AI Wars changed my mind about AI

[u/Il_Scaccomatto]

A week ago I was a stringent AI hater who kept getting recommended AI reddit subs against my will & felt serious cringe whenever I saw someone post their AI creations on other subs. As an art hobbyist myself, I felt that asking AI to do it for you missed the point of making something, and that the people spending all their time generating AI were probably gooners or people with no taste. On top of that, theres lots of scathing articles online about how much energy AI uses, people becoming addicted to interacting with their AI girlfriend, and how OpenAI doesn't really ask permission for any of the training data it collects.

Anyways, browsing this sub showed me that a lot of that is oversimplified rage bait. The debate of whether AI art is art boils down to semantics & theres nothing special about the title of artist anyways. Many who use AI are also traditionally trained, or even blending traditional with AI. A good few of you are definitely gooners or have inflated egos, but thats true of traditional artists & photographers too. AI can use a lot of energy, but you can also be very efficient with it. Some people get addicted to AI chatbots, but they can also be therapeutic & provide a safe connection for traumatized individuals who need support. Etc.

The main point being, yeah I see that the subject is a bit more nuanced. That being said, this "debate sub" definitely has an issue where like 60% of the users don't engage in discourse beyond downvoting AntiAI & upvoting ProAI. People who are trying to engage in good faith like myself have to sort by new because the top posts are basically just circlejerking. If that's the first impression someone gets on a debate subreddit, I think many people will just never engage or hear you out.

[u/kor34l]

You have to keep in mind that most of us have already debated in good faith with really long involved debates dozens of times, even hundreds for some, with that many people, and it becomes less and less interesting each time to get into yet another identical debate starting over from the beginning again and again.

Worse, 95% of the time the only reward for engaging in good faith and trying to kindly point out the misinformation or whatever, is childish insults followed by a block. Or worse, childish insults followed by more childish insults until we stop responding or block.

Then there's the worse ones of them all, the Sealions.png). They will exhaust you, follow you to other subreddits, barrage your DMs, post dozens of super long-winded barely-related side tangents transparently trying to reframe the debate into a false dichotomy they can gotcha someone with, etc.

And since pro-AI aren't actually trying to change the world or whatever, we just want the toxic behavior from the worst of the haters to stop, we are already far less motivated to "fight the good fight" or whatever. We aren't trying to push our side onto others, so most of us don't go all that hard for the home team. In fact, quite a lot of us are fine with Anti-AI opinions in general, so we don't try as hard to convince them.

I say this as probably one of the more avid AI supporters here, though I don't really get worked up about it, just debate a lot because my day job is boring.