/c/fuckai has two dozen mods but ironically only time I’ve ever seen them take action on anyone was when they removed my post asking for recs for a community with more active moderation (lol)
I’d like to discuss generative AI from a highly skeptical perspective but with higher standards of quality and without all the mouth-frothy raging and bad memes of /c/fuckai.
Does anywhere else like that exist on the fediverse? I don’t care if it’s small/underutilized. And no I’m not interested in creating it myself.
Your quest is flawed from the outset.
You should be looking for a community to honestly and openly discuss AI, not one with a prescribed viewpoint from the outset.
The fuckai and fuckcars and fuckwhateverelse communities can be satisfying but they are fundamentally biased, and tend to reinforce self righteous viewpoints that are emotionally satisfying in the short term, but reductively mischaracterize the situation and motives involved to the point that it leaves people with an angry, hollow, and unsatisfying perspective on the world.
I do not consider critical thinking skills to be a “viewpoint”. I consider them a requirement for intelligent conversation.
You’re not thinking critically when you start from a conclusion. That’s the opposite of critical thinking. That’s literally just continuing to believe and not question something.
If you don’t want honest advice then ask an AI for an answer, they’re programmed to butter you up and reinforce your bubble.
Seeking communities to reinforce an existing bias or emotional response to something is like saying “Where can I find less healthy food?”
Yes, it feels good and you get little dopamine hits when you say things that make people give you little up-arrows, but you’re literally walling off entire sections of your mind from growth and development.
I say this as a fierce AI critic. I could speak for hours about how it’s being used as a tool from fascists to support hate, how it’s being exploited by commercial companies to inflate stock value, how it’s being shoved into every product and system not to make our software better but to validate that inflating bubble. I could say how delusional people are about it and how it’s harming the minds of our population.
But I don’t hold these opinions as values. It’s analysis of a situation, of an intersection of ideas and socio-economic trends.
It may change tomorrow. Someone might develop an AI tool that actually benefits society. Someone might prove some aspect of it is doing more good than harm with peer-reviewed data. If that happened, and I sneered at it reflexively and ignored data and said “I don’t care what the data says, I know what I feel!” what would that make me?
It’s a technology like the internet. It’s not going away. We may rightfully hate what it is now and how it’s being used or misused, but we’re not escaping it. It’s not fucking going away.
Your choice is to be someone adapting as the environment changes, or being the old grump who whinges and whines endlessly how they don’t understand anything, just watching as the world passes by.
Use your head to guide your heart, not the other way around.
Did you write this with GPT? Skepticism and critical thinking are not biases.
