57% of Americans think AI is bad for society, 66% oppose new data centers, and Silicon Valley’s response is to build more data centers so AI can explain why the public is wrong. Apparently »democratizing AI« means giving billionaires the power to ignore democracy at industrial scale.

Ok now do vaccines. The public isn't very smart. Only 51% trust the childhood vaccine schedule

RTL 2

I'm all over this multi-dimensional spectrum...

I think AI is terrible for society; at least how society is currently structured. I also think society is terrible for AI.

The reason AI sucks, and the reason we're even calling this tier of ML "AI" to begin with, is because of global capitalism's incentives. And the reasons "AI" is bad for society is because our society is globally capitalist. From jobs, to loneliness, to disinformation, to the environment, to education, to the lack of critical thinking,... Everything AI makes worse is already weakened by our societal systems, and they incentivize using AI to further degrade them in order to expand, control, and extract.

I love AI and the world, in theory. I hate AI and the world for how they exist right now.

Ah, yes, data centers and vaccines, totally similar fucking things that can be easily compared

Sure they can. The fundamental similarity here is anti-intellectualism, a distrust in the notion that science and technology are positive things that can enhance our lives. America is rife with it these days and the result is all sorts of beliefs sweeping through society that stand in opposition to what the "experts" say. Vaccines cause autism. Pasteurization is bad. "Chemicals" or "GMOs" are bad. Transgenderism isn't real. Data centers are responsible for vast quantities of water consumption. LLMs are incapable of creating anything original. And so on. Once these beliefs get rooted then any effort to dislodge them only becomes part of the narrative of untrustworthy oligarchs and technocrats trying to manipulate people, which is especially tricky because many of them are trying to manipulate people. Makes it hard to know which authorities to trust without learning enough to become one yourself, and learning is hard when you don't know which information sources to start with.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to counter such a large-scale movement in society. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. A lot of the anti-science sentiment comes from irrational sources - fear of the uncertain future, fear of losing prestige and power, fear of loss of personal autonomy. Some of those fears are rooted in real concerns but the reactions they can provoke are not necessarily productive.

Of course.

The US is filled with chavinists who can't tell the difference between a social issue, a political issue, and an emerging technology.

It's an invented, made-up industry that is not necessary. The people may be suckers for a sale but they're not fools.

And your comment is an incredibly reductive view of people who have already been effected negatively by AI.

You are adding to the same bullshit you claim to be making a smart comment against.

Try again.

It's more than anti intellectualism though.

Many people are just sick of being forced into a society that only values productivity, gives nothing back to you for your efforts, and expects more time out of your week than you get with your family.

AI hasn't solved any of that, it's made all of it worse.

LLMs have accelerated people's worst aspects.

The poll is here and includes many questions beyond this one that grabbed headlines: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2026-10/ABC-Post-Ipsos Trend Topline 10.21.pdf

Including these two questions:

It is a reductive view, but at least I have a point.

Bad things happening to people is a social problem which should be addressed. You making it personal is a political problem, and the Internet is the enabling technology. The Internet didn't make you or I into assholes by itself.

Pretty consistently, about 4/10 Americans polled are irredeemable pieces of shit. Really closer to half.

There's some truth to the fact that anti-intellectualism plays some part in the backlash to both vaccines and AI.

But there's a difference: vaccines were pushed by medical science and governments around the world as a solution to a real problem (disease), with pretty much no side effects at societal scale.

Generative AI is being pushed by greedy companies (and governments that don't want to lose this artificial "arms race") as a solution to nobody's problem, and with a lot of side effects (global warming, raising power bills, raising the cost of electronic devices, filling the internet with crap, making the internet less secure, lowering open source incentives, making it easier for bad actors to influence democracy, etc. I could go on).

I don't dislike GenAI, and I think it can be a good technology when well implemented: narrow AI, or general AI with open training datasets and open weights that anyone (or at least a small company) can run locally. Instead we're getting super general AI controlled by an oligopoly of companies that see you as the product, partnering with governments that want to surveil and control you.

AI is a symptom, its not the root of the problem. If AI had popped up in a time where the common persons wellbeing was prioritised it would be hailed as miraculous.

We have a political problem, dont let the foreground distract you.

Well, sure. But how do they feel about SI?

Sure, but fighting AI is also a fight against these corpos and unfettered capitalism.

Not that I expected it in our timeline, but my brain thought this would be about some push towards metric units in the us

Well yeah it's bad, look at the people pushing hardest for it and that tells you all you need to know.

Billionaires will use AI in every way they can to profit from you, whether it be taking your works to train it, serving you slop, trying to rope you in to paying monthly to support their multi-billion dollar boondoggle, or attacking and killing brown people, liberals, and other "undesirables."

"AI is going to kill us all"

"AI is so powerful, it will hack everything"

"Why don't you like AI?"

I disagree. I think the technology is halfbaked at best, and deeply damaging to all aspects of society in its current form/implementation regardless of political atmosphere (although, it certainly does not help)

For those who disagree, please note that i agree there are a select very few fields that require a specialized industry standard LLM for processing data in a tedious way. These are obviously not included, but the amount of users actually doing that is surely less than 50,000 highly academic individuals in the world. The entire rest of the usage is "destroying my codebase", "eroding my technical skills (that ive built over decades) in 2 weeks", "im too lazy to update my calendar i dont read anyways" and "bird-box bad guy-esque 'look at this uncreative garbage that no one wants to look at' posting"

Given to the public at any point in history in its current state would be overwhelmingly negative. The general public should not have access to this, and those that do should be highly regulated. Ideally it would have about 5 years or so longer to increse efficiency before deploying hundreds of databases everywhere all the time.

Indeed. Capitaism is the cancer that destroys all the potential good in all things.

Meh. People would still use it to cheat on homework so they can spend 16 hours a day watching AI-generated brainrot.

More garbage futurism ads getting glazed.

Is this just like, a thing on Lemmy? I thought this was the website for media literacy.

I understand this perspective, I believe. Greed, dehumanization and prioritizing profits over communities are some of the worst elements of the AI situation and hardly unique to it. That suggests AI is just one example of a larger political problem.

But AI is also uniquely bad on its on terms. It is a fundamentally unreliable technology. It is rooted in plagiarism and requires unethical practices to build, to maintain and to use. It is environmentally disastrous. It is mentally damaging, creating cognitive debt in those that use it for many tasks. It is damaging and insulting to artists. It creates a specific, if not yet fully understood, psychosis in certain at risk individuals.

LLMs, and more accurately the corporate drive for its sudden mass adoption, is exemplary of corporate greed and reckless companies trying to stick working class people with the bill for their terrible bet. It is exemplary of the eternal folly of people to want confirmation of their own biases rather than actual info. But its also a technological dead end built from shady and unreliable practices at the expense of our world and the people in it.

We'll happily consume anything that hates on AI.

Using llms to summarize and learn information can be really useful, but check sources, just like you should for other online tools, and at the library too. The same best practices apply to this and education is important for proper tool use, like with anything, understand how to use it right. Lots of morons use tools wrong and cause problems and fatalities, doesn't mean the tool should be banned. Learn how to use tools right is an old lesson.

A majority of people have been convinced of many different things, many times, but that doesn't make any of them true or good. Unchecked, open weight, charging to protect from itself and accelerationist ideas don't sound good, and it should be used for good and peace, so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, another old one lol.

I guess but Futurism may as well be AI slop, though - and these articles keep popping up on my lemmy feed from tech - it's wild.

Oh, billionaires are bad for society. AI is their dream tool for controlling working class masses and getting even richer.

Not enough

we gotta up those numbers

I wouldn't say AI itself is bad for society, but billionaires and this current AI gold rush is.

An age legislation issue and a capitalistic over-reach issue. Algorithms are fucking people's minds, no argument there. AI is just more fuel on an existing fire that nobody profiting from it wants to do anything about.

I think their sick fantasy is replacement theory, but instead of whatever the far right thinks that is, they will attempt to replace the human workers that generate income and taxes 1:1 with robots. So they will have an obedient army of slave, just like they always wanted.

Public opinion wasn't on the power loom's side either.
Tech that is genuinely useful is basically impossible to roll back. AI is here to stay no matter what the AI company bubble does.

I'd be totally cool with that, provided that they be required to provide a comfortable living for every citizen before taking their profits. If they want to use their profits for substantial UBI, and give us all a permanent vacation, I'm all for it.

But we all know that's not how Sociopathic Oligarchs think.

A lot of these are the distractions imo, they take problems with how AI is currently developed and deployed and treat them as inherent properties of the technology itself. A lot of these criticisms have been repeated so often they've become accepted wisdom in certain circles, despite not standing up particularly well to scrutiny. You've also raised quite a few of them in a relatively short space, without much supporting argument, so addressing them properly is inevitably going to take a much longer response. Apologies in advance but bear with me if you care about the topic at all.

"Fundamentally unreliable" is an increasingly outdated way of viewing LLMs given how much they've improved in fairly short order. There's no denying the fact they can be wrong, but reliability is entirely task-dependent. AI might be poor at specific factual verification while being extremely useful for programming, accessibility, education, brainstorming or countless other applications. It's a tool, and how useful it is depends enormously on what you're using it for and how well you understand its limitations. Dismissing an entire technology because it performs poorly at certain tasks is an arbitrarily narrow way of evaluating it.

"Rooted in plagiarism" confuses training on existing material with reproducing it. There are legitimate copyright and consent issues, but that doesn't make the technology itself plagiarism. Likewise, there's a big difference between pointing out unethical practices in the AI industry and claiming that the technology fundamentally depends on them. You've demonstrated neither why those practices are unavoidable nor why they couldn't be addressed. If you want to point out a company that's done something unethical, entirely valid, that's not the same thing as saying the technology cannot exist ethically, that's nonsense.

Re artists, fully agree there are legitimate concerns about compensation, consent and displacement, but I don't think the existence of AI generated art inherently devalues human creativity. Much of the damage here comes down to how the technology is commercialised and regulated, which ties into my comment above.

The environmental costs are real, but you've not attempted to weigh them against the benefits, so you could be saying that about any polluting technology. You've used one to write this to me. You probably used one to get to work this morning. There might be one keeping your house the correct temperature. New technologies are very often relatively inefficient in their early stages, I doubt you'll struggle to imagine prior examples of that, and LLMs have already become significantly more computationally efficient in the few years since their mainstream introduction, as has the hardware. That obviously doesn't negate their environmental impact, particularly as demand continues to grow, but treating today's resource requirements as an inherent, permanent characteristic of the technology is shortsighted.

That's a regulation issue. Ireland put in some rules last year that any new data centre had to also install enough solar to cover it's entire demand and connect it to the grid. More of the world needs to be doing shit like that. If they want to profit, they need to earn it.

The cognitive debt research you mentioned is preliminary and task specific, and evidence of AI reinforcing delusions in vulnerable individuals doesn't mean that the technology generally causes psychological harm, and it's hardly the first technology capable of that. Books can do that, tv, social media, not to mention 4chan. That's another regulation issue, safeguarding. Similarly, AI reinforcing people's existing biases is a legitimate concern, but that's not really unique to AI. Algorithms have been doing that for years, and AI can equally be used to challenge people's assumptions, depending on how it's designed and used.

The corporate greed, labour displacement, reckless investment and the concentration of wealth are serious concerns, and the core part of why I think the political and economic context surrounding AI matters so much, and that leads me into to the thing that drives me to argue any of these points. The chances of the technology going away are essentially zero, there is absolutely no point in talking about that. It's a fantasy. You'd need a solar flare or a global revolution, most of us cant even revolt against being reigned by overt paedophiles. There is far more value in talking about how to mitigate the issues around it, because that is actually plausible.

I just think you're making a big leap from identifying problems with AI, some perfectly legitimate, to concluding that the technology itself is fundamentally bad. And calling it a "technological dead end" seems especially strange given how much it's improved in just a few years. I don't see how you've arrived at that conclusion, or why you'd be confident these problems are impossible to address.

It's worth comparing AI to previous 'technological revolutions'. They brought enormous benefits alongside serious social disruption, exploitation and unintended consequences. How those benefits and harms were distributed depended massively on the political and economic systems surrounding them. There's no reason to look at AI any differently.

I appreciate that we're probably not going to agree on this, but you put some effort into your response, so I thought it deserved a proper one in return.

The phrase "in its current form/implementation" is doing quite a lot of work there, how the technology is implemented is the topic. That's whether it's primarily used to replace workers (not that I think it capable of that in earnest right now) and maximise profits, or to reduce workloads, improve services and make people's lives easier, and those are largely a question of political and economic priorities.

The fact that people can use a tool badly, or become overly dependent on it, doesn't mean the tool is inherently harmful. You could make similar arguments about calculators, GPS, the internet or countless other technologies we've incorporated into everyday life. I've always had a naturally good sense of direction, I don't think GPS ruined the world by helping people who don't.

I also don't see how restricting access to a tiny group of specialists is supposed to improve matters. Surely concentrating the benefits of a powerful technology in the hands of a privileged few would make some of the problems we're discussing way worse?

Nothing changes if we waited another five years, imo. Efficiency and reliability will presumably improve, but if the same economic incentives remain, those improvements can just as easily be used to displace more workers and concentrate more wealth.

That's really all i'm saying above. We can argue about the limitations of the technology all day, but if we don't address the systems determining how it's deployed and who benefits from it, we're missing a much bigger part of the problem. It's akin to renovating a house while ignoring that it's built on a lake of custard.

Sure bro, the "thinking for yourself is too hard; just outsource it to this bot" group is surely the paragon of intellectualism.

It turns out other businesses don't like agentic LLM models either, when they are on the subject side of them rather than the client side.

We had a similar problem in the 2010s (maybe sooner?) that could automatically buy and sell stocks at set prices, leading to flash selloffs and resulting stock crashes.

So banks are disallowing agentic access to accounts and penalizing customers who give their access credentials to LLM agents, or have their agents harass customer service. I expect court proceedings will soon follow to determine who is responsible when agentic software becomes a public nuisance or commits a crime. (That is, commits a crime extreme enough to provoke the justice system.)

Since agents are unrestrained in pursuit of the goals they are prompted to chase, they've clashed harshly with human powered systems when they regard those systems like a force of nature. We may be creeping up on the first time an agent encounters an obstacle and escalates to force and deception. Watch for the first agent-filed lawsuit. Or the first agentic social engineering. Or the first agent-provoked SWATting.

In a better, more socially collaborative society, safeguards on agentic LLMs would be a priority to train them to behave appropriately in human intercourse. (All the stuff we're trained in kindergarten.)

But IRL, in our world, bad faith engagement is the norm, and so agentic AI will soon be used as a weapon.

To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Those firsts might be imminent.

They're discovering that this iteration of robots are way more expensive than human beings. Even well-paid, well-benefitted human beings. Data centers burn through a lot of expensive microchips quickly, and that cost is passed downstream to compute costs.

The hyperscalers are way under-charging for tokens and are hemorrhaging money, even as they borrow more for the data center buildout.

(I anticipate this desperation is what is driving the shenanigans and foul play regarding permitting and environment maintenence issues driving districts to moratorium buildout in their area. athe finance sector is notorious for overplaying their valuation and then turning to crime when they've borrowed over their head.)

Maybe as a society, we'll learn to treat financial fraud as severe as it is, instead of deciding it's too complicated to govern.

I suppose some folks were saying that about hydrogen-filled zeppelins too, but it turns out that you can't just jam new tech down society's throat that way.

We now have helium and hot air airships and the tech is used way more appropriately.

I do take your point that what whipped up AI frenzy isn't just the tech, but the tech itself does needs to change before society will accept its ubiquity.

You know we're talking about AI, not tech that's genuinely useful, right, sparky?

AI is genuinely useful. You don't have to trust me for it. Linus Torvalds uses it too.

@Kaligalis @Exatron 😆

How so, what sort of change do you imagine?

To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Those firsts might be imminent.

I believe they are already using autonomous drones in the Ukraine War. If so, those lines have already been crossed without fanfare or note.

I mean if you count in like a factory setting, industrial robots were probably first killing folks in like the 70’s

It is beyond capitalism now, it is corporatism turning into neo-feudalism. Some may argue that capitalism inevitably has to follow this path. I am not sure about that, but unregulated capitalism combined with large scale centralized representative democracy probably does.

Ai isn't inherently bad. It's just bad to have it in a society where your ability to get food, housing, and medical care are inherently attached to you having a job, which AI is marketed as replacing. Also, all the art that was stolen.