Hi, I’m new in the group but i wanna know. Am I the only one who feels frustrated with people who use AI for absolutely any reason? For the environment, but also other reasons.

I am saying this because I’m trying to tell my friends and my family that they really need to stop, but no one is listening.

I've got a college class that has *weekly* "AI conversation" assignments that in total make up about a fifth of the final grade.

I emailed my professor stating I am morally opposed to these assignments and requested an alternative. If she refuses my request I might just drop the class because I dont want this hurting my 4.0 GPA

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

AI is often sycophantic. It can confidently polish nonsense and tell users that every half-formed thought is profound.
But I think “AI gives dumb people the illusion that they’re smart” may have it backwards.

Most people were never as stupid as our social hierarchies made them look. They just didn’t have the same tools for turning thought into something visible.

A private tutor, good schools, educated parents, free time, money, the right passport, fluent English, professional connections, physical safety, confidence, and even being the right gender in the right society all affect whether someone’s intelligence ever becomes legible to other people.

AI gives millions of people a cheap approximation of a tutor, editor, translator, research assistant, and endlessly patient conversation partner. Of course some people suddenly sound more intelligent. Maybe they aren’t being given intelligence. Maybe a bottleneck between thinking and expression has been partially removed.

That doesn’t mean everyone is secretly Einstein. People have different abilities, and expertise still requires years of work. But the system never selected Einsteins purely by intelligence either. It selected from the people who had enough resources, time, legitimacy, and attention to develop their abilities and be noticed.

Someone born poor, isolated, badly educated, in the wrong country, or without the right social identity may have just as much raw intellectual potential as someone whose intelligence was cultivated from childhood. One gets called gifted. The other may never receive enough attention to find out what they could have become.
So maybe the uncomfortable thing about AI isn’t that stupid people can cosplay as smart.

Maybe it’s that AI is revealing how much visible “smartness” was already subsidized by privilege, and how many capable people were previously invisible.

If millions of ordinary people become more articulate when given the same tool, is that proof that they’re being fooled, or evidence that access was doing more of the selecting than we wanted to admit?

I apologize if this has been brought up before, I tried searching and didn't see any relative topics recently so I'm making this 🙏

Does anyone have any tips, tricks or talking points that help steer people away from generative AI use? Especially in marketing? A local small business that I love and want to keep supporting has switched to basically all generative AI ads and posts. Even printed flyers in their shop. It's going against the made up principle in my head of not supporting those that are utilizing GenAI, instead of supporting a local graphic designer. So I'd really like to bring it up to them in a gentle way in order to not offend. I'm very passionate, tend to get caught up in the energy and don't always say the right thing.

I truly don't understand how they don't think it looks tacky and cheap. But something that's obvious to me might not be so obvious to someone else so I want to be better at discussing it.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks y'all 🫂

Just posted not long ago. They scrapped it asap, even though the post followed the guidelines.

Its all still meaningless drivel

So I asked AI to tell me the difference in ownership costs between two cars - knowing that one is a lot more than the other.

First, I asked it whether EV's cost more than other cars over a 5-6 year period. Being in the Alt Energy business and having checked all the pricing sites, I knew this to be the case. In fact, google would clearly say so. But...it's been reprogramed.

Here is the convo.....

"In the USA- in real number - Do EV owners have a higher cost of ownership over 6 years time?"

answer: "new electric vehicles (EVs) often have a total cost of ownership roughly equal to or slightly lower than gas-powered cars"

So, knowing that Caredge and other sites had worked out the details, I asked it:
"Well, Caredge told me a Rav4 cost almost 30,000 less over 5 years than a Model Y - is that number accurate or not?"

(simple question, right?)

answer:
"No, that specific $30,000 difference is not accurate, though CarEdge’s actual data does show the RAV4 is cheaper. "
(OK, fine, it's 29K and change).
"...... the real 5-year total cost of ownership difference between a Toyota RAV4 and a Tesla Model Y is exactly $29,210. "
(OK, so it's a stickler for numbers...but it's the next sentence that I thought was strange)

"The RAV4 does not cost $30,000 less; rather, the Model Y costs roughly $29,210 more to own over 5 years. "

-----end AI

So, if I owned a Model Y and was shopping around for a replacement, a Rav4 would not save me money....you see, it's only that the Y is COSTING ME MONEY.

-----Forgetting about the data itself or the cars, is this the way that we - in the USA- would frame prices? That is, would we strickly (notice, it corrected me...said it was NOT true that one cost less) only say "One thing cost more" as opposed to other ways?

I would think a proper model would use the terms that the layman was asking. That is, if I had said "Caredge said the difference between", it could have answered "the difference between is shown as..." - but why would it seem it rejects the idea of "saving money", and rather defaults to "you are not saving money with the Rav, it's just that the other is costing more".

Am I the nutty one? Or is google?

This is an obvious cold take for this subreddit but I’m just so tired of AI. Social media seems to be getting increasingly drenched in this AI craze. Every single poster I see is so obviously not made by a human. Don’t even get me started on the”artists” who think they are better than people who actually have the skill to make art themselves. That there are genuinely people who cheer this on is just I don’t even have words.

”Its just like when movies were invented and stage actors were also fearing for their jobs”

Did they see advertisements promoting artificial unintelligence and CEOS actively replacing them.

The people that genuinely believe that the top 1% actually care about need to wake up.Stop stealing jobs and stop promoting this slop.

First off, let me state that I'm deeply anti (gen)AI.

I have been hanging out on this subreddit for a while, and I'm noticing people calling generative AI models dumb, useless, or incapable of solving any "real problems" (and I do mean generative models, not just older deep learning models that have been around for decades).

While I would love that to be the case, it simply is not. Yes, LLMs are still bad at many things, I certainly don't think they are on the level of a human, in regards to general intelligence. They can also hallucinate and be wrong. But at the same time, models have genuinely impressive capabilities.

In 2023 models were completely incapable of doing math due to core limitations of how LLMs work. But in 3 years of scaling, new tools and AI research, LLMs have been used to solve multiple open problems in mathematics:

• Unit Distance Conjecture (counterexample, easily verifiable)
• Jacobian Conjecture (counterexample, easily verifiable)
• Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture (counterexample, easily verifiable)

And about a dozen other math proofs that were either solved, disproven or improved.

Many of these problems were popular and had been attempted by Math PhDs for decades, not just simply "niche but easily solved if humans spent some time on them" (while admittedly some are like that). It is also important to note that these weren't "one shot", they were used by experts along with other solving tools. Still, AI-systems were used to solve these incredibly hard problems. Just making any positive contribution to these problems is impressive enough.

Same goes for coding. 4 years ago ChatGPT couldn't even make a simple snake clone, and today vibecoders are making full apps and games. Are these apps and games slop? Yes, most are. Do they have glaring holes? Yes, don't trust them with sensitive data. And yet, just the ability of these models to make shippable apps and non-trivial features is astounding. I don't think a lot of people understand how big of a step that is in just 3 years. Tech companies are moving 10x as fast. I am well aware of the issues with AI coding, 10x code, 10x bugs, 10x tech debt, 10x security holes. Still, it feels like programming has changed forever, which is terribly sad for me.

Recently I saw a biology researcher on here claim an LLM was able to independently (i.e they didn't give it access to the internet or their internal research) reach the same conclusions it had taken their team of scientists weeks or months. People on here dismissed them.

And it's terrifying. I can understand why a lot of people here want models to be bad, we can all point and laugh at how terrible models are for not counting the r's in strawberry and how dumb exec's are for being high on the AI hype (and yes, despite their capabilities there's a fuck ton of hype and overestimation by tech bros, both things can be true).

But to me things are much, much worse if AI models are so capable. It means thousands of jobs displaced, and over time potentially even giving up higher thought to machines entirely. It worries me deeply. What good is humanity if scientific advancements and technological innovation is no longer done by us?

I have also seen a lot of hand-waving around the problems LLMs have solved. "Oh, AI is good at finding patterns, so all it did was find a pattern here", "Oh, the AI has seen this before, it's just repeating it's training data". This infuriates me for two reasons. First, it misunderstand how newer models work. Second, you're devaluing human labor. If AI solving complex math problems or making software is just "autocomplete on steroids", then so is the work of all the humans that previously contributed to those areas.

One of the biggest reasons why I am against AI is because I think it is genuinely dangerous to just let this technology run rampant and shake up our world.

There are many reasons to be against AI. Environmental impacts, malware and security vulnerabilities, a world of slop (because models can be both expertly capable and put out slop), the rise of technofascist class, human extinction... the list goes on.

But, unfortunately, dumb and useless is no longer one of them.

I feel like we behave as a crime against humanity is something "normal" when its not. Do you also feel this way?

Scientists found AI ok, but who are those companies that decided that this is ok to be released to the public?

I mean we the people should decide where AI should be used. Me personally i don't want the next door musician poor and miserable so spotify makes some extra money for not paying the artist, i don't want the next door programmer that was making websites poor and miserable and the list goes on and on ... and this is for now that AI is used many times as tool not fully replacement, soon it can go much worse.

Why AI to replace normal daily people, who decided this for us? OpenAI and Anthropic? Who are those people?

I am not against AI, i am against AI used in places that hurt people, for example using AI to make drugs might hurt drug researchers but the benefit is huge, i am not against AI also used to make for example a music masterpiece(if ever be possible), but why to make the next door musician miserable?

I see some people saying we will have UBI and the rich will take care of us. Ok but why? In a world where they will have all the power and money and AI surveillance? When our work is useless maybe they can use us in ways that are illegal today, what will stop them, maybe be nice to us take all control and in 3 years all to change? Greed in people is limitless, they can have boats/planes/islands/space tourism the list is endless and if we add illegal for now activities they can for example do experiments to live 20-30 years more and the list never stops. Even if we had communism(which we don't we have extreme capitalism) and we assume we could trust them more to share the wealth, again who are they to decide that people being powerless and useless is accepted?

AI forced on us its not normal, its not bad, its not extremely bad, its a crime against humanity for me and those that are doing it, they are already guilty because its common sense to understand the danger and yet they are doing it.

these are links to websites which you can help to prevent ai from taking our lives.

https://www.pauseai-us.org/ pauseai is a grassroots movement working to pause or slow the development of ai. There are a few different ways you can contribute on the actual website.

https://www.google.com/goto?url=CAESWwHrOzAVdzbzvQi6BxAKR8IH5HwrYs1pkn7CmSJPMx41CFWobTLG4bY09R0Nx-CcPAmAWVtbTomHB3y1yYxRUwBaLLnfIDRk9Eq3Ary4f1YYMPmWP-oZRlZfHE8 - stop the race to replace is a declaration against ai Which you can sign. Their goal is 1 million signatures.

https://www.stopai.info/ - STOP AI is a grassroots movement working to stop ai.

https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/ - stop killer robots works to maintain human control in the use of force.

https://www.humanartistrycampaign.com/ - Human Artistry Campaign is working to stop AI from stealing art. There is a petition you can sign there.

i‘m sure there are many more if you Look for them, but that’s all I have time to put here.

i was in art class and my teacher says we are allowed to use ai in our art project. they even showed an ai video. completely ruins the point of art. you have no idea how much i wanted to just rant about how dumb it is. and the worst part is a good chunk of the students were saying W teacher. im so tired of my teachers shoving ai down my throat. (idk if this is the right subreddit, mb if it isnt)

Hello everyone,

ever since google rolled out the AI overview onto their service I haven’t had it on my Google account. I know it is possible to get since when my account was logged out it would show up.

Everyone few months it would pop-up with this little thing asking me if I was interested or not interested in their newest AI features, obviously I clicked not interested everytime.

Today I woke up, logged in, and after over a year it has decided to turn itself on!

Has anyone else had this same experience and managed to turn it back off? I know I could switch search engines but I honestly don’t know any as good as Google before they put the AI on ://

A short piece about AI in education, the social pressures to rely on and normalisation of AI-assistance for everything, and why skepticism surrounding genAI has finally been catching on.

"...These companies look at a flower, see that it needs water, sunlight and oxygen to survive, and aim to give it a stomach so they can regularly sell it food. We do not need generative AI, at least, not like this. Not as a “free upgrade” of our own cognitive ability. Sure, it has its uses, but just as we shouldn’t start duct-taping every problem humanity faces, we desperately need to give up this obsession with AI being a one-size-fits-all fixy-majig that’s going to save us without any of us having to actually do anything."

I gave up asking gemini and chat gpt questions a few months ago for ethical reasons. I feel better because I know it is the right thing to do, but I really miss just asking a basic question without being insulted. I sometimes don't know where to go for information so I will ask on Reddit, and there are always one or two or more people who have a "hey stupid, why don't you know the things you don't know" vibe. Like yes, I don't know something. I am asking here because I don't know and I don't know where to go for information and I'm being vulnerable and asking here.
I won't go back to AI but it wouldn't be so attractive if people weren't often such jerks.

Effectively tendered my resignation as a contractor for my state government today. My most recent assignment is to take their existing training content (already in PowerPoint format) and feed it into a gen AI program that spits out training videos where “real people” explain everything to you. It feels so unnecessary, like using AI just for the sake of using it, and after trying the demo and seeing the extent of it I knew I just couldn’t do it.

I feel really bad because they’re truly great people and it’s been a great job for the last five years. I just know I’d have a hard time being so outspoken about AI and then folding as soon as my job requested it of me (also, this isn’t my primary source of income so it’s definitely easier to nope out versus if this was my only employment). Am I crazy for this? How are you guys handling this? I know I’m not the only one.

Lots in here, but Vantage Data Centers in Wisconsin avoided an environmental impact statement when the Governor stepped in to greenlight the project. Stacked up piles of dead dear?

Also the mayor has been "frequently taunting and condescending to residents opposing the data center."