To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

oulipo2

Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows

hyperhello

One challenging thing about talking against AI is that it's both a centralizing thing, in that everything is supposedly to use AI as glue and linking center, and decentralizing, in that we can see all the leaf nodes become unreliable, then the outer nodes, because people just 'ask AI'. It's a dystopian idea that we should be making the computer itself the process, as opposed to just using the computer to help ourselves make the process.

Almondsetat

I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance

reedf1

We can't put the genie back in the bottle.

senko

This post, like many others, confuses AI with Big Tech (or maybe that's intentional). I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech". I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai

ronbenton

>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it. In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

217

First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment" GUYS PLEASE The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing? There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it

okeuro49

Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly." There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation. AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.

throwawaytwice

Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.

sealeck

I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively. Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc). Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.

CM30

Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well. If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best. Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it. So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it. But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.

forinti

I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.

noitpmeder

I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt. Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.

helterskelter

This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.

behole

Post-modem incel vibes. It’s always someone/something else making the protagonist an outcast.

hrideshmg

Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information. Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.

derac

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe. According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.

akomtu

Morality, good and evil, true or false, is a human way of thinking. AI sees the world thru the lens of efficiency, ROI and so on. From https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume... : > *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*

declan_roberts

I think many of us actually have a moral stance on AI, it's just that it's somewhat similar to our moral stance on cars, power tools, heavy machinery, the loom, etc.

Silagi

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.