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  • Like everything else since the advent of harnessing fire, it’s a double edged sword that can be used for good and evil.

  • I used to be excited for AI advancements 3 years ago. Now the situation is just trash. Good times when generating a Godzilla farting fire on a city was fun and cool

  • Hating AI is just the new hip thing to do, and it's just become a way to signal group membership for people. It's frankly sad.

    • I understand it as being similar to industrial workers opposing automation in factories under Capitalism, where technological progress ends up ultimately serving Capital, rather than supporting the proletariat. Office Workers have largely not had this same struggle until now, and are engaging with this contradiction for the first time.

      This is further compounded by increased power costs in a climate where that isn't abundant, the dumping of Finance Capital into the sector just to chase profits from an emerging, rather than established market before the TRPF makes profits more scarce leading to over-application, and the lack of compensation for artists and writers that end up training these models.

      I haven't fully formed my opinion on AI yet, but this article did give a good Marxist reason why it shouldn't be dogmatically opposed and has its uses for the Proletariat under Socialism.

      • Exactly, the hate for AI is reactionary in nature. What people are actually upset about is how this tech ends up being applied under capitalism, and that's where the anger should be directed. It's also worth noting how differently AI is applied in China where it's predominantly used in industry and robotics. Even stuff like LLMs are being applied towards socially useful purposes like improving healthcare or government services. There's also a big difference in the way it's being developed with Chinese companies treating AI as a commodity, often releasing models as open source and aiming to optimize them for efficiency, while western approach has been to try and make them into services that can be monetized.

        Personally, I've found AI to be a very useful tool for coding. It's sped up my workflow significantly because it's able to handle a lot of boilerplate. It's particularly good for stuff like making UIs quickly. I can throw some sample JSON at a model and have it produce a decent looking React component. It used to take me hours to figure out styling and handling different behaviors, which I find really tedious to do. I also find it's very handy for discovering language features. I haven't had to work with JavaScript for a long time, and the language evolved significantly since I last touched it. Now I have a project using it at work, and I can work with the language much faster without having to constantly hunt for how to do a particular thing using it.

        My experience is that this is already a useful tool, and it's only going to keep getting better going forward. At the same time, it's not magic, and you still have to learn how to get the most out of it and how to apply it effectively.

        And a couple of more articles I can recommend that have good takes on the subject.

    • Damn kids worrying about the environment... What a bunch of losers trying to be hip.

  • While AI offers transformative potential, significant criticisms highlight its drawbacks. Current systems often perpetuate biases embedded in training data, leading to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, law enforcement, and lending. The environmental cost of training large models—like massive energy consumption and carbon emissions—raises sustainability concerns. Automation driven by AI threatens job displacement, exacerbating economic inequality, while opaque "black-box" algorithms undermine accountability in critical domains like healthcare or criminal justice. Privacy erosion, through pervasive surveillance and data exploitation, further fuels distrust. Though AI’s capabilities are impressive, its unchecked deployment risks deepening societal inequities and prioritizing efficiency over ethical considerations.

53 comments