Lots of negativity towards AI lately, but consider:

this but tech in general.

on the modern internet
when you search for knowledge or try to connect with others on social media or consume content as a form of escapism from this hellhole what do you get?
you get fed ads, sponsored posts, scams, algorithmically curated content to optimize your engagement, and now also AI drivel that's inaccurate and sometimes dangerous.

even off the internet you cannot escape it. there are cameras, microphones, and other sensors everywhere tracking your every movement to anticipate your thoughts and desires to try to sell you something or even manipulate the costs of what you're already planning to buy to optimize profit.

i feel that the modern technological landscape is slowly driving me, a once tech supporter and enthusiast, toward some sort of neo-luddism to get away from it all.

and what's it all boil down to?
money.
it's always about the money.

I think the problem is that for consumers, it most often being used for generating spammy ad revenue sites with plagiarized rewritten content. Or the ads themselves in the case of image generation.

I’m glad it’s working for writing unit tests, though it would seem that better build/debug systems could be designed to eliminate repetitive coding like that by now. But I quit web dev about 5 years ago, and don’t intend to go back.

jobs existing is the problem with capitalism, people shouldn't need to work to live.

I also thought echo chambers were a bad thing.

Calcgpt.io combines all 3 to demonstrate how right all of these detractors are.

"When I was young, they told me that AI would do the menial labor so that we could spend more time doing the things we love, like making music, painting, and writing poetry. Today, the AI makes music, paints pictures, and writes poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job."

AI bros are like pro-lifers, straw-manning an argument nobody is making.

The world is a wildly different place now, and the people developing them were headed by people motivated by reasons other than extracting as much money out of the world at any cost.

This is not nearly as comparable.

Beyond that, very few people had an issue with AI as fuzzy logic and machine learning. Those techniques were already in wide use all over the place to great success.

The term has been co-opted by the generative, largely LLM folks to oversell the product they are offering as having some form of intelligence. They then pivot to marketing it as a solution to the problem of having to pay people to talk, write, or create visual or audio media.

Generally, people aren't against using AI to simulate countless permutations of motorcycle frame designs to help discover the most optimal one. They're against wholesale reduction in soft skill and art/content creation jobs by replacing people with tools that are definitively not fit to task.

Pushback against non-generative AI, such as self-driving cars, is general fatigue at being sold something not fit to task and being told that calling it out is being against a hypothetical future.

Yeah and people also said the same thing about NFTs and now they barely exist. If there was a use for AI outside of very specific things I'd agree with you. But the uses for AI are very basic when comparing it to the Internet.

Friend Computer, I just want you to know that I actually love my 24/7/365 integrated surveillance state. The internet is an unmitigated good and anyone who says otherwise should be flagged as such and disposed of.

That's the way most discussion trends right now. Blame the tech bros and investors chasing a buck for killing the term AI.

Apple Intelligence*

should cosplay porn of celebrities be banned too?

The moment you look at even the "best" ones for more than a few seconds you start seeing lots of fun body horror.

Man, you haven't seen the foot fetish images that bing can create

On the environmental question, AI tools are energy agnostic. If humans using electricity can be environmentally sustainable at all, so can AI. I suspect the energy requirements are going to drop drastically as more specialized hardware is developed.

There are already a lot of great things they can do in the category of generating content for enjoyment. Both art and text based. One of the most popular twitch streamers uses a language model. Games and interactive experiences can be much more realistic and responsive now. As far as I can tell, a lot of people are benefiting from the ability to ask a question and get an expert level answer on most topics that is correct at least half the time. And this is just the infancy of the technology.

As far as well meaning people, a lot of people working on the technology are researchers and computer scientists who legitimately believe in the potential for good of the technology. Of course, there are people who don’t care and only want profit also, but that’s true of basically every company. So you could probably accurately say it’s being worked on by any type of person in that spectrum, but you can’t say the opposite and deny that well meaning people are creating it.