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

[chaosmaker]

I find it increasingly threatening to our collective safety, the extent that our current idiocy in westminster is in bed with big tech and forcing ai on us.
I can't delete it from devices. Most social media is now embedding it again with no clue as to what they are hoping to achieve with it.
Children and young teens are increasingly using it to tell all their problems to and thinking of it as a sentient friend.
Nobody seems to be looking long term at how we are deskilling ourselves and trusting a database to tell them what to do when they are engaging with it.
It is possible to go through each whatsapp message and make it private from ai but with conditions. None of which I care about so have made mine private. Also can't search whatsapp for friends or ai does an internet search on them without actually connecting you to them.
WHO is holding all this data and what will it be used for above marketing purposes. I also spend a lot of time unticking the 'legitimate interest' boxes. It's not MY legitimate interest.

In general I think more tech is making us more stupid.
AIBU - no, no we need all the tech we can get
INBU (might have got the acronym wrong) - it's obviously right to be concerned about all this tech 'creep' into the world

Timely article by a philosopher:
https://unherd.com/2025/08/techno-politics-is-fuelling-public-anger/

"We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”.

You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonise space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind."

@ForestAtTheSea I think it's logical that AI would do the easier jobs first though.

However, things like digital twinning are used in more dangerous jobs, I think. So for example, if you see that nobody has come along to fix a water leak in the road, it will be because the digital twinning technology sensors will be operated elsewhere and then (hopefully) your water supply will be restored. And no one had to dig a massive hole in the pavement and climb into it.

As far as I can see, they are using generative AI to complement stuff like that.

There's also technology that will assist in things like disaster recovery zones, to assess whether it's safe for a human to go in or not. I don't know if that comes under AI. I think again it's more a case of it gets enhanced by AI.

I'm not sure where it crosses over with robots, but have you seen the robots folding the laundry? The ones that are made to look like lamps. I find it interesting that it takes two of them to fold the laundry and they're quite slow.

to be honest at this point, anything that seems to be progressing more slowly than I expected, I take as a win. I really do not want a long life anyway, but I shudder to think what life is going to look like in 30 years.

I feel people's personalities have changed a lot already as a result of this. It depends what kind of person you are. It totally doesn't work for me. I realise a lot of people love it though.

I suppose you have to factor in that a lot of people are really stupid and jump on anything new as good.
politicians probably want people deskilled and bereft of critical thinking skills.

ai is possibly the latest shiny bread and circuses

@EmeraldRoulette

what are the "easier jobs", though? composers or writers might have gone through college / university education, but collecting the bins is tough manual labour in all weathers and the necessity to get up at 3-4 am, to start at 7 - it probably varies by location. Depending on the country, waste collector is a job with an apprenticeship of 2-3 years.
They are both difficult jobs which require an education, but from completely different fields.

Haven't seen the laundry robots yet but your observation that they are very slow and need two robots shows that replicating manual tasks can be much more challenging and can help appreciate the work that people do.

I agree with you that robots and AI are extremely helpful when there are hazardous conditions - leaks in chemical plants for example - and in disaster zones and can help in quickly assessing complex situations. They can also help the emergency services.
But it is still very important that humans have the final oversight over decisions. And it also needs to be established in advance who is liable when there are errors, when the end users do not know the programming and decision making process of AI support.

However, disaster recovery is usually an area where there is not enough manpower right after an event, there is a deficit in both people and information, which means technical assistance can be tremendously helpful.

This is not the case in many other areas.

I know of the idea of digital twins.
But when a burst water pipe distributed water under a road, I don't think it can be fixed by remote work alone. Even if you have equipment that runs through the pipes and finds and fixes problems independently, for complex faults you'd probably still need to repair more than the pipe itself.

And this equipment was already available for wastewater pipes or oil and gas pipelines before there were digital twins, so it doesn't depend on it - though combining both is probably more efficient.

@ForestAtTheSea Sorry, I should've been clearer

I meant jobs that are physically easier to do. Or jobs that AI would find easier to do. So the companies are bound to target stuff that's cheap and straightforward from their perspective.

With the technology available on the oil rigs etc, I did wonder if "digital twinning" was just a new term for something that already exists, but I didn't know about.

I don't tend to say generative AI because I tend to think of it as the logical development of AI, if that makes sense.

I worry for my children, what will they even have to do when they are older? What will their world be like?

I wonder what the government think will happen when there is mass unemployment - will we have a universal wage? Who is going to pay that if the AI companies are making all the money? I doubt Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are keen on sharing. I feel the government are just ignoring the problem in the name of 'progress'!

@Beboopbadoopie I worry for my children, what will they even have to do when they are older?
People will be needed in droves to clear things up every time AI fucks up. Managing IT failures is already a £multi-billion industry. In the seventies we were told technology would give us all five days off a week, and electricity would be too cheap to meter. But we're working harder and longer than ever and costs are through the roof.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/26/can-ais-suffer-big-tech-and-users-grapple-with-one-of-most-unsettling-questions-of-our-times

And this is going so far down the rabbit hole I am sorely tempted to get under my duvet and stay there forever.

It’s gone beyond us now. US and China are fighting for control of AI whoever wins rules the earth. We (UK) are pretty irrelevant to this as we are out of the game. I only realised this recently.

Amen, sister! (To the op)

I am not seeing what value added AI is giving us and I’ve not been convinced by computers for a while, since ‘Web 2.0’ really. I used to like the WWW and the potential for information sharing that it offered. If anyone is interested, even Tim Berners Lee has expressed doubts.

I do not need a machine with dubious operators to read websites and summarise my information for me.

I do not see that our little island can supply the energy and water requirements for AI when it is already struggling to provide for all the humans here, and has already lost so much wildlife and habitats in the last 20 years. The whole world is already struggling ecologically and cannot afford this technology which costs so much and offers so little.

So why not scrap the new multi million industry of fire fighting and go back to actually producing what we need ourselves in an ecologically sustainable manner.

I will preface this by saying I work in a big tech related field so I basically need to get on with embracing AI or find a new industry, however that aside, I think we are at a juncture similar to when the internet became mainstream in the late 90s/early 00s and it can’t be avoided or ignored. Some work will inevitably become obsolete but it will also create new and different opportunities, children will need to be taught how to navigate that safely in the same way we now teach them about the internet. We are here online on Mumsnet so we can appreciate the benefits and challenges of internet for modern life. there are lessons to be learned from the ‘lawlessness’ of the internet and the effects we feel of that now, however AI already has significant regulation and guardrails compared to the internet in its early days.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Because that doesn't profit the super-wealthy.

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.🙄

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.

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

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

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.

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

The pathology is there. This is nothing new.

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!

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.

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.