This is a long text article about my discussion with Claude about linux and MacOS

[highplainsdem]

13. It being ubiquitous - as the tech companies try to force everyone to use it - is NOT an argument in

favor of using it, because the harm already being done by this type of AI is also already obvious and ubiquitous.

The worldwide theft of intellectual property, for instance, which is continuing every minute of every day, and driving tech companies to gather more and more data from users to train AI.

The dumbing down of users, from younger users - especially students - not acquiring skills they need, including for reasoning, to adults being deskilled as they turn tasks including professional skills they need for their jobs over to genAI tools.

The colossally stupid lowering of standards and lowering of quality of output as people are urged to use genAI despite all the hallucinations/errors that mean it can never really be trusted. Calculators would never have been widely used if there might be errors any time they were used, but sanity seems to have been abandoned as the AI industry insists that everyone needs to use genAI NOW. So we have AI slop flooding the world, people being told the errors being made by this inherently flawed technology are their responsibility to deal with, and genAI destroying the reliability of whatever it touches, from medical and scientific papers to legal arguments to textbooks to educational videos to coding to recipes. This is sometimes called the pollution of our information ecosystem, but it's more like a tsunami of shit.

Then there's genAI's pollution of the physical environment - again, a worldwide threat.

There's the worldwide threat to the economy, from workers losing jobs to money wasted on a bubble that could collapse at any time.

There's the worldwide threat to democracy, with increased surveillance and data-gathering plus more effective disinformation making voters easier to manipulate where people can still vote, and propping up authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

There's the worldwide destruction of trust as deepfakes leave people less certain what's real - which also favors authoritarian leaders who convince people to just trust their judgment.

And there's the worldwide increase in delusional thinking, from chatbot psychosis where bots push people completely off the rails, to the everyday delusional thinking of people believing they accomplished something themselves - coding, writing fiction or nonfiction, creating images or video or music - because they gave genAI trained on stolen intellectual property a short prompt, even though that was no more their personal accomplishment than having someone else do it for them would have been. The latter is a serious delusion, but one many AI users cling to as they proudly show off what they tell themselves "they did."

NOTHING that genAI gives us offsets even one of those harms, let alone all of them.

GenAI has done nothing to seriously improve any area of our society it's been used in. The genAI industry likes to talk about other types of AI being helpful in science and medicine, but those are not hallucinating genAI and were not trained on all the intellectual property in the world that the AI bros could steal. It's fraud when genAI proponents try to confuse the types of AI to make genAI sound more useful than it is.

GenAI has always been a mix of a con job to sell people on a flawed product and world-threatening delusions on the part of AI bros who believe that just adding more and more stolen data and more and more infrastructure to their flawed tech will somehow magically produce superintelligent AI that might destroy humanity, but - if it doesn't mean lights out for all of us, as Sam Altman once said - might become a benevolent god that could at least reward the AI bros who believed in it with boundless wealth, great power (at least if they get there first), godlike powers and immortality. And those AI bros are willing to gamble the world and everyone and everything on it as they pursue that delusion.

Which is both horrifying and almost unbelievably stupid.

Even though you run an opensource AI model on a local machine, you're using tech based on theft of intellectual property, and you're supporting the genAI industry with every message praising genAI.