Ask Lemmy

at work mgmt always brings it up. "we need to use it more!".

I say nothing. I smile and nod. I ignore AI prompts. I ignore emails written by AI. I ignore requests coming in to integrate AI into the product.

nobody has asked me about any of the inaction for the last year so I don't plan on drawing any attention to it by outing myself.

edit: I suppose if anybody does I can just say the AI agent I used failed to alert me to the thing they wanted. 🤣

One Thing to note: if you're strictly against it then you are on fact an AI vegan.

And that's okay!

Just like veganism you need to be clear though to us to help you answer that question:

1. what IS your reason? "At all" as absolute is not objectively feasible for all situations no matter your logic (stealing --> use an open model like apertus; energy --> link it to your solar panels, unreliable --> wrong use case, etc etc)

2. why do you want to convince others?

The issue is: you need to be honest to yourself AND to us to have a proper exchange.

"It doesn't feel right and I want to limit it's spread" is a way better answer then some stuff that sounds right but that are not grounded in your personal reality.

You are an AI vegan though. Why try not to sound like one?

If it's a decision you make out of conviction and value it is 100% like veganism so I would say embrace it

Live your truth and people will follow. Or not and that's ok too

My goto is basically since I have to strictly verify all the information/data AI gives me, it's faster for me to just produce this information myself. It's what they literally pay me for.

Fundamentally what is evil about AI is that it is part of a growing global movement towards increasingly not seeing value in human beings but rather in abstracted forms of capital and power.

Irrespective of how well AI works or how quickly it evolves, what makes it awful is how it is in almost every manifestation it is a rejection of the potential of humanity. Cool things can be done with AI/pattern matching technology, but the thinking that gave birth to and arose around these tools is incredibly dangerous. The social contract has been broken by an extremist embrace of the value of computers and the corporations that own them over the value of human lives. Not only is this disgusting from an ethical standpoint, it is also senseless, no matter how powerful AI gets if we are interested in different forms of intelligence we MUST be humanists since by far the most abundant diversity of intelligence on earth is human/organic and this will continue to be the case long into the future.

What defenders of AI and people with a neutral opinion towards AI miss is that you cannot separate the ideology and the technology with "AI". AI in its meteoric economic acceleration (in terms of investment not profit) is a manifestation of the desire of the ruling class to fully extract the working class from their profit mechanisms. There is no neutrality to the technology of AI since almost the entire story of how, why and what AI has been has been determined by the desires of ideologies that are hostile to valuing human life at a basic level and that should alarm everyone.

Is this a work requirement? If not, who cares.

I am telling people to refrain from wasting my time with parrotted training data and that there is no "I" in LLMs. And that using them harms the brain and the corporations behind are evil to the core. But yeah, mostly I give up beyond "please don't bother me with this"

This reminds me of those posts from anti-vaxers who complain about not being able to find good studies or sources that support their opinion.

You don't need artificial intelligence. We already have intelligence at home.

Your question is too vague to give any practical advice. I guess my advice is don't be so vague? There are 100s of subjects within the umbrella term of AI (you're actually talking about tokenized data inferred by LLMs but I digress). A healthy distrust around centralization of all the things is an honest conversation between adults. Using these various LLMs to remove tedious blockers to one's work is perfectly acceptable.

Now if you're coming at this from an envrionmental angle, then have that conversation with your people just as honestly as the centralization conversation. If you're in a position wherein people hang on your advice, being diplomatic for self-preservation reasons is the worst thing you can do.

Don’t bring it up unless prompted or posing philosophical questions to family and friends. I once was creating a video for a client that sent me some generated images into the video that he thought were hilarious. I told him sorry, no, didn’t over explain and just said that he would need to hire somebody else if he wants those things. It’s not very hard. I always try to push for human artists and explain not only is it better for the ecosystem but for copyright reasons.

I tried AI a few times over the last few years, and sometimes I don't ignore the Gemini results from a search when I'm tired or I'm struggling to get good results.

Almost every time I've done either, helpful looking hallucinations wasted my time and made my attempt to find a solution to a technical problem less efficient. I will give specific examples, often unprompted.

I also point to a graph of my electric bill.

I also describe the logon script that a colleague (with no coding experience) asked for help with. He'd used AI to generate what he had to show me and was looking for help getting it to work. Variables declared and never used. Variables storing relevant information but different, similarly named variables used to retrieve the information.

Maybe part of the answer is to not be so strictly against it. AI is starting to be used in a variety of tools and not all your criticisms are valid for all of them. Being able to see where it is useful and maybe you even find it desirable helps explain that you’re not against the technology per se.

For example Zoom has an ai tool that can generate meeting summaries. It’s pretty accurate with discussions although sometimes gets confused about who said what. That ai likely used much less power, might not have been trained on copyrighted content

Check out wheresyoured.at for some "haters guides."

My general take is that virtually none of the common "useful" forms of AI are even remotely sustainable strictly from a financial standpoint, so there's not use getting too excited about them.