[plasticeagle]

Certainly Gen AI is being marketed to business leaders as being capable of reducing their payroll, but I don't believe that's what it's for as such. And as several comments have mentioned, its energy use is not even especially significant.

Gen AI exists to wrest control of information from the internet into the hands of the few. Once upon a time, the Encyclopaedia was a viable business model. It was destroyed as a business model once the internet grew to the point that a large percentage of the population was able to access it. At that point, information became free, and impossible to control.

Look at google's "AI summaries" that they've inserted at the top of their search results. Often wrong, sometimes stupid, occasionally dangerous - but think about what will happen if and when people divert their attention from "the internet" to the AI summaries of the internet. The internet as we know it, the free repository of humanity's knowledge, will wither and die.

And that is the point. The point is to once again lock up the knowledge in obscure unmodifiable black boxes, because this provides opportunity to charge for access to them. They have literally harvested the world's information, given and created freely by all of us, and are attempting to sell it back to us.

Energy use is a distraction, in terms of why we must fight Gen AI. Energy use will go down, it's an argument easily countered by the Gen AI companies. Fight Gen AI because it is an attempt to steal back what was once the property of all of us. You can't ban it, but you can and absolutely should refuse to use it.

[exceptione]

The second order effects are were the real dangers lie: people will lose the ability to understand their own reality. You see it at Twitter, where community notes are being replaced by AI. Stupid users asking "@grok is it true that ...?" People are gullible, putting trust where they absolutely shouldn't.

Musk wasn't happy about some facts, so grok changed. "Sorry, I was instructed to.." These tools are seen by the clueless populace, whether it is your own aunt or some HN'ers, as an objective, factually correct oracle, free of influence.

Then there are lobby groups pushing for AI in the judiciary. Always under the banner of "cost savings". Sure, guess who gets their case being handled better.

A debate about what a healthy society would be, what people share as a common cause, is urgent as ever. Without reality distortion from autocratic interest groups an allied talking heads. The AI flood is unstoppable, but with the current culturally engineered crises in many democratic countries, it will most likely result in serious catastrophe.

[jofla_net]

We will be reduced to an infantile state, erased.