• Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    23 hours ago

    If the great AI swindle has taught us anything, is that what’s good for normal people isn’t really important when all the macro-economic incentives point the other way and towards the pockets of the ultra rich.

    As of April 2025, only 17% of Americans thought AI would have a positive effect on the US over the next 20 years. Only 23% thought AI would be positive for how people do their jobs.

    robert anton wilson intensifies

    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      I find it fascinating that none of the CEOs are confident enough to replace themselves with AI.

      ALL IN, except for uh…

      When actually, LLMs may be uniquely suited for management and tracking progress across many layers, it would render the decision makers victims and they won’t do that.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      It’s not even about making money, it’s about replacing human workers with digital slaves while driving down worker pay and driving more humans to desperation and lower pay. Even if they don’t make a massive profit, they plan to replace as many human workers as possible and drive down overall labor costs for the foreseeable future. Just like inflated prices don’t come down, depressed wages won’t come up.

      • fartographer@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        Yeah, I’ve been thinking for a while that all this AI promotion isn’t about actually replacing workers. It’s to scare away all the talks about liveable wages. And then the reduced wages will be used as an excuse to replace legacy employees who earned raises during the “old wages” times and now, “don’t make sense to keep because they make the same amount as entire teams.”

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          15 hours ago

          Which, if you think about it, is so absurd because the average LLM is probably more costly in terms of energy used and overall ecological damage than a traditional employee anyway, but since those are economic externalities, the CEOs don’t really care because they don’t see the impact directly on their spreadsheets as it’s the LLM companies paying for power and wrecking nature, while they’re just paying for access to the compute power.

    • John Richard@lemmy.worldBanned from community
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      1 day ago

      I think many people are in denial about AI. Is it perfect, no. Has it gotten substantially better at an alarming rate? Absolutely. People that I see hating on AI may have legitimate concerns like the amount of precious resources used in manufacturing, the energy it consumes & climate impact, being trained on & mimicking others work without compensation, etc. Those are all legitimate discussions. But to pretend people generally hate AI, is often just wishful thinking by those that can’t even debate their positions. Or those trying to convince others to hate something so they can have an even bigger advantage. It is a genie that you can’t put back in the box.

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        1 day ago

        “Ignoring all these reasons to hate AI, people shouldn’t hate AI, debate me bro” - that’s you lol

      • Cris@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I don’t meant to he rude, but did you read the article…?

        The statement that people are unhappy about ai is supported by poll numbers from multiple sources with different polling questions, and their primary point is that everyone hates data centers (which they do, because said data centers absolutely destroy water and electricity cost in every single nearby community as soon as they’re up and running)

        You haven’t really engaged at all with what the source article is saying. It kinda feels like you just saw an article critical of ai, and vented your feeling that people are too critical without engaging with the substantiation the article provides for it’s anti-ai narrative

        While I understand feeling on the outside when you’re getting value from this tool, and everyone won’t stop screaming about how much they hate it, but its not as though they dont have good reason to

        may have legitimate concerns like the amount of precious resources used in manufacturing, the energy it consumes & climate impact, being trained on & mimicking others work without compensation

        You know that mimmicing other people’s work without compensation is the only potential source of profit for the technology right? Thats its whole sell. So it comes with enormous existential costs, does a lot of harm to the social contract of creating and sharing things, has ridiculous environmental cost, and in exchange we get… A very unreliable source of info that presents hallucination with the same social ques of credibility as it does actual information, and the possibility of rich people making even more money at everyone else’s expense as they destroy utility rates, take intellectual property that isn’t theirs, and make a for-profit product out of it that can only succeed on the basis of that theft… That ain’t a great deal for anyone but the ai companies 😅

        People have good reason to be angry about this technology being shoved into pretty much everything possible. It washes things of their human origin so they can be sold by a corporation without paying those humans, has a huge cost, and is wildly inconsistent in whether its helpful 😅 sure sometimes it is, but you should double check everything it says so you could just start with a regular source directly created by a human…

        Dont even get me started on image generation, and how nauseating it is that people call it art (I say, as an art nerd who cares deeply about art, and understand that it is, at its core, the experience and product of thed deeply human need to make things).

        And its not like the costs are hypothetical either, workforces have already been slashed

        People are upset about the lack of regulation, the fact that these companies have been allowed to scrape everything ever and make a commercial product with other people’s creations without agency or payment, and wreck people’s already difficult utility costs 😅

        • bitwolf@sh.itjust.works
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          8 hours ago

          Don’t forget the noise pollution the data centers make! It’s driving people insane, affecting their sleep and mental health.

        • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
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          16 hours ago

          People are upset about the lack of regulation, the fact that these companies have been allowed to scrape everything ever and make a commercial product with other people’s creations without agency or payment

          This is certainly what I’m upset about.

          It’s mass intellectual property theft on a level that’s never been seen before, yet there’s been minimal Government action against it - and since everybody affected has been left to fend for themselves, only the giants who can afford it have any meaningful legal defence against it.