I saw this counterpoint on Mastodon and I think it sums up things rather well: https://hachyderm.io/@chris_e_simpson/116925250364867462
Child labour is such an excellent comparison to use against the “if it is effective why not use it” argument.
This has got to be the worst argument I’ve ever seen.
Please elaborate
comparing LLMs to child labor is summing it up well?
jfc
And watch the billionaires nod in agreement to more child labor lol
I really want to link this article here as a counterpoint - why “AI is just a tool” as a stance doesn’t quite cut it as far as well-founded opinions go: https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/05/just-a-tool.html
My concern with arguments like this are what policies is this guy advocating for and who gets to define what a just system is. AI is clearly political, but it’s not at all clear who it’s gonna end up benefiting or harming in the long run. I strongly suspect it won’t be the billionaires because they have consistently failed to keep control of technology, and it’s clear this one is already getting beyond them – We have local LLMs.
Furthermore, large parts of what AI doing to society are how people are using it. The AI psychosis, lazy slop, alienation, or cheating in education – all of these are people using AI wrong. It’s not an inherent property of AI. Crucially, both people and institutions are already beginning to adapt, and I think we’re gonna be better off for it.
Like for AI psychosis, people should be developing the habit of not trusting things until they’ve thought it through for themselves – that’s huge for getting people to think critically. Similar for cheating in education, we’ve been complaining about education systems that teach the test for decades. Now, our education institutions are being forced to give kids actual projects and track their progress with those projects regardless of what tools they use. This is related to the AI slop – I’ve set up a series of prompts to have the AI critique my important writing. Rather than having the AI write for me, I’ve created an additional check for quality. I’d be shocked if people weren’t doing similar things for code and images. You can create more resistance for yourself to produce better works.
I’m not going to pretend to have a response to alienation, but I went months between talking to people well before AI, so how bad can it be. Plus, something about “emotional labor” and women not wanting you to vent/whine to them like they’re your mother. Idk.
There are environmental issues, but if you can get the LLM running on your own computer you’ll realize it’d not be very much of an impact if it weren’t for weird data centers. We should ban all data centers that aren’t powered with 100% renewables. I’m all for a policy like that, but I’d be very opposed to a blanket ban on all AI.
The development of AI also doesn’t bother me. Part of being a member of society is contributing to collective works. In my field (structural biology) we spent the last 55 years meticulously organizing data as an open reference for anyone and everyone to do whatever they could to make the world a better place, and when AI came along we were happy. The problem here is that it hasn’t yet been made to go both ways in LLMs, but weight distilling is quickly resolving that issue. I’d be fine with stripping AI of its IP, and forcing them to charge profit via ads or tokens if we really must run them remote. I don’t support the insane claims that they owe everyone and their brother for IP violations and the complete destruction of fair use. Honestly, I don’t want to strengthen intellectual property laws in general monopolies are stupid – set up a donate to get past the release threshold and then just release your work. Charge of consent update services or bug priority then release rarer free updates. It’s not that hard to not be a be a prick about it.
The economic issues are just same conflict between the rich and the poor we’ve always had. You should have unions. You should be retrained instead of fired. There should be quality standards. Rich people should stop trying to be exploitative enshitifiers.
Anyway, my point here is a lot of the people who are blanket Anti-AI are kinda missing the interesting politics that are actively developing in favor of an “change is bad” stance that’s crippling the public’s ability to take advantage of this transition period and advocate for things that’d actually help us.
using it wrong
You can’t claim that it’s being used wrong when it’s being used as advertised.
AI lords are catapulting shovels-full of
shitAI at the wall and hedging the economy on something sticking.Who made finance bros the majority on all things technology? I’m certainly not advocating using their remote products, so why should their opinions matter? Rich people always spin whatever nonsense they can to sell their crap – believing them is stupid. I’m not gonna accept a blanket ban on all AI, including local AI, because some rich grifters can’t behave. There’s more nuance here.
I don’t think that you are really disagreeing with the article - I read it mostly as an invitation to broaden your view on what it means to use AI as it is today, with current benefits and harms, and stop trying to mentally divorce yourself of the consequences of said use by calling it just a tool, as if tools were fundamentally neutral, because they aren’t, as you said yourself.
I do have some gripes with your stance though.
Yes, we have local models. But have you ever tried to set up a coding assistant with a local model on consumer-grade hardware? LLMs that are small/performant enough to run on a laptop tend to suck really bad, compared to the cloud-based (data center driven) flagship models. You can barely use them for anything more advanced that “Write me a friendly email to my boss”.
That’s the whole problem - to approach anything like real “I can use this in production”-usefulness, you do need this gigantic mass of data centres. We are in the beginning stages of having that kind of usefulness, currently, with all its costs. But that doesn’t mean we should keep doing it.
It does mean that using gigantic LLMs as an everything machine is an ill-conceived idea, because they are too fucking expensive to run measured by the kind of ressources we have on our planet, and while you can make them more efficient, it always comes at a cost to their usefulness (more hallucinations, less stringent logic in long tasks etc.).
I also want to question this idea of “Well, any bad consequences of LLM usage are just people using it wrong, it’s not inherent”, especially for “AI psychosis”.
Most reports of “AI psychosis” I’ve read started out as something totally benign - someone had a random, unusual idea and they decided to talk to an LLM about it to get some feedback. You know, to not have any women in their life do emotional labour for them, or something.
And now, the inherent tool design of LLMs becomes important. The fine-tuning on LLMs used as chatbots can be optimized for different things - like giving the impression of being purely informative, or to be responsive to emotional markers in the prompt, or to structure answers in a way that keeps users engaged, to encourage them to burn their token rate limit and purchase more. The latter is something nearly all commercial LLMs do to some degree.
Human psychology is not a secret science. You know what is a lot of fun for many humans, and keeps them engaged? Being told that they’re right. And really clever. Have great observations and thoughts, and to offer to develop them further, together. A lot of people enjoy being flattered, even by a machine.
And this is fun, so why not explore further where this chat leads?
And the story goes on - the idea is expanded upon, the LLMs praising responses become grander and grander, the usage becomes longer, the user dives deeper and their divorce from reality becomes bigger, and at some point, no other human shares their reality anymore, and that is what psychosis, at its core, is.
Some snap back out of it in time, others get lost in it.
My point being: yes, maybe these harms result in a misuse of LLMs. But they are absolutely exacerbated by the way current implementations are designed. And then, the actual misuse is to have used an LLM for brain-storming at all, instead of talking to a human, that is fully prepared to tell you that your idea is stupid.
This harm, from my perspective, IS an inherent risk in the current implementation of the technology, and so are others. These systems are being designed that way. The misuses you decry are actively advertised for and are being promoted, because they are also lucrative.
No tool is neutral.
On a personal note: I personally don’t like working with LLMs. I noticed that by doing it extensively in the last couple of months, especially for educational and coding purposes. It does something bad with my brain and with my learning and thinking, and it impairs me in the long run - if I do this a lot, I don’t think I will be able to do things without an LLM at some point - classic skill decay. I don’t want that. Other people might not think so, and rather feel empowered. That’s fine to me, but I would encourage everyone to test themselves on that regularly.
And on a political note: The politics around “AI” are, to me, not especially new. It’s just end-stage-capitalism, again. It’s a finance sector bubble that will hurt us all when it bursts, again. It’s the devaluation of human labour, again. It’s surveillance and data collection and unjust wealth distribution and disinformation and societal atomization and environmental destruction again, but faster. The type of thing that has been happening before just keeps on happening, more. I do think that that kind of change (mostly in velocity) is something to oppose.
Yeah, I’m not in complete disagreement with the article. I agree that blanket “AI good” is bad, but I also think blanket “AI bad” is bad, and it wasn’t clear to me that there was much acknowledgement of the possible benefits of the technology.
I admit I’m not all the way there with coding with local LLMs, but I don’t think it’s as impossible as you’re making it seem. I’m running Qwen3.6-35B on my laptop, and while I’m sure it’s smaller than the flagship models when you break things down into chunks and have it work on those chunks one by one – I think it can do a lot.
Obviously the AI psychosis is related to how the model is tuned, but as the article pointed out our tools shape us, and in my opinion learning to resist this is going to turn people into critical thinkers. I don’t think there’s any realistic scenario where the technology wins in a tug of war with reality about what reality is. Maybe there are edge cases with people who are already mentally deeply comprised, but reality has a way of not being something you can just ignore. The growing pains suck too. People who’ve not thought critically in forty years are going to struggle, but it’ll force them to become better people.
I’m not arguing tools are neutral or that AI is all good – but it’s not all bad either. A lot of stuff associated with AI is horrific and should be banned: Pollution from AI data centers, AI mass surveillance, AI revenge porn. I don’t see how any of those thing are in any way defensible, but it’s the uses not the technology that should be banned. Those bad use cases aren’t all of AI. I use AI to critique my writing. I use it design proteins that will someday soon be used to treat or even cure disease. AI can be used for good.
I’ve felt the skill decay a few instances, but I’m power/skill hungry and immediately adjust my behavior. There are also skills I’d never be able to learn without AI. Writing is a great example. No one in my life has the time to read over every crappy attempt at writing I make and critique it. Without some sort of feedback, I can’t improve the writing. AI provides that feedback at least for early drafts. It’s also been able to point me towards information I’d never be able to find just digging through the literature. It’s often wrong on those technical things, but it can generate a list for me to look through.
Agreed on a lot of the politics, largely just another iteration of the same stuff.
i think most people here conflate ai with data centers. datat centers exist with out ai and you can use ai without data centers. local ai fills a lot of needs and in the next two years there will be more home hardware to run it. nvidia just announced a new consumer chip , coming out later this year, to run models at home.
in my eyes, the bubble has always been paying a company to use their ai. sure it has places for science and medicine but most of us dont use it for that.
so AI is a tool, how its used or implemented is the problem.
AI fills a lot of needs
Sure it does, Jensen
That was unnecessarily wordy to express only two complaints:
AI causes environmental damage and AI was created by scraping content that the AI companies didn’t own.
Did you read the whole thing? It’s about a lot more, such as corporate control, economic hardship, and alienation. It’s not a long read and you don’t have to care or agree with the author, but this is a disservice to their post.
This blog post is a wandering train of thought on the topic of what tools are and why it matters to be even slightly more mature in how we think about them.
That’s the second sentence, and it’s fairly clear that the author means to start the discussion of the titular topic, not to conclusively explore every ail of AI. Of which there are many, yet enumerated.
Some people call this “food for thought”; I would agree.
You can have a wandering train of thought without writing 2500 words repeating the same two ideas over and over and over.
He’s not wrong.
The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There’s no question on that side.
We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.
And no, AI isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.
Linus is, as usual, a pragmatist. And he’s right. All the bitching and gnashing of teeth over AI is ridiculous. If it produces good code then you should accept that code.
People will bitch and complain about ‘slop’ but the kernel team has processes in place to manage and review code from thousands of sources. They know what they’re doing.
Nobody serious is going to say “just accept AI created code without review!” That’s tech-bro BS. Quality software engineers know to adopt tools cautiously and deliberately.
If you’re going to argue people should accept AI code (what people ought to do) then you’ve entered a moral argument. People are free to argue about when the code is good ‘as in useful’ but naturally that’s not as important as when the code is good ‘as in morally good’.
I value software freedom, and copyleft licenses like Linux’s GPL for protecting it. While AI generated code cannot be copyrighted then it cannot be licensed under a free software license. It can legally become proprietary. You ought not accept “good” AI code.
AI generated code cannot be copyrighted
It can legally become proprietary
pick one
People can take “your” non-copyrighted code and ignore any copyright license you could try, and fail, to enforce in court.
It’s funny how you pretend this is a ‘moral’ issue but then just end up with a copyright law conclusion.
While AI generated code cannot be copyrighted then it cannot be licensed under a free software license.
This is a concern - though the legal question is still a bit open on this. The question has been around how much human involvement there has been. A purely “create me a photo of a cat” prompt generating a picture of a cat has very little human involvement (fully AI generated).
A “generate some code to do this, no make it do it this way, rename these variables, etc.” prompt “conversation” may be treated differently by the law. We don’t know yet.
It makes no sense to say to someone what they “should do” without the part where it’s helpful to them flourishing or avoiding missery (i.e. morality). This can be expanded to include others in purely selfish terms.
There are no moral issues to AI if we ignore all negative ways it’s creation (and use) affects people. Typical AI-creator take advantage of others’ works on-mass while we’ve punished normal people harshly for far less infringement/social violations.
If the purpose of copyright is about encouraging human creativity then the AI generated elements which are clearly seperatable from human input should not be copyrightable? There can be creativity in writing promps but the resulting code output is not itself creative?
