'Meet The People Who Dare to Say No to AI' (msn.com)
- Reference: 0179867078
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/25/0324244/meet-the-people-who-dare-to-say-no-to-ai
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/meet-the-people-who-dare-to-say-no-to-artificial-intelligence/ar-AA1P2kdF
"As the tech industry and corporate America go all in on artificial intelligence, some people are holding back."
> Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, [2]turning off Google's chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones. For some creatives and small businesses, shunning AI has become a business strategy. Graphic designers are placing "not by AI" badges on their works to show they're human-made, while some small businesses have pledged not to use AI chatbots or image generators...
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> Those trying to avoid AI share a suspicion of the technology with a wide swath of Americans. According to a June [3]survey by the Pew Research Center, 50% of U.S. adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in everyday life, up from 37% in 2021.
The Post includes several examples, including a 36-year-old software engineer in Chicago who uses DuckDuckGo partly because he can turn off its AI features more easily than Google — and disables AI on every app he uses. He was one of several tech workers who spoke anonymously partly out of fear that criticisms could hurt them at work. "It's become more stigmatized to say you don't use AI whatsoever in the workplace. You're outing yourself as potentially a Luddite."
But he says GitHub Copilot reviews all changes made to his employer's code — and recently produced one review that was completely wrong, requiring him to correct and document all its errors. "That actually created work for me and my co-workers. I'm no longer convinced it's saving us any time or making our code any better." And he also has to correct errors made by junior engineers who've been encouraged to use AI coding tools.
"Workers in several industries told The Post they were concerned that junior employees who leaned heavily on AI wouldn't master the skills required to do their jobs and become a more senior employee capable of training others."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/meet-the-people-who-dare-to-say-no-to-artificial-intelligence/ar-AA1P2kdF
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/try-these-hidden-nope-buttons-to-stop-ai-content/ar-AA1J4YgS
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/
PE Vultures are at it again (Score:2)
The only people gungho about AI are the PE vultures who invested in it. They are desperately trying to make sure the billions they put don't just go poof.
I don't know a single person who uses AI to do anything useful. One guy uses it for dumb work like reformatting CSVs, but that work can be done by anyone
Re: (Score:3)
I'm a programmer who started out hesitant about AI, and at first I thought all that it could do was auto-complete better.
Then I tried Claude Code, and it really is like having your own personal junior dev assisting you're every need. Like a junior, it makes mistakes, but using the *massive* amount of good code that it creates, and fixing what's left, is so much faster than writing it all from scratch yourself.
If you're a developer in 2025 and you're not using AI, you either have very specific concerns (ie.
Re: (Score:2)
How will it stack up against an actual junior when they start at least trying to break even on the cost? Those megawatts aren't free.
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Or you are working on a code base that isn't amenable to LLM assistance.
I don't know what sort of development you are doing that an LLM can create "massive" amounts of code that is anywhere near correct, but I wish you luck with it. I prefer to write my own race conditions and lock ordering bugs. I don't need something else to write them for me.
Re: (Score:2)
This.
I have not run into a single person who holds the AI stuff in a positive light. There are some small edge cases where AI is "better than nothing" like transcription (ASR), translation, and TTS, but these are things tourists in foreign countries are more likely to need to get from point A to B without being scammed.
The stuff we keep being told is that AI will write us novels, have AI's talk to other AI's to book our vacations, buy or sell us property, drive our cars, and fire weapons.I I want none of th
outliers? (Score:2)
My impression just from people I know is that most of them are enthusiastically embracing it, and happily falling down the cognitive hole it creates. This is not technical people, just anyone, like people at the gym. Examples I've heard: Rewrite this letter for me. Summarize such and such. Generate a few paragraphs for my newsletter. I'm not hearing any critical analysis of what comes back.
If they were forced to pay for it though, I suspect most of them would.
Re: (Score:2)
> Fuck AI. Dare me.
OK... I dare you to fuck an AI. I double dog dare you.
AI isn't going away (Score:2)
But it's also not taking over. It's a tool. Learning what it's good at and what it isn't, and how to tell the difference, is a skill worth developing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's scum being pushed by dweebs like Altman who should have been shoved lockers more in HS.
Both extremes are bad (Score:2)
Trusting immature tech is bad.
Avoiding potentially useful tech is bad.
Carefully and skeptically exploring it, with plenty of cross-checking and confirmation is good.
Also, the free version is the worst version. Paid versions are better
1994 (Score:2)
Back in 1994, I knew old people that refused to use a fad known as "World Wide Web" .. Gopher was much better. There was also FTP, Usenet, and IRC. Who needs the web? These same people used Word Perfect 5.1 and would never switch to "WYSIWYG" word processors.
Then they complained that they got replaced by "inexperienced" young workers.
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Frankly, society would be better off if the Web were much more limited, and not in everyone's pocket all of the time ... if we end up with a Carrington-level geomag storm (sun's active recently) that kicks tech back 50 years overnight, humanity would be improved for it.
Re: 1994 (Score:2)
OMG. WordPerfect 5.1.
Don't say that out loud, I'm having nightmarish flashbacks.
What an abomination.
Real masochists clung onto 4.1, and kept all their files in the same directory as the executable and dlls.
Moral reason (Score:3)
I avoid "AI" for moral reasons.
I don't support theft and plagiarism. (and no, the "it is just like a human is learning" argument is invalid and you know it)
I don't support people getting unemployed because their work is stolen, mashed up and resold.
I don't support massive data centres that draw ridiculous amounts of energy, when we are in the middle of a climate crisis.
I don't support AI technology being used for things where it does not belong: where wrongly applied it can do more harm than good. The IMF has warned about using AI to control supply chain management and high-frequency trading -- where when they get in a situation that they're not trained on, you will get actions based on hallucinations, which will mess things up royally .
I don't support economic bubbles for investing in AI, and pushing AI tools on people, where there are no clear good use cases. (hello Microsoft!)
I don't support pollution from gas turbines and oil furnaces powering AI server farms. I don't support power outages in communities near AI server farms. I don't support water outages in communities near AI server farms.
I don't support price hikes of computer hardware, because "AI" moonshots are sucking it all up. "AI" is the new "crypto". Many of the "AI-bros" today were "crypto-bros" yesterday. And I did not support cryptocurrencies because of many of the same reasons mentioned above.
I don't support using [1]technology that is a dead end [youtube.com], and instead hoping that throwing more hardware on the problem will make up for it.
I don't support the search for "superintelligence" (what is it supposed to be for, anyway?) The tech giants have not solved the "alignment problem" by the slightest, and are actively ignoring the problem: people who worked on it have been laid off, or left by their own volition to warn us about it.
Like Geoffrey Hinton ("The Godfather of AI"), Stuart Russel and tens of thousands of other people, I have signed [2]a petition against it [superintel...tement.org], and you should too!
But are there useful applications of neural networks? Of course there are. Image upscaling. I use the neural network engine in my phone every time take a picture with its camera. Recognition of anomalies in medical images, etc. etc.
But those are not part of the bubble, and they are not commonly called "AI". Have some reasonable expectations!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg
[2] https://superintelligence-statement.org/
Give me the CHOICE (Score:2)
If you want to use AI, fine. But if I don't want to use it, don't force it on me. Don't put it in my OS and make me have to jump through hoops to avoid it. Don't put it in my applications and have it automatically steal all of my original work to use as training data.
A reasonable person would understand that when these companies take these kinds of actions and put the onus on the end user to opt out, that this is highly suggestive of unethical motives. Normalization through market saturation and removal
Re:Oh my (Score:5, Insightful)
She prefers the raw, unbiased truth from TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, X (Twitter), ...
She never said that and you're manufacturing fake news.
Re: (Score:3)
He must be AI ... ;)