Most of these arguments are conflating AI with the people using them.
Labor exploitation, scraping without consent, military contracts, surveillance policing, grid strain and hardware prices driven up by speculation are real harms. But none of them are properties of a statistical language model.
They come from concentrated capital and state power, and whatever technology arrives next will get used the same way.
Just like we’ve seen everything in your list, done by the same people, using different technology.
We have had hardware speculation during the crypto craze.
These same companies (Google) have been taking your data without consent to power their surveillance advertising.
Datacenters have always been power and water hungry, the ones powering LLMs are exactly the same ones that exactly the same companies have been building since the Internet began.
Essentially every major advance in technology has been used for state surveillance and in the military. AI is simply the latest capability.
Models reproducing licensed code, poor code quality and floods of junk contributions. These are real problems with the technology itself. And the solution to most of these things is to iterate, build better models trained on consentually obtained data.
Yes, you should still be mad at what the AI companies are doing. I am too. Just keep in mind that Google was evil before Gemini and will certainly be on the forefront of fuckery with whatever technology comes next as long as people keep getting tricked into misdirecting their anger onto the technology.
Unfortunately “AI,” and LLMs in general are, at present, wholly inseparable from the people who use them, and especially, (and more pressingly), the
peoplecorporations that make them. This is the reason I maintain my opposition to “AI” (and LLMs in general) despite machine learning as a field and LLMs as technology being truly fascinating, and having immense potential.In my ideal world the corporations pushing “AI” wouldn’t exist, the datasets and recipes would be open, and model training would be a community led effort with Folding@Home style distributed compute used for training, pretty much removing the viability of “AI” companies. Without “AI” companies pushing for adoption, strong social pushback can be used to reign in the slopification of the commons. With those two together (and likely many other smaller changes elsewhere) LLMs can be seen for what they really are and their real pros and cons evaluated.
But that world isn’t currently feasible, and probably won’t ever be. Neither is toppling even a single corrupt corporation on the level of Alphabet, or Microsoft. So all we can do is evaluate whether we consider certain software’s use of “AI”/LLMs is acceptable, and advocate for not using them. Which is why I think efforts like openslopware, and pages like this are a positive thing.
It is lacking the “money problem”: the high cost is adsorbed by big capitalist organizations (at the cost of the hardware price inflating) that hope to get everyone addicted/dependent on the tool to then surge the prices.
This is not open tech, this is not for everyone, this is not to make a better world. This is business.
The most recent release of SOTA models being both more intelligent and 20-30% cheaper is really fighting against this argument (Opus 5.5 & Sol 6).
This is a pretty solid list, besides Code Quality. Most of the links there are user error. It’s akin to blaming a Junior dev for breaking production imo and undermines the entire page.
On one hand, many things that you think are “AI” are actually humans in another country pretending to be an AI chatbot
Since your target audience appears to be developers and software engineers, have there been any reported cases of human “AI” coding chat bots?
You know that would be a really great scam. Perfect way to get access to people’s computers
it’s really fascinating how one of the markers of such use is the speed at which new feature/capabilities are delivered.
in other worse: if it seems too fast for a human to do, it’s automatically labeled as ai.
you know, license washing can work both ways
Wonder what kind if cost we’re looking at, when “washing” a library like chardet. And whether that’s something available to robin-hood stuff from the rich, or if it’s just the other way around.
there are already decomp efforts of proprietary games that are accelerated thanks to LLMs, so yes
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