Mastodawn

There are going to be millions of individuals that will be left behind because they refused to adopt AI. They refused to change their ways and understand AI as a tool. It can be terrible, but it can also be good.

For those complaining about AI ethics, I ask: is your smartphone ethical? Even Fairphone contains problematic minerals to a degree. You can find ethical issues in almost everything. The wages and the way supermarket employees are treated. Water delivery and treatment. Clothing manufacturing. Just because you refuse to use AI does not mean you are a fully ethical individual. Are you also vegan too?

I am not sure what it is. Is it ego? Are people attached to their craft?

I have more ideas in my head but they are assorted rn, so I'll cut the rambling here.

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unawarewolf 🐺

@ulveon

Holy heck this is certainly one of the silliest takes I've ever read on here lol. The CW wasn't wrong!!!

For the first one, prompting is barely a skill. you just type out some shit, and it'll plagiarize something from the internet that matches. The ones who'll be left behind are the ones who cease learning and improving themselves because they let a computer do everything for em. I can always pick up a chatbot if I really gotta for some reason, but you can't just pick up the skills from the hundreds of hours of practice that you didn't get, cuz you asked a chatbot to just do things for you.

The ethics take is really really bad too, like, ethics isn't a binary; consuming less is better than consuming more. The trend is also important, arguably more so, than individual actions; and encouraging people to add one more unethical thing they do makes the world worse — we're trying to hecking reduce harm, not up the amount of harm... right?

AI incest also deserves an honorable mention. When AI is trained on other AI it gets worse. You can be as smug as you want about using AI, but every benefit you gain from it will be off the backs of real people doing real thinking, while you lose the ability to, for example; have a coherent thought on the ethics of using AI.

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Yacha 1d ago

@gimmechocolate @ulveon yes, real thinking, I am reading books and thinking myself!!

Can I just consume my harvested wood from the forest, with the text printed using the electricity made by burning coal and polluting the planet, while being delivered by the logistics and selling monopolist that actively bankrupts its competitors.
At least I'm not letting AI datacenters use tons of water.

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unawarewolf 🐺1d ago

@yacha @ulveon
not beating the "[AI users] can't have a coherent thought on the ethics of using AI" allegations lmao

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ulveon.net (on derg.social)21h ago

@gimmechocolate

Ok I'll reply by parts. But before that, I used to be extremely sceptical of AI, too, a few years ago.

prompting is barely a skill. you just type out some shit, and it'll plagiarize something from the internet that matches. The ones who'll be left behind are the ones who cease learning and improving themselves because they let a computer do everything for em. I can always pick up a chatbot if I really gotta for some reason, but you can't just pick up the skills from the hundreds of hours of practice that you didn't get, cuz you asked a chatbot to just do things for you.This is true. I never claimed prompting to be any kind of magic, and in fact, I think the people who are spinning up highly complicated harnessed sandboxed multi-agent agent swarms are just being quite silly. There's zero need for that. What I was talking about is the people who take pride in NOT using AI at all. These people will likely refuse using AI moving forward too, for ethical reasons or whatever. These will be left behind.The ethics take is really really bad too,I mean the fact is that people claim to be unethical (which it 100% is, as it is trained on stolen material and classified using slave third-world labour, trust me, I'm well aware of it all), but, if you think about it, many things are unethical. I mean, not being a vegan is very unethical (I'm not a vegan FWIW) but even things like owning a home are unethical because there are other people who don't have one, and in my opinion fixating on rejecting something that can give you a productivity edge just because it's unethical, I don't know. I think you are for sure allowed to reject AI if you wish, but I also think these people push this idea onto others, and this is the bad part. AI is for sure not going away, and just like my vegan friend who I love very much and doesn't push his vegan propaganda onto me (because I also fully know that eating meat is murder and that veganism is the only ethically correct way to eat), I think anti-AI people should really understand that not everyone is going to care about ethics, and honestly? That's ok. It's not ok that it's unethical, but it's ok that society works like this, as much as I may dislike it. I hope I was clear enough with this point because for me it's a bit difficult to express this kind of nuanced "both sides" opinion accurately.AI incest also deserves an honorable mentionYeah, that's also absolutely true, and honestly I don't know what is going to happen (I don't work in AI), but, definitely. AI consuming AI slop for training data won't get us anywhere. However, the models that exist today are already doing work. Like, if you think about it, even if we completely stopped AI development today, and closed all AI companies, and even banned AI research, the models that already exist like DeepSeek R1 or Kimi K2.5 are already doing real work and bringing in real benefits.

I can't believe I'm running out of characters here.

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unawarewolf 🐺15h ago

@ulveon Ok so yeah, there are scenarios where you might get left behind in your career specifically; like it's hard to keep up with AI slop cover-letters, and your boss might expect you to use it, either explicitly, or through metrics. If you have to use it, prolly just like, spin up a local model or something and give em the slop they crave.

And of course if you use it too much, *you'll* be the one left behind, because you don't practice your skills and stop learning new things.

For the ethics thing, I think the most important bit is that; if you don't care about ethics, don't care if your actions cause harm or not; that makes you, definitionally, a bad person. It also frustrates me that we're so tolerant of people being bad people nowadays, I don't think it's ok tbh.

There's also the comparison to veganism. I eat meat myself, but only because I'd struggle to feed myself otherwise. I also think vegans are basically objectively correct, and whenever I find a way to reduce my meat intake, I do. The reasons vegans should be delicate isn't because they're not right, it's because thats how they'll actually get people to swap over. I also think advocating for these unethical things is bad and should be called out, whether it's to eat more meat, or use more AI.

Your original post kinda felt in the same vein as saying "Hey vegans, did you know meat is healthy? also there's no ethical consumption under capitalism so like who cares?" I'm sure you could kinda see why that'd be neither entirely correct, nor in good taste (you clearly saw the taste part, given the CW tho lol); and I think the AI argument is even worse because AI has been shown to be really really bad for you mentally.

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ulveon.net (on derg.social)14h ago

@gimmechocolate I'm glad you at least had the patience to hear me out and allow myself to reason out what I meant. Unfortunately I was not able to articulate it correctly on my first attempt and I am pretty sure at least a few people unfollowed / blocked me over it, but that's fine (I haven't checked my follower numbers, and I honestly do not give a fuck).

But regardless, yeah, I also think all these people that are hailing AI like all the time and are allowing AI to take over their mental processes just so they can see themselves orchestrating a bunch of ~slaves~ assistants, and cosplaying as capitalists are going to be in trouble soon if they just give in fully and refuse to continue learning.

I like to think I take a balanced approach to AI (and well, everyone thinks they are right in their head, so duh). I don't think AI will eliminate jobs (or at least not in the sense of 1:1 human worker replacement), but I do think bosses will be inclined to replace humans with AIs that can produce plausibly similar results. this is a huge mistake, but it will happens whether I like it or not. But I think that learning to coexist and live with AI is essential.

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ulveon.net (on derg.social)21h ago

@gimmechocolate Don't think I am an AI fanatic like those tech bros. Sam Altman and Musk talk about a future when nobody has to work and we have abundance of everything but this is fallacious and also not really what they want anyway.

For example I think AI art is gross and pointless. Actually I think it should be forbidden to generate pictures with AI models because it not only poses huge disinformation risks but also erodes the livelihood of artists. And specifically in the case of art, AI is not about acceleration, it's about skill erasure.