10 ms·

To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

• oulipo2 5mo ago
  Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
    >Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
    • oulipo2 5mo ago
      If you think that people working in tech shouldn't be capable of criticizing their own domain, and taking a step back to understand what they're helping build, I can't do much for you
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
        >shouldn't be capable Where did you get that idea? Capability isn't in question. Intelligent, well-informed on the subject, positioned to see issues, problems, and drawbacks first. They spend most of their waking hours chewing over every tiny detail. They just don't want to. It'd be like asking a paleontologist why they hate dinosaurs. And if you can't see that, then I don't know how to explain it to you in a way that will ever make sense. On 4chan, they'd say something along the lines of "not your army", and that goes the same here. We're not your army to mobilize against AI. Nothing will ever change that. Somehow though, you think our positions are reversed, but they're not. I'm comfortable here, I'm comfortable with the zeitgeist and everyone's attitude on the subject, it's you that seems to be in distress. I don't want anything from you and I don't need your help.
  • swatcoder 5mo ago
    Not my experience. Maybe it's your presentation that earns downvotes, not your message. You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
  • resident423 5mo ago
    I don't think that's true, from what I've seen the people on here are pretty consistently anti surveillance
    • oulipo2 5mo ago
      Then they just lack the realization or understanding that in a capitalistic society, the ONLY possible use for AI is surveillance
  • scuppernong 5mo ago
    A principal dogma on orange reddit is the neutrality of technology. Most people here are opposed to the nigh inevitable incipient use of AI in mass surveillance but don't think that that has any relationship to their use of AI (for example) as "Google that actually works." Whether they are right, I am not sure.
    • oulipo2 5mo ago
      They lack the understanding that technology is not separate from society. Both go together, and CANNOT be analyzed without each other. People who did engineering studies often think that "tech is pure", it's a simple "knowledge field" where something is "true or not". That's completely wrong. Tech is indissociable from society But engineers don't understand that. Only researchers (and militants) do
• hyperhello 5mo ago
  One challenging thing about talking against AI is that it's both a centralizing thing, in that everything is supposedly to use AI as glue and linking center, and decentralizing, in that we can see all the leaf nodes become unreliable, then the outer nodes, because people just 'ask AI'. It's a dystopian idea that we should be making the computer itself the process, as opposed to just using the computer to help ourselves make the process.
• Almondsetat 5mo ago
  I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
  • mlyle 5mo ago
    And a lot of it is silly. What, we can't use AI even to show it's silly and incomplete? How are people supposed to know the ways it's incomplete if we cannot evaluate it?
    • 4ndrewl 5mo ago
      First principles?
      • Retr0id 5mo ago
        That would be nice, but the emergent properties of LLMs defy any kind of first-principles reasoning if you ask me.
  • dcrazy 5mo ago
    Real “I am persecuted for my genius” energy.
    • tedmiston 5mo ago
      Reads like a post straight from r/iamverysmart.
  • Schmerika 5mo ago
    > it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all? It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article. For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide. In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being. That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out. The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views: > I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs. Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt: > Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe? On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.
• reedf1 5mo ago
  We can't put the genie back in the bottle.
  • xigoi 5mo ago
    —slave owners at the start of the Atlantic slave trade
  • skeledrew 5mo ago
    We can, however, try to ensure that the genie answers equally to everyone, which I think is the way to go.
  • forinti 5mo ago
    I'm pretty sure the genie will put itself back in the bottle when the bubble bursts. But it will leave its tail outside.
• senko 5mo ago
  This post, like many others, confuses AI with Big Tech (or maybe that's intentional). I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech". I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai
  • wuhhh 5mo ago
    That the frontier models and subs are all big tech is probably what bothers me most about “AI” right now, but I’m bullish on advancements in the capabilities of local models. I suspect and hope that, in time, the field will level and we will have very capable local, offline models and the landscape will be much as it is now with subscription compute in the cloud for enterprise and self host / local first for indies / hackers etc.
  • morislz 5mo ago
    Well, but the data centers needed for AI are on a much different scale than what "big tech profitmaxxing" used to need. I also agree with the author and you. Morally, I also cannot support the toll it takes on the environment, workers, and society in general. However, what's the option? Either be part of it or get laid off. Build an AI startup or be employeed in one and get that money or well I really cannot imagine a third path that's both financially viable and keeps you relevant in the next decade.
    • sambuccid 5mo ago
      I guess the third path could be to use it as less as possible, hopefully finding a job that doesn't enforces its use. Still learn how to use it in case that becomes your only viable option in a few years time. And don't forget how to program by hand, for che case where in a few years time AI didn't improve as much(or just costs too much) and we discover there is a lot of messy AI codeto fix. In that case you might be able to keep your moral stance and still get paid reasonably
  • wesapien 5mo ago
    I agree. It's a finance capitalism issue. The people who build data centers get free reign on the use energy, land, water and the atmosphere while everyone will bear the cost. Its another upward transfer of wealth. Another wealth pump as Peter Turchin describes it. This could end whatever democratic process is left. The West will be just like China but worse. Slower trains and more violent. At least in China, Political power is in control of capital.
• ronbenton 5mo ago
  >This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it. In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
  • declan_roberts 5mo ago
    I've never seen a technology hated as much as AI currently is outside of tech. However, most people aren't moralizing about it, they just hate it. Turns out you can have strong opinions about things without it being an issue of morality.
    • sleples 5mo ago
      Most people I've spoken to in private hate AI in tech too, they just keep quiet out of fear for their job (voice any objection to AI? next on the chopping block), so you only hear the pro AI voices.
  • brabel 5mo ago
    Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing with AI... and so many more! I personally use it a lot for coding (though I still try to do some manual work so I don't just forget everything), translations, quick queries about things, in the computer (specially CLI commands, AI is just incredibly good at it - no matter the CLI, seemingly) and in the physical world (e.g. what's the name of that thing you turn on a tap to open it - English is not my first language), it even helped me a lot figure out legislation in two different countries, where finding and understanding the law was next to impossible by myself (and it gave me links to everything so I could check by myself).
    • 5mo ago
• 217 5mo ago
  First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment" GUYS PLEASE The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing? There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
  • mlyle 5mo ago
    Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown. But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use. Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
    • hrideshmg 5mo ago
      I was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations. Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate. cmiiw to think along these lines though.
      • zozbot234 5mo ago
        These are more like HPC supercomputers than garden variety datacenters. That's why there's so much concern re: water use for the electricity being supplied. (That's easy to address in principle, of course: wind and solar power use up negligible amounts of water compared to other sources.)
        • mlyle 5mo ago
          Most of the water concern is evaporative cooling of the datacenter itself. But IMO not too much of a concern. The energy use and the resource use to make the chips, etc, is bigger.
• okeuro49 5mo ago
  Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly." There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation. AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
  • CamperBob2 5mo ago
    "Really not intelligent," yet capable of taking gold at international math and programming competitions. <img src=surejan.jpg>
    • okeuro49 5mo ago
      The ability to solve maths problems still doesn't mean it is intelligent. It doesn't know what it is doing.
      • CamperBob2 5mo ago
        Neither do we.
• throwawaytwice 5mo ago
  Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.
  • ctrl-alt-zen 5mo ago
    Congratulations, you just discovered moral relativism why even bother if __bad thing__ exists? Why shouldn’t I sell opiates when doctors can prescribe oxycontin and fentanyl? Throwawaytwice won’t care about hurting me and mine with their choices, why not preemptively strike throwawaytwice? Where’s the bottom?
  • morislz 5mo ago
    Probably should feel as bad about it as you do for owning and using your phone. The world is unfair and will stay that way, but now with AI it'll probably just get worse. And if you only look out for yourself - fine, that might work, but all of it has consequences. If you use AI for coding you will most certainly have noticed already that your actual skills might have declined - at least that's the observation I made personally and from talking to fellow engineers.
    • gitaarik 5mo ago
      Or it gets better; every industrial revolution has made life for everyone better, not only the rich ones. Coding skills will decline indeed, like math skills of bookkeepers declined when they started using computers. But other skills come in their place too.
  • wiseowise 5mo ago
    You shouldn't. You should feel bad when they'll kick you out on the street, because Claude "does better job than lower value human capital".
• sealeck 5mo ago
  I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively. Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc). Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
  • FloorEgg 5mo ago
    Being able to discern what is and isn't in our control helps tremendously in doing what is right and constructive. The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them. That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control. So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions. My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature. What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment. Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control. I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes. If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse. The risk isn't AI, it's how we choose to use it.
• CM30 5mo ago
  Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well. If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best. Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it. So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it. But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
• forinti 5mo ago
  I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.
• noitpmeder 5mo ago
  I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt. Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
  • forinti 5mo ago
    Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.
    • noitpmeder 5mo ago
      Then your issue isn't with AI, it's with your bureaucracy. Just because your company is holding it wrong doesn't mean the entire technology is morally fraught. If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is? Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too. Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• helterskelter 5mo ago
  This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.
  • skeledrew 5mo ago
    I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to prevent/offset the "omnipresent big brother" is to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to models with decent capability and know how to properly evaluate and use them.
    • helterskelter 5mo ago
      I don't know if more models will offer a meaningful counter to those in power, who will have not only more resources, but also the military, law enforcement and effectively the law itself. Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.
      • skeledrew 5mo ago
        I don't think there's a way to "starve the beast", unless completely isolating from society is an option (which it isn't for any but a sparse few). But the data it lives on can be diluted and made more piecemeal by keeping things local first, and spreading usage across multiple jurisdictions when more than local is needed.
        • helterskelter 5mo ago
• behole 5mo ago
  Post-modem incel vibes. It’s always someone/something else making the protagonist an outcast.
  • nlawalker 5mo ago
    Yeah, you're not an outcast if you're the one rejecting and cutting off other people.
• hrideshmg 5mo ago
  Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information. Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• derac 5mo ago
  It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe. According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
  • ambicapter 5mo ago
    Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.
    • nerdsniper 5mo ago
      When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities. I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
      • lazide 5mo ago
        Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical. AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him. FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
        • marcosdumay 5mo ago
• akomtu 5mo ago
  Morality, good and evil, true or false, is a human way of thinking. AI sees the world thru the lens of efficiency, ROI and so on. From https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...: > *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• declan_roberts 5mo ago
  I think many of us actually have a moral stance on AI, it's just that it's somewhat similar to our moral stance on cars, power tools, heavy machinery, the loom, etc.
  • wuhhh 5mo ago
    Accepted answer
  • cm2012 5mo ago
    For sure, and for me that means AI tech is a great moral good like all human productivity improving technology.
  • literallyroy 5mo ago
    Thank you for putting this in more generalized terms. I was just thinking replace AI with smart phone and this reads the same.
• Silagi 5mo ago
  Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
  • macintux 5mo ago
    Some of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?
    • enraged_camel 5mo ago
      It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.
    • kentm 5mo ago
      Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face. It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).
  • CurtMonash 5mo ago
• sleepofreason 5mo ago
  It seems unlikely at this point, given the real or perceived utility of using modern AI models, that people are going to stop using the technology. Also, given the huge amount of capital that's gone into the industry at this point, it would likely have a pretty negative effect on the global economy if they did. If you feel like it's causing a lot of harm and you're more passionately morally opposed to it than most, perhaps the thing to do is to focus on devising methods to lessen the harm. I think that would be very valuable to society.
• add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
  I don't feel like an outcast when I'm outside of the bubble of this community and outside of an environment like a workplace where people have to demonstrate enthusiasm for AI because they fear getting penalized for not using it. That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
• CurtMonash 5mo ago
  There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent. But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.
• kenforthewin 5mo ago
  The weepiness and persecution complex is overwhelming.
  • ashgf 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • newaccountman2 5mo ago
      > making the OP an outcast for his opinions. Just like he said. Or the person, like many of us here, who come from diverse backgrounds working diverse jobs, simply thinks OP is a twat because the post is logically inconsistent and whiny.
    • cindyllm 5mo ago
      [dead]
• lyoncy 5mo ago
  What most AI companies won't tell you is that creating a massive amount of new code will result in an overwhelming amount of technical debt for companies worldwide, sooner or later. Many organisations now believe that they can develop their own apps form scratch using AI, but if they don't pay for tokens capable of handling their ever-growing infrastructure code, their infrastructure will rot. The tendency to reinvent the wheel has always been a problem in the software industry, and AI will only accelerate this trend. Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.
• AbrahamParangi 5mo ago
  This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.
  • graemep 5mo ago
    Its a problem of the privileged in both cases — a first world problem. People with real problems do not think like that.
  • TaupeRanger 5mo ago
    It's part of this nihilistic undercurrent, especially among Millennials and younger generations. "I'm not having kids, have you seen the world?" "I'm not saving for retirement, Social Security won't exist and the oceans will swallow the continent by the time I reach retirement age." "I refuse to use AI tools that could help me create new things and reach my goals, because the influencers told me AI is going to poison the water". Quite sad actually.
• eggbrain 5mo ago
  > [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI. I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author. I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?
• estetlinus 5mo ago
  > the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage? As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally? I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.
  • wiseowise 5mo ago
    > The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure it did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
• juleiie 5mo ago
  I like that AI sucks It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost. LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
• johnwheeler 5mo ago
  > don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now. This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy. I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects. All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same. Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
  • 34asg 5mo ago
    Get in line and join the Hitler Youth! You have no say in the matter! Lead, follow or GTFO!
    • johnwheeler 5mo ago
      Wow, really?
  • wiseowise 5mo ago
    > All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same. That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.
    • johnwheeler 5mo ago
      But the difference is I actually like artificial intelligence and the capabilities it provides. No one can predict the future. I don't know if it's going to make my life better or worse. But if you think you're gonna start an uprising and change the world while this thing is in motion, you're deluding yourself. Might as well adapt and make the best of it. Much better than getting steamrolled and not getting anything out of it.
• Kattywumpus 5mo ago
  To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards. I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
  • fmajid 5mo ago
    There are adverse consequences to his stance, primarily in the form of foregone professional opportunities.
• skrebbel 5mo ago
  This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters. As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.
  • dist-epoch 5mo ago
    It's not that simple, some principles are more principled than others. Would you be friend with Goebbels, knowing he has some different stances than you on some subjects?
    • em-bee 5mo ago
      yes, if if there is a chance to show him how he is wrong. see daryl davis.
  • insanetake 5mo ago
    Also, anyone who is anti-AI because of environmental reasons but still eats meat is a huge hypocrite.
    • cm2012 5mo ago
      Same should be said of anyone who ever does international travel
  • bawolff 5mo ago
    > As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel that is right. Obviously there is a spectrum of moral ills, and not all are created equal, but if you truly believe something is abhorent, you can't be a good person and tolerate it in others
• cm2012 5mo ago
  I mean if you had the same reaction when personal computers were made, you would also be an outcast. They also put whole industries out of business and caused huge pollution and etc. There is no real difference. But you have a right to withdraw from the world and be a luddite.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• fasterik 5mo ago
  There's nothing wrong with having a moral stance on something. It only becomes a problem when the stance is disproportionate and detached from empirical reality.
  • bawolff 5mo ago
    Its always detached at some level. Morality always comes down to a choice of what you think is wrong vs right. You can't reason from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be, without picking some values.
    • fasterik 5mo ago
      [dead]
• fionic 5mo ago
  Holy cow this is whiny And essentially saying no one else has morals… yikes. Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it… personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc it’s paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it it’s not all bad. In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I don’t see it being possible. It’s like saying: I don’t like cars (and I’m better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS… there’s absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.
  • Tubelord 5mo ago
    He left a caveat for you if you read it
• 4ashgt 5mo ago
  It is fun watching the thieves squirm in this thread and being upset at others calling them criminals. "But think of the loom," they say. The loom wasn't stolen by a replicator.
• 65 5mo ago
  I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers. Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
  • clapthewind 5mo ago
    Is it smart to pick a path that's probably not going to be appreciated anymore? One that's probably going to lead to unemployment?
• bensyverson 5mo ago
  This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals. I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior. If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.
  • intended 5mo ago
    Bit confused - you and me voluntarily reading a blog post linked on HN, doesn't make the author someone who is pushing their morals on us? I read the article, and at worst it could be called whinging, but at its lowest point it never came across as trying to push a view point on the reader. What am I missing?
    • bensyverson 5mo ago
      It’s less about the article pushing a POV (although it does), and more about the attitude of the author, which is basically “I’m angry that taking an absolutist stance will cause discomfort!”
  • ajam1507 5mo ago
    Having a libertarian stance on morality is great unless its actually important to take a stand. It's the difference between "I would never own slaves" and being an abolitionist. I think it's pretty reasonable to expect others to agree and align with my personal morals around slavery.
    • bensyverson 5mo ago
      To me, slavery is an ethical issue and transcends morals, but setting that aside: You have to follow your own moral compass and do what's workable. If you're compelled to take a stand, take a stand. Just know that you can't force other people to change their morals. People who follow this line of thought to its extreme end up killing people who disagree with them. This is how you get everything from anarchist bombings to civil wars. Personally I think car culture is more damaging than data centers and the threat of super intelligence, but I'm not willing to kill anyone over any of it.
• twodave 5mo ago
  TL;DR author confuses anxiety with morals, cuts people out of their life that they can’t cope with being around. This has played out a million different ways throughout history, nothing special about this case, it just happens to be rooted in anxiety about AI.
• jmyeet 5mo ago
  We've been through this exact same thing with crypto and particularly NFTs. Remember those? Oh sure, a shortened URL on a blockchain is worth millions. Remember that? This quote on cognitive bias is often brought out: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked. AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live. But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure. A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
• TaupeRanger 5mo ago
  The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with: > I accept the models were trained on stolen data. "Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with. > I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers. Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming. > I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models. No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake > I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company. No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways. > I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model. Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business? > I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world. I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago. > I accept that I am granting more power to the United States. I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago. > I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere. It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?
  • Timon3 5mo ago
    I disagree with multiple of your responses, but I'd like to push back on this point in particular: > Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming. You could have made the same point without the baseless accusation of bigotry. But even if it's true, it would still be the "You think we should improve society, yet you live in it" meme in action. Exploitation is not a binary state (some workers are exploited worse than others), and if the author believes that AI will broadly lead to much more/worse exploitation, watering down their actual point would only make their stance less likely to be heard. And if they mentioned DoorDash workers, would you actually be satisfied? Or would you be looking for the next group of exploited workers that aren't included?
• Kuyawa 5mo ago
  What's wrong about a beautiful banner done beautifully with AI? What's wrong with a new app done in 5 mins by a coding agent? What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter? A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side. I totally welcome our new AI overlords.
  • bethekidyouwant 5mo ago
    Your eyes were irritated and you took an antibacterial eyedrop which is basically the only product on the market for such a condition… I’m really not sure Google would’ve failed you 10 years ago or even just asking your pharmacist 20 years ago
  • 34asg 5mo ago
    Tobramycin is not prescription-free. Cool story, bro.
  • wiseowise 5mo ago
    Almost got me there, if it wasn't for > What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter? Very subtle.
• samat 5mo ago
  It started well, and then he is suddenly sick because fellow member of the drama group made a poster using AI without consulting him (her?) Anyways, people looking for drama will find one
• motohagiography 5mo ago
  the argument reminds me of the uncanny sense of being managed. i think there was a belief that having the skills that AI synthesizes was some kind of intellectual equity, when this was more of a convention and a promise than any kind of social contract that preserves the value and meaning of ones past contributions. imo we've been living out a decade or more of the Doorman Fallacy ( https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy ) where people are just liquid labour with some minimum constraints to distinguish them from chattel, where the ironic effect is everyone gets treated like they are chattel but for these minimum requirements. Maybe this will move the concerns and opinions class to act to conserve some of our cultural capital base? mostly i am not sympathetic to the author because we are not of the same tribe, but the essential argument that there's something to conserve that we arent with AI is a worthy concern. we should look less at problems and solutions and more upstream of what we want to preserve and still grow.
• the13 5mo ago
  AI is now much better and much more accurate than it was even a few months ago. Use Opus 4.8, etc. Terence Tao is more credible to me than the views OP expresses in this heart felt, well intentioned but outdated essay.
• simonreiff 5mo ago
  To the author: You are so consumed, with absolute certainty, of the permanent and eternal correctness of your moral position, that you literally say you would rather throw away personal connections to human beings than be triggered by the presence of ideas or things. Please reconsider. I'm not even going to try to persuade you that you're wrong about AI because it isn't even relevant. The truth is that if you carry out your plan, you will just end up being an incredibly hurtful person towards a lot of folks who probably have no idea why you are abandoning them and now feel isolated, hurt, and confused. Also, ask yourself how sure you are, that you're going to be right for all time, about AI, which is a brand-new technology. Maybe you know yourself. Your views seem incredibly rigid and perhaps you really will never change your mind no matter what AI becomes. But if you ever have changed your mind about anything ever, again, please consider whether the harmful course of action you are describing is worth the extraordinary harm you seem eager to effectuate on everyone who disagrees. Honestly I don't know why I bothered typing out of any of this. I doubt the author cares. I just wish people like this author would consider that their words and actions do actual harm to real people. And, by the way, zero harm to the progress of AI. Just hurtful and dumb.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• tedmiston 5mo ago
  > I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI. Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post. Hmm, okay, then... Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take. Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible... -- Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.] - Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure? - Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k? -- [^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though! [^2]: Not a typo.
• gos9 5mo ago
  Sent from my iPhone hosted at a data center powered by petrochemicals
• newaccountman2 5mo ago
  I think it's possible to come up with cogent and principled anti-AI arguments. This post is not example of something like that lol Numerous problems with it, but fundamentally a lot of their objections could apply to any post-internet tech. It seems like they just don't like AI. Writer should also entertain the possibility that it turns out they just don't like tech, and AI just makes a lot of the negative aspects of tech more obvious.
• jFriedensreich 5mo ago
  As a society its good for resilience to embrace small pockets of complete ai withdrawl. We should be happy some groups go through pain to keep best practices and processes alive that do not rely on any ai whatsoever. But most of these are unbearable for pragmatic normies to be around. This is made worse by the fact that seemingly a high percentage is not fully motivated by morals but by a deep insecurity that makes them militant, overly judgmental, bipolar thinkers and prone to weird authoritarian dynamics and exclusionism that i only know from the “vegan power” hatred for vegetarians and militant antifa s hatred for the “realist left”.
• Rekindle8090 5mo ago
  [dead]
• insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  I've always liked new technological discoveries, and LLMs is no exception. It's an amazing breakthrough. But the actual benefits for society are honestly underwhelming. Yes, we can code faster now -- but was there a serious problem with humanity being unable to produce enough code fast enough? We can write emails faster, and summarize documents much faster -- ok, yes, that does make some people more productive, myself included. But yeah, email also made us more productive than typewriters, which made us more productive than hand-written letters. LLMs might uncover medical discoveries that humans just couldn't on our own? Uh, maybe? I mean we've had ML/DL models for a while and they're getting better. And then you consider the way that AI is being implemented, developed, invested in, and pushed, by large corporations, whatever benefits there could be from LLMs, are highly outweighed by the negative effects on society as a whole. It is a highly destructive force in almost every area. It could be a force for good, but at the rate we're going, it will not be, because that's not the profitable path. Nuclear fission was an amazing scientific discovery as well! And yet if it weren't for strict regulations, international treaties, UN-verification agencies, major protests against nuclear weapons etc., there's a pretty good chance that millions would have died by now by some nuclear weapon. (In addition to the hundreds of thousands who did die by nuclear fission in Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- which makes you wonder if the discovery of nuclear fission was worth it at all.) (Ah, but nuclear-backed MAD prevents conventional wars that might have killed millions anyway! Yes, that argument has some merit but I'm certainly not convinced. I'm old enough to remember feeling like we were literally a button-press away from destroying much of humanity. The weird thing is that we still are, we just don't think about it much because it hasn't happened yet.)
• queenkjuul 5mo ago
  I'm torn because i genuinely think LLMs absolutely completely suck ass at 99.99% of tasks, i think AI "art" is disgusting, it sucks balls at writing, it sucks at documentation, it sucks at summarizing, it sucks at research, i would never in a million years trust current AI to tell me what medication is safe or how long food is safe to eat or any of that. However. For _programming_, they actually are shockingly useful. Like I'm actually shocked that models in 2026 do useful programming for me where 2024 models definitely could not. They still need babysitting, definitely. I see with my own eyes people with less programming knowledge accepting awful output without consideration. But in the hands of an expert, there are actually now programming tasks i prefer to do with an LLM, which i genuinely never thought would happen. Basically if it were me, the societal impacts of the "art" and the chatbots are clearly awful, cheapening creative cultural work, replacing it with hideous slop, and preying on the mentally unwell driving many of them to self harm, and i think these products should be taken off the market. But coding agents, specifically? It's getting harder to imagine life without them. Idk if it's possible to have one without the other, not that it matters, it's not up to me, it's up to sama, and he loves preying on the unwell and destroying culture
• Awoooooo 5mo ago
  Hating AI is the majority position. Almost everyone's experience of AI is that it has replaced something or someone that did the job better before AI. That means the experience that vast majority of people have with AI is that it has made things worse. It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.
• satisfice 5mo ago
  Thank you for this post. I hope we can get more people to rally around these sentiments.