Not a ragebait post.

I started thinking why I hate AI and it’s mostly:

  • It is pushed down my throat very hard for what it does;
  • The unauthorized use of content on the internet;
  • The worsening of the environmental crisis;
  • The content it generates is shit.

I am wondering do you have other arguments against it?

  • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
    16·
    11 hours ago

    Apart from the obvious environmental issues, I hate that “AI” promotes lazyness.

    I work as a software developer and over the last months, I slipped into a habit of letting ChatGPT write more and more code for me. It’s just so easy to do! Write a function here, do some documentation there, do all of the boilerplate for me, set up some pre-commit hooks, …

    Two weeks ago I deleted my OpenAI account and forced myself to write all code without LLMs, just as I did before. Because there is one very real problem of excessive AI useage in software development: Skill atrophy.

    I was actively losing knowledge. Sometimes I had to look up the easiest things (like builtin Javascript functions) I was definitely able to work with off the top of my head just a year ago. I turned away from being an actual developer to someone chatting with a machine. I slowly lost the fun in coding, because I outsourced the problem solving aspects that gave me a dopamine boost to the AI. I basically became a glorified copypaster.

    This is what all of those big AI companies want. They want people being dependent on their stupid little chatbots, just so they can suck a monthly subscription out of you. That really doesn’t sit right with me - I always wrote code to pay my bills and paying someone else to write that code for me feels disingenuous, in a way. I would probably be more open about AI and use it more if I had the option to host it locally. But now they’re hoarding all of the memory, CPU’s and other technology that would enable me to do so and drive their prices into unobtanium territory, and they can all get fucked for this.

    I don’t want to be a “prompt engineer” and outsource my brain into an LLM. Thank god my employer doesn’t force me to use any AI at all and I don’t have to be fast, I just have to be fast enough and produce quality code. And I can do this all by myself, I always could.

    I do feel like the last man standing, sometimes. Almost all of my colleagues and friends (who are also developers) have drank the AI-koolaid by now and I get so many messages like “We have Windsurf at our company now, you must use it or you’ll be left behind!”. It’s so hard to push back and resist this hype cycle, especially for students and junior developers, because they don’t have much experience and can be so easily exploited by their employers and AI techbros…

    So that’s (mostly) what I hate. A good technology that’s being misused by a capitalistic system. Again.