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I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI

I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI? Not a "code is bad but it'll get better" but actual criticism in the nature of the financing, politics, etc. I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes.

simianwords 25d ago
Valid criticisms of AI - safety critics who think AI can take over the world like Yud (I find this the least credible but still valid) - Bernie type of critics who think AI can cause widespread job losses - Ruxandra Teslo who thinks AI can remove meaning which I feel is the most serious one [1] What are not valid - environmental like emissions and water usage - AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage - AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!) [1] https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661 https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661
- knowaveragejoe 25d ago
  This sounds completely reasonable: > - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
  - fwip 25d ago
    Agreed. And so are the other two, if stated reasonably instead of as strawmen.
- Retr0id 25d ago
  What is invalid about the environmental angle? (aside from the dubious water claims)
  - simianwords 25d ago
    Here's what I find invalid about environment angle. I fundamentally don't think it is wrong to increase emissions as long as you consider the tradeoffs and externalities. Every single action you do in life has externalities - if you start opposing all of them then what really is your point? You just hate people doing stuff. If you think emissions are so harmful, try putting a number to it. I implore you to do the exercise and convince yourself or me or others and suggest that the pros don't outweigh the cons. I'm half predicting that the conversation will end in dubious claims about tail risks and world itself collapsing (I hope you don't do that). I don't think AI is uniquely harmful for the environment given the value it provides. Hell, it can even contribute to accelerating renewable resources and increasing efficiencies overall. There's way more to lose by slowing down AI because of emission control than to gain by reducing emissions.
    - nateglims 25d ago
      You are making claims for why you think the emissions are worth it but I don't see how this makes concerns about emissions invalid. Even water usage, while blown out of proportion, can be a rational concern if you have a fossil fuel power station. You can just flip this around and ask why is slowing down AI to control emissions harmful? What numbers that don't make tail risk claims are you providing for this?
      - simianwords 25d ago
        wait, please stick to the argument. Why is increasing emissions bad while considering tradeoffs? >You can just flip this around and ask why is slowing down AI to control emissions harmful? What numbers that don't make tail risk claims are you providing for this? Slowing down reduces the value it provides to humans, that's clear to me and you I hope.
        cccbbbaaa 25d ago
        Our current emissions level is causing climate change.
- ChoosesBarbecue 25d ago
  > - environmental like emissions and water usage Water usage, sure. But emissions has plenty of reasonable concern. There are the various xAI data centers have/are running using mobile gas turbines. In general, the extreme amount of power is going to put pressure on the grids. I hope this leads to the world doubling down on renewables to offset it all, but is that going to happen? Hell, the US actively paid [0] to stop a turbine project. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
  - hajile 25d ago
    Water usage may be a drop in the bucket nationally, but they tend to put datacenters in areas without much water (often because evaporative cooling is less expensive in arid regions) and the effects to those local water supplies can be extreme.
  - alpineman 25d ago
    Eating meat is much worse than using AI though (both in terms of emissions and local environmental impact), yet no one talks about that
- achierius 25d ago
  > - environmental like emissions and water usage Those are two very different things, and the former should be a serious concern. If AI does indeed become a double-digit percentage of electricity usage as the AI labs themselves predict, then it becomes a significant contributor to emissions, full stop.
- karmakurtisaani 25d ago
  Another one: data centers making electricity more expensive while not contributing much to the local economy.
- Borealid 25d ago
  I think the three valid criticisms you listed are valid, but there are other quite a few other IMO-valid criticisms of AI. Here are a few as I see them: - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification - AI is generally trained on the creative output of humanity without those who train it giving back proportionally (copyright "rules for thee, not for me") - AI breaks social processes built around the idea that TRYING something is inherently a cost in time or effort, such as filing a legal claim or sending someone a threatening letter. We haven't made the social changes to punish or charge people for using every appeal/option/application, so this makes asymmetric-effort tasks like applying for a job really bad in the interim - AI use makes it harder to develop the ability to critically think for yourself, especially among those who most need to develop that ability - AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist - AI leads to distrust in remote communication, increasing cynicism and breaking social bonds generally. This is NOT your point about "AI spreads misinformation" - no matter whether it's true or not that AI can be used to produce misinformation, having people doubt each other is a harm - AI demand crunches hardware and time availability for other adjacent markets, such as computer gaming, construction, 3D graphics production, etc. This harms both hobbies and professions in those fields having to cope with rising prices and lower availability of materials - Everyone is using the same or similar AI, leading to a homogenization of culture and process across humanity. This is perhaps a mixed blessing, because humans are capricious, but less variety can be viewed as a harm I will also say I personally hate seeing "job loss" said to mean "wealth loss" or "people starving". The goal of life isn't to have a job, it's to be well and happy. If you can be well and happy without a job, great, so it's really painful to me how people don't even see those things are not the same.
  - astrange 25d ago
    > - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter. > - AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist That it does, but I think the real social evil is bad recommender systems. eg YouTube is basically on a mission to drive me insane because it literally only recommends me a) reviews of espresso machines b) video essays by autistic people about Mario 64 c) PBS scienceslop about how quantum physics is super mysterious. None of these are even what I watch, but they're also not what I want to watch.
- watwut 25d ago
  Basically, all criticism of issues that affect real people is invalid per you. > environmental like emissions and water usage There is real crisis with warming this year, yes the plan to consume staggering anounts of energy and make environment worst in the process is valid criticism. > AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble If it turns out to be true, a lot of innocent people get hurt. Valid. > AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage As valid as criticism of facebook was valid the whole time. And yes, facebook made world into worst place. > AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!) 100% valid. > safety critics who think AI can take over the world Not valid, that is bullshit. If you think the word is wrong suggest polite word that says the same.
dgellow 25d ago
Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel
- tolugenius 25d ago
  I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.
  - thoughtpeddler 24d ago
    Newport does tend to be more level-headed, but honestly, the people that have gotten AI 'right' so far (in the true technical sense of how scaling laws held, etc) had their strong convictions set back in the mid-2010s, when Newport would've been far more skeptical. At least Newport's shown that he's capable of updating, but in general, he hasn't been someone I'd value for their predictive power.
kristianp 25d ago
The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst? I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.
- mossTechnician 25d ago
  I ended up on this comment after looking through the linked article and realizing the words "data center" never come up in it.
- oblio 24d ago
  > I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google. After watching this space for a long time, I think the growth angle is... untested. All the FAANGs were slowing down after Covid. They boomed as the money printer went brrrr, then they plateaued. They've also kind of covered a lot of their potential their main total addressable markets, with the big exception of clouds, which probably have at least 5 or 10 years of growth as workloads are still being moved away from on-premise. Maybe ads, too, since TV is still around and big and there are probably a bunch of other holdouts I'm forgetting. Then, FAANGs started reaccelerating around 2024. Part of it was due to internal reforms, basically, layoffs shaking some things up. But I suspect the bigger part has been AI, driven by CapEx and all sorts of other things. The problem with the AI growth is that it's highly opaque. We don't really know who the actual clients are. It is <<extremely>> likely that for Oracle (OCI), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), Amazon (AWS) their direct customers are just OpenAI and Anthropic. That's it. It's likely that 70% of the AI growth is just 2 companies. That can't be healthy, it's also likely extremely risky. Just the fact that the new cloud growth is so opaque is worrisome.
jonathanpglick 25d ago
Check out the writing of Baldur Bjarnason. There are a lot of blog posts and a book outlining the risks and tradeoffs. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
igorkraw 25d ago
To shamelessly shill a passion project: A friend of mine and I try to be skeptical-but-reasonable on our podcast https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ we aggregate papers and reporting and try to contextualize it with our own (hopefully useful) perspectives and takes
nomel 25d ago
> however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. As with most things, most people are somewhere in the middle, as the silent majority. You only see the comments of the strongly aligned, which are also the most emotionally motivated to comment. The internet is not real life.
jplusequalt 25d ago
>I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. There are a myriad of people out there who have brought up genuine issues that AI presents, or preexisting issues that AI is exacerbating. This series of articles is perhaps the best long form critique of AI as both a technology and an industry I've encountered [1]. [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-where-do-we-go-from-here https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

simianwords 25d ago

Valid criticisms of AI - safety critics who think AI can take over the world like Yud (I find this the least credible but still valid) - Bernie type of critics who think AI can cause widespread job losses - Ruxandra Teslo who thinks AI can remove meaning which I feel is the most serious one [1] What are not valid - environmental like emissions and water usage - AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage - AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!) [1] https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661 https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661

knowaveragejoe 25d ago
This sounds completely reasonable: > - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
- fwip 25d ago
  Agreed. And so are the other two, if stated reasonably instead of as strawmen.
Retr0id 25d ago
What is invalid about the environmental angle? (aside from the dubious water claims)
- simianwords 25d ago
  Here's what I find invalid about environment angle. I fundamentally don't think it is wrong to increase emissions as long as you consider the tradeoffs and externalities. Every single action you do in life has externalities - if you start opposing all of them then what really is your point? You just hate people doing stuff. If you think emissions are so harmful, try putting a number to it. I implore you to do the exercise and convince yourself or me or others and suggest that the pros don't outweigh the cons. I'm half predicting that the conversation will end in dubious claims about tail risks and world itself collapsing (I hope you don't do that). I don't think AI is uniquely harmful for the environment given the value it provides. Hell, it can even contribute to accelerating renewable resources and increasing efficiencies overall. There's way more to lose by slowing down AI because of emission control than to gain by reducing emissions.
  - nateglims 25d ago
    You are making claims for why you think the emissions are worth it but I don't see how this makes concerns about emissions invalid. Even water usage, while blown out of proportion, can be a rational concern if you have a fossil fuel power station. You can just flip this around and ask why is slowing down AI to control emissions harmful? What numbers that don't make tail risk claims are you providing for this?
    - simianwords 25d ago
      wait, please stick to the argument. Why is increasing emissions bad while considering tradeoffs? >You can just flip this around and ask why is slowing down AI to control emissions harmful? What numbers that don't make tail risk claims are you providing for this? Slowing down reduces the value it provides to humans, that's clear to me and you I hope.
      - cccbbbaaa 25d ago
        Our current emissions level is causing climate change.
ChoosesBarbecue 25d ago
> - environmental like emissions and water usage Water usage, sure. But emissions has plenty of reasonable concern. There are the various xAI data centers have/are running using mobile gas turbines. In general, the extreme amount of power is going to put pressure on the grids. I hope this leads to the world doubling down on renewables to offset it all, but is that going to happen? Hell, the US actively paid [0] to stop a turbine project. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
- hajile 25d ago
  Water usage may be a drop in the bucket nationally, but they tend to put datacenters in areas without much water (often because evaporative cooling is less expensive in arid regions) and the effects to those local water supplies can be extreme.
- alpineman 25d ago
  Eating meat is much worse than using AI though (both in terms of emissions and local environmental impact), yet no one talks about that
achierius 25d ago
> - environmental like emissions and water usage Those are two very different things, and the former should be a serious concern. If AI does indeed become a double-digit percentage of electricity usage as the AI labs themselves predict, then it becomes a significant contributor to emissions, full stop.
karmakurtisaani 25d ago
Another one: data centers making electricity more expensive while not contributing much to the local economy.
Borealid 25d ago
I think the three valid criticisms you listed are valid, but there are other quite a few other IMO-valid criticisms of AI. Here are a few as I see them: - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification - AI is generally trained on the creative output of humanity without those who train it giving back proportionally (copyright "rules for thee, not for me") - AI breaks social processes built around the idea that TRYING something is inherently a cost in time or effort, such as filing a legal claim or sending someone a threatening letter. We haven't made the social changes to punish or charge people for using every appeal/option/application, so this makes asymmetric-effort tasks like applying for a job really bad in the interim - AI use makes it harder to develop the ability to critically think for yourself, especially among those who most need to develop that ability - AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist - AI leads to distrust in remote communication, increasing cynicism and breaking social bonds generally. This is NOT your point about "AI spreads misinformation" - no matter whether it's true or not that AI can be used to produce misinformation, having people doubt each other is a harm - AI demand crunches hardware and time availability for other adjacent markets, such as computer gaming, construction, 3D graphics production, etc. This harms both hobbies and professions in those fields having to cope with rising prices and lower availability of materials - Everyone is using the same or similar AI, leading to a homogenization of culture and process across humanity. This is perhaps a mixed blessing, because humans are capricious, but less variety can be viewed as a harm I will also say I personally hate seeing "job loss" said to mean "wealth loss" or "people starving". The goal of life isn't to have a job, it's to be well and happy. If you can be well and happy without a job, great, so it's really painful to me how people don't even see those things are not the same.
- astrange 25d ago
  > - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter. > - AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist That it does, but I think the real social evil is bad recommender systems. eg YouTube is basically on a mission to drive me insane because it literally only recommends me a) reviews of espresso machines b) video essays by autistic people about Mario 64 c) PBS scienceslop about how quantum physics is super mysterious. None of these are even what I watch, but they're also not what I want to watch.
watwut 25d ago
Basically, all criticism of issues that affect real people is invalid per you. > environmental like emissions and water usage There is real crisis with warming this year, yes the plan to consume staggering anounts of energy and make environment worst in the process is valid criticism. > AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble If it turns out to be true, a lot of innocent people get hurt. Valid. > AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage As valid as criticism of facebook was valid the whole time. And yes, facebook made world into worst place. > AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!) 100% valid. > safety critics who think AI can take over the world Not valid, that is bullshit. If you think the word is wrong suggest polite word that says the same.

dgellow 25d ago

Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel

tolugenius 25d ago
I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.
- thoughtpeddler 24d ago
  Newport does tend to be more level-headed, but honestly, the people that have gotten AI 'right' so far (in the true technical sense of how scaling laws held, etc) had their strong convictions set back in the mid-2010s, when Newport would've been far more skeptical. At least Newport's shown that he's capable of updating, but in general, he hasn't been someone I'd value for their predictive power.

kristianp 25d ago

The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst? I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.

mossTechnician 25d ago
I ended up on this comment after looking through the linked article and realizing the words "data center" never come up in it.
oblio 24d ago
> I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google. After watching this space for a long time, I think the growth angle is... untested. All the FAANGs were slowing down after Covid. They boomed as the money printer went brrrr, then they plateaued. They've also kind of covered a lot of their potential their main total addressable markets, with the big exception of clouds, which probably have at least 5 or 10 years of growth as workloads are still being moved away from on-premise. Maybe ads, too, since TV is still around and big and there are probably a bunch of other holdouts I'm forgetting. Then, FAANGs started reaccelerating around 2024. Part of it was due to internal reforms, basically, layoffs shaking some things up. But I suspect the bigger part has been AI, driven by CapEx and all sorts of other things. The problem with the AI growth is that it's highly opaque. We don't really know who the actual clients are. It is <<extremely>> likely that for Oracle (OCI), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), Amazon (AWS) their direct customers are just OpenAI and Anthropic. That's it. It's likely that 70% of the AI growth is just 2 companies. That can't be healthy, it's also likely extremely risky. Just the fact that the new cloud growth is so opaque is worrisome.

jonathanpglick 25d ago

Check out the writing of Baldur Bjarnason. There are a lot of blog posts and a book outlining the risks and tradeoffs. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

igorkraw 25d ago

To shamelessly shill a passion project: A friend of mine and I try to be skeptical-but-reasonable on our podcast https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ we aggregate papers and reporting and try to contextualize it with our own (hopefully useful) perspectives and takes

nomel 25d ago

> however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. As with most things, most people are somewhere in the middle, as the silent majority. You only see the comments of the strongly aligned, which are also the most emotionally motivated to comment. The internet is not real life.

jplusequalt 25d ago

>I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. There are a myriad of people out there who have brought up genuine issues that AI presents, or preexisting issues that AI is exacerbating. This series of articles is perhaps the best long form critique of AI as both a technology and an industry I've encountered [1]. [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-where-do-we-go-from-here https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...