alt Hacker NewsTo have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
Comments
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 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...
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 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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [...] 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?
This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.
> 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.
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.
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.
It is fun watching the thieves squirm in this thread and being upset at others calling them criminals. "But think of the loom," they say. The loom wasn't stolen by a replicator.
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.
Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information.
Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
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.
I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
I mean if you had the same reaction when personal computers were made, you would also be an outcast. They also put whole industries out of business and caused huge pollution and etc. There is no real difference. But you have a right to withdraw from the world and be a luddite.
I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.
Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly."
There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.
AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
> don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now.
This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.
I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.
All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
I like that AI sucks
It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.
LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment"
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Post-modem incel vibes. It’s always someone/something else making the protagonist an outcast.
One challenging thing about talking against AI is that it's both a centralizing thing, in that everything is supposedly to use AI as glue and linking center, and decentralizing, in that we can see all the leaf nodes become unreliable, then the outer nodes, because people just 'ask AI'. It's a dystopian idea that we should be making the computer itself the process, as opposed to just using the computer to help ourselves make the process.
I don't feel like an outcast when I'm outside of the bubble of this community and outside of an environment like a workplace where people have to demonstrate enthusiasm for AI because they fear getting penalized for not using it.
That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
Morality, good and evil, true or false, is a human way of thinking. AI sees the world thru the lens of efficiency, ROI and so on.
From https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...:
> *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
We've been through this exact same thing with crypto and particularly NFTs. Remember those? Oh sure, a shortened URL on a blockchain is worth millions. Remember that? This quote on cognitive bias is often brought out:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows
TL;DR author confuses anxiety with morals, cuts people out of their life that they can’t cope with being around.
This has played out a million different ways throughout history, nothing special about this case, it just happens to be rooted in anxiety about AI.
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.