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I mean, it is objectively bad for life. Throwing away millions to billions of gallons of water all so you can get some dubious coding advice.
The currently hot LLM technology is very interesting and I believe it has legitimate use cases. If we develop them into tools that help assist work. (For example, I’m very intrigued by the stuff that’s happening in the accessibility field.)
I mostly have problem with the AI business. Ludicruous use cases (shoving AI into places where it has no business in). Sheer arrogance about the sociopolitics in general. Environmental impact. LLMs aren’t good enough for “real” work, but snake oil salesmen keep saying they can do that, and uncritical people keep falling for it.
And of course, the social impact was just not what we were ready for. “Move fast and break things” may be a good mantra for developing tech, but not for releasing stuff that has vast social impact.
I believe the AI business and the tech hype cycle is ultimately harming the field. Usually, AI technologies just got gradually developed and integrated to software where they served purpose. Now, it’s marred with controversy for decades to come.
For those who know
The reason most web forum posters hate AI is because AI is ruining web forums by polluting it with inauthentic garbage. Don’t be treating it like it’s some sort of irrational bandwagon.
Wow i’m sure this comment section is full of respectful and constructive discussion /s. Lemme go pop some popcorn.
Wait to power tripper db0 sees this. Crying that their ai photos in all their coms are cringe
Reddit too
I was laughing today seeing the same users who have been calling AI a bullshit machine posting articles like “grok claims this happened”. Very funny how quick people switch up when it aligns with them.
I find it very funny how just a mere mention of the two letters A and I will cause some people to seethe and fume, and go on rants about how much they hate AI, like a conservative upon seeing the word “pronouns.”
I’m a lot more sick of the word ‘slop’ than I am of AI. Please, when you criticize AI, form an original thought next time.
Reminder that Lemmy is typically older and older people are usually more conservative about things. Sure, politcially, Lemmy leans left, but technologically, Lemmy is very conservative.
Like for example, you see people on Lemmy say they’ll switch to a dumbphone, but that’s probably even more insecure, and they could’ve just used Lineage OS or something and it would be far more private.
True. Now shut up and take my upvote! Jo need for arguments; all has already been said.
Now see, I like the idea of AI.
What I don’t like are the implications, and the current reality of AI.
I see businesses embracing AI without fully understanding the limits. Stopping the hiring juniors developers, often firing large numbers of seniors because they think AI, a group of cheap post grad vibe programmers and a handful of seasoned seniors will equal the workforce they got rid of when AI, while very good is not ready to sustain this. It is destroying the career progression for the industry and even if/when they realise it was a mistake, it might already have devastated the industry by then.
I see the large tech companies tearing through the web illegally sucking up anything they can access to pull into their ever more costly models with zero regard to the effects on the economy, the cost to the servers they are hitting, or the environment from the huge power draw creating these models requires.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
tbf now I think AI is just a tool… in 3 years it will be a really impactfull problem
And the whole AI industry is holding up the stock market, while AI has historically always ran the hype cycle and crashed into an AI winter. Stock markets do crash after billions pumped into a sector suddenly turn out to be not worth as much. Almost none of these AI companies run a profit and don’t have any prospect of becoming profitable. It’s when everybody starts yelling that this time it’s different that things really become dangerous.
and don’t have any prospect of becoming profitable
There’s a real twist here in regards to OpenAI.
They have some kind of weird corporate structure where OpenAI is a non-profit and it owns a for-profit arm. But, the deal they have with Softbank is that they have to transition to a for-profit by the end of the year or they lose out on the $40 billion Softbank invested. If they don’t manage to do that, Softbank can withhold something like $20B of the $40B which would be catastrophic for OpenAI. Transitioning to a For-Profit is not something that can realistically be done by the end of the year, even if everybody agreed on that transition, and key people don’t agree on it.
The whole bubble is going to pop soon, IMO.
Yep, exactly.
They knew the housing/real estate bubble would pop, as it currently is…
… So, they made one final last gambit on AI as the final bubble that would magically become super intelligent and solve literally all problems.
This would never, and is not working, because the underlying tech of LLM has no real actual mechanism by which it would or could develop complex, critical, logical analysis / theoretization / metacognition that isn’t just a schizophrenic mania episode.
LLMs are fancy, inefficient autocomplete algos.
Thats it.
They achieve a simulation of knowledge via consensus, not analytic review.
They can never be more intelligent than an average human with access to all the data they’ve … mostly illegally stolen.
The entire bet was ‘maybe superintelligence will somehow be an emergent property, just give 8t more data and compute power’.
And then they did that, and it didn’t work.
I agree with everything you said, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be very useful in many fields.
I mean, I also agree with that, lol.
There absolutely are valid use cases for this kind of ‘AI’.
But it is very, very far from the universal panacea that the capital class seems to think it is.
When all the hype dies down, we will see where it’s actually useful. But I can bet you it will have uses, it’s been very helpful in making certain aspects of my life a lot easier. And I know many who say the same.
That too is the classical hype cycle. After the trough of disillusionment, and that’s going to be a deep one from the look of things, people figure out where it can be used in a profitable way in its own niches.
… Unless its mass proliferation of shitty broken code and mis/disinformation and hyperparasocial relationships and waste of energy and water are actually such a net negative that it fundamentally undermines infrastructure and society, thus raising the necessary profit margin too high for such legit use cases to be workable in a now broken economic system.
The world revolves around the profit margin, so the current trend may even continue indefinitely… Sad.
Time will tell how much was just hype, and how much actually had merit. I think it will go the way of the
.combubble.LOTS of uses for the internet of things, but it’s still overhyped
The .com bubble had nothing to do with the Internet of Things.
Fair enough.
The dot-com bubble (late 1990s–2000) was when investors massively overvalued internet-related companies just because they had “.com” in their name, even if they had no profits or solid business plans. It burst in 2000, wiping out trillions in value.
The “Internet hype” bubble popped. But the Internet still has many valid uses.
It’s a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we’re seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.
You’re right. It’s the business model driving technological advancement in the 21st century that’s flawed.
i see a silver lining.
i love IT but hate IT jobs, here’s hoping techbros just fucking destroy themselves…
I have to disagree that it’s even a nice idea. The “idea” behind AI appears to be wanting a machine that thinks or works for you with (at least) the intelligence of a human being and no will or desires of its own. At its root, this is the same drive behind chattel slavery, which leads to a pretty inescapable conundrum: either AI is illusory marketing BS or it’s the rebirth of one of the worst atrocities history has ever seen. Personally, hard pass on either one.
You nailed it, IMO. However, I would like a real artificial sentience of some sort just to add to the beautiful variety of the universe. It does seem that many of my fellow humans just want chattle slaves though. Which is saddening.
I 100% agree with you
Do you really need to have a list of why people are sick of LLM and Ai slop?
Ai is literally making people dumber:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/is_ai_changing_our_brains/
They are a massive privacy risk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyH7zoP-JOg&t=3015s
Are being used to push fascist ideologies into every aspect of the internet:
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/
And they are a massive environmental disaster:
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
Stop being a corporate apologist and stop wreaking the environment with this shit technology.
Edit: thank you to every Ai apologist outing themselves in the comments. Thank you for making blocking you easy.
Do you really need to have a list of why people are sick of LLM and Ai slop?
We don’t need a collection of random ‘AI bad’ articles because your entire premise is flawed.
In general, people are not ‘sick of LLM and Ai slop’. Real people, who are not chronically online, have fairly positive views of AI and public sentiment about AI is actually becoming more positive over time.
Here is Stanford’s report on the public opinion regarding AI (https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2024-ai-index-report/public-opinion).
Stop being a corporate apologist and stop wreaking the environment with this shit technology.
My dude, it sounds like you need to go out into the environment a bit more.
We don’t need a collection of random ‘AI bad’ articles because your entire premise is flawed.
god forbid you have evidence to support your premise. huh.
My dude, it sounds like you need to go out into the environment a bit more.
oh you have a spare ecosystem in the closet for when this one is entirely fucked huh? https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/nx-s1-5088134/elon-musk-ai-xai-supercomputer-memphis-pollution
stop acting like it’s a rumor. the problem is real, it’s already here, they’re already crashing to build the data centers - so what, we can get taylor swift grok porn? nothing in that graph supports your premise either.
That’s stanford graph is based on queries from 2022 and 2023 - it’s 2025 here in reality. Wake up. Times change.
That’s stanford graph is based on queries from 2022 and 2023 - it’s 2025 here in reality. Wake up. Times change
Objective polling shows attitudes about AI were improving. Do you have any actual evidence to support your implication that this is no longer the case?
Being self-righteous, rude and abrasive doesn’t mean you’re correct.
You disregard everyone else’s evidence but expect us to embrace your two year old data.
you disregard what mental health experts are saying this is doing to actual people.
You callously disregard the wellbeing of others for the benefit of aibros. Just because you’re ignoring the evidence doesn’t mean you’re correct numpty. Being willfully ignorant of the harms caused to the environment from this just tells me you’re profiting off of it, or a fanboy.
Gish gallop
You’re repeating debunked claims that are being pushed by tech giants to lobby for laws to monopolize AI control.
I’d rather read AI crap than this idiocy.
Are being used to push fascist ideologies into every aspect of the internet:
Everything can be used for that. If anything, I believe AI models are too restricted and tend not to argue on controversial subjects, which prevents you from learning anything. Censorship sucks
They are a massive privacy risk:
I do agree on this, but at this point everyone uses instagram, snapchat, discord and whatever to share their DMs which are probably being sniffed by the NSA and used by companies for profiling. People are never going to change.
Ai is literally making people dumber: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
We surveyed 319 knowledge workers who use GenAI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot) at work at least once per week, to model how they enact critical thinking when using GenAI tools, and how GenAI affects their perceived effort of thinking critically. Analysing 936 real-world GenAI tool use examples our participants shared, we find that knowledge workers engage in critical thinking primarily to ensure the quality of their work, e.g. by verifying outputs against external sources. Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort. When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking shifts from information gathering to information verification; from problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task execution to task stewardship. Knowledge workers face new challenges in critical thinking as they incorporate GenAI into their knowledge workflows. To that end, our work suggests that GenAI tools need to be designed to support knowledge workers’ critical thinking by addressing their awareness, motivation, and ability barriers.
I would not say “can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving” equals to “literally making people dumber”. A sample size of 319 isn’t really representative anyways, and they mainly had a sample of a specific type of people. People switch from searching to verifying, which doesn’t sound too bad if done correctly. They associate critical thinking with verifying everything (“Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort”), not sure I agree on this.
This study is also only aimed at people working instead of regular use. I personally discovered so many things with GenAI, and know to always question what the model says when it comes to specific topics or questions, because they tend to hallucinate. You could also say internet made people dumber, but those who know how to use it will be smarter.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/is_ai_changing_our_brains/
They had to write an essay in 20 minutes… obviously most people would just generate the whole thing and fix little problems here and there, but if you have to think less because you’re just fixing stuff instead on inventing… well yea, you use your brain less. Doesn’t make you dumb? It’s a bit like saying paying by card makes you dumber because you use less of your brain compared to paying in cash because you have to count how much you need to give, and how much you need to get back.
Yes, if you get helped by a tool or someone, it will be less intensive for your brain. Who would have thought?!
Not clicking on a substack link. Fucking Nazi promoting shit website
Ai is literally making people dumber:
And books destroyed everyone’s memory. People used to have fantastic memories.
They are a massive privacy risk:
No different than the rest of cloud tech. Run your AI local like your other self hosting.
Are being used to push fascist ideologies into every aspect of the internet:
Hitler used radio to push fascism into every home. It’s not the medium, it’s the message.
And they are a massive environmental disaster:
AI uses a GPU just like gaming uses a GPU. Building a new AI model uses the same energy that Rockstar spent developing GTA5. But it’s easier to point at a centralized data center polluting the environment than thousands of game developers spread across multiple offices creating even more pollution.
Stop being a corporate apologist
Run your own AI! Complaining about “corporate AI” is like complaining about corporate email. Host it yourself.
Run your own AI!
Oh sure, let me just pull a couple billion out of the couch cushions to spin up a data center in the middle of the desert.
I linked it in this thread but here it is again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T17bpGItqXw
There is a huge open source community working on LLM’s.
Comments like this remind me of all the blockchain hate. People with no idea what they were talking about inventing justifications for hating something they were unwilling to understand. There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize both and people still make shit up on the fly.
Oh sure, let me just pull a couple billion out of the couch cushions to spin up a data center in the middle of the desert.
From my, very much not in a data center, desktop PC:
Lol I didn’t know that the anarchists over at lemmy.dbzer0.com are being corporate apologists. /sarcasm
Weird … It looks like there’s nothing stopping me from signing up for an account on dbzer0 even though I’m not actually an anarchist.
Do you really need to have a list of why people are sick of LLM and Ai slop?
With the number of times that refrain is regurgitated here ad nauseum, need is an odd way to put it. Sick of it might fit sentiments better. Done with this & not giving a shit is another.
Evil must be fought as long as it exists.
OK, but you’re just making yourselves lolcows at this point where you announce these easy-to-push buttons & people derive joy from pushing them. Imitating AI just to troll is a thing now.
So…that’s a victory?
This can be called not a technology, but a weapon for killing in my opinion.
If you ever take a flight for holiday, or even drive long distance and cry about AI being bad for the environment then you’re a hypocrite.
Same goes for if you eat beef, or having a really powerful gaming rig that you use a lot.
There are plenty of valid reasons AI is bad, but the argument for the environment seems weak, and most people using it are probably hypocrites. It’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to other things
Texas has just asked residents to take less showers while datacenters made specifically for LLM training continue operating.
This is more like feeling bad for not using a paper straw while local factory dumps all their oil change into the community river.
your source about beef relies on poore-nemecek 2018, a paper with dubious methodology
Ahh so are you going to acknowledge the privacy invasion and brain rotting cause by Ai or are you just going to focus on dismissing the environmental concerns? Cause I linked more than just the environmental impacts.
Uh dismissing that concern seems like valid point? Do people have to comprehensively discredit the whole list to reply?
This echo chamber isn’t ready for this logical discussion yet unfortunately lol
Hypocrisy can be called the primitive nature of man who chooses what is easier because he is designed that way. Human is like a cancerous tumor for the planet.
You’re getting downvoted for speaking the truth to an echo chamber my guy.
But he isn’t speaking the truth. AI itself is a massive strain on the environment, without any true benefit. You are being fed hype and lies by con men. Data centers being built to supply AIs are using water and electricity at alarming rates, taking away the resources from actual people living nearby, and raising the cost of those utilities at the same time.
https://www.realtor.com/advice/finance/ai-data-centers-homeowner-electric-bills-link/
AI itself is a massive strain on the environment, without any true benefit
Rockstar games developing GTA5: 6k employees 20 kwatt hours per square foot https://esource.bizenergyadvisor.com/article/large-offices 150 square feet per employee https://unspot.com/blog/how-much-office-space-do-we-need-per-employee/#%3A~%3Atext=The+needed+workspace+may+vary+in+accordance
18,000,000,000 watt hours
vs
10,000,000,000 watt hours for ChatGPT training
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/27/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use/
There are more 3d games developed each year than companies releasing new AI models.
You’re getting downvoted for providing a well founded argument that should facilitate a broader discussion. Jesus Christ what are we doing here, people?
It’s honestly rediculous, it weakens actual valid concerns with AI.
The problem is the companies building the data centers; they would be just as happy to waste the water and resources mining crypto or hosting cloud gaming, if not for AI it would be something else.
In China they’re able to run DeepSeek without any water waste, because they cool the data centers with the ocean. DeepSeek also uses a fraction of the energy per query and is investing in solar and other renewables for energy.
AI is certainly an environmental issue, but it’s only the most recent head of the big tech hydra.
This is valid to all data centers serving all websites. Your take is a criticism of unregulated capitalism, not AI.
Beef farming is a far far far more impactful discussion, yet here we are.
And your car or flight is a massive strain on the environment. I think you’re missing the point. There’s a way to use tools responsibly. We’ve taken the chains off and that’s obviously a problem but the AI hate here is irrational
The same can be said for taking flights to go on holiday.
Flying emits way exponentially more CO2 and supports the oil industry
I just avoid both flights and AI in its current form.
Do you stream HD video, or Game or eat meat? Because those footprints are more than if you’d use AI a lot.
Not saying you should use AI, just pointing out a hypocrisy I see on here a lot
Do you really think those data centers wouldn’t have been built if AI didn’t exist? Do you really think those municipalities would have turned down the same amount of money if it was for something else but equally destructive?
What I’m hearing is you’re sick of municipal governance being in bed with big business. That you’re sick of big business being allowed to skirt environmental regulations.
But sure. Keep screaming at AI. I’m sure the inanimate machine will feel really bad about it.
AI uses 1/1000 the power of a microwave.
Are you really sure you aren’t the one being fed lies by con men?
What? Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Tennessee (when fully expanded & operational) will need 2 GW of energy. That’s as much as some entire cities use in a year.
Rockstar games: 6k employees 20 kwatt hours per square foot https://esource.bizenergyadvisor.com/article/large-offices 150 square feet per employee https://unspot.com/blog/how-much-office-space-do-we-need-per-employee/#%3A~%3Atext=The+needed+workspace+may+vary+in+accordance
18,000,000,000 watt hours
vs
10,000,000,000 watt hours for ChatGPT training
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/27/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use/
Yet there’s no hand wringing over the environmental destruction caused by 3d gaming.
And then you have a trained model that requires vast amounts of energy per request, right? It doesn’t stop at training.
You need obscene amounts GPU power to run the ‘better’ models within reasonable response times.
In comparison, I could game on my modest rig just fine, but I can’t run a 22B model locally in any useful capacity while programming.
Sure, you could argue gaming is a waste of energy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t argue that it shouldn’t have to cost boiling a shitload of eggs to ask AI how long a single one should. Or each time I start typing a line of code for that matter.
Semi non sequitur argument aside, your math seems to be off.
I double checked my quick phone calculations and using figures provided, Rockstar games with their office space energy use is roughly 18,000,000 (18 million) kWh, not 18,000,000,000 (18 billion).
Hi. I’m in charge of an IT firm that is been contracted to carry out one of these data centers somewhat unwillingly in our city. We are currently in the groundbreaking phase but I am looking at papers and power requirements. You are absolutely wrong on the power requirements unless you mean per query on a light load on an easy plan, but these will be handling millions if not billions of queries per day. Keeping in mind that a single user query can also be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of separate queries… Generating a single image is dramatically more than you are stating.
Edit: I don’t think your statement addresses the amount of water it requires as well. There are serious concerns that our massive water reservoir and lake near where I live will not even be close to enough.
Edit 2: Also, we were told to spec for at least 10x growth within the next 5 years which, unless there are massive gains in efficiency, I don’t think there are any places on the planet capable of meeting the needs of, even if the models become substantially more efficient.
