If tech billionaires were talking about how this will reduce your work week, enable Basic Universal Income, all while increasing production it would be one thing.

Are they doing that?

Or are they increasing the laying off of workers, increasing the work week for the remainder, reducing pay, and doing everything they can to create an inescapable surveillance state?

That’s an interesting question, especially since at least one poll suggests that BOTH sides of the political spectrum have significant reservations about A.I.

It’s bad for the environment, now uses half of all energy produced globally in just a few years.

It’s bad for society, automating labor without guaranteeing human needs is really really fucked up and basically kills unlucky people for no good reason.

It’s bad for productivity, it is confidently wrong just as often as it is right, the quality of the work is always sub par, it always requires a real person to baby it.

It’s bad for human development. We created a machine we can ask anything so we never have to think, but the machine is dumber than anyone using it so it just makes us all brain dead.

It’s complete and not getting better. The tech can not get better than it is now unless we create a totally different algorithmic approach and start from scratch again.

It’s an artificial hype bubble that distracts us from real solutions to real problems in the world.

It’s too energy hungry, it steals art and is giving artists a rough time. It’s the pinnacle of dehumanising hypercapitalism.

Lots of reasons.

It’s yet another thing that is only going to benefit corporations. Because they get unsleeping workers that don’t get sick or talk back or strike. They get to charge us for the benefits.

It’s built entirely off of everyone else’s work and content.

The servers that house the AI are draining water sheds and power grids and in the case of Elon Musk and Tennessee literally poisoning people.

It sounds way too much like a cult. Promising the sun and moon on essentially a chatbot.

It looks way to much like a bubble, our stock market is currently going up because of Nvidia largely.

AI taking over is literally one of the main plot points of Sci fi.

It’s infuriatingly blameless. If the AI therapist says “try meth” you can basically only sue the massive faceless organization that built it spinning your wheels for possibly nothing.

Driving people manic by feeding into delusions

It’s a God send to scammers, trolls, propaganda, sexual harassment, people in college just for the paper degree at the end, teachers who can’t be bothered to write, upper and middle management who can’t be bothered to write. Lots of just terrible people.

And for every new protein and material that’s discovered because of it. (Some of the most useful and least destructive uses of it) They are immediately gobbled up by patents for a corporation that now has even more control of the universe and everything useful in it. And no human can decide to just open it for the world like vaccines.

It’s doesn’t solve any problem I care about. In fact, it only worsens ones like climate change or wealth inequality.

https://lemmy.world/post/33939597 https://austinpost.com/business/2025/07/17/elon-musk-austin-data-center-planned That’s two in tx and tx was already running out of water and has been in a drought for decades.

I mean I see the benefits, but I also know many humans and most Americans are profoundly stupid, and AI is just going to exacerbate that.

With that in mind, I think it would be best for AI simply not to exist.

Because small number of people benefit from collective creation. Billionaires owned companies benefit from stealing and selling this stolen goods to people, saying them this is a thinking computer.

What if I go to your house, take picture of everything including your face and sell those pictures to porn company ? Are you ok with that ?

I’m against the massive, wasteful data centers that are destroying all climate targets and driving up water/electricity prices in communities. Their current trajectory is putting us on a collision course with civilization collapse.

If the slop could be generated without these negative externalities I don’t know if I’d be against it. China has actually made huge strides in reducing the power and water footprint of training and usage, so there’s maybe some hope that the slop machines won’t destroy the world. I’m not optimistic, though.

This seems like a dead-end technology.

Modern LLMs, incorrectly labeled as “AI,” are just the modern version of spell-check.

You know how often people create totally embarrassing mistakes and blame spell-check?

“AI” is another one of those.

And it also requires tons of water that could be going to people’s homes.

I see two reasons. Most people that are “left leaning” value both critical thinking and social fairness. AI subverts both of those traits. Firstly by definition it bypasses the “figure it out” stage of learning. The second way is by ignoring long establish laws like copyright to train its models, but also its implementation which sees people lose their jobs

More formally, it’s probably one of the purest forms of capitalism. It’s essentially a slave laborer, with no rights of ability to complain that further concentrates wealth with the wealthy.

Not mentioned so far:

• the costs involved in creating a market competitive AI is high, restricting who can enter the market. Effectively funneling control of what the magic answer box says to a select few.

I will not be surprised when they collectively stop mentioning some facts, then slowly start to deny them, then start to gaslight you into thinking you made it up.

AI removes critical thinking for you.

It steals from the copyright holders in order to make corporate AI money without giving back to the creators.

It uses insane amounts of water and energy to function, with demand not being throttled by these companies.

It gives misleading, misquoted, misinformed, and sometimes just flat out wrong information, but abuses its very confidence-inspiring language skills to pass it off as the correct answer. You HAVE to double check all its work.

And if you think about it, it doesn’t actually want to lick a lollipop, even if it says it does. Its not sentient. I repeat, its not alive. The current design is a tool at best.