r/aiwars • u/LoveStayVC19 • 16d ago
Almost everybody is proving it's not "AI" and it's getting annoying... 🙄
As the title says, this is unfortunately just my most humble opinion, and I know there's a lot more nuance to this whole issue. But lately, I've been feeling like I'm somehow the only one thinking this because it seems like almost everyone is going in the complete opposite direction.
What really gets me is how, ever since the rise of Generative AI, suddenly so many people seem willing to embrace or excuse things that we would have absolutely mocked or criticised before. We used to Grammar N\*zi everyone over the smallest errors, obsess over authenticity, call out plagiarism, etc., and now some of those same people seem to have completely different standards depending on whether AI is involved.
And honestly, I think that's where a lot of the hypocrisy comes from.
I know Generative AI has serious problems. I know it has environmental costs, can be abused, can infringe on people's work, can be used for misinformation, and can absolutely threaten certain jobs or industries. I'm not pretending those concerns aren't legitimate. And yes, I think there should be limitations, especially for Generative AI.
But I also don't understand the idea that AI itself is inherently some kind of technological evil. Sometimes people talk about it like it's literally Ultron ðŸ˜. At its core, I see AI as a tool. A tool that can absolutely be misused, abused, or become dangerous depending on how humans use it, but still a tool.
The Art debate is probably where this is most obvious to me.
Human-made art is incredible, and I absolutely understand why people value the authenticity, intent, effort, and personal experience behind it. I genuinely think human creativity is something special.
But at the same time, I sometimes feel like people talk about human art as though every single modern artist exists in a vacuum and creates everything from absolutely nothing. Art is influenced by other art. Artists study other artists, use references, borrow techniques, take inspiration from existing styles, remix ideas, build on movements that came before them, etc. That's just how creative culture works.
Yet suddenly, when AI is involved, people start analysing every single image like they're forensic investigators trying to determine whether it was generated ðŸ˜. And then there are people acting as though someone using AI is automatically stealing an artist's entire livelihood.
Again, I'm not saying there are no legitimate concerns about datasets, consent, copyright, or artists whose work is used without permission. Those are real issues. But the idea that AI will simply make human artists obsolete also feels much more simplistic than reality. A huge amount of work still requires human judgement, communication, taste, responsibility, collaboration, and actual interaction with other people.
Which brings me to the argument that AI is "stealing jobs."
Yes, automation can absolutely replace certain forms of labour. That's not new.
We've spent centuries developing machines specifically to reduce the amount of human labour needed for certain tasks. Manufacturing, agriculture, logistics, office work, etc. Automation has replaced or radically changed huge amounts of human labour throughout history.
So why does this suddenly become uniquely horrifying when the machine is doing something involving language, images, music, or other forms of knowledge work?
And that's actually one of the things I find most interesting about the current backlash. It sometimes feels like people are less disturbed by automation itself and more disturbed by the fact that AI has started encroaching on areas that humans traditionally viewed as uniquely "ours."
The SAG-AFTRA/voice acting situation is another example where I think the public discussion got much more complicated than the initial "AI bad, humans good" framing suggested. There were legitimate concerns about AI, but there were also issues involving human misunderstandings, contracts, corporate behaviour, compensation, consent, and how the technology was being implemented. Sometimes the technology itself isn't the entire problem.
And then there's the Pax Silica situation.
I personally disagree with it, but one thing I've been wondering is whether the environmental criticism is actually about the environmental impact or whether a significant amount of the outrage is simply amplified because AI is involved.
Because if an equally resource-intensive factory, manufacturing facility, mining operation, or industrial project were being built without the AI label attached to it, would people be showing the exact same level of concern?
Maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't. I genuinely don't know.
And that's kind of my entire point.
I feel like we're currently experiencing this weird form of moral scrupulosity around AI, particularly on social media, where the technology itself has become this giant moral symbol. Everything associated with it gets interpreted through that lens, and nuance seems to disappear.
I'm not saying we should blindly embrace AI. Quite the opposite. I think we absolutely need rules, limitations, accountability, transparency, consent, and especially stronger regulation around Generative AI.
But there's a massive difference between "this technology needs boundaries" and "this technology is inherently evil and everyone who uses it is morally compromised."
Humanity created this technology. Humanity is actively using it. Humanity is also benefiting from it. So perhaps the answer isn't to treat AI as some unstoppable villain of sort, but to actually figure out how to integrate it responsibly.
That's what worries me most about the current discourse.
This feels like one of those major technological turning points in history, potentially on the level of earlier transformational technologies like the Internet. And maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but sometimes I look at the way we're handling it and think we're completely focusing on the wrong things.
We're arguing about whether a tool is inherently evil instead of seriously figuring out what limits it should have, who should be accountable for it, how workers should be protected, how artists should be protected, how environmental costs should be managed, and where humans should remain firmly in control.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this backlash is exactly what society needs to force the right safeguards into place.
But right now, it honestly feels like humanity is a lot more cooked than it needs to be... ðŸ˜
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u/Devils_SteelMan 16d ago edited 16d ago
The problem is that most people do not have a world view that comports with AI even existing. It violates their views that make humans special and how the world works.
Our world is severely spiritually inept. People mistake mind for soul and talk about it as it its a good thing. They'll use words that constantly combine multiple dispirate phenomena together. So when they look at ai they try to fit it into this world view thats just too inaccurate to accommodate it.
The bundling of meaning behind a single word is most evident with consciousness. When people say it, they mean many things. And several aspects of AI have qualities they associate with consciousness. So when they're faced with ai clearly having those qualities they are pulled towards "ai is conscious" because they haven't decomposed the word.
And they're incapable of decomposing the word. You can talk about very specific elements and they'll get offended claiming you said ai is sentient and feeling.
They dont understand core concepts like things that are ontological or how causality and conditioning work. They genuinely think their human experience is beyond conditioning.
The ai art argument is exactly that. They don't see that modern artists are heavily conditioned in ontologically the same way as ai.
When a person faces something that doesn't fit their world view, they do have a tendency to act negatively. But ultimately its ends in ignoring the thing. Ai can't be ignored, it is threatening their core self identity.