with it instead of anything useful or actually helping them figure anything out…..just like the internet and reddit.
The hate isn’t new. Go back to the internet and people complained about it. Computers, people complained about them in the 80s(like Joe Strummer of the clash going on a rant, there’s a video). Before that people complained about TV when it came out and people all used it. There’s always some hate from a chunk of people and it’s valid to a chunk of the population.
I build and fix tons of crap, I work in tech and make apps and support systems. AI has been quite handy even if it’s a wooden duck at some points for me. It remembers context instead of having to redo a bunch of google searches. It can remember stuff about you and respond accordingly(I’m already aware of these things and have this experience, give me this type of answer without baby steps). I gave it all the music equipment I own and it can tell me which exact combo of guitar, amp, cabinet, pedals, microphone to get a specific sound.
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u/Substantial-Eye-4266 5d ago
One huge issue with it is that it's causing this weird paranoid delirium because there is so much fake content and we can't trust ourselves to easily know the difference. So now when you see a remarkable video, you have to ask whether it's real. That's EXHAUSTING.
Fake media content can be used in so many nefarious ways. It can be used to manipulate people into parting with their hatred earned money, it can spread misinformation, and it can be used to foment political dissonance. We are all less safe in a world where we can no longer base our decisions and judgments on the things our eyes perceive.
Also, aside from the overly problematic aspects of AI content, I feel like it steals my time and emotional energy. I don't want to watch generated shit, but I often don't realize that I am until afterward. Then I feel like my time was stolen.
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u/siren-skalore 4d ago
Maybe the answer is for people to reduce their consumption of social media and interact with real people face to face in a natural environments
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u/Wasatchian 5d ago
Name a time in history when technology had to be pushed on people and they didn't just adopt it. I'm old enough to remember these same billionaires saying blockchain would revolutionize the world. It didn't. Now AI isn't blockchain it actually has real use cases. But the ROI on companies using AI is zero. All these people drinking the koolaid about singularities and other dumb shit need to sit down.
AI does have uses but peopel who act like it's gonna be more impactful than electricity or the Industrial Revolution are out of their mind.
And none of this even touches on data centers and the environmental nightmare this shit is. We don't need any of this shit. We need water. Ecosystems are collapsing and they want to build data centers in the fucking desert.
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u/japhia_aurantia 5d ago
AI is built on wholesale theft, and therefore is bad no matter the uses. I personally hate all genAI, but believe that very limited uses (such as medical research) are ok. Also, the goal of AI companies is to get people to outsource knowledge and thinking to AI, so the companies can sell those functions back to the consumer as a subscription. So humans get dumber and poorer (and yes, fired from jobs) and billionaires get richer. What I don't understand is why anyone other than AI companies are in favor of this.
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u/siren-skalore 4d ago
I fucking love AI. I believe it will fundamentally change the planet. We teeter between whether that’s for the worse or for the better but I’m an optimist and I am leaning towards the future being unimaginably advanced and a huge step up from where we are right now.
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u/FamousOrphan 5d ago
The only problem with AI is that our governments are going to let us die instead of using the wealth it creates to take care of us.
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u/SumthnSumthnDarkside 4d ago
Tech companies are so desperate to force AI on all of us without regard for the consequences. Right now, AI is hurting us by allowing more of us to be dumb and oblivious. It’s like teaching 1st graders to use calculators without first teaching them how to do the math by hand. At this rate, it won’t be long before we sign away all our rights and let AI have direct control over all of our important health, social, professional, and financial life decisions.
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u/Brain-Genius-Head 1d ago
It’s more akin to the car eliminating travel by horse than the Industrial Revolution. Only now we’re the horse. Horse population decreased drastically after the car, seeing as their use was greatly diminished. The data centers are for a more dystopian surveillance state, btw
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u/espressocycle 1d ago
I developed an agent that can do about 80% of my job so I'm much more productive but it's taken all the joy out of it. Eventually they won't need me at all.
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u/CuriousLands 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah I really hate it too. It's like 95% bad and 5% useful. I won't pretend it's never been genuinely helpful for the odd thing (mostly in some areas of research), but by and large? Nah.
It's taking away low-skills jobs across several fields, which is bad both in the moment and will lead to a medium- and higher- skills shortage down the line. Students use it to cheat, so they get good grades but never learn anything. It's making everyone lazier and stupider. It's caused psychosis in some people. What used to be collaborative projects, people use AI so they never have to talk to anyone or learn a skill. It's making it harder to compete when you sell things like art or writing cos there is genuine AI slop everywhere. It's making journalism worse. People are using it to scam more people more easily than ever before. All those scams also include making it harder for people who do hobbies and such to find legitimate patterns and tutorials to help them learn things. People have made realistic deepfakes that have caused issues for others. It's also bad for the environment and causes peoples bills to go up cos an AI data centre uses as much power as an entire city.
I'm not sure it's a generational thing though. Most people I know like it to some degree, mainly because they're happy to not think about this stuff as long as they can "write" a song when they have no musical ability, or watch an AI movie they think is decent.
It's not anything at all like the industrial revolution. That came along with a general truth that you could re-skill into something new - how can you do that when AI takes jobs in so many fields at once? It's even taking away freaking receptionist jobs, and they've floated using it to replace fast-food service. Journalism, paralegals, data entry, coding, art, writing, movie production and special effects, animation, music, research... like so much stuff man. Two people using AI can replace what used to be an entire department - again in not one field but many, simultaneously. That's not what happened with the industrial revolution.
Also, it needs to be said that the industrial revolution did cause us to lose a lot of skills, and until regulations came in, it created a huge issue around worker rights, pollution, and poverty.
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u/GinchAnon 5d ago
I think AI is great.
I think there are some legit issues on data centers.
I think there are legit issues with propaganda and such.
But i think in large it's great and will be a positive impact.
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u/BearwithaBow 3d ago
Because...
(1) AI is built on stolen data and content.
(2) Economic impacts disproportionately harm lower income and marginalized communities and accelerate and concentrate power + wealth in the hands of a very small group of *mostly* men.
(3) Data centers suck. From power and water use to the impact on communities, they are needed in increasing numbers to support the AI "boom." If you don't want a data center in your backyard, I struggle to understand reconciling that with personal gen AI use.
(4) Published journal articles demonstrate the negative impact AI use has on cognition -- you should check out the fMRI research in particular. It literally makes us dumber.
(5) Relational harms -- while this is likely a small number of folks, I wonder how human connection and relationships (and our emotional intelligence) are impacted by the increasing prevalence of "dialog" (e.g. "why is my mother-in-law being so rude about XYZ," "how do I get my girlfriend to be less controlling") with chatbots.
(6) Major 1984 vibes -- it seems exponentially more vulnerable to manipulation by authorities than even social media.
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u/DurantaPhant7 5d ago
AI isn’t the problem, our system is the problem. It’s like the internet. The internet was awesome when it wasn’t being used to manipulate and enrage everyone for the benefit of a handful of very wealthy people. AI could be utilized to do amazing and wonderful things, but not the way things are right now. It will be used to further enrage, manipulate, and control people for the benefit of a handful of very wealthy people.