arguments against ai
i am generally pretty anti-ai. however, i think a lot of the anti-ai arguments people make on the internet are not very good. here are the reasons i think ai is bad (with a particular focus on its use for coding)
(note: this is not complete, needs more sources, etc)
productivity gains are minimal, if best
developers who use ai usually feel more productive, but actually aren't getting much more work done at all. there have been multiple studies about this: study 1, study 2. even anthropic themselves (who are very biased!) found that using AI caused a "statistically significant decrease in mastery" when learning a new skill, while not producing a statistically significant speedup
ai generated code is low quality
ai is addictive
ai is accelerating the climate crisis
the technology (both training and inference!) is responsible for a massive increase in nonrenewable energy use, which is accelerating the climate crisis and significantly worsening pollution in communities near data centers.
ai is worsening the wealth gap
stolen training data - companies have taken the work of open source developers, authors, artists, etc and used it to build a system with the goal of replacing those people's jobs, redirecting and concentrating all the money they would otherwise make into the pockets of a handful of massive tech companies/billionaires/trillionaires instead of the working class.
bad arguments
here are some anti-ai arguments that i do not think are valid and hurt our case when you argue them
ai training is IP theft/violates copyright law/etc
(section needs cleanup/deduplication)
very often i see people criticizing ai because of training being a copyright violation where work was "stolen" from people. and because they stole IP they are bad. and i am against intellectual property as a general concept so i don't tend to like this particular phrasing of this argument? the issue i have with what the ai companies are doing re: training data is not the theft itself, it's what they're doing with the result of their theft. they're taking people's work without compensation in an attempt to replace them and redirect all the money the individuals would make for themselves as token costs. they're just increasing the divide between the working class and the owner class, etc. and even if they are releasing open weight models, they're still creating technology which, given capitalism is a thing, will be primarily used for that purpose
water usage
llms are not good at anything
rebuttals
TODO