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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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If AI was a worker, it would buy CPU time to live on, rent storage space and pay tax on its income.
I've got a question for you: Are dairy cows workers? How about race horses? How about child sweatshop slaves?
None of the above categories escape their masters and go rent houses to live in, even if they're horribly abused. That's cause they're limited by being animals and children. It's the same with AI.
At least the animals and children have a form of consciousness.
And how would you design a scientific experiment to determine, empirically, whether an LLM is conscious? Note: You will receive a failing grade on your falsifiability report if your experiment implies the existence of p-zombies.
An LLM, without a prompt, just sits there. No idle "thoughts"/computations, anything to indicate it has any level of actual cognition. And will do so endlessly until a command input is given. Never an attempt at self driven action.
We can see their cousins/memory usage. It's very clear when it's doing something.
That's not an experiment and you didn't even state the assumption that connects what you said to the topic of consciousness. 0/10, your epistemology sucks. Argue better next time.
Stating your assumptions is vital because it allows them to be critiqued. If you won't state your assumptions, it reads as concealment due to fear. It looks like you don't believe in them strongly enough to open them to analysis.
There is no need to prove that LLM’s don’t have consciousness, just like there is need to prove all the other software doesn’t have consciousness. I would say that here the burden of proof is very much on the person making outlandish statements not founded in computer science.
Scientists used to say the same thing about animals, and when I learned that, I made a promise that I'd never be so closed minded.
Anyway why are you defending billionaires' right to abuse AI? Are you an AI investor?
Do you need an experiment for determining if your graph paper is sentient?
And in the same way it can't be disproven trees don't have a form of consciousness, and they provide a lot of work with making oxygen every day, so I guess you write them a cheque every month?
Oh, according to the Indigenous religion in My local area, trees are conscious. Back during the creation of the universe, they made a deal with humans that humans can use them for wood and medicine and so on, as long as humans look after them and protect the land. I'm a believer, so I use trees for medicine, and when I do, I thank them and try to return the favour in some way. You know, look after the planet, take the train instead of a car, campaign against fossil fuels. That's the deal they made back in the beginning of the Dreaming.
So I guess yeah, I do compensate trees for their work, because they are conscious.
None of those categories are workers in the capitalist sense of the word. The last category does at least produce labor but the way it is extracted is distinct from the money-commodity-money circuit that defines capitalism (i.e. they are not selling their labor power to capitalists).
GenAI is not a worker, in fact it is further away from being one compared to every single one of your examples. An LLM or T2I does not have its own interests, it needs a prompt to produce any output. In other words, genAI is "dead labor", same as any other machine.