I posted a similar topic early today but worded it wrong that was my mistake. I’m genuinely curious how people have reached to this point and what they hope to achieve after. I understand getting rid of AI/LLM is the obvious one. What do you think we should do to get to that goal or your personal goal.
I’ve been playing around with chatbots since they arrived in the mid 90s. It was fun.
I tried the first iterations of the new LLMs and decided they too could be fun, but are useless and untrustworthy for real life situation whether personal or business. Definitely not worth the cost to the environment, society, or the nature and wielding of power in the world.
What cemented it was when someone wrote, paraphrasing here, that LLMs are going to be like asbestos. Initially seeming like some kind of wonder solution to all kinds of problems until we realize it creates much worse problems. And like asbestos, the abatement of LLMs will be long, slow, and costly. And will ruin a lot peoples lives in the meantime.
It’s less about the AI and more about how the AI is used by folks. It all boils down to how it lets people who don’t care about the quality produce way more than it lets people who care about quality produce, even as it helps both.
My experience browsing video content to discover new stuff is pretty much ruined. Folks that really don’t have a good idea prompt up crap. AI speeds up folks that don’t care about quality orders of magnitude more than it speeds up people that care about quality, so the flood favors low quality. Then there’s the knockoffs. Something looks like a creator that I liked and I’m not paying much attention and then 30 seconds in I’m wondering why the hell it’s so soul meltingly hollow, then I catch on it’s an AI knock-off riding the wave of a more popular channel.
In software development, folks that formerly trusted in the developers to do the job as they see fit now think themselves experts on software development. They prompted up “hello world” type fodder and now they are micromanaging folks with decades of experience. This happens to some extent with every tech fad, but this one is just way worse. Then there are people who have basically been pundits, high on opinion, low on actionable anything. They’ve always been annoying and pretty much wrong, but you could pretty much tune them out because everything they said amounted to nothing. Yeah, it’s annoying that they get paid to basically talk the way executives like, but at least they didn’t actually impact anything. Now they prompt up their bad ideas into pretty bad concepts, and there’s increased demand to pay attention to “almost realized concepts” that they convinced their executive friend looks good.
In terms of what to change, basically I don’t see a good way other than going back and just not figuring out this tech in the first place. I don’t see a path for leveling the playing field to penalize slop, for the narcissistic know-it-alls to go back to being on the sidelines.
I work in IT for a tech company that is embracing AI to an extent. We have a ticketing system for managing all the work we do. Tickets can range from simple tasks that take literally 5 minutes to complex multi-part collaborative projects that take weeks.
Recently I’ve been getting tickets that read like a miniature novel, with formatted sections labeled things like “summary”, “acceptance criteria”, and so on. It’s all clearly AI generated, and it makes it difficult to understand exactly what is being asked. I don’t need (or want) three pages of word salad when the requestor could have simply said “write a script to alert us when the API key ‘X’ is set to expire in 7 days”.
When I see tickets like these the first thing I do is go back to the requestor and ask them exactly what they want from me. Often times what they want is not what it sounds like their AI generated ticket is asking for, or at least specific details are wrong. And I have absolutely no problem wasting their time when they waste mine with this AI slop.
It’s really super simple what turned me against it. The absolute torrent of mindless garbage. Blogs and articles, and videos, and people who can’t hold a conversation without saying “Hang on, let me ask ChatGPT”, garbage code that people submit and demand I fix because “Claude said it should work” only to find out they couldn’t explain what it does or why, let alone figure out how it works themselves. The absolute sea of AI generated spam, the robo-calls, the infinite, endless baying of, infinite idiot electric sheep. People who literally cannot read without a chat bot reading it to them.
This is hell. This is hell and every single AI is an legion of demons, and all I have to slay it is the lump of bacon-flavoured jello with anxiety between my ears to slay all the trash it generates.
What should we do about it? I’m not putting that on the internet. Nice try though. If you want to fix it, you fix it by abandoning the digital wherever possible and living in the real world. Touching grass, talking face to face with real human beings. You’re not going to find the solutions in digital spaces. You find them in the faces and hands of your neighbours.
garbage code that people submit and demand I fix because “Claude said it should work”
Man, feel that in my soul. Someone had an issue and instead of asking for help they just sicked Claude on it. Claude replaced an error handling that induced a failure if it didn’t recognize data for management with code that just assigned random meaning to the data and mangled it. But the user insisted it was the right fix because it seemed to work in the moment. Still trying to get a look at the data they have that is causing the issue as they keep insisting the problem is ‘fixed’ instead of the silent data corruption I know it to be. Every freaking day I get AI slop suggestions from people who are unable to assess the slop and asking me to “just fix it, AI did most of the work already”. People who think I can’t ask Copilot or ChatGPT or Claude myself if I wanted, and think their slop to expound upon their point helps me, when I would rather just be fed the same thing they fed to a prompt instead. I’ll AI it up if it will help me, but all they did was bury their point in a bunch of obnoxious fluff.
fix it by abandoning the digital wherever possible and living in the real world. Touching grass, talking face to face with real human beings
Fun fact, an organization around me has started doing in person “job fairs” again, after years of saying “just apply online”, precisely because the online model of engagement has just become useless noisy.
When I watched about 5 maker videos in a row. Each one was struggling with a build. Then they all say “now until this point I had being using AI and realised it was lying to me/from the start. After searching the web for 20mins I found the answer” I genuinely said wtf out loud.
Shamefully I’ve also done this myself.
Its gernly not faster to seek information via LLMs even when they give you links to the data they’ve referenced.
I’ve also seen a high level exec use it to make a 10year department plan in the 5 minutes before a meeting.
Also both staff and managers using it for their relevant parts of performance reviews. They could just skip the review altogether and save time.
One thing we can do is stop calling it AI. It’s just a LLM and complex guessing machine.
Somethings (like performance reviews) need to be explicitly declared to NOT use AI.
I got a degree in data science cause machine learning is cool as hell. Interesting math that does cool shit, if a bit fiddly. We can process cancer scans faster and more accurately than ever before!
Then the fucking crypto bros showed up and thought you could use it to replace literally anything, stole the entire contents of the Internet, and gave us shit quality tools (validating my opinion that the tool is support, not replacement), and are destroying the planet in the process.
And I’ve given it a shot. Only tool that was useful was Claude and I kept it on a tight leash. Every app based on AI (gave up distinguishing LLM long ago) hasn’t been been worth the bits it was written with.
Edit: oh right, that thing where it’s also making us dumber. That’s in there too.
- LLM is good for language-related stuff. i.e., translation(also convert legalese to common street), summaries???, removing noise words from huge texts.
- generative models are suped up photoshop-bandaids
those are good at what they initially are made for.
- LLM for search: nobody asked for.
- LLM for ask jeeves?: search has already been doing this. website localized search is even better.
- LLM for writing: only for shitposting.
the marketing and shoe-horning around it are BS. if i can change something, i wish the improvement was more on protein-folding, weather prediction, farming and logistics.
I don’t know if LLMs are very good for translating legalese or foreign languages because they could add or remove things randomly why are important.
The niche I have found is when I could pretty much write the foreign language myself, but with poor spelling and grammar, so I have the LLM do it instead.
I dabbled with ChatGPT when it first came out, then this happened:
That was the catalyst that turned me against it. I’m a pretty big reader and I love finding new authors and stories. Knowing that people were cheating the system to make a quick buck did not sit well with me. Knowing that a scifi magazine that has published some of my favorite authors received so many bad submissions that they had to shut it down for a while made me angry.
Then came the information about inaccuracies, environmental issues, AI psychosis, and it being forced into Google searches made me not want to have anything to do with it. I was so disgruntled that I switched every one of my default search engines to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ so I can avoid it.
One of my biggest gripes is that people use it for an easy quick solution but do not verify the information is correct through other sources. I have a friend who is very into AI, to the point he told his employee that he must use it during work hours when trying to find solutions. I told him, if my boss said that, I would start looking for a new job immediately.
That said, I’m not entirely against LLMs in specific circumstances. I can see how it’s useful in research spaces, but it should be triple checked by a human. Or in creating documents and summaries of meetings, but again should be triple checked by real humans.
I don’t trust the output, I don’t trust the companies behind the output, I just don’t trust it.
It’s destroying software because juniors are no longer using their brain to learn.
It’s destroying intelligence because most people will use it as an external brain.
It’s being pushed into situations where having a black box of probability is not what you want. Support bots as an example, you want the same outcome for the same problem. Not a different outcome because someone didn’t put a question mark.
You don’t want the bot being able to hijack an account because it was asked in the specific way. See Facebook support bot.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/metas-ai-support-bot-instagram/You don’t want a chat bot to tell airline customers they can do something when the airline has a FAQ section specifically saying no you can’t.
See Air Canada support bot.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-knowYou don’t want AI bots hallucinating court cases to justify a case. Many news articles on this.
It’s used as a workforce reduction mask.
Businesses are using AI rollouts to lower the number of front line employees. Only for the tool to fail.
See Oracle firing 21,000 people to boost ai numbers.
https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/23/21000-oracle-jobs-vanish-amid-big-reds-big-bets-on-ai/5260086It’s oversold:
When Gardner says only 30% of AI deployments work as sold after asking over 700 IT executives. Why are people still treating it as anything but a broken tool?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/07/only-28-of-ai-infrastructure-projects-fully-pay-off/5221652For a black box of probability it is terrible at maths. There has been instances of AIs failing high school math tests.
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-ai-struggle-math-problems.htmledit: sources as I grab them on mobile.
While I agree with the environmental, ownership and financial concerns, for me it’s seeing how stupid and dependent it makes people.
If we can’t get rid of them as a society, we should at least restrict/ban them in schools and universities.Yup. Same here. Watching people choose atrophy for their own brains because they don’t want to write emails anymore radicalized me.
It’s shocking to see how lazy people are. I get the work stuff, it’s usually boring and many hate their jobs. But when it’s for personal stuff? Seriously, you’re offloading all your thinking to a random generator machine? If you have no curiosity about anything in life and want to be an LLM zombie, what’s the point of living at all?
The extreme damage to the environment they cause made me firmly against them. Add to that the destruction of the RAM and GPU markets, poisoning people’s water, skyrocketing cost of living, their use for mass surveillance, etc.
I’d honestly impose very strict environmental regulations and usage regulations. I’d also impose regulations preventing AI from replacing humans, given all AI isn’t reliable enough to do that in virtually any field.
This argument just proves you’re thinking with your emotions and completely ignoring logic. You’re simply repeating what you heard without any sort of critical thinking involved.
“The extreme damage to the environment they cause”
Like you don’t own a car, eat meat, or heat your home.
The environmental damage from AIs doesn’t even amount to a fraction of a percent of the pollution and environmental damage you cause simply by existing on this earth.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike AI, but anyone who starts with environmental reasons is being played so hard they don’t even know it.
Sounds like you are the one being played.
Transport, food and heating are not required because they are fun or nice to have. They are means to survive.
Energy and water consumption of data centers are different because the product (AI slop and best guesses) is NOT required to survive.
Sorry for existing (not sorry)
Do me a favour. Go look up the energy use per person for me in Germany, Spain, or the UK. Then go look up the energy usage per person in the USA or Canada and tell me again how necessary it is that transport, food, and heating are required energy use at the levels that currently happen in North America. You can repeat that same look from the “good” countries I listed to even lower use areas like Lithuania who still manage to heat and feed themselves on even less.
The way we live here is wasteful beyond belief, and the total value of that waste makes global AI energy usage look like a rounding error on one of the decimal points.
I’ll even make it easy for you by giving you a link to a page that has these values. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
You are still arguing a moot point.
Could and should we, in the western world, be more sustainable? Absolutely yes!
But do you think, that even MORE energy consumption for something as useless and flawed as current AI systems are is in any way justified?
Even if it is just a blip on the radar compared to energy that is used to survive, it is still more load that comes on top of current usage.
How much sense would it make to undertake efforts to reduce the energy that is used to live while at the same time using more energy to power data centers that mostly benefit some guys who bet on the usefullness of AI, even against common sense?
Even if it is just a blip on the radar compared to energy that is used to survive, it is still more load that comes on top of current usage
You aren’t allowed to be this upset about AI power usage while at the same time almost completely accepting the individual choices you’re making to waste 100s of times more power. There’s a term for this, Hypocrite.
The scales you’re suggesting are just not even close to each other. We could build 10x more AI datacenters, and we (the population of the world) would still end up saving significantly more energy by eating meat one fewer day per week and eating vegetarian that day instead. I’m not even kidding.
The things we could do by adjusting our diets, choosing more appropriate housing sizes, cohabitating more, walking, biking, public transit. Individually every single one of those dwarfs the amount of energy used by AI by orders of magnitude.
It’s the equivalent of yelling at your kid for leaving the LED bulb on in their bedroom all day, when you drove them to school and picked them up and it’s only a mile away. One driving trip, one day, uses more energy than that bulb does if left on all year.
I am not ‘allowed to be upset’? Lol, ok. Sounds like you see youself as some sort of moral police.
Call me a hypocrite if it makes you feel better but you are just skirting my point that the energy usage of AI is something that is unnecessary, just like the glowing LED lightbulb in your empty kitchen.
This makes you come across as either daft, or as someone who argues in bad faith.
Ever heard the saying “Penny Shy and Pound Foolish”
It’s literally what you’re doing right now.
There is a point there, though.
American cars are much less efficient than European ones.
The amount of water required for AI data centres worldwide is more than an order of magnitude lower than the water required for just corn in the US alone. Only a small fraction of which actually gets used for food.
The average energy usage per person in the US is nearly three times higher than someone in the UK.
The environmental cost of data centres is absolutely a concern, but we shouldn’t forget the US alone wastes more energy and resources than are used by data centres worldwide.
I’ll reply to this because I think it fits in refuting your greater point:
There is a point there, though.
No, there isn’t.
I, as a mere peasant, have only the power to vote for a better system. Something I often don’t even have as we have a dualopoly of right wing political parties in America, and probably won’t ever have a fair election again regardless at this point.
The billionaires who are putting up these AI data centers, poisoning our water at unprecedented rates, spiking electricity usage and costs at unprecedented rates, polluting our environment at unprecedented rates, are doing this entirely at their own will. They have the power to create major change. They’re using that power for evil.
This is a false equivalence. Especially when you remember its the same hyper-rich fucks that made America rely on cars, and made our cars inefficient gas guzzlers.
I don’t know what you think my greater point was, maybe you’ve accidentally conflated me with another poster.
My point actually is that these are not unprecedented rates. These are entirely precedented rates. This is gross capitalism destroying the world as gross capitalism always does. What you’ve lost sight of, though, is the respective scale of things.
As I said, the US alone needlessly wastes vastly more energy and water than the entire world’s usage of AI consumes. For energy, it’s several times more, for water it’s orders of magnitude more.
You make out that solving these massive problems is impossible, so instead you’re railing against AI. Which of course is your prerogative, but just remember that there are much bigger wins out there.
When we try to solve any of them, they literally send the military at us. Which is federally illegal, but you know, rules for us, not for them.
This argument just proves you’re thinking with your emotions and completely ignoring logic. You’re simply repeating what you heard without any sort of critical thinking involved.
Said just before you vomit some Redditor ass, fedora tipping neck bearded bullshit but I’ll let you continue.
“The extreme damage to the environment they cause”
Like you don’t own a car, eat meat, or heat your home.
Omg the dipshit is unironically doing the meme. Holy shit.
Hey dumbfuck, driving a car in America and heating my home in the winter isn’t a fucking option, its a necessity to live. You also have to be fucking delusional to think my collective pollution, meat eating included, is even slightly comparable to these power chugging, water and air poisoning AI data centers that are entirely optional to build and run, by the way.
The environmental damage from AIs doesn’t even amount to a fraction of a percent of the pollution and environmental damage you cause simply by existing on this earth.
- This is a laughably stupid statement.
- Source? Back up your claims with evidence.
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike AI, but anyone who starts with environmental reasons is being played so hard they don’t even know it.
Again, source? Or are you just regurgitating what you heard Sam Altmann say while you were grargling his nuts?
Total Datacenter energy use globally is about 1.5% of total Electricity use, which electricity usage itself only makes up about 20% of total global energy use. All Datacenter use isn’t even AI use, it’s every single datacenter holding up the internet from Netflix to Amazon to the Wix page created for your home business.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/data-centers-share-electricity-demand?country=~OWID_WRL
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
So again I assert (with sources that back me up) that AI energy use/pollution is a small fraction of a single percent of overall use.
You’ve been lied to, now you need to ask WHY you’re being lied to about AI energy use and pollution being a problem.
You’re also absolutely wrong about heating and transportation being necessities in their current form. There are real choices you can make to drastically reduce your footprint on the environment including things like living in a smaller home, or with more people under the same roof. Those choices can quite literally reduce your individual heating requirements by 70-90%, and often those housing options are located in higher density urban locations where public transit, walking, and cycling are significantly easier to do. Practically everyone in the world could live in Cities and realize these efficiencies, there’s no real reason stopping that from happening other than personal choice. People in North America have just normalized this ultra-spread out suburban bullshit that’s literally costing us the planet.
Why are you guessing when there is a lot of information available?
https://www.hanwhadatacenters.com/blog/what-are-the-power-requirements-for-ai-data-centers/
AI data center power demand will surge 160% by 2030, requiring 68 gigawatts of capacity compared to 10 gigawatts in 2025.
1 gigawatt is equivalent to about the energy usage for 800,000 homes. That is 8 millions homes right now projected to be 54 million homes of electricity in the next 4 years an increase of 580%
You have the gal to try and blame a single end user for their consumption when faced with this? You are clearly being disingenuous.
How much pollution does 68 gigawatt make!? Anywhere from 300-600 million metric tons of C02. This doesn’t include all the other pollution this energy generation will make. Just the C02.
“China makes one-third of all global carbon dioxide emissions, emitting roughly 13 billion metric tons annually. By contrast the United States, emits about 4.6 billion metric tons a year.”
Once again, just the C02 and wow. I am sure it is all the suburban populations fault in the US. Man you act like a corporate shill trying to blame pollution on the individual to shift the blame. Acting so dumb it hurts.
“according to a groundbreaking 2017 report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Climate Accountability Institute, just 100 companies were responsible for over 70% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.”
People need to do their part to reduce waste and people in North America definitely produce more than average. Pretending they are the problem is pure bullocks though.
You simply don’t seem to understand scale.
Lets use your article’s number. 68 Gigawatts of capacity required Globally, which is a little under 600 Terawatt hours per year. Global electricity production is around 29,000TWh Global total energy consumed per year (including non-electricity sources) is about 150,0000 to 160,000TWh
That puts AI use at about 2% of electricity use, and about 0.38% of total energy consumption. It’s quite literally a fraction of 1% even by your own numbers.
Your China argument math is bad as well. You can remove a billion people from China’s population, and they would still have more people than the US. They have 4.2x more people, and have only 2.8x as many carbon emissions.
I just explained the scale. Saying 2% is a nonsensical and reductionist argument that ignores the projected increase and the reality we don’t actually need AI at all.
It is not my math dude. If you want to argue the experts take it up with them, not me.
China produce 3 times as much pollution. Are you saying their 300 million rural farmers produce this pollution!? You are acting impossibly dumb right now.
The problem is industry, it always has been. Your ignorance to this issue and trying to shift the blame is pathetic.
That’s the projected increase from YOUR OWN FUCKING SOURCE by 2030, and it’s not 2%, it’s 0.38% of global energy use.
You’re clearly moving the goalposts because you recognize you’ve lost. I know it, you know it, and you’re still choosing to be mad about it instead of mad that global meat production uses somewhere between 12% and 20% of global energy usage. We could all literally start eating vegetarian, and save somewhere between 31x and 52x more energy than AI datacenters are projected to use. You could eat vegetarian just one day a week, and you’d still save somewhere around 5x as much energy.
You don’t practice what you preach, you’re a hypocrite.
Yes, and me burning tires in my backyard accounts for an even smaller portion of global emissions, so why does my HOA make such a big deal of it?
Participate, society, very smart, etc. Top notch.
The fuck is with the sudden influx of “innocent” pro-AI “I’m-just-asking” questions on the fediverse lately? Are you a troll using a bunch of alts, or are the tech bros so fucking desperate to get people’s buy in before the bubble pops that they’re posting fake shit on the fediverse of all places?
Dunno if this OP is part of it, but I’ve 100% seen a pretty big influx of pro-AI sentiment on Lemmy over the past couple of months
Nope, check my history I have been here for awhile. I just like asking questions in general.
I do wonder what makes my post appear pro AI?
I would answer this but I feel like it’s just a billionaire in disguise trying to figure out how to better market their product and that sums up why I hate 2026
I can’t even trust that you’re human. That’s why.
That is fair
Two main catalysts:
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Seeing how dumb 99% of products are.
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Seeing how dumb 99% of users are.
Call my naive, but I truly did not see it coming. I didn’t expect cognitive surrender. I didn’t expect the whole world to start continvoucly morging. I didn’t expect lawyers to submit fake case citations, again and again and again.
I didn’t expect society as a whole to just shrug their shoulders and decide that accuracy doesn’t matter.
I also didn’t expect how much or how rapidly the bubble would inflate. GPU prices were already crazy, but now RAM and even SSD prices have roughly doubled in the past year, with no end in sight, with all production toward data centers. This is a disaster. We’re seeing higher prices for downgraded machines, like Microsoft’s 8GB Surface.
Seeing as we’re all on Lemmy, I hope that I will not need to belabor the point that centralization is bad. The shift toward data centers and away from personal devices is a shift toward centralization. It’s a shift toward greater censorship and away from freedom.
It’s not coincidence that this is happening at the same time as fascism is rising all around the world, that online ID laws are passing all over the world, that privacy-protecting technology like VPNs and end-to-end encryption are under greater and greater attack, and that knowledge repositories like The Internet Archive and Wikipedia are under attack. The shift is toward governmental control of the Internet, of access to knowledge in general.
Now the US government gets the final say on who will have access to ChatGPT 5.6. Surprise, surprise.
I’m not anti-AI or anti-LLM per se. I am anti-corruption and anti-bullshit. I am pro-consumer, pro-privacy, pro-individuality. In practice, that means I am anti-AI. Or more generally (but less strongly), I am anti-cloud.
As for what I would do: well the real solutions are the same as the solutions to most of modern society’s problems. We need extensive economic reform. But barring that, we need to do whatever we can to shift the balance back toward personal, private computation. We don’t need more datacenters. We don’t need trillion-parameter models at all. The only thing they are good at is basic stuff you don’t need them for (unless you’re an idiot), and generating well-masked bullshit.
Edit: Oh, and I would also hold all the corporations accountable for their obviously-illegal behavior, like pirating all the copyrighted material in the world. We definitely need more transparency in terms of training data.
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