I’ve been on Lemmy for about 2 weeks now, and I’ve noticed a trend:
The VAST majority of posts that mention AI in any manner are some dig or criticism or some other negative commentary, and the rare ones that have anything positive to say about it almost always have negative whatever-Lemmy’s-version-of-karma-is.
I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.
The internet has gotten a lot worse at nuance. People don’t know how to have a perspective other than pro or anti for controversial things, and if you’re going to think of AI as a brand with a team then the team it seems associated with is big tech fascists, a group Lemmy’s userbase will naturally regard as an enemy. Similar story as with cryptocurrency, it’s seen as a brand, and associated with all the negative things that are done with it. Technologies are seen as themselves having a moral stance.
The thing about AI is, that this kind of concentrated control over a technology is more baked into it than with other internet things.
You need control over heaps of training data to get anywhere with it and you need a lot of computing power to train it and to run it.
Not impossible to do for smaller players, but a lot harder to compete with the giants.
And on top of that it kinda clashes with traditional open source code sharing. The code alone isn’t helping you much, if you don’t have access to the above.
Yes, you can copy and share a trained AI model, but that’s not the same as sharing code and it is fundamentally intransparent. So in a way it automatically violates some of the free software principles. Which might also rub the Lemmy crowd the wrong way, since many people here lean towards free software.