It’s quite common for me to be annoyed, angry, or upset at a headline writer. Then there’s the feeling I got reading “Meet the AI vegans.”
Whole new level.
Its so wacky out there. When I read something like this I’m sure its The Onion. And its not. Then I read a headline about US politics and its totally believable , alas its The Onion.
I refuse to believe this title is anything other than engagement-bait, personally.
Seems to me you‘re a BS vegan.
Yeah, pretty disappointing to see from the Guardian.
This is such a stupid name for this.
Abstaining from a thing does not make one a vegan. That’s not how any of this works.
It’s like how they put the word gate after something to say that it is a scandal involving the former word.
Somesort of political scandal involving road maintenance? Oh yes well that’s roadgate then. Even though the Watergate scandal was in fact it scandal in the watergate hotel, rather than a scandal about water.
Awe so the article author has a vendetta against vegans got it.
I mean, abstaining from animal products makes someone a vegan, right? If you abstain from AI products then it would follow that you’re an “AI vegan”.
It follows, but it is also feels like click bait.
A definition of vegan is:
A vegetarian who eats plant products only, especially one who uses no products derived from animals, as fur or leather.
There is an environmental parallel, and it made me read the article to see what they were on about – so I guess it worked.
To be clear, I am very pro environment (I live in it); I just feel like this is crossing the streams of related, but completely different movements, isn’t particularly helpful.
Abstaining from animal products is just vegetarian. Veganism requires an extremely strict adherence to a very specific set of rules concerning animals.
Vegetarians can eat cheese, which is an animal product.
Calling them after a maligned (if harmless) group seems like a choice to paint refusing to use AI as being annoying, preachy and scorn-worthy.
They seem very determined to pressure people into using AI regardless of it’s practicality, environmental impact, or anything. Fuck this shit.
There’s been recent pushes in that regard, investment in AI shit has been enormous but the financial payoff for anyone besides hardware manufacturers remains nonexistent. So investors and corporations have recently redoubled their efforts into trying to get everyone to use it in the hopes that this somehow will make them profitable.
yeah, this is 1000% deliberate manufacturing consent
how to belittle and minimize a very serious thing: call any protesters of it a " ___ vegan"
They are “journalism vegans”. They are choosing to abstain from actual journalism for clickbaiting, herd mentality, and personal lack of skill reasons.
Why are you dissing on vegans? Veganism is legit, bro.
I’m not dissing on them. I am simply aware of how they are perceived in society.
This makes about as much sense as calling Linux users “Windows vegans”.
Choosing to not use AI isn’t some wacky contrarian position, it’s a tame position that can easily be justified. (Don’t want to use AI? Then don’t.) If anything, trying to assert that constantly using AI for everything would be the new normal is the wacky position.
Imagine thinking that veganism is “wacky”.
“Newspaper which uses AI to write its articles concocts derogatory term for people who doesn’t use AI”
Imo vegan shouldn’t be seen as derogatory. I’m not one, but got a lot of respect for most of em.
it shouldn’t, but years of lobbying and demonization online certainly have made it so
And here i am not using it because I’m old and cranky.
I just don’t use it because it’s shit and doesn’t do anything I need any better than I can do myself in the same time.
I applaud folks like this - they make a choice and stick with it. No “I’ll never use AI to generate art but I vibe code to save time” hypocrisy. No “I use it to help me with maths, but I’d never use it to steal artistic work”.
Just straight up “it is an environmental hazard, it is unethical, not engaging”. Should be called “AI Ethicists” rather than “AI Vegans”.
Yeah, I too hate those hypcrites who complain about the massive environmental impact of AI, then drive a 10 mile round trip to buy a burger made from a cow raised on soy.
Would you happen to be a vegan who is also anti-car by any chance?
If so, I can recommend fuckcars on ml as they share your viewpoint.
No I’m a meat eater who is anti-car! I’m more getting at how people have latched on to the energy use of AI models without realising the huge energy usage that goes into their daily lives.
Definitely a good point to raise; thanks for doing so!
Here’s a fun one - where do you stand on those forced to commute dur to housing prices near inner city work (e.g. I live in near poverty paying a mortgage for a small place near where I work due to poor public transport so I can walk to work - how does this figure into the anti-car vision? Is it an employer issue, a government issue, a personal sacrifice, or something else entirely?)
Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.
Good to know, I’ll go ask one if the profs in our school of built environment for more info. See if they can offer more insight there.
If you’re interested in this topic, I simply must plug the Adam Something YT channel :) He makes funny but also serious videos about urban and transport planning, and whatever new “trains but worse” transport idea techbros came up with this month.
are the two comparable? genuinely asking because i suspect AI usage is an order of magnitude or so more…
You’re right that there’s orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that’s far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.
Starting it with “AI” is already misleading. Whatever the noun is should be preceded by “Anti-AI.”
I dunno, the use of AI Ethicist fits as they’re not against the concept of generative AI as a whole, they’re against unethical generative AI (in terms of stolen training data and environmental harm).
If the world transitioned to a post-IP (intellectual property) society (as we need to), with AI eating less power, then AI Ethicists are unlikely to object.
Fair!
I’ve personally sworn off writing code with any if statements or static values, my webpages hallucinate differently on each refresh 💟
My desktop is a bit allergic to any art made my humans
— A.I. Vegan
I refuse to use it because it’s shit.
We are not the same.
Every last bit of it? What is your stance on use of AI for tasks such as data analysis of massive sets for scientific research, or procedural automation of massive operations?
AI doesn’t exist, machine learning algorithms can be useful and are used with no controversy, generative bullshit is basically useless.
You’re using a lot of very loosely defined terms with a lot of certainty. Machine learning is AI, we just usually apply it to the more simple versions of it. Where do you personally draw the line? I fully understand the plethora of risks, downsides, and injustices that can potentially be involved in the matter, but I legitimately don’t understand the extremist level hatred that some people express to anything that could hold the title of AI. To me, it parallels with someone saying that they hate ionizing radiation. Frequently, it’s also bad, and your entirely reasonable to try and avoid it on a daily basis, but it also has many uses that are beneficial and life-saving.
Yes, I am also frequently accosted by Google’s data analysis of massive sets for scientific research. I can’t tell you how many times they’ve forcefully inserted research analysis of large data sets into my search results.
What?
What bullshif us this?
A. I vegan is a nonesence title.
How about " people who don’t want the world to end even faster tell corps to fuck off"
Im also a gun vegan, a car vegan, a facebook vegan, an exercise vegan (unfortunately), a windows vegan, … just not actual vegan.
I feel like thats a bad way to use the word vegan.
Yeah… It’s just abstaining from something. Veganism didn’t invent that. Dumb headline
I don’t use A.I. because I’ve had nothing but negative interactions with A.I. Customer service bots that fail to give adequate responses, unhelpful and incorrect search result summaries, and, “art,” that looks like shit hasn’t made me want to sign up for ChatGPT or Gemini. For most people, this isn’t a moral stance, it’s just that the product isn’t worth paying for. Stop framing people that don’t use A.I. as luddites with an ax to grind just because tech bros spent billions on a product that isn’t good yet.
It’s fair to say that the environmental and ethical concerns are significant and I wouldn’t look down in anyone refusing to use AI for those reasons. I don’t look down on vegetarians or vegans either - I don’t have to agree with someone’s moral stance or choices to respect them.
But you’re right, LLMs are full of crap.
LLMs definitely are full of crap. But that isn’t the point of them (even if some corporations make it seem like it is)
They are supposed to be used for text generation. And you are supposed to read through everything afterwards to correct any hallucinations.
It can’t work on its own, and make mistakes about 30% of the time.
But there are use cases where that isn’t a problem. Use them as inspiration for creative writing prompts for example. They are crazy good at that.
Truth is definitely a bit of a blind spot for LLMs.
For most people, this isn’t a moral stance, it’s just that the product isn’t worth paying for.
Wait till you see the price of a burger in another five years.
You only notice AI-generated content when it’s bad/obvious, but you’d never notice the AI-generated content that’s so good it’s indistinguishable from something generated by a human.
I don’t know what percentage of the “good” content we see is AI-generated, but it’s probably more than 0 and will probably go up over time.
Shit take, the more AI-made media is online, the harder it is for AI developing companies to improve on previous models.
It won’t be indistinguishable from media made with human effort, unless you enjoy wasting your time on cheap uninteresting manmade slop then you won’t be fooled by cheap uninteresting and untrue AI-made slop.
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Maybe, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was trained on stolen artwork and is being used to put artists out of work. I think that, and the environmental effect, are better arguments against AI than some subjective statement about whether or not it’s good.
Shitty click baity title
I don’t use it because I have no trust in it.
Sounds like you are not eating enough small rocks a day. You should eat 1 small rock a day.
Wtf this is the weirdest thing to read while taking a shit in the morning
This was an actual response that Google’s stupid Gemini LLM really gave somebody. The notion was lifted from a satirical Onion article which the LLM regurgitated as if it was an established fact.
also because it’s shit, if my memory serves me, I have successfully used AI for a productive task 1 time out of 7 attempts so far… it saved me 5 minutes
That is part of the trust thing. I spent more time fixing the word salad it spat out than it would have taken to write the document.
Yes, hand in hand…
Anecdotal of course, but every person I know who claims AI is a huge productivity booster simply trust it blindly.
I can’t even get “Copilot” to return a proper answer from its own meeting transcript… just yesterday there was some confusion about an IP address we exchanged in a past meeting… I asked Copilot to check the transcript and give me the IP of the vendor’s server (which I pointed by name of system and who spoke it in the meeting) and it gave me the IP of MY server, functionally the complete opposite of what I was asking but with full confidence in its answer
Don’t use it for things you need trust in then.
Inspiration for creative writing prompts for example. Things that make you double check every word that has been generated or where it doesn’t matter they hallucinate.
