I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of pro-AI posts on this platform.
Various posts with titles similar to “When will people stop being afraid of AI” or “Can we please acknowledge AI was very needed for X”
Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.
It’d be great to see more centralist views. AI can be a useful assistant with certain things, but i dont get needing to be fully against or fully for it
A centralist view of AI on Lemmy is seen as pro-AI. I think the person commenting is including neutral posts about AI as pro-AI
I know and its annoying
I think AI has positives to help people, that being said I think it’s out of control currently. I hope the bubble burst soon and we can actually get to a reasonable balance.
I hope the bubble burst soon and we can actually get to a reasonable balance.
In fictional stories yes, in reality no. The only application that AI will find is to replace all employees, and people will be thrown out into the street.
FYI: Anti-AI people are a very small minority of the world.
When more “normies” join in, you’ll see a natural shift into being more “pro AI”
Anecdote: A fucking therapist told me to “just use AI to help you write a resume”… 🧐 (don’t remember how I even got to the topic of resumes)
Yeah… turns out not a good fit, for other reasons… (constantly just be like “go outside” and making me feel so unconfortable and I kinda had an existential crisis on whether or not I belonged in this country)
Yeah… Your opinion isn’t really backed by the data
“Normies” don’t default to pro AI
The byline of the article you posted is “Americans see a role for AI in some areas of society” and it clearly states “a majority is open to letting AI assist them with day-to-day tasks and activities”.
Being “afraid” of it isn’t the same as not using it.
“Normies” don’t default to pro AI [emphasis mine]
That’s a pretty significant distinction there. People are using AI even if they’re not “paying” (directly) for pro versions.
A lot of people are using AI in ways they don’t realize as well. Like the click through rate on Google search results is terrible now since people are just reading the AI generated summary and moving on (Study Confirms Google AI Overviews Cut Organic Clicks 38% https://share.google/8gllKLbbC0Onygqvz).
Other people eat up and share AI slop articles, videos and photos without even batting an eye. I ask them if they’ve thought about whether it’s real or not. Nope. I point out its AI slop. “oh, that sucks. But it’s still hilarious/cool/fascinating/etc.”
I know several people who don’t even think twice about using free AI directly. Need to translate something? Copilot. Need to write an email? Copilot. Need to post something to instagram? Copilot (for text, not the photos - as far as I know.)
Will they pay for it? No. Will they say they’re worried about AI? Yup. Do they connect what they’re doing to the issue? Nope.
If you only pay attention to the prevailing winds here on Lemmy, your view of the world will be very skewed.
Tbf they said “the world” not “USA”
"Globally, the share of individuals who see AI products and services as more beneficial than harmful has risen from 52% in 2022 to 55% in 2024.
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion
Yeah, and you can automatically trust such an independent and neutral source as that 🙄
Is Stanford not neutral or independent? AFAIK the data is from Ipsos and they just made visualizations, though you can correct me if I’m wrong. I was just trying to say that the OP said the world whereas the person I replied to showed data from Americans specifically.
Edit: Ohhh I see it’s from Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) not just Stanford the University, my bad.
I could definitely see how this would be a biased source then:
“Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is an academic entity led by an interdisciplinary steering committee of university researchers and industry experts.”
Luckily they only made visualizations from Ipsos’s data though I think?
Ipsos is a poll-for-hire firm and they just design the surveys their clients want, unlike Pew which is doing actual independent research polling. It’s like the difference between tobacco company-funded specialized research and independent, government funded basic research.
Here, try this - genuine, well-regarded organization with actual experience at opinion polling far in excess of the clanker wankers at Stanford: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-around-the-world-view-ai/
But many are worried about AI’s effects on daily life. A median of 34% of adults say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI, while 42% are equally concerned and excited. A median of 16% are more excited than concerned.
clanker wankers at Stanford
Just going to toss out a wild guess here, but any chance you might be emotionally motivated to find a source that backs what you already believe to be true rather than looking at the stats objectively?
I too am concerned about AI, but I’m not against it. Those things aren’t the same.
Being concerned about at technology and being against that technology are not synonymous.
Those are a different set of questions though. The question shouldn’t be if someone is concerned about AI use. Frankly, everyone should be. It has a huge capacity for harm in a growing number of areas in modern society. The question should be about who is using it. Additionally, what are they using it for? Novel problem solving, new automation, replacing older automation, or just for fun? That is what I’d personally be much more interested in finding out.
Interesting how Americans are the most concerned. I wonder what might explain that. In the US, white people are the most worried (IIRC).
Probably because we have the worst mix of low govt regulations and high amounts of AI tech being pushed at us.
I think you may be misinterpreting the data set that you posted. The point of that data set wasn’t to find if someone was pro versus anti-AI. It was to find concerns about existing AI structure. Nonetheless, that post shows on a few occasions The majority of the people surveyed were okay with AI as a whole, but were just concerned about how it was functioning and controlled.
if you would like to look into that data yourself, it even says it right on the front page when it asks about what sectors people believe that AI should be in and only about one third of the people who responded said that it should play no role whatsoever in the topics.
The best graph for it though in my opinion is the very last page where they asked the question of how many people would use AI at all even a little bit and the majority of them said they would at least a little bit use AI.
from how I interpreted it, it’s clear at least by that study that the majority of the people are for AI, but they are concerned with how it’s currently being implemented. And there are certain areas that they don’t believe it should be in Such as relationships, health care and creative thinking. (Although these areas still got quite a bit of votes just didn’t hit the 50%)
What do you mean by AI? LLMs or artificial neural networks in general?
It’s usually bots. Unfortunately it’s not easy to moderate them, but if a bot is reported, doesn’t have a bot flag, and says a bunch of pro-ai stuff in addition to the reported activity it’s usually enough evidence to ban. It’s just one of their current tells, I wouldn’t base a ban only on that though. Report when you suspect them though.
Pro-AI people are a small minority in my experience, but are generally overrepresented in the tech geek communities that make up the majority of users on the fediverse. If you were to ask on a more creativity-centric community, you would find that anti-AI sentiment is near ubiquitous amongst the working creative class.
Even here there’s a significant number of untalented and brainless fools who use unethical corporate AI models as a crutch to compensate for their lack of real-world skills and relationships.
Also, for reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.
AI psychosis is a documented problem.
I think the majority of people are pro AI and don’t give it a single thought. Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated and people don’t understand why you would point out that the guitarist had three arms.
Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated
But why do you care? I don’t get it, when was the last time you cared about how a restaurant advert looked? It either has good food or doesn’t, who cares about their marketing? It has always been fake anyway
I agree. It’s lazy and makes me hate it more. I don’t trust a content user doing it.
My husband works with it, at an ai company, in an ai data center. He gushes about it 24/7. It’s even getting hard for him to defend.
Also, for reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.
Elon Musk is making his typical wild promises again, this time about AI leading to UBI and abundance for everyone … as he makes money from xAI, of course.
They are all saying that since someone threatened to molotov Altman’s house, but at the same time they’re doing everything in their power to make sure nothing resembling ubi ever happens.
It’s probably a mix of both, plus the normal cycle of online discourse. As AI tools become more common, you naturally get more people defending them, evangelizing them, or reacting against criticism. Some are genuinely enthusiastic users. Some are industry-adjacent people pushing narratives. Some are just contrarians who enjoy provoking anti-AI spaces.
On federated platforms like Lemmy, a small number of highly active users can also create the impression of a broader cultural shift. Repetitive framing like “people are irrationally afraid of AI” often comes from the same internet optimism culture that treated crypto, NFTs, and “disruption” as inevitable progress.
That said, there is also a real backlash to constant doomposting. Some users are tired of seeing every AI discussion framed exclusively around collapse, theft, or dehumanization, so they overcorrect in the other direction.
Your instincts are not unreasonable though. Coordinated narrative shaping absolutely exists online, especially around technologies tied to massive corporate investment.
On federated platforms like Lemmy, a small number of highly active users can also create the impression of a broader cultural shift.
And bear in mind that this goes in both directions, it’s possible for highly active anti-AI users to flood the discourse.
Community opinion is often a bistable state. If 70% of the userbase has opinion A and is constantly downvoting and browbeating anyone who says anything positive about opinion B, one would naturally expect the userbase to soon be 80% opinion A. Then 90%. And so forth. The few holdouts who continue to say positive things about opinion B get labelled as “bots” and “trolls” and are dismissed.
Thank you. Not enough people recognize this.
Additionally, groups with an agenda can reinforce this trend.
Maybe it’s just that the world isn’t as uniform in their anti-AI opinion as you imagine it to be? Social media inherently forms bubbles, smaller platforms like the Fediverse even moreso than most. As the Fediverse grows opinions are likely to become more diverse.
I am in general pro-AI and far from being a teenager. The important difference is that i can acknowledge that not everything is fine.
For example, i do see no harm in self-hosting your LLM, or in things like Horde AI, where people share their resources for Imagegen. I also think that machine learning in itself is simply a technique like any other CS method.
I DO see harm in the way that Corpos try to push LLMs in every nook they can find (nothing wrong with experimenting inhouse, but lots of wrong when rolling out “features” noone wants or needs, and which can never be cost effective). It’s also very much not fine how this technology has been marketed (especially by Sam Altman) as more than a small stepping stone towards AGI - the expectation (and the correlating real-life consequences) that LLMs in their current state can actually replace human workers cannot hold up when taking a critical look at it. The current push away from open source models is also a bad thing.
All of this leads to very unhealthy things, like unsustainable growth/building of datacenters that will probably not be needed in this form, elimination of entry-level (or worse, even senior) jobs which will bite the industry in the ass sooner or later, and people who seemingly aren’t capable of seeing that production of language isn’t the same as intelligence or conscience.
I have said before that i would suggest an UNESCO-founded open model with the option to opt out for whoever doesn’t want their data in this “world heritage model”. It’s the worlds combined output that is used, so it should be free to use for private usage, and with licencing terms for organizations funding an stipend / UBI for the arts.
I’ve seen that anti-AI folks get very irrationally angry when you don’t share their hate towards AI. It often degenerates into personal attacks, as in “how could you be so stupid as to not share my views?”, which translates into the knee-jerk reactions you mention.
For the articulated response, I agree with you though. I’ll copy a comment from another thread that I think shines a really valuable light on the issue:
Most arguments people make against AI are in my opinion actually arguments against capitalism. Honestly, I agree with all of them, too. Ecological impact? A result of the extractive logic of capitalism. Stagnant wages, unemployment, and economic dismay for regular working people? Gains from AI being extracted by the wealthy elite. The fear shouldn’t be in the technology itself, but in the system that puts profit at all costs over people.Data theft? Data should be a public good where authors are guaranteed a dignified life (decoupled from the sale of their labor).Enshittification, AI overview being shoved down all our throats? Tactics used to maximize profits tricking us into believing AI products are useful.
Zoomers and gen x that drank the kool aid. What’s worse is they are saying yes to high paying jobs to fuck us all in the ass.
As a member of GenX (1980)…
Yep, that sounds like my peers. Most of them believe the marketing or are at least convinced enough to indulge. The hold-outs are getting more infrequent.
I used to feed AI anything I wrote that I wanted to sound professional to save me time and brain power. Not only do I have no need for that anymore considering I’ve just accepted that my CS degree was truly a waste of my life, but now I realize I’d encourage the building of data centers so now I’m fully radicalized to never use them
Dude your CS degree is not a waste. AI is just a tool. Anyone who thinks they can replace their staff with it are in for a rude awakening. I understand how much harder it is to get your foot in the door though. Its not permanent though. I remember when “no code” was going to take the jobs. The job just changes a bit.
I’ve been around long enough to have experienced multiple technologies that were the “end” of programmers and yet they still exist.
As you pointed out, the job changes a bit, but we are still here. When I started, the job was a lot more about compilation. You had to remember exact syntaxes (spelling, letter cases, line continuation, ect) and code optimization. You couldn’t just look up a function name or something like a win32 API by typing part of it into your code editor. You couldn’t even just go to Google and search because Google and the Internet didn’t exist. You had a literal shelf of books next to your desk that were heavily worn and you referenced constantly. Books got handed down from senior programmers to junior programmers. The senior got a new book that wasn’t held together by a rubber band and the junior got a stack of pages, often partially glued together by coffee stains, that contained invaluable notes in the margins.
Compilers used to be really dumb. Schooling, blogs, articles, ect, these days are all about “readable code”, but for a long time readability wasn’t even in the top 10 or 20 things that you thought about. Just getting the damn thing to compile was easily half of your job and time spent. Schooling and articles spent a massive amount of time discussing optimizations and memory usage. Things like “if else” vs “switch”, which one was actually better and how you could abuse both. Just in case you were wondering, “switch” was king and the “if else” lovers can get go fuck themselves.
I have seen massive shifts in the industry, and companies will use any excuse to fire everyone useful and eviscerate themselves in the name of short term profits. People used to talk about IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Compaq, ect, like they talk about Amazon and Facebook now. But those are just brands owned by some new titan that didn’t even exist that long ago.
CS will come back, it will be a little different, but new companies will rise from the carcasses of all those that tried to replace developers with ai.
Honestly, given what Facebook is these days, I am more surprised that they still have that many software developers to lay off than I am with the idea that they are laying off people due to AI.
Current AI is unsuitable, but automation of some kind (maybe not AI) will be necessary for a nearly workless future. Life is kind of dumb as is, it’s better if we spent time in the gym, or doing yoga, or learning something, instead of spending life in the pesticide factory, then dying after 3 years of retirement from a horrific disease.
We already had (pre-2020) all the automation we needed to work less than 20 hr/wk and produce all the necessarily calories, fresh water, and housing for everyone. But, instead we chose to turn a few people into decabillionaires and continue to bicker over the scrap like we weren’t in a post-scarcity society.
LLMs, transformers, convolution layers, characteristic tensors, etc. all have some legitimately novel uses, but all the big “AI” product lines are unethically developed, irresponsibly deployed, and dishonestly marketed.
If you want an ethical chatbot, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus_(LLM) .
I don’t know of a ethical model that’s good for images or code, yet, but I know people are working on them. The IBM Gemini models are getting close, but I don’t know if IBM will ever get the training data completely “clean” / open / free.
I’ve been told that StarCoder is an ethically-trained free software model, but some of my research ( https://mot.isitopen.ai/model/StarCoder ) contradicts that assertion, and I’ve not looked into it deep enough to resolve that conflict myself. (IMO, we don’t actually need automated code generation, we need to write less code in better languages with better tests and more reuse; but you may not agree.)
So there is a few groups there is the ignorant group, which you are part of evident by your terminology use. When ignorant people do things they tend to be wrong whether that is trusting AI or not trusting AI.
Its annoying but so is this. There are very anti ai folks on the fediverse and very pro and very nuanced. Myself I see it like smartphones and the www. www in terms of the dot com bubble and smartphones in term of the ick. There is no denying it has uses though and its not going away.
OP is baffled by the pro-AI people.
I’m baffled by the anti-AI people.
Fundamentally it seems bizarre to judge the quality of, for example, an image or a piece of music, by the process that created it: the proof is in the pudding.
I’m amazed at what AI is generating…it seems kind of fake to pretend a beautiful image isn’t beautiful when you discover it’s made by AI.
The arguments against AI are annoyingly reductionist or biased: e.g. focusing on occasional “hallucinations” as if the majority of AI productions aren’t, basically, impressive (or, at least, what was asked for by the user).
I’m amazed at what AI is generating…it seems kind of fake to pretend a beautiful image isn’t beautiful when you discover it’s made by AI.
Wow, the USA is such a beautiful country, but it feeds its beauty with someone else’s blood. But yes I agree with you the content is beautiful, no really beautiful. Only the price of this beauty is the future of all humanity (AI will kill us all)
Is that something you know or something you choose to believe?
It’s not that I know, it’s rather a natural outcome under capitalism, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.
Although it seems to me that this can be described as a pattern of the universe.
It reads like a child who’s never had a human interaction in their life and was raised by Elon Musk Stans.
AI slop is void of any creativity or originality, and the infrastructure required to make it is killing the environment at an unprecedented rate while also poisoning drinking water and driving up costs everywhere.
But hey, at least your mom got to show you Fruit Love Island on your iPad, I guess.
What do you hope to achieve with the personal attacks? You’ll only make me dislike “your side” even more. It only reveals how unpersuasive your position is…if you resort to shaming and insult to bully people into your position.
You care so much about water waste and the environment…but do you eat meat?
If so…all of a sudden your “rational justifications for an ethical position you have taken without bias” cease to be coherent with your other lifestyle choices.
As for “AI Slop” [an obvious propaganda term, designed to be reductionist] and its lack of X, Y and Z: it’s literally drawing on an ocean of X,Y and Z in the first place - the sum total of all X, Y and Z driven human artistic and creative endeavour.
As with so many political discussions: I suspect this one is pointless. Two sides, both alien to the other. I’m as unlikely to bring you round as you are to bring me around.
It processes information to generate new (often very beautiful) works: just like human artists.
You’ll only make me dislike “your side” even more.
The fact that you know this, state this, and will do this is exactly why we’re doomed as a species.
If you know what your lizard brain is doing and that it’s activated, at least have the good sense to not still pretend it’s someone else’s fault.
No.
Being a persuasive communicator and recruiting people to one’s political agenda has never been a matter of pure logic and reason: going around insulting “the other side” will not work.
Not that anything would: I judge the value of X by X. X could have been made by a sandstorm: if it’s beautiful it’s beautiful.
A piece of music, for example, is either enjoyable or it isn’t. Admittedly AI music has a way to go yet - but it’s clearly already superior to a percentage of human made music.
A piece of music, for example, is either enjoyable or it isn’t.
Or it grows on you over time and expands your range as a listener.
But 🤷 you’re just looking for mediocre simulacrums of art anyway, so of course you’re into GenAI “art”.
occasional “hallucinations”
Every single AI output is a hallucination
You might prefer the word “confabulation.”
The very concept of “hallucination” and the choice of that word in this context shows how retarded the entire debate had become.
A machine cannot hallucinate because it cannot have an experience.
The output is either pleasing or displeasing, an accurate and useful response to a request or not. To claim that all AI products are “ugly and useless” is a patently absurd position: were the same thing made by a human a decade ago it would have been deemed as “good, beautiful, useful, and valuable.”
Dude created a brand new account just for this post, because they knew AI is actually fucked up and very unpopular here.
Is someone paying you to peddle this bullshit propaganda being pushed by the AI billionaires or are you just this dumb and gullible?
Do billionaire boots taste good?
It’s my first 24 hours here. If I could get paid for saying what I believe I’d gladly take the money. But honestly, I’m just a Reddit refugee - and have no idea about the ideological bent of the users of this platform (though I’m quickly learning it’s as hysterical, fanatical and willing to use disingenuous argumentation and rhetoric as those on Reddit).
My real reason for joining: I’m addicted to having my faith in humanity destroyed by interacting with terrible people on the internet - but got permabanned from Reddit for speaking against Israel on r/Worldnews.
So thanks for delivering: 24 hours and I’m already being insulted and called a bot because I think AI is impressive and refuse to join the “Everything AI produces has 0% value” nonsense.
It’s literally got to the point where if I want an actual rationale, balanced, non-hysterical discussion: I go to ChatGPT. If I want an emotionally unpleasant, annoyingly irrational, rhetorically disingenuous and frustrating argument that goes nowhere: I feed my social media addiction instead and talk with a human.
This has been going on for decades. Machine learning was used to create new composition based on classical sheet music in the early 2000s. Concert-goers loved it until they found out it was generated.
The first sensible thing I’ve read here.
It’s got to the point where if I want a rational, well-informed, and balanced discussion about anything I’ll just chat with AI.
If I want an emotionally unpleasant, “us vs then” manipulative, frustratingly one-sided or limited interaction: I’ll go onto social media and find someone to trigger me.
Didn’t take long on this new platform.
Ironic I suppose: these people hate AI so much, but everything they type (e.g the manipulative nonsense arguments) illustrates their own inferiority to the AI systems they oppose.
For me it is, apparently, the unpleasantness of social media discussions that make them so compelling and addictive… otherwise I’d just discuss things with AI.
AI hs already been demonstrated as a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs. It is not a question at this point. At this point, all of the AI-evangelists are either extremwly stupid or fascists themselves.
AI hs already been demonstrated as a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs.
Lmfao, what? The internet is also a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs. Does that make every user of the internet a fascist, or just stupid?
Of course bad actors are going to take advantage of a tool that is very useful in an absurd amount of contexts…
Palantir wants not only a total surveillance world, but also needs AI to process and use the information it has on almost anyone to send to jail or murder.
Yeah that is why the worst fascists and oligarchs block access to the Internet. I think you are being pretty disingenuous here whether you realize it or not. The Internet is like a utility at this point and that is not even remotely comparable with how AI is currently being deployed and used by major corporations.
I am glad to hear you accept bad actors will misuse it. I don’t think anyone is actually ready for the level of deception that AI will be able to accomplish once it has access to you and your family/friends information while being used by a nefarious party. For example impersonating loved ones to trick you, epic cat fishing with a persona that has been custom tailored to you, complex financial schemes involving fraud, etc.
