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.
Ai:
- ruins the planet by polution
- is used to influence political discourse, erase facts and history.
- is a tool brought to you by people who at the very least don’t want the masses to be free (look up palantir owner)
- is being pushed with the end goals to have a tool of mass surveillance and control.
- makes people abandon their ability to think critically (or in general really)
- is used to violate copyrights by it’s very design. If you think artists have been undervalued so far just you wait. They don’t want creative people anymore.
Take your pick, it’s war and you’re in it.
I mean, take your pick. This is a place where a lot of us…
- are leftists who disagree with extractive, anti-human economic systems
- left Reddit because they insisted on controlling how people could connect to each others ideas
- like the open collaboration of open source, which is getting wrecked by AI
- like open access communities like wikipedia, which are also getting undermined by AI
- dislike copyright law, which is being selectively ignored here because the people violating it are rich (on paper)
- are marginalized people, who tend to be disproportionately effected by AI decision-making
I can’t answer for anyone else but I hate it because it makes us stupider, it degrades human knowledge as a whole, it contributes to climate change and is helping to dissolve culture by isolating us into fewer and fewer shared spaces
Because the endgame of the way we are developing the technology is not Star Trek but I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
It’s an existential threat, a Great Filter.
The anger toward AI is a class-conscious reaction to its use under capitalism: it’s a tool for deskilling work, centralizing wealth, automating surveillance, and devouring energy and water while the planet burns. The scraping of creative works for private profit is a new enclosure of the commons, and the flood of disinformation and slop serves imperialist interests, not working people. The science isn’t the enemy—the capitalist relations that shape its deployment are. A socialist society could put such forces to collective use, but until then, skepticism is a measured response to a technology wielded as a weapon of class power.
I can agree with most of the points in the thread. Especially the forced use of AI where it makes no sense.
I’m a software engineer going on my second decade in developing media streaming technologies.
LLMs are useful in my day-to-day work. They speed up development a lot, but I do realise that I am getting disassociated with my codebase. I know that the individual commits are on a level that I would’ve written myself, often even better. But I don’t know the codebase as intimately as if I actually wrote it myself. The cognitive load of reviewing two other people’s AI-assisted code is also very taxing.
But, we can hate it as much as we want. Pandora is out of her box, and it’s better to get ahead with it than be left behind.
Lots of good answers, but I’ll throw another in: pollution of the Internet with slop. I’ll search for e.g. what good flashlights with ‘n’ features are and there will be hundreds of near-identical listicles that are clearly hallucinated. I’ll try to look at a local restaurant’s menu and it will bring me to a fabricated webpage with ai generated images of food (with Wonder brand Hont Doug bundts yesterday!) and a menu that is very obviously factually incorrectly.
There have always been low-effort fake listicles and bad information, but it used to be easy to avoid the couple links per search or to refine the search to be specific enough to rule them out. Now I’m not convinced there aren’t websites that generate poor quality content on the fly based on whatever I just searched.
Platforms themselves are self-selecting. I’m speaking for myself here. I am on Lemmy because I dislike the power that big tech has gotten to control content, policy, news, and global perceptions. As such, I self host and use federated technologies where possible. The vast majority of AI tools are controlled by the same centrally controlled big tech companies that I’m here to avoid. There are self-hosted AI tools or there, but basically every AI tool was trained using scraped data, and, for instance, my Searx-ng instance was flooded by so many bots that I had to make it harder to use for myself just to keep the bots out. My blog? Constantly scraped, killing my bandwidth. A lot of foss projects used to have bug bounty programs and accepted code from any contributor to wander in, but are now closing off due to AI slop code contributions. So, the type of person you’ll find here probably hates AI if they’re like me. Also, I work in tech and have to bite my tongue every time a co-worker “helpfully” sends me a Copilot Slop answer to a question when I was asking for a judgment call or an opinion.
mostly ram prices, and shittify every service and program and search engine.
Someone else can give a more comprehensive answer, but here are a couple bullet points:
- Models trained by violating copyright
- AI data centers using tons of water and power, driving up costs for local residents
- AI data center noise pollution
- “Slop” results (uncanny valley pictures, incorrect answers given confidently, etc)
- Companies using AI as an excuse for anti-worker actions (notably massive layoffs)
- Concern over how much of the largest companies valuation is tied to AI hype (because it affects everyone’s retirement accounts)
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Trained by the same thing humans are.
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Video games are worse and get worse as they run 100% constant and are constantly evolving, not short bursts or getting more efficient over time like AI
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Localized
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More accurate than humans -especially humans on social media
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AI is replacing shitty jobs; just like machines did in the industrial revolution
Trained by the same thing humans are.
This is at best, misleading and completely wrong at worst. An LLM is completely different from a human mind. It’s a mathmatical model that finds the average of any given input against a massive dataset.
Video games are worse and get worse as they run 100% constant and are constantly evolving, not short bursts or getting more efficient over time like AI.
This is a completely made up statistic dreamed up from the thought of “people use computers at home, so why is that different than a datacenter?” The thing is, those datacenters dont run in short bursts, they run constantly, as long as there is money to be made. And while the hardware does get more efficient as new developments are made, that improvement doesn’t offset the resource usage, it just improves density of compute.
Localized
Absolutely unhinged opinion that could only come from someone incapable of empathy. There is a worldwide cost of living crisis happening right now. Anything that makes life worse for a regular person, while offering almost no benefit to anyone outside the top of this boondoggle is to be hated.
More accurate than humans -especially humans on social media
Another completely made up statistic based on nothing. Yes, misinformation on social media is a problem in modern society, but those people are not being treated as subject matter experts. AI is often being treated that way, despite working from flawed data that distills assumption into fact by way of some reddit comment or retracted paper.
AI is replacing shitty jobs; just like machines did in the industrial revolution
What’s the weather like under that rock where you live? AI is not replacing the backbreaking labor of harvesting vegetables, it’s not clearing sewer pipes, or pumping septic tanks. It’s being used to (poorly) replace artists, engineers, and writers. The work that people actually want to do.
Gonna ignore the sad attempts at rebuttal by someone that appears to be out of touch with reality (shunning social interactions?).
Where I live? -It’s replacing depressed and lonely artists and writers. -That shit often isn’t healthy or a good way to get human interaction / attention. Engineer? -Can be high stress with lives on the line, it will also be a waste of time / schooling for many. (You’re also arguing for their accuracy here). Enter productivity sooner: retire sooner. The other jobs you mention are high pay that grunt and migrant workers can profit from.
People that compare their wealth against a billionaire don’t realize that the billionaire is inspired and the wealth benefits all in capitalism. Neither pure capitalism nor communism succeed. China isn’t pure communism.
Wow, assuming you’re being genuine, I’m pretty surprised. It’s rare to encounter a true AI cultist.
I really just hope you’re trolling at this point.
I think you’re lost here. Maybe you skipped reading the post?
This isn’t a debate over whether AI is useful or not. It’s not a conversation about whether people are right/wrong if they dislike AI. The point of this thread is to help OP understand why some people have strong, negative feelings about AI.
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I don’t “hate” it universally. I see its positives and how it can make certain things easier. My own negative feelings towards it just outweigh the positives at the moment.
If they can figure it out where:
- AI isn’t being developed for autonomous armed military combat
- isn’t sucking up heinous amounts of power and water, especially in places that can’t support it.
- isn’t readily available to the criminal masses to do great harm with.
- isn’t being completely untruthful about the harm it is doing.
- isn’t being forced down the throats of everyone in the business world.
- Isn’t used by, from, around, or even remotely involving children.
The main problems aren’t with the technology, but with governments slow response to properly regulate it and protect society. I guess.
I use it now and then to spot bugs in my code and it is super handy for that. Coming up with code all by itself can be wonky. If non-programmer vibe coding becomes the norm, we are all going back to paper.
Me, personally, a couple of reasons:
Without wanting to sound like a pretentious twat I think art made without a soul is the antithesis of art.
People ask dumb questions that a quick web search would answer.
The blurring between what is real and what isn’t.
Capitalism suggesting that there might only be two or three “non-human entities” controlling the entire internet soon.
The fear of another economic bubble.
It making people stupider.
The fokken poes that is an anagram of my user name being involved. Plus all the other bros too.
Fear of something that has the power to potentially go beyond thought.
The absolute ease of facilitating surveillance.
Terminator franchise
Etc
I don’t hate AI. I use AI. I criticize AI, because it’s a tool and it’s being misused.
I criticize how people and specially companies use AI…
So true
Someone asked this 2 days ago so I’ll just paste what I wrote there.
It’s being pushed into situations where having a black box of probability is not what you want. Support bots as an example, you want the same outcome for the same problem. Not a different outcome because someone didn’t put a question mark.
You don’t want the bot being able to hijack an account because it was asked in the specific way. See Facebook support bot.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/metas-ai-support-bot-instagram/You don’t want a chat bot to tell airline customers they can do something when the airline has a FAQ section specifically saying no you can’t.
See Air Canada support bot.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-knowYou don’t want AI bots hallucinating court cases to justify a case. Many news articles on this.
It’s used as a workforce reduction mask.
Businesses are using AI rollouts to lower the number of front line employees. Only for the tool to fail.
See Oracle firing 21,000 people to boost ai numbers.
https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/23/21000-oracle-jobs-vanish-amid-big-reds-big-bets-on-ai/5260086It’s oversold:
When Gardner says only 30% of AI deployments work as sold after asking over 700 IT executives. Why are people still treating it as anything but a broken tool?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/07/only-28-of-ai-infrastructure-projects-fully-pay-off/5221652For a black box of probability it is terrible at maths. There has been instances of AIs failing high school math tests.
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-ai-struggle-math-problems.htmledit: sources as I grab them on mobile.
It’s an exploitation tool with no benefit to actual people.
