I want to let people know why I’m strictly against using AI in everything I do without sounding like an ‘AI vegan’, especially in front of those who are genuinely ready to listen and follow the same.
Any sources I try to find to cite regarding my viewpoint are either mild enough to be considered AI generated themselves or filled with extremist views of the author. I want to explain the situation in an objective manner that is simple to understand and also alarming enough for them to take action.
Most people are against AI because of what corporations are doing with it. What do you expect corporations and governments are going to do with any new scientific or technological advance? Use it for for the benefit of humanity? Are you going to stop using computers because coorporations use them for their benefit harming the environment with their huge data centers? By rejecting the use of this new technological advance you are avoiding to take advantage of free and open source AI tools, that you can run locally on your computer, for whatever you consider a good cause. Fortunately many people who care about other human beings are more intelligent and are starting to use AI for what it really is, A TOOL.
“According to HRF’s announcement, the initiative aims to help global audiences better understand the dual nature of artificial intelligence: while it can be used by dictatorships to suppress dissent and monitor populations, it can also be a powerful instrument of liberation when placed in the hands of those fighting for freedom.”
If it’s real life, just talk to them.
If it’s online, especially here on lemmy, there’s a lot of AI brain rotted people who are just going to copy/paste your comments into a chatbot and you’re wasting time.
They also tend to follow you around.
They’ve lost so much of their brains to AI, that even valid criticism of AI feel like personal insults to them.
Yup, that’s dbzer0
They’ve lost so much of their brains to AI, that even valid criticism of AI feel like personal insults to them.
That’s the issue. I do wish to warn me or even just inform them of what using AI recklessly could lead to.
Why care?
You’re wanting to go out and argue with people and try to use logic when that part of their brain has literally atrophied.
It’s not going to accomplish anything, and likely just drive them deeper into AI.
Plenty of people that need help actually want it, put your energy towards that if you want to help people.
The post is aimed at me facing situations where I state among people I know that I don’t use AI, followed by them asking why not. Instead of driving them out by stating “Just because” or get into jargons that are completely unbeknownst to them, I wish to properly inform them why I have made this decision and why they should too.
I am also able to identify people to whom there’s no point discussing this. I’m not asking to convince them too.
I wish to properly inform them why I have made this decision and why they should too.
You’re asking how to verbalize why you don’t like AI, but you won’t say why you don’t like AI…
Let’s see if this helps, imagine someone asks you:
I don’t like pizza, how do I tell people the reasons why I don’t like pizza?
How the absolute fuck would you know how to explain it when you don’t know why they don’t like pizza?
You do have a point. I think I may be overthinking this after all. I’ll just try to talk with them about this upfront.
Why care?
To give some fucks, probably.
I paste people’s AI questions into a chatbot for the humor of it.
They’ve lost so much of their brains to AI, that even valid criticism of AI feel like personal insults to them.
More likely they feel insulted by people saying how “brain-rotted” they are.
What would the inoffensive way of phrasing it be?
Genuinely every single pro-AI person I’ve spoken with both irl and online has been clearly struggling cognitively. It’s like 10x worse than the effects of basic social media addiction. People also appear to actively change for the worse if they get conned into adopting it. Brain rot is apparently a symptom of AI use as literally as tooth rot is a symptom of smoking.
Speaking of smoking and vaping, on top of being bad for you objectively, it’s lame and gross. Now that that narrative is firmly established we have actually started seeing youth nicotine use decline rapidly again, just like it was before vaping became a thing
What would the inoffensive way of phrasing it be?
…and then you proceed to spend the next two paragraphs continuing to rant about how mentally deficient you think AI users are.
Not that, for starters.
The lung capacity of smokers is deficient, yes? Is the mere fact offensive? Should we just not talk about how someone struggling to breathe as they walk up stairs is the direct result of their smoking?
This is literally begging the question.
I don’t think it is, nor do I think name dropping random fallacies without engaging with the topic makes for particularly good conversation. If you have issues with OP’s phrasing it would benefit all of us moving forward if we found a better way to talk about it, yes?
It’s not a random fallacy, it’s the one you’re engaging in. Look it up. Your analogy presupposes an answer to the question that is actually at hand. It’s the classic “have you stopped beating your wife” situation.
I want my creations to be precisely what I intend to create. Generative Ai makes it easier to make something at the expense of building skills and seeing their results
You’d rather make your own painting than fill in a coloring book?
What are some good reasons why AI is bad?
There are legitimate reasons people worry about AI. Here are some of the strongest, clearly framed concerns:
1. Bias and unfair decisions
AI systems often learn from biased data and can unintentionally discriminate—against certain races, genders, ages, or socioeconomic groups—in hiring, lending, housing, policing, and more.
2. Lack of transparency
Many AI models act as “black boxes,” making decisions that are hard to explain. This creates problems when the stakes are high (medical diagnosis, legal decisions, etc.).
3. Privacy risks
AI can analyze huge amounts of personal data, track behavior, or identify people through facial recognition—often without explicit consent.
4. Job displacement
Automation threatens certain categories of work, particularly routine or repetitive jobs. Without proper planning, this can increase inequality and unemployment.
5. Misinformation and deepfakes
AI makes it easier to create convincing fake audio, video, or text. This can undermine trust in media, fuel propaganda, and destabilize democratic processes.
6. Weaponization
AI can be used in autonomous weapons, cyberattacks, targeted surveillance, or manipulation—raising serious security and ethical issues.
7. Overreliance and loss of human skills
As AI does more tasks, people may become too dependent, reducing critical thinking, creativity, or expertise in certain fields.
8. Concentration of power
Powerful AI tools tend to be controlled by a few big companies or governments, potentially leading to monopolies, inequality, and reduced individual autonomy.
9. Alignment and control risks
Advanced AI systems may behave in unexpected or harmful ways if their goals aren’t perfectly aligned with human values—even without malicious intent.
10. Environmental impact
Training large AI models consumes significant energy and resources, contributing to carbon emissions.
If you want, I can also provide reasons why AI is good, help you construct an argument for a debate, or analyze specific risks more deeply.
Were you looking for this kind of reply? If you can’t express why you have an opinion maybe your opinion is not well founded in the first place. (Not saying it’s wrong, just that it might not be justified/objective.)
Please, for the love of god, tell me you didn’t write that post with AI, because it really looks like that was written with AI.
Except the first phrase and last paragraph, it was AI. Honestly, it feels like OP is taunting us with such a vague question. We don’t even know why they dislike AI.
I’m not an AI lover. It has its place and it’s a genuine step forward. Less than what most proponents think it’s worth, more than what detractors do.
I only use it myself for documentation on the framework I program in, and it’s reasonably good for that, letting me extract more info quicker than reading through it. Otherwise haven’t used it much.
“Good catch! I did make that up. I haven’t been able to parse your framework documentation yet”
My question was genuine. I haven’t been an avid user of generative AI when it was first released and decided against using it at all lately. I tried to use it in niche projects and was completely unreliable. Its tone of speech is bland and the way it acts as a friend feels disturbing to me. Plus the environmental destruction it is causing on such a large scale is honestly depressing to me.
All that being said, it is not easy for me to communicate these points clearly to someone the way I have experienced it. It’s like the case for informing people about privacy; casual users aren’t inherently aware of the consequences of using this tool and consider it a godsend. It will be difficult for them to convince that the tool they cherish to use so much is not that great after all, thus I am asking here what the beat approach should be.
I haven’t been an avid user of generative AI when it was first released and decided against using it at all lately. I tried to use it in niche projects and was completely unreliable. Its tone of speech is bland and the way it acts as a friend feels disturbing to me. Plus the environmental destruction it is causing on such a large scale is honestly depressing to me.
Isn’t that exactly the answer you are looking for?
The “environmental destruction” angle is likely to cause trouble because it’s objectively debatable, and often presented in overblown or deceptive ways.
You beat me to it. To make it less obvious, I ask the AI to be concise, and I manually replace the emdashes with hyphens.
I haven’t tested it, but I saw an article a little while back that you can add “don’t use emdashes” to ChatGPT’s custom instructions and it’ll leave them out from the beginning.
It’s kind of ridiculous that a perfectly ordinary punctuation mark has been given such stigma, but whatever, it’s an easy fix.
just say that you don’t want to use it. why are you trying to figure out good reasons that somebody else came up with to not use something you have to elect to use in the first place? just say “I don’t want to use genAI”. you don’t need to explain yourself any further than that.
That’s perfectly fine if anyone just doesn’t want to use it, but he’s “strictly against” it and he’s searching for reasons. Pretty irrational IMO. It doesn’t surprise me, it’s the general trend regarding almost any subject nowadays, and you can’t blame AI for that.
“It’s a machine made to bullshit. It sounds confident and it’s right enough of the time that it tricks people into not questioning when it is completely wrong and has just wholly made something up to appease the querent.”
I know people like this lol
This reminds me of those posts from anti-vaxers who complain about not being able to find good studies or sources that support their opinion.
I normally ask them if they have a moment to talk about the rebirth and perseverance* Nurgle. For they already embrace his blesses on the land.
I am telling people to refrain from wasting my time with parrotted training data and that there is no “I” in LLMs. And that using them harms the brain and the corporations behind are evil to the core. But yeah, mostly I give up beyond “please don’t bother me with this”
Check out wheresyoured.at for some “haters guides.”
My general take is that virtually none of the common “useful” forms of AI are even remotely sustainable strictly from a financial standpoint, so there’s not use getting too excited about them.
The financial argument is pretty difficult to make.
You’re right in one sense, there is a bubble here and some investors/companies are going to lose a lot of money when they get beaten by competitors.
However, you’re also wrong in the sense that the marginal cost to run them is actually quite low, even with the hardware and electricity costs. The benefit doesn’t have to be that high to generate a positive ROI with such low marginal costs.
People are clearly using these tools more and more, even for commercial purposes when you’re paying per token and not some subsidized subscription, just check out the graphs on OpenRouter https://openrouter.ai/rankings
None of the hyperscalers have produced enough revenue to even cover operating costs. Many have reported deceptive “annualized” figures or just stopped reporting at all.
Couple that with the hardware having a limited lifespan of around 5 years, and you’ve got an entire industry being subsidized by hype.
Covering operating costs doesn’t make sense as the threshold for this discussion though.
Operating costs would include things like computing costs for training new models and staffing costs for researchers, both of which would completely disappear in a marginal cost calculation for an existing model.
If we use Deepseek R1 as an example of a large high end model, you can run a 8-bit quantized version of the 600B+ parameter model on Vast.Ai for about $18 per hour, or even on AWS for like $50/hour. Those produce tokens fast enough that you can have quite a few users on it at the same time, or even automated processes running concurrently with users. Most medium sized businesses could likely generate more than $50 in benefit from it per running hour, especially since you can just shut it down at night and not even pay for that time.
You can just look at it from a much smaller perspective too. A small business could buy access to consumer GPU based systems and use them profitably with 30B or 120B parameter open source models for dollars per hour. I know this is possible, because I’m actively doing it.
“There are emerging studies about AI induced psychosis[1], and there is a possibility to go psychotic even if one doesn’t have pre-conditions to become one. I would like to be cautious with the danger, like with cigaretes or Thalidomide. You never know how it might be dangerous.”
Very simple.
It’s imprecise, and for your work, you’d like to be sure the work product you’re producing is top quality.
The most reasonable explanation I’ve heard/read is that generative AI is based on stealing content from human creators. Just don’t use the word “slop” and you’ll be good.
Except that is also a subjective and emotionally-charged argument.
I’m just honest about it… “I don’t find it useful enough and do find it too harmful for the environment and society to use it”
And you then spend longer verifying the information its given you than you would have spent just looking it up to begin with.
In a way aren’t you asking “how can I be an AI vegan, without sounding like an AI vegan”?
It’s OK to be an AI vegan if that’s what you want. :)
The fuck is an AI vegan? There isn’t meat and AI isn’t food.
It’s called a euphemism. We all know that a vegan is someone who does not use animal products (e.g. meat, eggs, dairy, leather, etc). By using AI in front of the term vegan, OP intimates that they do not use AI products.
I suspect you’re smart enough to know this, but for some reason you’re being willfully obtuse.
~Then again, maybe not. 🤷♂️~
Your bed isn’t really made for a king or queen.
Oh great the bots are hallucinating.
They’re saying you’re taking things too literally and not thinking about the potential meaning of the sentence.
There is a belief that a lot of Vegans basically preach to others and look down on people who still consume meat. Their use of AI Vegan was meant to utilize that background and apply it to AI, so they don’t want to come off as someone preaching or being a snob about their issues with AI.
I get the impression his bed was made for twins.
The fuck it’s not.
Baseless slur made up by corporate-pushed mainstream media to normalize giving time and money to the AI companies that paid for their airtime
Ah ok. You might be new to language? There’s this thing called analogy
Oh hey, language is supposed make ideas easier to transmit. The term is fucking clunky, using AI is not akin to diet.
Communicate clearer.
OP came up with the analogy. I understood quite well and caught up with it easily. Well done OP!
It seems to mean people who don’t consume AI content not use AI tools.
My hypothesis is it’s a term coined by pro-AI people to make AI-skeptics sound bad. Vegans are one of the most hated groups of people, so associating people who don’t use AI with them is a huge win for pro-ai forces.
Side note: do-gooder derogation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation ) is one of the saddest moves you can pull. If you find yourself lashing out at someone because they’re doing something good (eg: biking instead of driving, abstaining from meat) please reevaluate. Sit with your feelings if you have to.
You say “pro-AI” like there’s a group of random people needing to convince others to use the tools.
The general public tried them, and they’re using them pretty frequently now. Nobody is forcing people to use ChatGPT to figure out their Christmas shopping, but something like 40% of people have already or are planning on using it for that purpose this year. That’s from a recent poll by Leger.
If they weren’t at the very least perceived as adding value, people wouldn’t be using them.
I can say with 100% certainty that there are things I have used AI for that have saved me time and money.
The Anti-AI crowd may as well be the same people that were Anti-Internet 25 years ago.
Of course people are using AI. It’s the default behavior of Google, the most popular web search. It confidently spits out falsehoods. This is not an improvement.
And there are definitely people “needing to convince others to use the tools.”. Microsoft and Google et al are made of people. They’re running ads to get people to adopt it.
Buying stuff online and email are useful stuff in ways LLMs can only dream of. It is a technology nowhere near as good as its hype.
Furthermore , “the general public likes it” is a dubious metric for quality. People like all sorts of garbage. Heroin has its fans. I’m sure it’d have even more if it was free and highly advertised. Is that enough to prove it’s good? No. Other factors such as harm and accuracy matter, too.
Stop trying to make AI Vegan work. It’s never going to stick. AFAIK this term is less than a week old and smuggly expecting everyone to have already assimilated it is bad enough, but it’s a shit descriptor that is trading in right leaning hatred of ‘woke’ and vegans are just a scape goat to you.
Explain how AI haters or doubters cross over with Veganism at all as a comparison?
Like veganism, abstaining from AI is arguably better for the environment.
That’s not just true of those two things though. I’m looking for a tie that binds them together while excluding other terms. If it’s an analogy what is the analogy?
For me this was the first time hearing it. And it made immediate perfect sense what OP meant. A pretty good analogy!
Explain how AI haters or doubters cross over with Veganism at all as a comparison?
They’re both taking a moral stance regarding their consumption despite large swathes of society considering these choices to be morally neutral or even good. I’ve been vegan for almost a decade and dislike AI, and while I don’t think being anti-AI is quite as ostracizing as being vegan, the comparison definitely seems reasonable to me. The behaviour of rabid meat eaters and fervent AI supporters are also quite similar.
But there are other arguments against ai besides consumption of resources. The front facing LLMs are just the pitch. The police state is becoming more oppressive using AI tracking and identification. The military using AI to remote control drones and weapon systems is downright distopian. It feels like they’re trying to flatten the arguments against AI into only an environmental issue, making it easier to dismiss especially among the population that doesn’t give a shit about the environment.
The way the term is being used here though is to refer to vegans as preachy and annoying; it’s not a pro-vegan term. It’s just not a nice term to use as it ostracizes and belittles people fighting for rights.
This is the first time I’ve encountered the term and I understood it immediately.
Congratulations? Does that make it universal? Dude was being a prick when someone didn’t know what it meant.
