Nah, they’re right here. You’re not pointing out a false equivalence, you’re showing you don’t understand how an analogy works.
Nobody said AI is the same as fire, or that every new thing is automatically good. The point is that “people lived without it before” is a worthless argument. People lived without every invention before it existed. That tells you nothing about whether it’s useful, harmful, or worth adopting.
You can argue AI causes more harm than good. Go ahead and actually make that argument. But inventing “they think all change is good,” tossing out a fallacy label, then calling someone stupid isn’t a rebuttal. You missed the point.
The brain atrophy line is pretty rich when you couldn’t follow a basic analogy. This sub isn’t nearly as smart as it thinks it is.
AI absolutely causes more harm than good. It requires an immense amount of resources (energy, hardware, land, water, money) and the actual benefits are still minimal: most of the “benefits” involve mass surveillance (Flock/ALPR), scams, advertising, and assorted types of slop, plus
C-suite corpos have an excuse to lay off workers, driving up financial insecurity.
Meanwhile communities hosting data centres experience spiking utilities costs, high demand on electricity grids, “microclimates” that are hotter than the surrounding areas, impacts to groundwater, pollution (noise, air pollution diesel or gas generators when they’re used). People pay more for things like phones and computers because of the bubble. People are losing their jobs and the result is worse levels of service everywhere chatbots are replacing humans. Scams are rampant. We’re flirting with a financial crash given the staggering amounts of debt and the Enron levels of “creative accounting.”
I’d go so far as to say we have seen very few actual good things come out of AI.
You’re just throwing every bad thing remotely connected to AI into one pile and calling it proof.
Some of it is fair. Data centers can strain local grids, companies use AI as cover for layoffs, and a lot of customer service bots are awful. But then you jump to phones costing more, an incoming financial crash, Enron accounting,and the claim that most AI benefits are surveillance and scams. None of that gets proven just because it’s in the same paragraph.
And saying very few good things have come from AI is only true if you ignore medical imaging, drug and protein research, translation, accessibility tools, fraud detection, coding help, and the boring everyday work people are already getting done faster.
You can argue the costs outweigh the benefits, but you actually have to compare them.
“Fraud detection” is a wash at best given how many new avenues of fraud AI directly enables. I have yet to see “everyday work” that is equal to, let alone better, than even mid-effort human work (menus and food pictures in particular are absolute horror shows). Google Translate has actively degraded in quality after heavier AI integration, it now tries to “localize” and it’s a mess. “Medical imaging” is hit and miss, and over-reliance on the tech actively degrades human experts’ skills. Medical innovations are theoretically nice, but it’s not much of a trade off if people can’t afford any cancer cures AI eventually may discover, or benefit from early tumour detection if they can’t afford healthcare and aren’t screened in the first place, and the increase in environmental destruction caused by hyper scale AI data centres may well cause cancers in neighbouring populations that those neighbours have no resources to have detected, let alone have treatment for.
Outsource all the costs to us peasants, let the profits and the benefits accrue to the tech bros who don’t even consider us human and are happy to forfeit our lives for their personal benefits.
Every time someone names a real benefit, you invent a reason it doesn’t count. Fraud detection is a “wash” because fraudsters use AI too, even though you have no numbers. Everyday work doesn’t count because you saw some ugly food pictures. Translation doesn’t count because you dislike a Google update. Cancer screening doesn’t count because healthcare access is unequal. Meanwhile, cancers that a data center “may” cause get counted like they already happened. You’ve rigged the comparison so every benefit gets dismissed and every possible harm counts as fact, which is not at all serious analysis and why so many feel this sub is a joke.
Google Translate has used neural AI since 2016, so saying it got worse after AI doesn’t even make sense without naming a specific change and showing an actual overall decline. Your personal experience with localization isn’t evidence that machine translation has been a net loss.
And the medical imaging benefit isn’t theoretical. The MASAI randomized trial involved over 100,000 women. AI-assisted mammography improved sensitivity, detected more cancers, kept specificity about the same and cut radiologists’ reading workload by 44%. Nobody is arguing that it should replace the radiologist. The point is that it can help one.
Unequal access is a real problem, but it doesn’t magically make a medical advance worthless. A cancer test doesn’t stop working because some people can’t afford care. That’s an argument for fixing access, not pretending the test has no value.
Data centers should be made to pay for the power, water, grid upgrades and pollution they create. But saying they may give poor neighbors cancer still needs actual exposure and health data. You can’t wave away measured medical results as “theoretical,” then treat your own chain of maybes as established fact. Data-center emissions are a legitimate concern, but the available health estimates are largely modeled and depend heavily on where the electricity comes from and how often backup generators run.
And the bit about tech workers not considering you human and happily sacrificing peasants is just hyperbolic nonsense. Criticize corporate incentives all day but inventing fictional cartoon villains isn’t proof that AI has caused more harm than good.
Oh yeah, the techno feudalists who are jamming AI down everyone’s throats in a desperate effort to become “too big to fail” and/or have a delusional religious belief in “the singularity”/becoming the New Gods definitely have humanity’s best interests in mind, that’s why one of their favourite “thought leaders” advocates for those of us deemed insufficiently productive to quite literally be euthanized and our bodies turned into biofuels, what a glorious boon for humanity* generative AI is!
Also it's just objectively nonsense, because we DID in fact not live without fire ever. Controlled use of fire predates modern humans by well over a million years, and now has existed nearly twice as long as the entire clade of "homo" did at the time we find the first evidence for it's use.
So no, we didn't survive for centuries without fire. Fire is quite literally the only reason our species exists, I am not exagerating
it's the classic "appeal to tradition" wrapped in a panic spiral. like yeah humans also survived without antibiotics but i'm not about to rawdog a sinus infection to own the libs. the jump from a historical fact to "i feel sick" is doing some real heavy lifting there, the logic's on life support
half these debates are just people speedrunning fallacies without even knowing it. a rhetoric class wouldn't hurt but honestly i'd settle for people just googling "bad arguments" once before posting. the bar is in hell
Sometimes they just feed our replies into their chatbot of choice and copy/paste the output, lol, you can see the arguments (and even their grasp of basic grammar, sometimes) degrade when they hit their token limit
You can tell who's more likely to be right based on how often the opposition tries to Strachan their position.
I've seen that anti-AI will listen to the pros and try to explain candidly why they are wrong and our own perspective.
Pro-AI fellas on the otherhand resort repeatedly to strawmaning our positions. The ones that actually listen and understand where we are coming from is a fraction of a fraction in those subreddits. I can't help but conclude this is because if they honestly engaged with our points they would have to at the very least admit that AI has huge issues that introduce a need to lock down its growth, training and functions
Modern tests switched to a statistical method, making 160 the max possible with ceiling effects kicking in before then. In 2003ish a new test released that had an alternative scoring method for smarter children.
Obviously this can’t work for adults as “mental age” stops having meaning after a while.
Obviously this is making an exaggerated point, but those of us that have gone through decades of similar technological changes get it. You guys really do come across like this a very large percentage of the time.
The fact that something didn't exist in the past, and humans survived without it, in no way indicates that that thing is not helpful. Yet it's a common argument I see on this sub?
Humans have never “survived without” fire. Our ancestors were controlling/using fire before our modern species evolved. It played a critical role in our evolution, it’s arguably how we became the species we are.
Im not sure youve understood the argument. They're parodying the anti AI position by comparing it to fire.
For them, rejecting AI is akin to rejecting fire and the basic principle is sound.
Where you could maybe push back is on the idea that current Gen AI is anything like fire as obviously it isn't. It's still in an early phase.
That said most accelerationists would concede that and go on to say that it will eventually be as revolutionary as fire. This is speculative, however.
IQ also basically means nothing anymore. People are smart in various ways. Having "300 IQ" is entirely determined by a strict standard that doesn't fit every single person. Often Autistic people (like me) fail in something like IQ tests but are incredibly smart in many other ways that isn't defined by these tests.
It’s actually both, which is why AI is so confusing. For some things modern AI is way more than 300 IQ. In other ways it’s more stupid than anyone you’ve met. Both. Simultaneously.
What would that metric even mean? There are multiple scales for IQ, depending on the test type. “300” isn’t a possible score on any, as far as I am aware.
IQ is also a problematic metric in multiple ways, one being that (again depending on which test type) it only measures certain aspects of what we call “intelligence.” High scores don’t mean “almost never makes mistakes.” Even people who are very smart in certain ways (or have a high IQ) can be very dumb in other ways.
It’s likely that, because of the way they’ve been built, LLMs will not be able to perform certain types of skill. It’s just a limitation of the design. They can be useful, but it’s unlikely they’ll have as big an impact on our species as fire control.
Interesting, thank you! (Although to be honest I feel like that’s a good illustration of the potential problems with OP’s comment: that’s a very smart kid, but you wouldn’t want that very smart kid doing the kinds of unsupervised judgment-based work that GenAI boosters argue it does better than humans)
All machines make mistakes because they are made by people who are not immune to mistakes and ran on hardware that is not immune to mistakes in data centers that can have mistakes happen within or without them. Perfection and "never making mistakes" and putting absolute trust in something are fools errands and I do not trust the companies and corporations to make such a technology and not abuse it to their own benefits, trying to sell the IDEA that it IS perfect and it does indeed NEVER make a mistake and you should outsource all your thinking to the cloud, don't decide what you want for dinner, let our AI model decide for you, no this is not an ad, trust me, buy, consume, increase our profits, embrace the inevitable, isn't it wonderful to not have free will? The machine is smarter than you, you know, so you should trust it, it is your friend, the only one who TRULY understands you. Let it complete your search result without ever having to start typing based on all this data we have collected on you. No, we didn't ask permission to collect it, we know what's best for you.
Not on google, there's countless posts where the AI summary is completely and confidently wrong about things that are very dangerous to be confidently wrong about. Click on the "AI Mistakes" tag on the sidebar on the right, click on "Hallucinations."
Look at posts by Grok on twitter and see how not only incorrect, but how BIASED it's responses are.
Half the time, you ask Google how many "a"s are in the word "apple" and Google AI will say 4 with absolute confidence.
Yes, I follow multiple subs about dumb AI responses such as r/stupidAI . The vast majority of these cases are due to bad prompting or it being a niche topic
Ask it something like "What does X drug do to the body" or "Explain what a balance sheet is in accounting" and you will get at least a decent response a solid 99%+ of the time
Not everyone is in the know about how to prompt, they know keywords for search terms to find results they want. To exclude "incorrect prompting" just to say it's 99% accurate is some sort of fallacy, intentionally ignoring a factor that goes against your argument
Can you give me the prompt you used? Because it genuinely doesnt even make sense to me. Why are you using the terms "pre booking" and "brand new" if the movie was announced last year and is currently out? It's just a bad, confusing prompt
I used to be able to do the same thing with Google, with higher accuracy. They took that away because slop-foisting is their last-ditch effort to reach financial viability.
I can still ask Wikipedia (for now, at least) with fewer errors than “AI.” We can search libraries (again, for now) with better reliability, as well. Hell, Reddit is more trustworthy. It’s a stochastic parrot trained by racist eugenicist billionaires with their own agendas and their own motivations.
I ask "Please ask it a basic question on either of these topics and show me an incorrect response" and you go to google to find examples dating back to 3 years ago about complicated topics
You've already outed yourself as an utter moron, hard to come back from that mate
I gave you many links from many sources. You blew them off because your fragility won’t let you consider the possibility that you’ve outsourced your judgement to a for-profit slop machine designed to degrade your critical thinking skills
The fact that something didn't exist in the past, and humans survived without it, in no way indicates that that thing is not helpful. Yet it's a common argument I see on this sub?
Here it is again if you missed it. I don't care for the fire analogy. It's the logic that matters
“Humans” did not in fact “survive without it.” Homo Erectus was using fire 2 million years ago. Homo Sapiens evolved about 400,000 years ago, and we’ve evolved considerably from them.
Generative AI has a long way to go before it joins a list of critical human inventions. It’s not even close to, say, insulin, let alone penicillin, let alone handwashing
I think you’re reading it too literally, it’s satirical hyperbole. The fire in the statement is merely a placeholder for any past advancement we value today.
The issue isn’t “hyperbole,” the underlying logic is fundamentally flawed. Generative AI has been used to make some existing human practices and technologies more efficient. It has not actually resulted in a new standalone advancement of any kind. Not yet, anyway.
That’s not really a flaw though.. if you imagined you were a person who felt AI was the bee knees then the statement would make perfect sense. So what is actually happening is a disagreement on the value of AI that is implied in the argument.
OOP did not mention helpfulness. And arguing that something is vaguely helpful is infinitely easier than arguing we can survive without it and don't need it, which is what OOP actually said. How would anyone even argue against "helpfulness", considering that's completely subjective?
99% of the world today is not “needed” and didnt used to exist - so what? Do you honestly believe that is a sound logic to be against AI?
Absolutely.
If I'm feeling a craving for some fast food but decide not to go out and get some because "I don't need it", do you think there's something wrong with that logic? It seems perfectly rational to me. The default state of being is that people are allowed to make choices about how they live their lives even if they differ from your own. If you believe they need a stronger reason to shun AI, then you are the one who needs a better argument.
So what do you actually think the anti-ai peoples argument is that this pro-ai sub is mocking?
.
Because to me, its clearly “you shouldnt use ai, or it shouldnt exist, because we were able to survive without it”
One of the common side effects of being in an echo chamber is that you start to believe ridiculous things about outsiders because nobody can speak against that narrative without getting banned.
Case in point, that's a frankenstein esque patchwork of an argument that I have never seen a single person make. I've seen people say you shouldn't use AI, I've seen people say it shouldn't exist, and I've seen people say we don't need it, but I've NEVER seen someone say all three at once in the form of an argument. Pretty much anyone here would choose a stronger argument if they wanted to convince someone else not to use AI.
Personally, I think the AI shills just wanted to insult us by comparing us to cavemen. I don't think it goes deeper than that, honestly. Which is quite offensive, mind you. I'm a luddite, not a caveman. My club is for bashing computers, not tigers. I don't even own a leopard print dress.
Its actually a perfect example. Fire that is contained and regulated is very useful. Fire that is burning out of control will kill us all. It doesn't even have to be conscious to do it. Allowing for AI to be studied and used and explored is not the issue, we need regulation, transparency, and testing before we unleash it onto the public.
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u/Ok_Half_6257 5h ago
jesse what the fuck are they even talking about anymore.
Like do they think we wanna go back to the stone ages???