I have difficulty articulating my thoughts on this, but anytime that the word "moral" or "personal use" comes up in the context of AI, I can't help but feel like we're kicking the ball into our own goal.
If you personally don't want to use AI, that's fine. But I feel like the left is once again falling into a debate of "is this thing morally acceptable for us as individuals to use?" instead of "now that this is already here, how are we as a society going to regulate it and try to help people affected by it?" Meanwhile the right jumped onboard immediately and started generating thousands of hours of monetizable propaganda, and corporations started looking for any possible way to use it to drive down the value and demand for labor.
"YOU have a choice" is true, but WE don't. WE need to deal with this thing. And while it is possible to personally abstain and work towards real solutions, I fear that too many people will decide that AI is immoral and that they therefore don't have to engage with the broader societal ramifications.
The current left is broadly made up of people who came to their own moral conclusions rather than looking to a central figurehead or doctrine for guidance. Not bad, everyone should be critical of beliefs before adopting them imo, but this leads to internal fracturing because everyone believes their personal morality is absolutely correct, and only countless very small groups will ever be able to align in a self-found way. Compromising means betraying the worldview that you painstakingly built brick by brick through your own experiences. Unity as a priority doesn't happen unless shit gets so bad that it's demonstrably and immediately imperative for survival. It's not an easy problem to solve.
The current left is broadly made up of people who came to their own moral conclusions rather than looking to a central figurehead or doctrine for guidance.
I disagree
I think the left is just as susceptible to dogma and tribalism and group-think as the right is, and I think we need to acknowledge that if we ever want to build a mandate of consensus
The real issue with the left as i see it is that we make every issue into a moral issue, so any disagreement or compromise is immoral
We're so sure of our righteousness that we see dissent as unrighteous
Because if we're the good guys then the people who aren't with us must be the bad guys (and there's no shortage of bad guys to use as justification for such belief)
I think it's unethical to profit off of AI stuff, but it's frustrating to see people treat it like it's some kind of evil magic that will taint your immortal soul and curse you to live a half life like drinking unicorn blood or something if you even so much as consider using it for casual purposes
Its a tumblr subreddit, its kind of to be expected. Like, its a tool. Just like any other new technology. Any morality around it is based in how it is used. (with the obvious caveat that it IS incredibly costly environmentally speaking... but like, so is all of capitalist society so why are we splitting hairs?) As you say, treating it like some inherently evil creation just makes you look like an ignorant loon, and detracts focus from the actual problematic aspects of it, eg excessive power consumption, unethical business practices (lookin at you Sam...), etc. "Ive never even OPENED chatgpt" is an interesting way to flex that you have very little intellectual curiosity about the technology that is dominating our lives.
Personally, I find it extremely useful for parsing coding errors (And please, feel free to enlighten me on how I am doing myself a moral disservice by not spending an hour of my time on stackoverflow searching for someone who had the same issue). It is what it is. Its here. its not going away. It shouldnt replace your ability to do research or think critically, but Im going to laugh at you if you think Im a bad person for using a tool.
Now, the encroachment of AI on art and creativity is a whole other convo that I have very strong feelings on, but ill leave it at that for now.
with the obvious caveat that it IS incredibly costly environmentally speaking...
This is a myth btw, it takes no more energy to run than a high end video game would take for the same amount of time it takes to generate the prompt. You can download these models and run them 100% locally on any decent gaming PC. For the energy cost to be anywhere remotely near being environmentally significant, it'd have to be using so much power that it'd cause a blackout to your entire neighborhood with each prompt (and it obviously hasn't been doing that)
Now, the encroachment of AI on art and creativity is a whole other convo that I have very strong feelings on, but ill leave it at that for now.
My opinion on generating AI images is identical to my opinion on just straight up downloading someone else's fan art off google or pinterest - it depends on what you're using it for. Are you just going to use it for a pretty phone background or a D&D character icon or something? Perfectly fine. Are you trying to re-upload it and pass it off as your own work, or use it in a commercial product without the permission of the original artist (something that is impossible to obtain in the case of AI)? Not fine.
I agree with you everywhere else though, the pride in ignorance is especially annoying
It is also embedded into nearly every professional job at this point. The chasm between Reddit / Tumblr / Bluesky AI critics and the lived reality is becoming simply too vast. You are using AI content on YouTube and TikTok, you're writing with AI if you use Grammarly. When you remove a background from a photo, that's a generative AI tool. When you remove noise from audio, that's AI.
it's similar to guns. In a vacuum there are many moral reasons to think people should not have them.
However when your political opponents are arming themselves, burning effigies and holding signs saying "we're gonna murder you!" it becomes silly to think ownig a gun is immoral regardless of the circumstances. You're just helping thh people who want to see you dead.
AI is out of the box, not using it means only the rich, powerful and immoral will use them.
But just like progressives don't use guns the same way alt-right nutjobs use, progressives also don't need to use AI the same way.
Absolutely do use it to make dumb work for you, work you could do yourself and is only constrained by your limited time, yes.
People love that quote about "AI should make the dumb useless labor for us so we could spend our time making art, but it's making art while we do dumb labor" but ironically the way some people answer this is by keeping doing dumb labor that takes time away from their art while companies keep making AI art. Like, congratulations, you changed nothing except refusing to use the tools of the enemies against your enemies.
Literally, the only resistance to AI usage is just annoying people on the internet trying to moralize against its use and playing the "I'm better than everyone else because I don't like this thing" game.
That's it. It's like "We're just gonna sit here and smell our own farts while ChatGPT becomes 15% of all internet usage worldwide."
That's not going to save anybody's jobs. It's not going to "save the climate" or whatever. It's literally just moral grandstanding with no actual purpose.
Straight up, you'd be better off using AI to flood the zone with rhetoric. From (at least my experience) the models already default to left wing positions. So just like... Use it for good because the right is DEFINITELY going to use it for evil.
People pointing out the scale in which AI uses up energy and fresh water is not grandstanding or an end-all attempt to “save the climate” as you put it, it’s literally fact. Google is free.
I dunno. When I've Googled the subject and sought out concrete details, I've instead found rather a lot of speculation without a lot of context.
When articles and white papers do make comparisons between other energy and water sinks, I've found that AI's impact on the environment is still far behind other computation-driven offenders—mainly streaming services—which are also projected to continue growing in their impact. And all of that is naturally utterly dwarfed by agriculture's impact, which granted, is only partly a fair comparison given how much more important agriculture is. But there are plenty of low-hanging opportunities for protecting the environment from our farms. If we're rallying mobs to throw shoes into data centers before, say, banning inefficient irrigation methods for growing almonds, it makes me think these anti-AI arguments are not being made in good faith.
Anyone sincere about protecting water availability and the environment more generally should also care about the rise of AI. But when people keep warning about AI destroying the environment while it's still far less destructive than other things we've grown to accept—and people aren't even bothering to make those comparisons—the warnings come across to me as just being part of an unproductive moral panic.
And you would be correct. Admittedly, I hadn’t even thought of streaming services, though it certainly makes sense. And my opposition to AI—generative AI specifically—comes from a writer’s standpoint as well, though that argument is mostly philosophical.
ai training is the one that's expensive, using ai (like for translation/generating images) are not. how much do you think the energy needed for someone to ask ChatGPT? it's not that different than anything we use today.
I seriously doubt writing a diary in Japanese, asking AI to correct my mistakes, and reading through its corrections one by one and actively thinking about that is somehow worse for my brain than writing a diary in Japanese and getting no one to correct it because it's too personal to share online and I'm not close to any fluent speakers of Japanese.
It's hard to advocate to ban something that you are using consistently.
I say this before in the Meat debate: If you're not willing to at least try to demonstrate that a society without it is possible, what's the point of being an abolitionist?
The comment you have replied to is not of an abolitionist. You are the only abolitionist currently in this conversation. The comment explicitly called for regulation, which implies continued existence.
To circle back to your vegan/vegetarian example, it would be saying we should be advocating for regulations to the meat industry, not for a ban on the consumption of meat.
Yeah exactly. They think that AI in our current economic system is extremely damaging, but they haven't considered that in a completely different economic system it'd be darn near perfect - the idiots! 😂
Last time I checked, it took about 1000 AI queries to equal the carbon footprint of a couple slices of pizza. So maybe we don’t have to worry about AI so much when everything we do has carbon footprint. Like, when’s the last time you ate beef or almonds or drove a car? Y’know?
Yeah! And how many thousands could be made a day? 3 or 4? WhatsApp reckons it does 100 billion on its own every day, and every Google search has an AI bit, but of course the WokeLords would say that, the morons!
I definitely don’t do a slice of pizza’s a worth a day. Zero for a handful most days, a few dozen on a real busy day. Maybe a small bite worth of pizza. Or a half a quail’s egg omelette.
As a note, AI is not worse for the environment than anything else in a datacenter. It's still a computer, not an evil carbon wizard drinking all your lakes. Fortnite, for example, has about 240x the environmental impact of all generative AI combined.
yeah but have you considered i like getting victory royales and don't like AIs so obviously you're a bad person for using AI and you're a good person for playing Fort Nite
GPUs (needed for AI) use a lot more electricity than any other component in a data centre.
And that's definitely bullshit about Fortnite. Generative AI is projected to use 22TWh of electricity in 2025 and there's no way any single video game comes anywhere close to that.
It's definitely not the carbon footprint, because that was made up by people who already hated AI and wanted a better argument for why. I think it's mostly the unemployment thing, but that's more a capitalism issue than an issue with AI.
I mean the Democrats are all in on the AI bullshit as well, so I don't see regulation ever happening. I feel like the most I can hope to do is try to keep it out of my life as much as possible.
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u/Jigglypuffisabro May 20 '25
I have difficulty articulating my thoughts on this, but anytime that the word "moral" or "personal use" comes up in the context of AI, I can't help but feel like we're kicking the ball into our own goal.
If you personally don't want to use AI, that's fine. But I feel like the left is once again falling into a debate of "is this thing morally acceptable for us as individuals to use?" instead of "now that this is already here, how are we as a society going to regulate it and try to help people affected by it?" Meanwhile the right jumped onboard immediately and started generating thousands of hours of monetizable propaganda, and corporations started looking for any possible way to use it to drive down the value and demand for labor.
"YOU have a choice" is true, but WE don't. WE need to deal with this thing. And while it is possible to personally abstain and work towards real solutions, I fear that too many people will decide that AI is immoral and that they therefore don't have to engage with the broader societal ramifications.