It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.

I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.

According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.

To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.

I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.

This post, like many others, confuses AI with Big Tech (or maybe that's intentional).

I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech".

I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai

I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance

>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it.

In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals.

I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior.

If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.

I think many of us actually have a moral stance on AI, it's just that it's somewhat similar to our moral stance on cars, power tools, heavy machinery, the loom, etc.

The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with:

> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.

"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.

> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.

Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.

> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.

No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.

No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.

> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.

Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?

> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.

I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.

> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.

I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.

> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.

It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?

This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters.

As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.

This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.

The weepiness and persecution complex is overwhelming.

There's nothing wrong with having a moral stance on something. It only becomes a problem when the stance is disproportionate and detached from empirical reality.

It started well, and then he is suddenly sick because fellow member of the drama group made a poster using AI without consulting him (her?)

Anyways, people looking for drama will find one

What most AI companies won't tell you is that creating a massive amount of new code will result in an overwhelming amount of technical debt for companies worldwide, sooner or later. Many organisations now believe that they can develop their own apps form scratch using AI, but if they don't pay for tokens capable of handling their ever-growing infrastructure code, their infrastructure will rot. The tendency to reinvent the wheel has always been a problem in the software industry, and AI will only accelerate this trend.

Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.

Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.

It seems unlikely at this point, given the real or perceived utility of using modern AI models, that people are going to stop using the technology. Also, given the huge amount of capital that's gone into the industry at this point, it would likely have a pretty negative effect on the global economy if they did. If you feel like it's causing a lot of harm and you're more passionately morally opposed to it than most, perhaps the thing to do is to focus on devising methods to lessen the harm. I think that would be very valuable to society.

I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively.

Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).

Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.

> [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.

I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.

I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?

Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.

If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.

Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.

So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.

But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.

> the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths

The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage?

As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?

I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.

There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.

But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.

Holy cow this is whiny And essentially saying no one else has morals… yikes.

Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it… personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc it’s paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it it’s not all bad.

In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I don’t see it being possible. It’s like saying: I don’t like cars (and I’m better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS… there’s absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.

What's wrong about a beautiful banner done beautifully with AI? What's wrong with a new app done in 5 mins by a coding agent? What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?

A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side.

I totally welcome our new AI overlords.

> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.

Some of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)

It's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.

Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).

If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.

Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?

Most people don't work for Uber, Meta or AirBnB and these companies have been criticized forever in tech forums.

This time the "innovation" is also based on actual theft.

This is like saying cancer is perfectly normal.

> Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.

If someone who has never had any major financial benefit from tech, but loved it all the same, criticizes AI, do they get a pass?

Who's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates

There are about ten billion relevant and reasonable ways to differentiate and choose priorities in all of that.

Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.

People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway.

Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists

Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing with AI... and so many more! I personally use it a lot for coding (though I still try to do some manual work so I don't just forget everything), translations, quick queries about things, in the computer (specially CLI commands, AI is just incredibly good at it - no matter the CLI, seemingly) and in the physical world (e.g. what's the name of that thing you turn on a tap to open it - English is not my first language), it even helped me a lot figure out legislation in two different countries, where finding and understanding the law was next to impossible by myself (and it gave me links to everything so I could check by myself).

I've never seen a technology hated as much as AI currently is outside of tech. However, most people aren't moralizing about it, they just hate it.

Turns out you can have strong opinions about things without it being an issue of morality.

I don't work in tech (school teacher), so the main way I interact with tech people is online.

IME, everyone I meet offline has some low-level caution about AI taking their job, but uses AI and is amazed by their capabilities and is glad for this tool.

Most ppl I meet online are strong anti-AI advocates.

Being able to discern what is and isn't in our control helps tremendously in doing what is right and constructive.

The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them.

That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control.

So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions.

My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature.

What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment.

Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control.

I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes.

If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse.

The risk isn't AI, it's how we choose to use it.