Post #3417579
2026-06-25 02:44 UTC
I am getting sick of this conflating of every case of "computer use algorithm" into the single gelid blob of "AI" making it impossible to have a productive conversation on the subject
When people say they're "against AI", they usually mean certain specific things. "Image generators displacing human-made art" and "LLM summarizers and chatbots being shoved into every software and website we use regardless of our preferences", maybe with a side of "black box deep learning algorithms being used for predictive policing and determining court sentences" and the like if they're particularly woke.
We don't like AI books being sold alongside real ones. We don't like ChatGPT being used to write scientific papers or legal briefs. We don't want AI slop code used in the programs we depend on every day. We especially don't like the next generation of children and youth being taught that this is the normal and accepted way of doing things.
We do not mean spellcheck, or machine translation, or optical character recognition. We do not mean procedural generation or enemy pathfinding in video games. And whatever genuinely beneficial use case you are bundling into "AI" when you tell us that we shouldn't be blanket against it, if it doesn't fall under the above rubric, we don't mean that either.
We are against the de-skilling of the human species and the wholesale replacement of the output of our brains with low-quality machine-generated trash. If we can keep whatever your brilliant "AI" hack is while eliminating all the rest of this crap, I'm all for it. But using those edge cases and overdefinitions to delegitimaze criticism of AI in the broad strokes is at best repeating bad-faith propaganda. Stop it.
Replies (1)
-
@XauriEL@mastodon.nz 2026-06-30 07:07
As a clarification: if you don't want your super useful "AI" tool caught up in "anti-AI hysteria", the quickest and easiest solution is to STOP CALLING IT AI Sorry but I didn't set the terms of the debate. The whole point here is that techbro propagandists are deliberately conflating all kinds of disparate technologies with their plagiarism machines so they can go "see, AI is super useful, everyone uses it and everyone likes it, so you have no grounds for objecting in any way to what we are doing (and if you do you're ableist)" Will you please for the love of Lord Satan stop carrying their water