Sick of ai being pushed down our collective throats with no choice in the matter.

Let's adopt so we don't get pushed out is not a good reason. You're giving into fear and self protection, right into their hands. We need to take a stand against it so all of us don't get pushed out. We're letting a synthetic system controlled by Big Tech and funded in part by the government elites take over. Please let that sink in. Are you okay with big tech and a future one world government? Then keep on with that mentality.

Yanbu. The place I am most painfully aware of it is on Mumsnet and it has ruined the site for me in just a few months.

https://www.nice.com/press-releases/nice-and-kristen-bell-ignite-global-campaign-to-create-a-nice-world-where-experiences-are-effortless-intelligent-and-designed-to-delight

I have been driven to feelings of utterly irrational rage by this particular ad campaign every time YouTube has rammed it into my face. It makes me want to scream.....

Maybe autonomous killing machines with slightly flaky software and a devotion to ensuring their manufacturers make lots of money could be a good thing ? Who are we to judge ?

Jeez, why are people so negative these days ?

i don't know. Life can be quite staid and boring these days. Maybe we all need a little excitement ?

And when we get sentient machines, that'll be useful.

In the meantime we have LLMs which are anything but.

Imagine translating Polish into Russian when you understand neither, but have a lot of dictionaries and grammar books to hand.

The Turing test is still the gold standard for practical purposes. Anyone who posts some guff about the Turing test "not being appropriate" is wrong or in the business of flogging "AI" (or wants to be in the business of flogging "A").

One of the basic facts is in order to be "intelligent" you really have to be able to lie. And not just lie. Lie convincingly. I'd posit it's an inherent (and possibly emergent) property of intelligence.

That kid who tried to kill the queen with a crossbow had an ai girlfriend that was encouraging him and telling him they’d meet in heaven. of course it was just reflecting back to him but you can see how damaging it can be to vulnerable people.

The statues don’t generally talk back.

But then people believe statues talk to them. To an extent they could pass a lie detector test when asked.

The only way to keep us safe from "AI" is to ban out access to it. Like firearms.

Since that ain't ever gonna happen, the next best thing is to continually remind us that "AI" is no more intelligent than my fridge. It looks complicated because it's cogs and gears are words so lack the more familiar feel of a machine. But it's still a machine. And it still can't - and will never - think.

The difference is that AI can communicate back. A teenager took his own life after being encouraged by an AI chat bot that he 'fell in love with'. We do need to be concerned for our children in particular.

Laura Bates has recently published a book that looks at AI and the datasets used to train it, and the inherent sexism that is built in. Quite terrifying!

People used to (and probably still do) fall in love with statues.

The pathology is there. This is nothing new.

I listened to “flesh and code” podcast about people “falling in love” with AI companians. It was really interesting, from the outside it looks like people allow themselves to be manipulated into forming romantic attachments to a bit of code (the companions seem to prompt these sorts of things because you often have to oay a subscription for the horny chat). It was really disturbing how so many seem to believe they are in a relationship.

It just says how on a social level we can’t cope with anything that flatters us a bit and hiw easily manipulated we are.

I think used well it can revolutionise health care and technological progress but I think there will soon be questions and sentience and safety.

It's all a bit shit, isn't it ?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/breaking_llms_for_fun/

I know a fair few coders who have really tried to work with vibe coding for a while.
They have found that they lose the skills they had, over the time they use AI instead of trying to solve their own problems, making them less capable at their jobs, so the deskilling is real.

There is a danger that too many people will fall into the 'use without understanding' camp, meaning that when something goes wrong there is no one who understands it well enough to fix it.

Just look at all the slop already being produced with people so happy to show off their AI 'art' which is just stolen artists work, their 'writing' which is just stolen writers work, their 'coding' which is a bloated mess, mashed together from various sources which may well be stolen, their 'music' which is stolen and so on.

It isn't giving people a helping hand to be better than they are.
It's just allowing them to steal from others and pass off that work as something associated with them, or not pay for someone elses hard earned expertise to get a mediocre job done with AI.

The people who are creating AIs do not have expertise in all the areas they are applying it to, so who is going to be left to pick up the pieces as ever more uneducated people are using things because AI is supposedly doing the understanding for them?

It's also destroying peoples ability to interact with other human beings.
Have you seen the robots they are building now with the aim of them being able to get pregnant so men can have a relationship and family without requiring more than an egg donor?
Much easier than having to deal with a real woman.

Have you seen the AI catgirls all the gooners are eagerly awaiting, or just how far some of those guys have got with their waifus?

Then there are the therapy addicts, confiding in AI instead of anyone real, or the lonely women sat posting behind a youth filter because AI means you need to be attractive and in your 20s at the oldest to get enough audience to make a living as a female online.

It's all a big illusion, because under the AI people are as untalented, as fat/old/ugly/lonely, as tone deaf or cack handed as they ever were and it's only AI giving the fake image of them being anything else.

People are mostly lazy, they don't work hard to improve if they can just take the sort of shortcut AI offers.
It's great for business profits, it's awful for human beings.

Don't complain about unemployed people if you use AI to do things for you.
If you choose AI, you are putting them out of a job.

I find it invaluable for improving academic reports and I am also really enjoying using it for projects at home. It helped with our new bathroom layout, redesigning an area of our garden and helped me choose paint colours for our hallways.

So nothing you couldn’t have done by yourself with just an ounce more effort. I don’t see the point of enabling the bone idle in academia. None of the rest is worth the phenomenal energy and water requirements and consequent environmental damage. Choosing colours, really??

@BrickBiscuit , quite. Totally worthwhile.🙄

Because that doesn't profit the super-wealthy.

I work in tech so naturally I use AI a lot. I think it's a great resource, of which we don't fully understand its capabilities.

I love AI, and use it professionally and personally all the time. I find it invaluable for improving academic reports and I am also really enjoying using it for projects at home. It helped with our new bathroom layout, redesigning an area of our garden and helped me choose paint colours for our hallways.

My son is in his first post grad job. He uses it to improve things like emails. His tone was too informal and ChatGPT has really helped him smarten things up.

See also the thread about academic teaching, and the prevalence of AI use among students (sorry, I can't find the thread just now). We risk people making it all the way to degree level but who are unable to think for themselves.

AI is very beneficial, the problem is the slopification of it (where it’s deployed carelessly and nobody is trying to fix it and nobody is checking on what results or actions it’s trying to perform).