Are you affraid of AI?

R. von Pnaklendorf

R. von Pnaklendorf

Chymist
AI is scary. Recently, a new feature was added to X (Twitter) that allows anyone to edit users’ photos. This doesn’t just apply to artwork—it also includes selfies and other personal images. Honestly, it gave me the creeps. I’m a very introverted person, so I’m glad I don’t have photos of myself online. We can also see those AI YouTube channels, and how sometimes AI users come here just to make spam.

I don’t know if anyone else is concerned about this, but at least for me it’s deeply unsettling. I can’t help thinking about how stupid humans can be sometimes. For some reason, though, I still feel safe in this forum.

Hope everyone had a nice Xmas (if you celebrate), and sorry for the rant…
 
If I was white collar, I would be concerned.
AI gaining consciousness I believe is a SciFi pipedream.
More worrisome is dark agents using AI to create a lethal mass epidemic, or to detonate anything nuclear.
Or someone who just doesn't like Life. There are always those who hate the world.
 
Yes, Merry Christmas everyone! I'm not concerned with AI because it is simply out of my hands. Worrying would be pointless. I dislike all the AI slop on YouTube. This should certainly be identified and eliminated by the platform. The only thing that concerns me is radical Islam and a certain sub-culture in the U.S. that seems to be getting worse and worse.
 
Zaharoff said:
If I was white collar, I would be concerned.
AI gaining consciousness I believe is a SciFi pipedream.
More worrisome is dark agents using AI to create a lethal mass epidemic, or to detonate anything nuclear.
Or someone who just doesn't like Life. There are always those who hate th
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It’s more of an “uncanny valley” thing for me than something concerning… however, I agree.
 
There is a meme going out on the Internet currently that the only think men fear is what they can't personally kill. I guess by that definition I should fear AI.

I could reasonably say that I fear tigers because I don't expect to be able to personally kill one, but I don't lie awake at night fearing tigers because tigers don't roam around where I live. The introduction of AI into the wilds could be thought similar to billionaires introducing tiger cub-like animals into the streets and telling everyone to enjoy their presence. If these tiger cub-like animals remain cubs, there isn't a problem but if they do what regular tiger cubs do, well not so good. That's were we are with AI; it's generally harmless at the moment but we can all see a path to something much worse even though we are not certain if that path will be taken.

Personally, I think the biggest danger will be when if asked a question and my answer is different from one of an AI, regardless of what the correct answer is, everyone will assume the AI is correct and I am wrong.
 
Zaharoff said:
Unlikely. Social platforms do little that might trim their cash flow.
Lies, misinformation and AI generated twaddle = "Hey, look at our profits!"
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You're right. YouTube just made it more difficult to clear your viewing history. They used to just have a box you could check to eliminate the video. Now you have to click those 3 dots at the end. You have to be careful, or it will restart the video. Which, of course, they factored in. effng scum.
 
I am not afraid of AI by itself, but I am terrified of the way this technology is misused and the precious ressources this misuse consume.

Generative AI in particular is one giant waste. We are giving people the lie they can "make art", have understanding "friends" and write intelligent things with just a couple of prompts. We're giving these people everything they want, but it's a lie and a dangerous one as that. People are getting factually dumber because of this. It was already bad with the internet and overuse of screens but now it's getting even worse because the access to "everything" is made so convenient.

Of course people will fall into this trap: when the world demands performance, speed and efficiency, convenience is the key to success. But what if you become addicted to it? What if you lose your critical skills, cognitive abilities, the capacity to engage with real life people? What if you end up not being able to eat or drink because the data centers will have taken every single drop of water available? Are illusions of success and love really worth it? Technology is fragile. Any incident could make your whole fabricated life fall like a card castle.

I know what it's like to prefer dreams to life, but when the price is so high, it's not worth giving up your humanity. What scares me is that, as always, other people will make this choice for me. They will demand more of it, always. There will be an offer that will cause a lot of damage, always. I don't see this problem disappearing without a catastrophe, like hunger reaching the western world, war or (best case scenario) a major solar flare.
 
I am a white collar worker. In tech sales no less. We have been on the front line using ai to augment ourselves for at least a decade. There aren't as many of us anymore and our numbers continue to decrease I'm just waiting for the ax to drop
 
"It’s the End of the Internet as We Know It"

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | It’s the End of the Internet as We Know It

In the race to patch up cybersecurity holes found by the newest A.I. models, we risk leaving too many people to fend for themselves.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

According to Anthropic, Mythos found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg, buried in a line of code that, Anthropic says, other automated security tools had glossed over five million times. (Both organizations say they have fixed the issues identified.) Even Firefox, the web browser my own organization builds, wasn’t spared: When Anthropic ran its previous model against Firefox, it was able to weaponize an already discovered bug just twice out of several hundred attempts. When Anthropic ran Mythos, it succeeded nearly every time. Across all these projects and many more, the model identified thousands of vulnerabilities in code. These are the types of issues that can allow ransomware to shut down hospitals. They’re how cyberattacks can disrupt critical infrastructure. And they’re how foreign intelligence services can compromise government networks.

Beyond detecting problems in lines of code, Mythos found the seams in the informal social contract that holds the internet together. It’s long been understood that developers would share their work openly, help one another fix what’s broken and maintain the software that all of us depend on — not for pay, but because that’s how the community has worked. The veteran programmer who has been patching critical code for 20 years in his spare time is in the same position as the shop owner who vibe coded her first app last Tuesday. Both are exposed. Neither has a security team. Neither currently has access to Mythos.
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R. von Pnaklendorf said:
Even search engines are being affected; it is now harder to find images that could be considered “iconic” across various search terms, all due to AI. The same applies to the algorithms of search engines and of the websites themselves.
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I think this is a growing trend of "enshitificaiton" as described by Coy Doctorow here. I noticed a time before AI advent that searching google was impossible without including "reddit" to make the search more relevant.

What's even more troubling is the unstoppable rise of AI Art Scams where people take art creators' videos on Instagram/Youtube and replace the actual people with AI and use dropshipping to fool customers. Very alarming and difficult for real art creators to fight against this.
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I'm getting increasingly fed up with AI, but I don't really fear it anymore. If anything, I find it somewhat amusing now. What still bothers me, though, is the sheer number of mass-produced bots on forums like this one and others I participate in. They flood these spaces with scams or attempts to harvest information, making the whole experience increasingly frustrating.
 
Knygathin said:
I have mentioned before that AI is ultimately owned by the global banking elite (popularly called the Illuminati, or the New World Order), to digitalize and control all of the information flow.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has begun. Millions of books are now systematically being collected and destroyed:
https://www.news.com.au/technology/...s/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9
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Tell me about it. I've been thinking about it all damn morning. I even had to go lie down and get some sleep. Have you seen that I have a thread where I post my thoughts and vent? I'm actually considering shutting down my Twitter account, even though I still need it...
 
I use it for work quite a bit. Increasingly so, many have been laid off or asked to retire early at work only a few of us remain. Despite knowing this was coming for well over a decade I haven't done much to position myself for the time I'm asked or forced to leave. I quite like what I do for the most part it allows me a stable income with minimal effort I may find work elsewhere as the work will never really go away and I have experience. The uncertainty of it all is the main problem
 
Things have been going really well for me. I'm gradually distancing myself from mainstream social media, and I don't even feel the urge to use it anymore. I've only used Twitter for specific purposes, and Instagram in much the same way—mainly to promote my own work or the work of fellow writers I support through the camaraderie of the pulp community.

That said, I recently watched a few Instagram reels, and several messages from Pope Leo XIV really resonated with me. He emphasized the importance of putting the phone down instead of endlessly scrolling (that's not really my problem, but I completely understand his point). He pointed out that the time many people spend on social media could instead be devoted to reading, exercising, spending meaningful time, etc.

He also spoke about artificial intelligence. He said we should learn to think for ourselves and, above all, avoid becoming dependent on technology for everything. As an example, he mentioned that on more than one occasion a GPS had taken him to the wrong place. His point was that we shouldn't rely blindly on technology or AI, but instead prepare ourselves, learn on our own, and develop our own judgment.

I thought it was a good message.
 
I was never a member on Facebook. My brother once was, but he mostly mentioned how difficult it was to unregister.
I don't even know what Instagram and Twitter is; I thought Twitter was a special tool for politicians sending out oneliners.
I use email frequently, but never send sms (I have written four or five sms messages at the most throughout my life).
 
When the algorithm starts acting weird, I don’t know how it works behind the scenes, and then it starts recommending strange things… I get scared. It just happened to me on YouTube. It’s weird and uncomfortable. I know it has something to do with AI… it’s just weird. It makes me want to stop using YouTube altogether.
 
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