So what's so bad about using AI any way?

[werdna]

DU is an image rich forum. Many posters however use GenAI images. Here are a couple links that explain why this may not be the best thing to do, especially if you consider yourself a supporter of human rights and the environment.

Generative AI ethics: 16 biggest concerns and risks, By George Lawton

As adoption and use cases grow, generative AI is upending business models and driving ethical issues such as misinformation, brand integrity and job displacement to the forefront.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/Generative-AI-ethics-8-biggest-concerns

18 Risks and Dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Written by Mike Thomas
AI has been hailed as revolutionary and world-changing, but it’s not without drawbacks.
https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/risks-of-artificial-intelligence

[Matthew28]

1. A.i is here to stay

It would be like being against the factory in 1820, Electricy in 1900, the car in 1910 and the computer in 1990.

Society progresses and that is the way it is. I find it useful in many areas and I use it daily.

[cayugafalls]

3. I completely agree.

You could no more stop AI than you could keep the caveman from using the rock as hammer...

Peace.

[Fiendish Thingy]

15. AI would be easy to stop

Just block the construction of data centers and refuse to allow the existing ones to use to power grid.

Starve the beast.

[Boomerproud]

18. Or unending wars.

NT

[Fiendish Thingy]

16. Using AI requires unquestioning trust and a suspension of critical thinking.

AI only makes things easier if the user trusts that it is infallible.

[cayugafalls]

2. I wrote a paper 35 years ago called the Technology Rock...

I was writing LISP back in the 80's which is the precurser programming language of AI.

Like any tool, it is the user that is the danger...a hammer in the wrong hands can cause mayhem just as easily as AI.

I use AI as a tool, it has no problem being told you are using it like a tool, so turn off the personality and just answer the question.

Those who master the tools of their era will be the masters of that era as has always been the case.

Peace

[Roy Rolling]

8. This 👆

This was true 35 years ago and it’ll be true forever. The tool isn’t the problem, it’s the tool-bearer.

Like any technological advancement, applying the most advanced technology to antisocial and evil purposes is a risk. That risk is heightened when the the technology is controlled (or uncontrolled) by unqualified people.

It’s bad enough selling guns to everyone, imagine if everyone had the right to own an atomic weapon? A.I. cannot be un-invented.

But it must be guided and used for the benefit and not the detriment of society. Not for the sole benefit of A.I. money-grabbing corporation CEOs and shareholders.

[msongs]

4. the problem with AI is separating fact from fiction and knowing what is real vs fake

[ThreeNoSeep]

6. That's not an AI probem

Telling truth from fiction has been a problem since humans started communicating.

[highplainsdem]

24. It's an AI problem because generative AI hallucinates and is a pretense of intelligence, a fancy autocomplete

trained on theft of the world's intellectual property. A fancy autocomplete mimicking human intelligence and creativity that can make an error at any time and has no awareness of truth or correct answers.

That's why those tools come with all those warnings that genAI makes mistakes so its results should always be checked.

You have a tool that will always create misinformation being hyped as intelligent, and some humans gullible enough to fall for the con job, trust whatever the AI tells them, and forget to use their own brains.

It's badly flawed tech that should never have been released, and it's solely a testament to hype that it was ever widely used. Calculators would never have been widely adopted if they were so unreliable users had to be warned to check all the results. GenAI wowed the gullible because it could imitate human writing and art so quickly that if you didn't notice all the errors, it looked like instant writing and art with no real intelligence or skill or effort required.

[Blue Full Moon]

5. All of the GNP is data centers.

The centers are using our water that we all need to live on. It's stealing the electricity and infrastructure with zero benefit except the billionaires who built it. They will kill thousands. But then there is Bezos, that human water consumption is limiting AI's potential. Surprise is any jobs are very temporary. AI and robots and humans are not needed. This tech every single one of us paid for. We paid for the companies. Most through CIA and In-Q-Tel. Every single one us should be living off of it. The robber barons need to be ended. Corporate personhood should have never been.

[DFW]

7. Interesting theme

I don't (knowingly) use AI at all. I don't even know how. I'm sure my company does. With a 25 man IT department, I have to assume it would be impossible to maintain their work without it.

Nonetheless, our activities depend on people, period. We are still hiring and expanding. When I joined in 1975, we were maybe twelve people in out early twenties. At 23, I was one of the older ones. Today, we are over a thousand people worldwide with very little turnover. To my knowledge, every single one of us is a living person. Max Headroom doesn't even visit. On my visits back to Dallas, I meet with real people, not zoomed images. I suppose the day is coming when AI will be combined with 3D printers for artificial people as well, but we're not there yet. Maybe, after Trump, the Republicans are hard at work on it. I'm sure the image is to their liking, but the odors perceived in proximity would be eliminated with the AI version. They could probably even program him to remain awake and speak English, although that would be a dead giveaway that something had been altered.

[ShepKat]

9. never used it, and feel no attraction to do so

I won't even click on those youtube links with the misleading AI graphics to 'entice' viewers.

I'd rather use my brain, critical thinking skills and heart.
Not into relying on something that can be tweaked and manipulated by nefarious others.

I won't own a spy phone either.

Altho, It has promise in some specific 'channels' like detecting disease in medical situations.

[Scrivener7]

10. Thank you! I saw an interview with a former AI developer

who stopped when he realized where it was headed. He said AI is a species, not a technology. And it is a smarter species than we are. Think of what we have done to the species we outrank in intelligence. He said if we are lucky, we'll end up as pets to AI.

The same day I read that, I read about an AI agent which bought itself a robot so it could interact in the physical world.

AI is the devil.

[Polybius]

12. "I read about an AI agent which bought itself a robot so it could interact in the physical world"

That kinda cute actually!

[Scrivener7]

20. You think? How about the experiment they did a couple of months ago where they

made it clear to the AI that one of the scientists was pushing to shut it down. The AI then proceeded to try and ruin the scientist financially and socially and blackmailed him to back off.

https://www.uniladtech.com/news/ai/anthropic-exec-ai-extreme-reactions-when-threatened-614393-20260211

Adorable.

[Polybius]

11. I think DU is much more anti-AI then the general population

I don't believe it relates much to politics either. Instead, I think it's more about age. DU primarily consists of older individuals, and from what I've seen, the majority are Boomers, with a significant number still belonging to the Silent Generation.

On the other hand, Millennial and Gen Z members of DU, who generally favor AI, are still a minority here. As for Gen X, their opinions vary; however, it's often the early Gen Xers (those born in the 60s) who tend to be against it.

So combine early Gen X, Boomers, and Silent Gen, and you get the vast majority of DU. For what it's worth, I'm a mid-range Gen Xer that uses AI almost daily.

[highplainsdem]

21. I guess you've missed the recent news stories about how much younger people dislike genAI.

For instance:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221159855

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/style/gen-z-ai-gallup-study.html

More than half of Gen Z-ers living in the United States use generative artificial intelligence regularly, but their feelings about the technology are souring, according to a new survey released on Thursday by Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures, a venture capital firm that works in education technology.

The percentage of respondents ages 14 to 29 who said they felt hopeful about A.I. declined sharply since last year, down to 18 percent from 27. Young adults’ excitement about artificial intelligence dropped, too, and nearly a third of respondents indicated that the technology made them feel angry.

-snip-

He said he had been surprised by how noticeably young people’s attitudes had shifted. Many respondents did acknowledge that A.I. might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said. But they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills.

Young adults in the work force were especially skeptical. Close to half of those surveyed said the risks of artificial intelligence outweighed its potential benefits in the workplace, an 11-point jump from the previous year. Only 15 percent said they saw A.I. as a net benefit.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skepticism-climbs.aspx

Similar proportions of Gen Zers believe AI will help (37% a little or a lot) or hurt (39% a little or a lot) their ability to search for accurate information, while about a quarter think it will do neither. At the same time, more tend to believe the technology will be harmful rather than helpful to their abilities to come up with new ideas on their own (38% harmful, 31% helpful) or think carefully about information (42% harmful, 25% helpful).

Gen Zers are less optimistic today than last year that AI will enhance their creativity and research skills, with the percentages expecting it to help them down 11 and six points, respectively.

Gen Zers also question whether AI's short-term conveniences come at the expense of their long-term development. Eight in 10 Gen Zers say it is “very” (34%) or “somewhat” (46%) likely that using AI tools will make it more difficult for them to learn in the future.

The artists I know on Bluesky who'll block anyone promoting AI or posting AI slop include very few older people.

GenAI is not viewed favorably by most people on Bluesky, which is a mostly liberal platform.

And it's good that it ISN'T viewed favorably, because genAI - the tech and the AI bros - are on the wrong side of issues liberals are supposed to care about.

GenAI is not viewed favorably by most people on Reddit, which tends to be liberal, with the exception of the specifically pro-AI forums.

You wrote:

For what it's worth, I'm a mid-range Gen Xer that uses AI almost daily.

You're also in favor of people wearing smart glasses, as I recall.

Generative AI is extremely flawed tech - so flawed even the genAI companies warn (as a way of reducing their legal liability for their defective AI tools) that its results should always be checked - but people who like it enough to keep using it have been found to check results for errors less and less, and to become more and more dependent on it, even outsourcing their judgment to it. That's probably in part because chatbots are designed to flatter AI users to keep them engaged and make them more and more dependent on AI.

Some people are unfortunately forced to use AI because of school or work. But it's unethical to use genAI voluntarily if one's aware that it's trained on stolen intellectual property.

Multiple studies have already shown that it dumbs users down.

And those very basic and catastrophic problems with genAI come with the additional problems that it harms both the natural environment and the information ecosystem, wrecks education, worsens inequality, and puts our digital infrastructure at risk through flawed code.

The question shouldn't be why anyone dislikes genAI, but why anyone who's even slightly aware of all the harm it does would think genAI is a good thing.

[Emile]

13. After you work all day talking to an algorithm, will it still remember to pick up milk?

[Fiendish Thingy]

14. AI destroys critical thinking and makes the whole world dumber and more pliable for the oligarchs. Nt

[Bettie]

17. And the data centers are accellerating the destruction

of our planet while also making life worse for everyone except the oligarchs.

I can think for myself and know how to do research, so I don't need AI.

I saw an ad that said you could write a novel in 90 minutes with AI....that's not "writing a novel", that's having AI write a novel and you pretending it's your work, it saps creativity and the ability to think critically.

But, you can just put your question into the AI and get an answer that's probalby wrong, but who cares right? It's answered.

[Drum]

19. Bookmarking!

[highplainsdem]

22. Re DUers posting and sometimes creating AI images - it makes DU look much less liberal than it should

look, because every single one of those AI slop images (and they're all AI slop) gives a thumbs-up to the intellectual property theft genAI is built on, and another thumbs-up to the companies and oligarchs behind genAI, who are mostly either Trump-supporting or willing to go along with him, and in some cases are openly both anti-Democratic Party and anti-democracy.

Trump loves AI art because it perfectly suits his fraudulent and exploitative character.

[highplainsdem]

23. Btw, thanks for posting those links, werdna! Important info there.