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"But we cease to feel struggle when we use AI."

Sounds like this person has little experience using AI.

I get the TLDR; (ie. the tool has negative externalities). But the counter is, the cat's out of the bag. No amount of public pressure is likely to affect that trajectory very much, especially when it comes to how nation-states and the military have already been using it against the general public since long before LLMs became widely available to the public. Nor will it affect the vast majority of sheeple and bandwagoneers, who frankly don't give a fuck, and can't get much more retarded than they already are.

Boycotting it entirely might make one feel morally superior, but I don't think it will meaningfully affect how bad actors leverage the technology, mainly because you have almost no control over how your taxes are spent. The best we can do is be careful about who we pay for the service. You get what you pay for (taxes notwithstanding) and there's no need to throw gasoline on the forest fire for the sake of personal convenience. In other words, choose ethical providers and local models whenever possible. But for the same token we can also use AI to enable us to fight back against the bad actors. In effect like Tai Chi, to redirect their own destructive energy against them. Think USA's 2A, swords and military munitions are meant for killing people, but is it really better for us when only the enemy has them at their disposal? Clearly not.

https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/05/just-a-tool.html

@toiletpaper
> Boycotting it entirely might make one feel morally superior, but I don't think it will meaningfully affect how bad actors leverage the technology

well, you only can truly change what you do so that's the only thing that can be changed anyway. feeling superior isn't good though. i have good reasons not to touch LLMs, it's for my own sake, not because i can save the world with it. when others choose to not use LLMs, i will support them.

@bonifartius

I get chided a lot for not having a cell phone, not using the internet without a VPN, not having traditional social media, not wanting to be digitally recorded every time I step into the public domain, not using ecommerce if it means compromising my privacy, etc. So I get the urge to boycott invasive/destructive technologies in a visceral sense. That said, I think AI is a bit different in this respect. I've been able to do a lot with it that would have simply remained a perpetual pipe dream if it was just me left to my own devices. I don't really do less programming or research or other stuff I would normally do because I use AI. In effect I do a lot more of those things, but cut out the menial tasks and things which were previously out of reach due to time constraints, skills gaps, disinterest, etc. That includes creating software that enables me to have better privacy, including from AI systems. That said, I don't use just any AI/provider. I choose carefully and implement safeguards, because it heavily intersects with my privacy and related ethical concerns. I don't see it as a black and white decision to use or not use it, but in shades of gray, and I'm strongly motivated to use it to fight back. I even use it to write my local politicians when they're weighing in on policy decisions which have an impact in these areas.

@toiletpaper i mainly don't use it because of the heidegger argument. it would change me, and the slope is downward - stopping it's usage would be much harder for me than starting it.

if i can't do things on my own, i have to reflect if i really need to do them. if i'm too lazy to do the menial tasks, is the whole important enough for me? is it really MY work if 90% is done by some automaton? (isn't the compiler the very same?)

not easy and of course different for everyone.

@bonifartius

> the heidegger argument. it would change me

I get it. personally I'm not opposed to changing. in the words of heraclitus, you can never step in the same river twice. but fwiw, I think citing heidegger is also a great argument that refusing to use AI is inherently fascist (libtard logic). 🤪

> is it really MY work if 90% is done by some automaton

you could make the same argument about whether it's your work because you used a plough and a combine to plant & harvest crops instead of digging the furrows with a stick and harvesting with a sharp rock. at the end of the day "MY work" is just a question of ego, whereas the products of the labour is what's really the point in the first place. and given that AI is trained on a large chunk of human knowledge, how is it different from planting an acre by yourself, vs planting that same acre with the help of your family or community? there's no case where we're not leveraging work done by others, whether directly or in the form of tools we didn't invent and manufacture from scratch, and thus we're always necessarily sharing the credit for the end result whether we acknowledge that explicitly or not.

that being said, I don't fault or judge you for your choice. just being the devil's advocate for the sake of argument.

@toiletpaper hannah arendt lets libtards heads explode 💁

everything changes one, hence i have to decide if i want to use something and thus be changed. fedi is ok for me, i can talk to interesting people here. X etc. just fry my brain.

i can't really place my finger on it, but LLMs feel functionally different to me. a plough is a plough, a lathe is a lathe, a compiler is a compiler. a llm produces semi random combinations of things. fwiw, i'd be leas critical if they were trained locally.

@toiletpaper if i could train a llm with the corpus of GNU software locally and use THAT model, it would take away most of my criticism. i'd know what's inside. no one knows what's hidden in the corporate models, and it's clear these models could steganographically hide anything in their output. no matter if you run them locally or in some corporate datacenter.

@bonifartius

> models could steganographically hide anything in their output

I think that's actually a given to some extent, particularly now with vision/audio models. for the same token, even the shitty inkjet/laser printers you can buy off the shelf do this with tracking dots, so that everything you print can be attributed to the specific device and thus to it's owner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

I suspect it's less likely with coding models though, because that would be incredibly challenging, and unless it's a large codebase and extremely robust encoding, it would be broken whenever the output is modified manually.

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