I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
yhea sure. shake teh keys for the idiot.
Am I the idiot for not being an expert and not just automatically assuming a side is objectively correct. I’m an expert in a couple things, truly, not in this. I’ve seen some compelling comments from a few perspectives in this thread. Why be a dickhead?
Many are skeptical that there is a push by ai companies to make them appear more than they are due to their weak economic footing. From my experience with the llms I am not frightened they will become self aware. I am frightened that we are wasting energy and resources while polluting the planet further for little return and it will result in messing up our economies even more.
Good job in helping with their guerilla marketing campaign.
When a corporation realises that working for government will be more profitable than working for consumers, they pivot to scaremongering, but always with the undercurrent of “and that’s why you should PAY US so that you own the nukes, and not your enemies”
Personally, this just feels like marketing and these big asshole companies trying to resurrect the 2025 level of hype in order to salvage their IPO’s.
If they honestly believed this I can’t imagine that their workers wouldn’t do something more drastic.
In addition to what everyone else said, I’ll tell you why I don’t think that what we have currently can become some runaway superhuman intelligence:
All “AI” people are talking about are basically “just” LLM wrappers: tools built to run a LLM in a loop while giving it access to the ability to write and run code. This gets pretty powerful, since you can do a lot programmatically (including monetary transactions), but has a fundamental limit:
LLMs are trained ahead of time. And that’s a very cost intensive, long process. Beyond that, the LLM has only a context window of finite length. So there are no long-term planning capabilities. While running after being trained, the LLM can only condense knowledge into a summary and then re-read it, a lossy process that might introduce mistakes in “understanding” and will make any prolonged task degrade over time.
And even if they figure out how to make the things actually self-modify and learn things, you can’t give every session that ability, since that’ll vastly increase the storage and performance requirements. Do sessions with that ability will be closely monitored and limited.
So I don’t see any space where an evil AI could emerge, even when factoring in an essential possible future improvement to the technology.
I’m not worried about AGI. I’m worried about the insane military applications they’re developing right now, and giving Artificial Incompetence control.
I watched a grokbot get confused connect to the wrong vnc console and try to shut down its own little computer.
I’m not worried about AI taking over the planet. I’m worried about it clicking the wrong button with no oversight
Same, I am worried about humans using ANNs to kill people. Current society is a gigantic apparatus that is constantly shifting shuffling responsibility around. LMMs only accelerate the problem.
Humanity should be way more frightened of greedy psychopaths running the world than any technology.
And they’re peddling “AI” so aren’t they married in this case?
A lot of us here hate streaming platforms because they’re designed to benefit greedy capitalists first and foremost. That doesn’t mean the core idea or the technology behind streaming platforms is bad, though. An open source project like Jellyfin that is designed purely to benefit the end user is something that legitimately enriches all of our lives.
Similarly, just because scumbag companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are plundering the world for their own deranged benefit doesn’t make the underlying idea or technology bad. The tech is built on contributions from a lot of brilliant people over a long period of time whose names are not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. Open LLMs that run on gaming rigs are quickly catching up with cloud-based models as well.
At this point, I’m running Qwen 3.8 27B on a gaming GPU that has similar capabilities to Claude Sonnet 5 without giving Sam or Dario my data or $200 a month, just like I run Jellyfin without giving Netflix or Disney my money or data.
It is to distract us of real dangers we already see today: https://youtu.be/pauBYSQ1K_c
I’m more worried about the people using AI than the tech itself.
Every issue has been because corporations have “get out of jail free cards” these days, greed is sky high, and AI psychosis is rampant.
All those supposed AI agent hacks happened because someone set that as a task for the AI agents. Yes, someone thought it was ok to do so for marketing and profit. That’s the problem, companies are willing to use the AI tool to commit crimes.
Imagine if weapons companies advertised their products by shooting people in the streets. Someone thought it was a good idea, and can get away with it.
I don’t believe at all that AI agents have free will enough to decide to hack companies for fun. They’re just glorified text generation machines hooked up to an interface. They don’t have intentionality unless some human gave them the directive and wrote them a large cheque.
Also, we know all these AI company billionaires read dystopian scifi novels like business strategy textbooks. That’s why everything surrounding AI is so overtly scifi coded.
it’s the former juuuuuuuust until the latter
once it escapes the lab there’s no putting it back in the bottle
Unlike a bio-virus that has evolved for a billion years across all the niches of our ecosystems, when AI “escapes the lab” it’s entirely confined to man-made infrastructure, it’s not going to infect a flock of migrating birds and hop to the other hemisphere, it’s going to be in systems we built, mostly within the past 30 years or less, mostly in the past 30 months for the powerful ones.
When AI starts demonstrating “copying itself” through DNA encoding infecting living beings without killing them (too quickly), and/or “running” on something more ubiquitous than massive data-center hardware, that’s when it’s over.
It may be confined to man-made infrastructure, but that same infrastructure is what keep billions of people from starving to death. At this point, computers and networked systems are so baked in to every facet of our logistics chains and government that simply shutting it all down isn’t an option. The nightmare scenario is where rogue AI escapes the lab and copies itself to so many systems that the only way to kill it is to shut down every computer on Earth.
That’s the thing, at least right now, AI is dependent on new data centers, excess capacity built just for it - it’s not going to “escape” to the banking system and the tractor navigation chips, if it could do that they wouldn’t need to be building all this capacity for it.
hopefully you’re right
The people claiming it’s humanity ending are all directly involved in the AI companies. One take is that they are the ones that know the most about it.
My take is they are financially incentivized in making sure their investments grow in value.
I figured out recently that Thor Ragnarok is a perfect analogy for what is happening, and this is also why I think everyone’s pdoom should be very little, because they just evolve into new asgard
A third take is that they are unhinged cult members who are high on their own supply. Although I expect it’s a mix of both types (maybe within the same people).
Cory Doctorow also thinks that it is a coalition of true believers high on their own supply, and cynical grifters collaborating with them. https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/17/porque-no-los-dos/#fascist-incoherence
But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
there are too many people who don’t care about shit until they see results (good or not). like our greatest billionaires.
Look up “rationalists” and “zizians”
It will quickly become clear to you that the dichotomy is caused by one side being completely off their fucking rockers.
I knew a guy in high school that told girls they shouldn’t date him because his dick was so big it would hurt them. You can wax philosophical on his motives if you’d like, but spoiler alert - his dick wasn’t big.
That’s exactly what I think is happening. Remember a few months ago anthropic saying mythos is too dangerous to release until the government as the idiots they are starting believing them and banned them from exporting it, therefore losing them money. Very quickly they came up with fable (ironic name isn’t it) a week or two later saying it’s got the proper safeguards now. Now they’re all trying this marketing strategy asking the gov to regulate them, seemingly because they’re dangerous and not because they’re getting diminishing returns and feel threatened by the chinese competition
Did it work?
I mean there are people eating up this Anthropic crap.
I’m going to take a guess that it prob worked once, then word got around he was exaggerating.
Once is a win…
Your username with that conclusion paints a very funny picture.
Same thought. Pretty clear indication of how they knew it was a lie. :D
That is… Certainly a strategy of all time
The biggest risk I see is Idiocracy. Like, the movie.
Business workers become afraid to do or propose anything without AI signoff. Retail & service workers are told to do what the AI says, the way the AI says to do it, or get fired.
Technology innovator Marshall Brain (RIP) wrote a book in the early 2000s about an AI called “Manna” designed to replace fast food managers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201204080050/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The AI just talks in your ear all day: “Empty one bag of fries into the fryer. You have 6.5 minutes, switch to the sandwich station. Make one Big Burger: grab one patty from the 1/4 pound bin and place it on the griddle… … The fries are ready, turn around and lift them into the drain hopper…”
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
This is a boss’s wet dream. However a kitchen is the type of chaotic real world situation that AIs are unlikely to ever do well.
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
Yeah, they took care of that too in the book.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
It’s the Gypsy lifestyle of the new world. Gypsies prefer their life to the alternatives.
I believe you mean Romani. Your choice of word is a slur
Apologies. In Westpondia nobody knows what Romani means…
Ed Zitron’s podcast “Better Offline” recently talked about this. There is a small tech community called the Rationalists who believe AI super intelligence is inevitable and it will either accelerate humanity to new heights or kill off the species. These rationalists are actually a very prominent faction within tech and the AI industry. Apparently the language used within top AI firms is largely about the immense danger posed by AI super intelligence if any other group or company were to achieve it first. This creates an echo chamber that makes the people in the industry kind of lose their mind and misinterpret the capability of LLMs.
Everyone outside that faction recognizes that LLMs are just unreliable cloud software with limited use cases and that there’s no evidence LLMs could actually lead to any kind of intelligence.
Edit: Please, someone stop me from commenting on an AI post next time I’m tempted. I’m so tired of people replying, arguing with opinions I don’t have, based entirely around a hypothetical technology that doesn’t exist yet. LLMs make slop. Thats it. They hacked a company after weeks of 100s of instances being run, using old exploits published online. San Francisco will be underwater from climate change before LLMs can do anything more.
@FRYD @Return_of_Chippy there are also some exelent behind the bastarda aboit them too
@FRYD @Return_of_Chippy i love that the logic and reason guys’ next evolution is even less tethered to either
My Problem is: Even if your take on AI is true, we give an unreliable piece of software access to the internet and more and more systems and infrastructure. Even if it is not a malicious AI, it can be so unreliable, it might kill us by incompetence. a Sme can be said about some presidents…
LLMs are not intelligent. They lack morals, knowledge, and intent. The only remote risk of extermination is if a company with absolute impunity and endless resources told an LLM to hack the nuclear weapons and if knowledge of how to do that was already published online and processed as training data.
LLMs cannot do anything new, they can only regurgitate information thats already been stolen.
That is simply counter-factual. LLMs can absolutely do things that have not been published before, and they can access knowledge that is not in their training data through RAG. Intelligence is debatable, but reasoning models can reliably imitate “thinking” to a degree, and recursive self-improvement might lead to an autonomous advancement of intelligence. That LLMs allegedly “only regurgitate information” is simply wrong.
You’re confusing morals, knowledge, intent, and intelligence with capability. An atomic bomb has no will of its own either.
can be so unreliable, it might kill us by incompetence.
Same can be said of Homer Simpson manning the console at a nuclear power plant.
AI is a tool, irresponsible use of a tool is… irresponsible. Just like people puttting “not-self-driving” cars into “supervised driving assistance mode” and taking a nap at the wheel at 80mph.
It won’t kill us as a species, but its use may lead to disasters that were unintended and didn’t need to happen. Much of the regulation in other industries is due to that kind of thing happening. Worse, the companies making them are trying to get regulation to curtail other parties development for economic advantage rather than regulation on use which will steer the entire industry.
disasters that were unintended and didn’t need to happen.
As you say, every “scientifically based” industrial innovation / breakthrough has had the potential to cause new kinds of mayhem, and most of them did to some degree or another. Burning rivers and CO2 overload in the atmosphere spring to mind, but industrial “accidents” are part and parcel of industrial activity, always have been.
any kind of intelligence
A photocell that turns on a streetlamp after sundown, or when a dark cloud passes over the sun, is a kind of intelligence.
deleted by creator
either accelerate humanity to new heights or kill off the species
Arguably those are two ways of describing the same event.
Aren’t they called TESCREALists or something? It’s like a mish-mash of pop culture and pseudo intellectual BS
It’s just a freaking machine, unplug it lol
You can’t just “unplug” a data center, and probably mirrored campuses too.
Yeah, you know, it’s really a tossup between “one million malevolent GPUs with the all the constitution of a Ming dynasty vase” and “Sarah, from the county public works department, with a backhoe that hasn’t been replaced since 1987”
I was being facetious
I think that they’re seeing all the scary movie stuff start to come true - but missing the essential plot holes like that one: just unplug it.
People complain about AI slop - well, before AI slop there was lazy human slop, but lazy humans generally gave up before writing too many words or painting too much mess, or digital clone-stamping too many generic things… Truth is: if you put in 1/2 the effort of making something great without an AI tool into making something great with an AI tool, you can usually get something much better out in the end - if you’re sincerely trying to use the tools well.
It’s the people who don’t know / don’t care whether the result is slop or not who are putting in 1/10th (or less) the effort of making something great who are putting all the slop out there.
I’m not afraid of the machines taking over (yet), but I am afraid that the same explosion in copy-pasta document vomit that came with word processing 40-ish years ago is going to explode again into a docpocalypse with people using AI to drown each other in supposed “legal written” communications that are only even vaguely understandable using AI tools to read them.
I don’t think anyone’s afraid of the machines taking over, but human stupidity in over-relying on them.
No, Anthropic and ClosedAI are talking about such scenario.
They’re talking, they want other people to become more afraid, but is anyone actually afraid - or just latching on to this delusion of power to push their own agendae as if we all should be afraid?
