“AI is going to kill us all”
“AI is so powerful, it will hack everything”
"Why don’t you like AI?
Well yeah it’s bad, look at the people pushing hardest for it and that tells you all you need to know.
Billionaires will use AI in every way they can to profit from you, whether it be taking your works to train it, serving you slop, trying to rope you in to paying monthly to support their multi-billion dollar boondoggle, or attacking and killing brown people, liberals, and other “undesirables.”
AI is a symptom, its not the root of the problem. If AI had popped up in a time where the common persons wellbeing was prioritised it would be hailed as miraculous.
We have a political problem, dont let the foreground distract you.
I disagree. I think the technology is halfbaked at best, and deeply damaging to all aspects of society in its current form/implementation regardless of political atmosphere (although, it certainly does not help)
For those who disagree, please note that i agree there are a select very few fields that require a specialized industry standard LLM for processing data in a tedious way. These are obviously not included, but the amount of users actually doing that is surely less than 50,000 highly academic individuals in the world. The entire rest of the usage is “destroying my codebase”, “eroding my technical skills (that ive built over decades) in 2 weeks”, “im too lazy to update my calendar i dont read anyways” and “bird-box bad guy-esque ‘look at this uncreative garbage that no one wants to look at’ posting”
Given to the public at any point in history in its current state would be overwhelmingly negative. The general public should not have access to this, and those that do should be highly regulated. Ideally it would have about 5 years or so longer to increse efficiency before deploying hundreds of databases everywhere all the time.
Sure, but fighting AI is also a fight against these corpos and unfettered capitalism.
It’s an invented, made-up industry that is not necessary. The people may be suckers for a sale but they’re not fools.
The poll is here and includes many questions beyond this one that grabbed headlines: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2026-10/ABC-Post-Ipsos Trend Topline 10.21.pdf
Including these two questions:
Pretty consistently, about 4/10 Americans polled are irredeemable pieces of shit. Really closer to half.
Well, sure. But how do they feel about SI?
Not that I expected it in our timeline, but my brain thought this would be about some push towards metric units in the us
I’m all over this multi-dimensional spectrum…
I think AI is terrible for society; at least how society is currently structured. I also think society is terrible for AI.
The reason AI sucks, and the reason we’re even calling this tier of ML “AI” to begin with, is because of global capitalism’s incentives. And the reasons “AI” is bad for society is because our society is globally capitalist. From jobs, to loneliness, to disinformation, to the environment, to education, to the lack of critical thinking,… Everything AI makes worse is already weakened by our societal systems, and they incentivize using AI to further degrade them in order to expand, control, and extract.
I love AI and the world, in theory. I hate AI and the world for how they exist right now.
57% of Americans think AI is bad for society, 66% oppose new data centers, and Silicon Valley’s response is to build more data centers so AI can explain why the public is wrong. Apparently »democratizing AI« means giving billionaires the power to ignore democracy at industrial scale.
Of course.
The US is filled with chavinists who can’t tell the difference between a social issue, a political issue, and an emerging technology.
And your comment is an incredibly reductive view of people who have already been effected negatively by AI.
You are adding to the same bullshit you claim to be making a smart comment against.
Try again.
It is a reductive view, but at least I have a point.
Bad things happening to people is a social problem which should be addressed. You making it personal is a political problem, and the Internet is the enabling technology. The Internet didn’t make you or I into assholes by itself.
RTL 2
Ok now do vaccines. The public isn’t very smart. Only 51% trust the childhood vaccine schedule
Ah, yes, data centers and vaccines, totally similar fucking things that can be easily compared
Sure they can. The fundamental similarity here is anti-intellectualism, a distrust in the notion that science and technology are positive things that can enhance our lives. America is rife with it these days and the result is all sorts of beliefs sweeping through society that stand in opposition to what the “experts” say. Vaccines cause autism. Pasteurization is bad. “Chemicals” or “GMOs” are bad. Transgenderism isn’t real. Data centers are responsible for vast quantities of water consumption. LLMs are incapable of creating anything original. And so on. Once these beliefs get rooted then any effort to dislodge them only becomes part of the narrative of untrustworthy oligarchs and technocrats trying to manipulate people, which is especially tricky because many of them are trying to manipulate people. Makes it hard to know which authorities to trust without learning enough to become one yourself, and learning is hard when you don’t know which information sources to start with.
Unfortunately I have no idea how to counter such a large-scale movement in society. As the old saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. A lot of the anti-science sentiment comes from irrational sources - fear of the uncertain future, fear of losing prestige and power, fear of loss of personal autonomy. Some of those fears are rooted in real concerns but the reactions they can provoke are not necessarily productive.
It’s more than anti intellectualism though.
Many people are just sick of being forced into a society that only values productivity, gives nothing back to you for your efforts, and expects more time out of your week than you get with your family.
AI hasn’t solved any of that, it’s made all of it worse.
LLMs have accelerated people’s worst aspects.
There’s some truth to the fact that anti-intellectualism plays some part in the backlash to both vaccines and AI.
But there’s a difference: vaccines were pushed by medical science and governments around the world as a solution to a real problem (disease), with pretty much no side effects at societal scale.
Generative AI is being pushed by greedy companies (and governments that don’t want to lose this artificial “arms race”) as a solution to nobody’s problem, and with a lot of side effects (global warming, raising power bills, raising the cost of electronic devices, filling the internet with crap, making the internet less secure, lowering open source incentives, making it easier for bad actors to influence democracy, etc. I could go on).
I don’t dislike GenAI, and I think it can be a good technology when well implemented: narrow AI, or general AI with open training datasets and open weights that anyone (or at least a small company) can run locally. Instead we’re getting super general AI controlled by an oligopoly of companies that see you as the product, partnering with governments that want to surveil and control you.
