Post #3609943

2026-07-05 17:17 UTC

So, first, I suspended the person in question from this server, because he chose to follow me (after sending a dozen or more comments) *after* I asked him to leave me out of his GenAI evangelizing. He called my stance against AI virtue signalling, so I figured we could talk about that.

Replies (1)

@ajroach42@retro.social 2026-07-05 17:21

When Generative AI hit the scene, it took me a really long time to make up my mind about it. Some people around me were (rightly) immediately against it, but I didn't fully understand why. I played with early image generators because I found the results amusing. I was running stable diffusion locally, because I had a machine that could do that. I tried to convince myself that there were places that this tech could be used ethically. I tried to justify it. I tinkered with early LLMs, partially because I found the results amusing and partially because (like many other people in the tech world) I saw in them the promise of a thing that I had long dreamed about and couldn't really articulate. (I was wrong! That promise is not there. These are machines built to look useful while doing nothing.) And, in the meantime, I learned a lot about how these things work. I've seen inside the sausage, I've eaten the sausage. I can say without question, that the sausage is made of people and sewage, and we're just hurting one another and ourselves when we eat it. But there's nuance here, and I want to get into that for a second.

Open ##3609942