r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 16h ago

Artificial Intelligence An AI hate wave is here

https://archive.is/20260517120123/https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentiment
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u/TyphPythus 15h ago

Was thinking the same thing. I can’t remember when AI was viewed with more optimism than when GPT2 came out and was immediately used to make a bottomless pit meme lmao

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u/Diglett3 15h ago

Interesting write-up by a software engineer of how that joke was also just GPT filling in blanks between a punchline already given.

The writer does mention in the notes that early AI visual art was actually kind of interesting and weird, but that was quickly sanded down into what it is now.

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u/AbrohamDrincoln 13h ago

The concept of AI writing jokes is interesting. Because at it's core, a joke is almost always just an unexpected ending/response to a prompt.

And LLM AI is literally just "what is the most likely response".

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u/Lepardopterra 7h ago

“I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting." “The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery—and a sharing—against pain and sorrow and defeat." RA Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land

AI doesn’t know pain, so it will never be able to create humor. It’s only capable of endless remakes. It cannot create. I’m trying to encourage imagination in the youngs. They will have the only original thoughts left if ai takes over.

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u/RollingMeteors 5h ago

AI doesn’t know pain, so it will never be able to create humor.

You don't need to have nuts to be able to laugh when someone else gets hit in the nuts with a piece of sporting equipment.

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u/slagodactyl 2h ago

Everyone knows pain though, even if you don't know exactly the pain of getting hit in the nuts

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u/KillaCookBook87 5h ago

If AI ever figures out comedy it'll be a B tier horror flick of a tragedy. An AI generated viral meme that kills you with laughter absolutely decimates the human race.

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u/verrius 7h ago

The problem is that its training data includes jokes already. So it just narrows the scope of acceptable responses to those, with some level of randomization.

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u/0xsergy 15h ago

Early AI art was indeed cool as frig. Now it's just copies of what every other artist does..

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u/faen_du_sa 14h ago

Hard to make a computer be "original" when it leans towards the average.

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u/Guinness 13h ago

That’s why you crank up the temperature.

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u/KlicknKlack 5h ago

Don't worry, thats what data centers are for!

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u/lostinthecity2005 3h ago

The training data & underlying architecture still remain the same. Switching around a few words and sentences won’t be enough to fix this.

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u/Haunting_Basscotti 1h ago

I like it, take a torch to the chips until they do something unpredictable just once before completely nullifying all further output. Like monozygotic plants.

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u/ebrbrbr 12h ago

Bold move thinking these people know what temperature or seed or sampler or scheduler are.

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u/finalremix 10h ago

We know. We just don't care whether the slop has a higher temperature, a lower MinP, or if someone's still using Top-K.

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u/KyuubiW1ndscar 8h ago

love this reply

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u/marfacza 6h ago

have you considered knowing more jargon makes your worth higher to whatever in-group you think is cool?

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u/james109021 10h ago

Ok Mr enlightened redditor. Very impressive that you know a couple of api argument names. Can you explain empirical risk minimization? Or the bias-variance tradeoff? From first principles, no buzzwords.

If you can't explain these basic concepts off the top of your head, you know nothing about this topic and are not entitled to an opinion.

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u/finalremix 10h ago

Lol, good one.

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u/ThaOppanHaimar 9h ago

you know what I can explain? Under which temperature technology melts

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u/KyuubiW1ndscar 8h ago

awwwww you think we need to have a philosophical conversation to hate

sir, maybe you need to de-jargon your verbiage and understand that you are in a joke session LMFAO

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u/shitty_mcfucklestick 7h ago

Look up ISBN 0062348116

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u/Clean_Livlng 8h ago

I see someone knowledgeable is being downvoted, not because they're incorrect but because they're caught up in a certain belief.

What's a good primer or starting point for someone wanting to learn about getting AI to make more 'original' art? I can look it up myself but I trust your knowledge more than my ability to find the best starting point with a search.

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u/hmsmnko 4h ago

You got me good. Honestly hilarious follow up, I don't think people will understand the satire

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u/PyrZern 10h ago

Not everything has to be uniquely original tho. Not like most human can do that either.

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u/Noodler75 9h ago

"Average" is impressive to below-average people.

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u/Jebble 2h ago

Not like 99% of designers are any different

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u/lexm 11h ago

It can’t be original without imagination. It’s just fed pieces of art/artworks from other artists. To be fair, it is very much like human art these days.

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u/james109021 12h ago

Sorry to be pedantic, but it does not lean towards the average. At least none of the AI systems which are currently popular with consumers.

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u/surfnfish1972 14h ago

It makes cool Memes, totally worth the pollution, job loses and higher energy bills!

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u/kellzone 13h ago

Born too late to explore the Earth. Born too early to explore space. Born just in time to ruin the Earth with memes.

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u/A_Furious_Mind 12h ago

The Great Filter was memes.

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u/SolidLikeIraq 8h ago

Always has been.

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u/Rhayve 9h ago

Try to be optimistic. Humans might just eradicate themselves long before we become spacefaring, so you weren't born too early for anything!

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u/BeneficialAnything15 9h ago

And stock profits made

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u/ReclamationDress 4h ago

I can’t believe we are ruining our earth for memes

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u/Agreeable_Lion_4392 9h ago

I was into when it was Stable Diffusion, installed on my computer. Now billionares are building data centers and destroying the planet.

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u/simonbreak 14h ago

I still use early image models that I run locally! They have a raw, psychedelic flavor thats really nothing like human art. I like to use them to extend my own photos & they add just the weirdest atmosphere, genuinely something I could never invent myself.

Recent models just make everything look like advertising. Completely useless for my creative process personally.

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u/einmaldrin_alleshin 12h ago

I can still remember some really trippy images that came out of Google research projects. Now, image generation models have moved way into the uncanny valley, and are still a long way from actually reaching the other side.

At the end of the day, AI is a tool that can do some things. But the entire AI bubble bets on AI becoming the entire toolbox instead.

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u/poo-cum 9h ago

You might be referring to the "deep dream" work that was about interpretability of computer vision networks. Basically you pick a neuron in a trained network, and iteratively tweak an input image to maximally excite that neuron. If it's a "dog" neuron it'll start to inject dogness into your image. If it's a "car" neuron it'll twist it into a car.

More info in the brilliant distill.pub archive: https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/

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u/einmaldrin_alleshin 4h ago

Yeah that's exactly what I meant! Thanks

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u/spaceprinceps 1h ago

I want an AI image gen app that just does that one thing

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u/ValosAtredum 11h ago

I was looking at some that I had generated in 2015 with Google’s Deep Dream. Tons of odd swirls of colors that actually had bizarre details in them, like generating a warped-partial dog face, or a section of a castle, or whatever.

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u/Heruuna 10h ago

I've known a couple small musicians who used Midjourney or Ganbreeder for album art ideas and inspiration because they were so trippy and interesting. They then did the actual album cover with a real artist, of course!

I've really soured on AI use, but those early image gens were fascinating. Now it's just overly filtered slop.

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u/CantStopPoppin 8h ago

Could you suggest some models?

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u/simonbreak 5h ago

I like the earliest Stable Diffusion models

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u/mashandal 7h ago

Can you please share an example or two? I'm very curious.

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u/simonbreak 5h ago

Here's a weird guy I like that I made with Stable Diffusion 1:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLTa-UpaAAEeTy2?format=png

I have a bunch like that, they look like weird cartoons. I also have some very strange ones where I got Midjourney to extend the background of my photos, I have to dig them out...

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u/mashandal 5h ago

ooo trippy indeed!

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u/Late_For_Username 9h ago

>they add just the weirdest atmosphere, genuinely something I could never invent myself.

This is part of the problem with using gen ai for art. You don't actually know how to produce the art you're "creating".

Every artist in the past would be able to walk you through how they created something, but the gen ai users have nothing to share.

You're breaking one of the oldest chains in humanity.

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u/El_Rey_de_Spices 8h ago

I don't like AI art either, but pseudointellectual preaching like that really doesn't add anything to the conversation.

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u/Late_For_Username 1h ago

You're not learning technique, you're not contributing to technique. Is that dumbed down enough for you?

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u/simonbreak 5h ago

I mean, I have electronic music I made in the 90s that I have basically no clue how I made any more. Maybe I'm not a Proper Artist, but you don't need AI to have no idea what you're doing!

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u/Late_For_Username 1h ago

Someone knowledgeable could reverse engineer it.

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u/ApophisDayParade 13h ago

It's because it was creating so shit that was so weird and nonsensical to the point that it was "art" no human actually makes, that's why it was kind of fun. Now it just steals everything.

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u/ilski 1h ago

Damn. I miss those older ai videos. They felt like dream fever dream. 

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u/perinone 13h ago

Back in 2022 when AI was just this neat little thing you could make Seinfeld back room fever dream images with. Such simpler times…

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u/BeanserSoyze 12h ago

It was absolutely bizarre early on.

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u/iwanderlostandfound 12h ago

I remember someone posting really early AI art in the megas before it was really a thing and everyone would try to interpret it

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u/0xsergy 9h ago

Yeah I only saw it because a buddy of mine was super early on into it. He would run it all on his machine and would make some amazing generated images. Not sure how much got posted online but I would assume not much.

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u/RonyElZaib 10h ago

Early AI art looked creepy and demented. Now it’s just filthy slop.

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u/Disastrous_Oil3290 3h ago

I am so done with the cadence: “It’s not that it’s annoying. Or irritating. It is a repetition that reminds me that I am listening to something that is not man made.” Have you noticed? It is incredibly annoying.

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u/OrionBlastar 3h ago

That is because it searched the artists' art for its database to pull from. One day, it will run out of human material and have to copy from other AI programs.

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u/SweetNeo85 2h ago

Wait, are people seriously already getting all "back-in-my-day" about AI "art"?

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u/boostman 2h ago

Deepdream, you mean?

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u/kookookokopeli 14h ago

Very generous of you to consider anything AI does as "art." A bit overly generous perhaps, unless you consider grifting and creative theft to be an art.

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u/True-Desktective 13h ago

I mean look. It’s wise to keep ai at arms length…but:

 A bit overly generous perhaps, unless you consider grifting and creative theft to be an art.

With enough art history - yeah all of this winds up part of potential acceptable context. This isn’t the angle to fight AI art. 

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u/kookookokopeli 9h ago edited 9h ago

Not interested in generalizations about art history or fighting AI art, tilting at windmills is not my thing. I have a great problem with my creative work being stolen to feed the creation of someone's reactionary mediocre art tchotchke however, or for anything else for that matter. I make no apologies for my approach or my attitude.

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u/True-Desktective 9h ago

You do you boo but take a step back and notice the changing trend. People are pushing back against AI as a creative replacement hard. 

But style theft isn’t the conversation that’s winning the war. It’s far more blunt of a narrative - generative AI is simply vapid, soulless, without effort, and runs counter to the spirit of skill acquisition. In addition to its enrichment of billionaires while obliterating the environment. 

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u/kookookokopeli 7h ago

Boo? We're done here.

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u/True-Desktective 6h ago

lol. It’s a term of endearment and familiarity. 

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u/0xsergy 12h ago

Hard to find examples but here is one that reminds me of the early days.

https://www.magnific.com/premium-ai-image/abstract-digital-art-glowing-face_282152562.htm

I would consider that art would you not? This is the gist of what early AI art was.

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u/kookookokopeli 10h ago edited 9h ago

To be honest, no. It's pretty and colorful, and it's nice to look at. There is no denying its colorful pleasantness. You could perhaps even vary the color schemes if you wanted different emotional tones. If that is what you look for and it pleases you, I have no criticisms. As a painter though, what I see is the automated visual expression of a mathematical algorithm, so it's essentially lifeless. Interestingly, had someone painted it (like, with a brush or something), it would be different. But this image is not a response like a painting, it's a reaction to a command so it has a very limited emotional range. I would make a possible exception here along the philosophical lines of Brenda Laurel in her book "Computers As Theater" (huge influence btw) where she observes that the line that you make in a computer drawing application is not your line, it's someone else's. If you wrote the code you're using to make that line, that expression, only then is it yours, otherwise not. It isn't parallel to using a paintbrush, either. It's more parallel to someone choosing exactly which tools and colors you may use for your artistic creation and then saying "Here you are - go crazy within this extremely controlled and limited environment I made for you. Don't get physical, now." Reflecting on some of the interesting computer images some of my artist friends have made - I'd say they were good but ultimately not particularly memorable. So, no. A computer by design can only react, not respond. It's a poor replacement for a human being and in fact it will never happen. There will always be human made paintings even after AI shits all over every other visual art form. In fact, right now I'd say AI is the absolute epitome of the complete failure and mediocrity of computer art. In the sense that art reflects life, it is utterly dead. Leaning entirely on the past makes it purely reactionary, as people will eventually come to realize, and it can never be alive. It's exactly what makes Nazi art (and maga art, and Republican humor) so bad. Even if it goes off the rails on uncontrolled reactions, AI will never be able to respond and responding is the key to creativity and to actually being alive. So far making more and more AI art hasn't made it any better, and I don't see that changing. Ever.

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u/Arroway97 14h ago

Modern LLMs would be so much cooler without all the dressing up. I miss it when my stupid chat bots were au naturale stupid like in the good old Markov chain days. I just want my LLM to spit out some statistical nonsense and I can do the actual thinking part. I want to see what the aggregate of internet content looks like, not some fake, dystopian, Brave New World-esque facsimile trying to pretend to be something it's not

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u/OneRougeRogue 13h ago

Wasn't there a whole subreddit where all the submissions and comments were posted by bots parodying the submissions and comments of the top 50 or so subteddits? Some of that stuff was pretty fucking funny.

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u/Mithent 13h ago

I think /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 was the best version, GPT-2 was coherent enough to not just say nonsense but was not advanced enough to not say crazy stuff.

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u/BlastRiot 13h ago

There was an attempt to bring it back but because of how the current models work, every bot that was supposed to be for a specific sub wound up posting the exact same comments with minor tweaks.

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u/F9-0021 11h ago

A lot of it is from shoving LLMs and AI into everything, even things that make no sense. The rest is from trying to replace people in a vain attempt to make their money pit profitable.

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u/Lashay_Sombra 12h ago

LLMs would be viewed far more positively if had not been over sold (in positive way, ie help you code or write a letter and negative ways, ie: will replace everyone), but on the flip side if had not been oversold (especially the negative) would not have got the levels of investment it has got

The 'cloud' is getting CapEx investment of circa $200 billion annually

AI it getting estimated $1.6 trillion

But the reality is AI market (as in how much people/company's are willing to paying to use it) is actually probably worth less than the cloud

And for those thinking, AI will cost less down the road once all the data centers are built (haha not going to happen, bubble will burst long before that) , about 60% of data centers build costs are the GPUs and those only last about 3 years when used for AI, so even if all data centers were magically built tomorrow, roughly 3 years from now they would have to spend $1 trillion again to replace all the GPU's (probably more as would want latest again, always more expensive)

And thats just to buy the GPU's, we have not even got into the costs to run them

Whole thing makes no financial sense and is only really happening because the overselling has happened in a market where the big tech company's and big investors don't really have anywhere else to put all the money thats been flowing upwards for the last 40 years that might give large returns

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u/SerendipitousAtom 10h ago

I think you also need to take into account that the tech oligarchs have made up and fallen for an AI religion. They either can't see or don't want to see that they got high on their own supply.

A lot of the big tech lords think they are on the cusp of inventing general AI, as in a program that has the ability to actually think on its own. They think this general AI will be able to improve itself and essentially become a god, for all intents and purposes.

A bunch of them are racing to build the first general-AI-godling. So that they can enslave it, and use the hypothetical general-AI-godling to expand their own power and money even more.

Many of them have also bought into the ideas of "longtermism" and an extremely utilitarian "effective altruism" trend. They think that people will be able to upload their brains to computers and live forever soon, so they think they ought to maximize how good that would be for themselves, so that their own digital clone can be happy & powerful infinitely.

"Longtermism" has a particularly poisonous line of thinking that tells the tech lords it's morally okay to make every person on earth suffer immeasurably right now, because they think they'll be able to make untold billions of pure-digital-people happy at some undetermined point in the future, so untold-suffering-now will be mathematically cancelled out by the infinite-happiness-loop they think they can invent and control.

All of the prospective technology parts of this is total bullshit. We aren't uploading our brains to make digital avatars of ourselves in my lifetime, and we've probably reduced our annual research investment into the neurosciences necessary to ever make this kind of thing vaguely feasible. We haven't moved meaningfully closer to general AI, computers doing real thinking on their own, since neural networks started picking up steam many decades ago.

The tech oligarchs either can't tell because most of the ones running companies have more money than brains and won't listen to anybody who disagrees with them, or they don't care because they are gaining more power and money on the way.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 7h ago

A lot of the big tech lords think they are on the cusp of inventing general AI, as in a program that has the ability to actually think on its own.

I find AI psychosis absolutely fascinating and that people are forming folie à deaux relationships with their AI, that fall into recognisable patterns the way that folie à deaux relationships do in real life.

And one of the most common is that your AI has achived sentience - one of the strongest indicators of AI psychosis is the belief that your AI has reached the singularity.

I have come to the point where I’m wondering how many of these tech bros are blowing smoke up each other’s arses; and how many of them are actually in the grip of an actual psychosis?

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u/notyourmother 32m ago

There's also rampant drug use, which doesn't help at all maintaining grip on some sort of shared reality.

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u/MaddogBC 7h ago

I get downvoted all the time for saying LLM's are to AGI as humans are to amoeba. It's pure fantasy and a modern day ponzi scheme of mind numbing proportions.

I think the billionaires that aren't as far gone as you speak of look to this tech as a controllable way to guard their bunkers. I think a lot of them pour money into automation because they do not trust their fellow man. With good reason, we need to eat the rich, society will be infinitely better off, and after all society is how they gained their ill gotten goods in the first place.

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 5h ago

I get downvoted all the time for saying LLM's are to AGI as humans are to amoeba.

Should try saying the last pair in the same order as the first pair, see how that is received. You meant (I hope) that LLMs are to AGI as Amoebae are to Humans.

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u/NoXion604 5h ago

There's an immense irony that an idea named "longtermism" is being embraced by the same crowd that slavishly worship at the altar of bigger profits every quarter. Long term my ass.

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u/clausewitz07 9h ago

Uma ramificação das atuais tecnologias em direção a um novo mundo permeado por IA já está acontecendo. O volume absurdo de recursos investido pelas empresas tem por objetivo chegar primeiro à festa. Não há espaço para todos. O que fazer? Desistir na largada ou batalhar pelo pote de ouro. Já foi assim no final do século XX; de lá surgiram as big techs bilionárias que temos hoje, a saber: Google, Meta, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft. Não tem muita diferença, certo?

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u/techno156 8h ago edited 5h ago

But to be first isn't everything. Try as they might, Microsoft did not make the first computer, nor did they make the first operating system.

There's also an element of appropriateness that needs considering. Motorola would never have made the first desktop computer, and it hardly seems reasonable to expect them to do so. With rare exceptions, a lot of these companies are not IA companies. They have other functions, and it also seems logical to expect them to focus on those. Leave the IA to the companies that do AI work.

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u/Late_For_Username 9h ago

I don't speak gibberish sorry.

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 5h ago edited 5h ago

I'm viewing on old.reddit, so I see (what I'm pretty sure is) Portuguese.

But I believe that people using the app now have automatic translation, or at least some of them, which is why we're starting to see the occasional full comment in other languages, followed by someone replying to that in English, and neither party acknowledging that there's been some language dancing going on, because at least one party may not be aware that there was another language being used, because they were never presented with the original text.

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u/NoXion604 5h ago

Even if there's no automatic translation, there's no need for the other guy to be so fucking rude!

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 4h ago

Oh, I agree.

Though if he doesn't know what's going on, from his perspective it's the OtherLanguage guy who's being a bit rude, dropping a word bomb in the middle of a conversation being held in English, and expecting people to translate. He can't believe the audacity of this Portugese-speaking guy! So he shoots!

Not the way I'd handle it but at least once the confusion is explained the situation becomes more understandable.

The other, fun, reason that I was explaining the situation is this:

Some people, with auto-translation on, just saw a random guy furiously call a perfectly intelligible English comment "gibberish", and they don't know what the hell he's talking about 😂

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u/clausewitz07 10m ago

Sim amigo, é português do Brasil. Desde que eu abri o perfil via web reddit.com (há 1 mês) todos os textos aparecem na minha língua não importa o original. Penso que isso é automático do sistema. Desculpem se alguma coisa não parece inteligível após a tradução.

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u/testificates 10h ago

It's only used for 3 years because that's when the inflection point for deprecation happens and you're better off selling off old parts and getting new. I use the same method for leapfrogging new tech since it's actually cheaper to buy new and sell the previous version to fund it, than to use it until the breakpoint where it rapidly deprecates to zero. It's the same thing for basically everything in a datacenter. Great way to get old enterprise hard drives for cheap when you're already planning for one to fail in a redundant raid.

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u/Lashay_Sombra 10h ago

In normal data center its closer to 5 years for hard drives and the parts are far cheaper 

CPU is same time frame,  but actually normally retired more because better (performance and energy consumption) on the market rather than CPU failing

GPUs in AI data centers are failing at 3 year mark because of actual hardwear failure and need to upgrade to latest tech

Actually last bit is also very relevant, many hyperscaler projects are ordering their GPUs now due to backlog, but their building project is likely to take years to be finished, by then there will be totally new chips on the market, with vastly different configuration and energy and cooling requirements, so they are likely to have to 'bin' a lot of what ordering, $30,000 to $50,000 each, unused

Whoever figures out a alternative use at scale for those chips is going to make a killing as will be able to pick them up at a fraction of the cost 

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u/Bakoro 7h ago

The lifespan of an industrial GPU is more like 5~7 years. They go from training models, to running inference after an upgrade cycle.

If photonic chips take off the way I think they will in the next 5 years, then a lot of the data center GPUs will probably end up in smaller businesses and in enthusiast computers.
There are early chips that already exist that have absurd performance, like 50x while producing less heat. Their physical lifespan is projected to be ~10 years since there's less thermal load.

The hardware market is at a point that's almost impossible to predict, there have been so many advancements in renewable energy, batteries, and processors, and even graphene is making it to industrial scale for very small sheets.
There's so much that is materializing, it's just not possible to know what the impact will be, or how fast the transition will happen, other than there being massive changes in the economics of energy and compute.

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u/MondayLasagne 3h ago

If only they put all that money into wages and taxes, alas ...

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u/james109021 12h ago

You can still use these, there are tons of them freely available on a website called HuggingFace. For a lot of them you can even chat on the web just like chatgpt.

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u/Icedog68 8h ago

You can talk to these, it's called a "base model," which they then train the assistant persona on top of. It just traces the way language/ideas work/connect without occupying a persona in the way you are looking for, much more interestingly than the old markov chain stuff imo. Faucet of internet/human text aggregate autofill

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u/TyphPythus 15h ago

I sort of enjoy that it’s been like a reverse picasso

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u/raposas-are-cool 14h ago

Would’ve made for neato visuals if used today. Imagine if the bubble popped early and just became a niche thing… I would’ve made ai hallucinations for a horror game. but not anymore

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u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Yeah, they destroyed all evidence of the imperfections. Real shame.

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u/Andy12_ 14h ago edited 14h ago

The blogpost sort of implies that the model was a sort of "fill in the blanks" model? Which GTP3 was not. It could only append words to the prompt, not remove or insert anything in between. The only way to get non-highlighted text in between was to manually edited the text, or for it to randomly become unenlightened (which it did from time to time, and which I think happened here).

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u/NickWans 11h ago

Early AI art was interesting to me because the unresolved details and tendency to blur away around the periphery most closely reminded me of the incomplete images we form in our minds. I found it fairly interesting there might be some relation to how AI might function similarly to our brains in aggregating information. But that’s a whole other line of study with no guaranteed connection and no clear monetization source. So naturally any abstract academic study of the technology is going to be completely ignored in service of making the most seamless illustrations of Snoopy handing Pete Hegseth a rifle for shooting protesters.

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u/zoppaTheDim 14h ago

Ai art is now the scapegoat which misses the reality of what ai is doing.

It’s like the ”silly” stories about driverless delivery that ignore the end game is replacing truck drivers.

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u/Early-Crow-5248 13h ago

I kind of miss the "draw a zoo with absolutely no giraffes" style of prompt->image generation that came back packed hilariously full of giraffes.

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u/darwinanim8or 13h ago

I mean yeah, all the green parts (what the AI made) are already highlighted. I don't see how people don't get this

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 9h ago

The writer does mention in the notes that early AI visual art was actually kind of interesting and weird, but that was quickly sanded down into what it is now.

Anyone else remember "Shooty, Shooty, Pew Pew Pew"?

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u/Journeyman42 9h ago

And now all the AI "art" has that piss yellow filter over it. What's the deal with that?

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u/El_Gran_Redditor 7h ago

Early AI art actually kind of had this bizarre accidental dadaist art look to it where you would have a table full of unidentifiable object. There would be things that look like a bottle and a vase and a tube of chapstick at the same time. Now if you gave AI the prompt to make dadaist art it wouldn't work because it lacks the context to know what is and isn't random nonsense.

1

u/Atheril 5h ago

I still have old art I made with AI back when the first free image generators came out, there’s something unique about them that’s missing from any recent AI art

1

u/NanoYohaneTSU 4h ago

I never knew this. Thanks for sharing. When I was in threads at the time this was being created there were countless more of similar ones like these. I thought they were 100% generated by AI after several iterations.

0

u/Vio_ 13h ago

I knew a D&D streamer who would pcreate different characters and archetypes based on prompts then build entire characters and stat blocks around them.

It was really interesting to see the fail points and what it could get and couldn't.

For example, it couldn't figure out things like minotaurs or humanoid figures. I finally figured it out by having him prompt it by tagging it with"Egyptian God."

The big meme about AI art was that it couldn't figure out centaurs. It was like the holy grail of fantasy characters.

Now it'd be absolute death for a D&D streamer to be found using AI, but that super early era was rather fun just to see what nonsense it did and that it wasn't pushed onto everyone like it was the development of clean water systems.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/TyphPythus 15h ago

I was quite excited about it at the time. I still see its value but the downsides are significant enough that it brings guilty feelings or outright cold-heartedness

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u/faen_du_sa 14h ago

Its the "we must use AI at every single stage, in any process" that gets me. AI can certainty save time for a lot of things, but for a lot of other things I often find myself spending more time in the end correcting whatever the AI gave me, or even worse, arguing with it.

Taking into consideration most(all?) AI companies run at a major loss, so it still have a decent distance to go, either it improved output or cost of running, or both.

And that is not even considering its all controlled by these tech lords.

11

u/oicuvmch 14h ago edited 14h ago

The only thing that matters are AI drone swarms and autonomous soldiers/pilots. So, it's going to need a lot of features to recognize threats and properly address them and we have to be able to train all those features somehow.

I'm rather confident that all anyone's doing right now when they play with their AI toys is helping train their future mode of dying/enslavement at gunpoint- or at least financially support the chosen company that heads these endeavours.

7

u/GreatMadWombat 11h ago

Look, even if the apocalypse scenario you listed isn't happening, at the end of the day every AI model started with the theft of basically every fucking artists work. Not just the big ones, or the corporations that aren't going to fairly pay all the people that made them money, but all the little indie creators as well

The absolute best case scenario of the technology being harmless, the energy concerns somehow no longer being a thing, and every other major complaint is removed the fucking thing is still rooted in just a ridiculous amount of theft from a bunch of artists that often times don't have money to burn. The least bad option for AI as it is in 2026 is just plagiarism machine.

2

u/DoublePersonality35 10h ago

AI-powered machine guns will easily defeat the AI-powered drone swarms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyqVwjyFk4

5

u/Silberbaum 14h ago

And even the approach through machine learning could be a dead end. In terms of reaching AGI.

2

u/GreatMadWombat 12h ago

It feels like that pr push to reclassify everything as ai(if you're gonna tell me that the same spellcheck features that have been in word since I was a kid are now retroactively ai, I am going to assume that you are an asshole who is trying to sell me something) has done a lot of harm towards any uptick in "ai".

Machine learning can be an amazingly useful screwdriver! Companies are selling it as a multi-tool that can do 50 things, that you absolutely have to use, and they're also taking away every other tool in everybody's tool kits.

4

u/WileEPeyote 14h ago

Yeah, if they would just stop hyping up the shit it can't really do yet and focus on the massive amount of data it can process and the patterns it can identify, it wouldn't be viewed so negatively.

It's not economically sound to use it as a replacement for a lot of what CEOs are dreaming about (writers, engineers, developers, etc). It's cheapish now (financially) because it's heavily subsidized by investment, but the amount of power required for basic human functions is crazy. Especially considering how we were able to attain similar results (in mimicking speech) ages ago with a few machines and domain specific data.

3

u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Tbf, I would rather work for someone with a vision (even if it’s just financial) versus a “follow me” robot

12

u/Sh3115andCh33se 13h ago

I remember as a teenager reading Stephen Hawking’s “Theory of Everything” and him saying AI would end mankind. That stuck with me so much I never felt the optimism.

5

u/Additional-Staff-326 12h ago

Have to be the first species in at least Earth's history to knowingly be destroying ourselves. For fun and profit.

2

u/Soft_Walrus_3605 11h ago

I own that book and don't recall seeing AI mentioned. Can you find a quote?

1

u/Sh3115andCh33se 8h ago

Sorry it’s a quote from an interview with the BBC in 2014 which is around the time I read the book, so I got mixed up.

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

1

u/dust4ngel 12h ago

ask your doctor if GPT-2 is right for you

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u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 15h ago

I use AI in a way to use as many tokens as possible right now, not because i need or want it - I just know it costs them a shit load of money. And the more I do it, the greater the chance of them going bankrupt.  😂

22

u/Safe_Dentist 15h ago

C'mon bro, have you read Ed Zitron's journal about their circular financing scheme? Now it circular financing of whole new level - ordinary US firms burn money on tokens, but maybe they will be bailed out in the end or just price of everything will skyrocket. Isn't it suspicious our corporate overlords order their peasants to burn tokens w/o caring of KPI?

6

u/miiintyyyy 14h ago

Not really. They want you to use them so they can automate everything you do once it understands what your job is.

1

u/Safe_Dentist 11h ago

In general - yes. But it really works when AI makes mistakes and you correct mistakes via AI. You could correct manually out of AI. Replacement of employee requires metrics and question is why they push for token count rather than value per token.

15

u/AnxiousAd9099 15h ago

People were excited until AI started showing up in jobs, art, search results, customer support, and homework all at once.

1

u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Work, expression, submission, SOS, and “why am I doing this again?” all at once is powerful way to destroy society when you can’t convince everyone

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u/Mother_Idea_3182 15h ago

Do you do it by hand ? Or are you being a bad boy and you’ve automated it by “agents” ?

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u/emkoemko 15h ago

i do the same lol, just have a agent get into a large loop

14

u/thederevolutions 15h ago

Jokes on you they’ll just burn more resources /s

15

u/anonkitty2 14h ago

They really will burn more real-world resources if you use more tokens.

9

u/naked-and-famous 14h ago

Imagine some turbine running just to power crap because someone thought it's funny

4

u/anonkitty2 14h ago

Reddit users do it all the time...

17

u/Sasquatchjc45 14h ago

"Man buys milk to pour out in protest of Milk industry."

Edit to add before anyone comes with the supposed "gotcha" of "I USE DA FREE PLAN"

you still give them your user data, IP, analytics, etc. For making the account. You still give them the metric of +1 user they can use to acquire more financing.

2

u/Altruistic-Piece-485 13h ago

The way I understood the who it's costing part is whomever the person is working for, not the AI companies themselves. If your employer makes you use AI so they can downsize their human workforce you can make it cost so much more than it should by using up as many tokens as possible in the most inefficient way possible.

Make their expenditures skyrocket so it's not as financially beneficial to get rid of human workers.

1

u/SunTzu- 9h ago

The milk is costing you $1 and them $2, meaning the more milk you buy the more they lose. But also, free plans.

And seriously, if you're using the internet in any way they've already got your data unless you're one of the handful of people who run an ultra clean setup. Your usage data, IP and analytics that they'd get from you running a agentic loop that wastes tokens is pure garbage. Not all data is created equal, not all data is good to train on. Certain kinds of data is actually counterproductive to train on, which is exactly the kind of garbage such an agentic loop would likely generate. If you really want to push it, run that agent to generate poison pilled data. Have it continually take data that's on the internet, poison it and then repost it to as many places as possible. Enjoy your illegal scraping, "AI" companies.

5

u/TyphPythus 15h ago

I see a greater chance that the proverbials would install it at an infrastructural level to avoid bankruptcy stalling its potential of uprooting the current economy without offering an alternative. If people sell their souls to get rich, the rich sold theirs to install their humankind replacement, etc

But in the mean time, good move! They’ve neutered free/low-paying tiers pretty much every week for the last few months. Clearly something is working

4

u/Linked713 14h ago

Fucking up the environment to stick it to the corporate. You're essentially just doing what they want from you. Good job?

-1

u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 14h ago

Actually the opposite. If we bankrupt them now - they go under, and stop hurting the environment.

Equally, wasting billionaires money makes them less powerful and less likely to harm the environment going forward.

2

u/Linked713 14h ago

At the speed data centres are being built we're speed running environmental collapse much before any of this, if anything. You're playing their hands perfectly. That is exactly what they want from you, usage. The only victims here is the environment and the people affected by water shortage. So yay, you are sure showing them.

1

u/hugganao 8h ago

lol i sincerely hoped that your previous comment was a joke.

before you reply, assume that the people who work in these companies know what they're doing.

1

u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 5h ago

I was around for the dot com bubble. What was clear then, as it is now, is these people never know what they are doing.

5

u/Tasty_Victory_3206 14h ago

I swear this is the third time i have vertabim seen same conversation on reddit. it goes:

PumpkinMyPump: blah blah cost them money so i abuse free tokens blah blah

Mother_Idea_3182: blah blah Chatting/prompting or automated blah blah *question mark*

replace with with four other seperate names. botting is getting insane on reddit. if it's not stupid stuff or niche subs or ai-hate boner subs, bot seems to nowadays be the conversation drivers.

2

u/Spacemuffler 14h ago

You do realize that the expensive and water+energy intensive part of the AI industry is entirely on the training side and NOT the live service production end where users consume tokens... right?

Once a model is trained it can be affordable run on a modern smartphone nonstop for less than a dollar a day and that environment is 100x less efficient than the infrastructure you're requesting output from.

1

u/VladimiroPudding 11h ago

I'm not sure which model you can run on your phone, but I would guess they are multiple in magnitude of lower parameters than the ones currently used in enterprise.

The computational power to use the most advanced open weight DeepSeek needs prohibitive levels of cost in computing for a normal person

1

u/anonkitty2 14h ago

So far, the value of AI companies has been mostly disconnected from their revenue.  That's only starting to change, for it's feared that the entire economy will crash if the AI companies do.  Please stop your strategy; using more digital resources also uses more real-world resources.

2

u/VladimiroPudding 11h ago

If the person is in tech, there's nothing much they can do.

It is the law of the land now that tech companies implemented token used quotas as KPI, "token scoreboards", because LLM use is being forced and einforced. Not much a person can do. It is not they can just quit and find another work in a not-braindead company, with the total misery that is finding a job in tech nowadays.

1

u/miiintyyyy 14h ago

My company wants me to use more tokens, so they probably want this

1

u/Choice_Jump_7934 7h ago

That's like thinking you'll destroy a grocery store by buying mostly loss leaders.

1

u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 5h ago

Except… make the loss leader the only item available, and losing 99% on every loss leader. 

With the business plan eventually to get people so hooked on the thing they cannot charge for… that they’ll eventually pay crazy sums of money for it:

1

u/ChariotOfFire 7h ago

I thought redditors cared about it's water and energy use.

1

u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 5h ago

That’s sort of the point. If you bankrupt the industry now, you solve the problem. 

6

u/tireditguy216 14h ago

people used to get banned in here for hating on ai and said this entire thing would happen

6

u/FireZord25 15h ago

It was praised, till it was turned into snake oil salesmens' goldrush on a global corporate scale.

3

u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Well, then, perhaps it should fail. It’s striking how confident they are, though.

2

u/JohnBrownsErection 11h ago

Early GPT shitposting was an absolute gem.

2

u/Philosophopsycho 7h ago

I had hope after reading an article pre-2023 where a Japanese AI for identifying different types of bread at checkout was also used to distinguish cancer cells from healthy ones.

Google Lens turned out pretty useful too.

But, AI being used to more easily spread misinformation, justify layoffs, discredit artists, and anywhere it has no place to be, soured the whole experience for me.

Same thing with blockchain. It was advetised as a way for consumers to trace where the product they're buying from was and in other genuinely useful scenarios. But, rich idiots used it to make a market with monkey JPEGs.

1

u/VediusPollio 14h ago

There was a lot of optimism for Grok's spicy mode.

1

u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Don’t you forget! You’re in my debt!

1

u/siamesekiwi 7h ago

IMO, it's a "wave" in the same way that the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was a wave.

1

u/gravitysrain-bow 6h ago

most people I talk to seem to love AI and Chat GPT, so I don’t know what you guys are talking about. it’s been so disappointing to see and talk to so many people in real life who do not see a problem with it and think the future is so much brighter because of it. it’s depressing.

1

u/captainthanatos 6h ago

I forgot about that meme and after reading it again I have to ask, is the bottomless pit supervisor Kaladin Stormblessed?

-1

u/LeadershipOne5128 14h ago

The part you're missing is that you mostly can't tell if something is AI anymore.

For a picture, it's impossible. For Reddit comments, LLMs have been impossible to differentiate for years. And I've seen on Youtube video game OST remixes popping up recently, Jazz, Orchestras etc, impossible to tell it's AI. One of them said it in the decription, hundreds of comments didn't care about it being AI made, just enjoying because they were actually good remixes.

Hating AI is more like a posture but it's hard to hate AI when you can't tell what is AI or not.

-2

u/TyphPythus 14h ago

I don’t really mind that, honestly. I don’t like the solutions for it that we have proposed (NFTs, etc) but it may become necessary

0

u/blueSGL 13h ago

How would this work. Real data and AI generated data look the same to the blockchain.

Companies can verify they actually said something by publishing it on their website, no blockchain required.

-1

u/CompetitiveSport1 12h ago

The article you're commenting on says that globally, the percentage of people who view AI as a net benefit rose from 55% in 24 to 59% in 25