this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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First of all, no it's not. A hammer is a tool. There's only one person responsible for taking it and making it useful: you. The fire department is not a tool. It performs a useful function which you can initiate, but it requires a complex chain of logistics which involves large amounts of resources and specially trained humans at every step to continue functioning. AI is a service.
Second of all, even if we accept that it is a tool, a jackhammer that has a specialized tip made from a rare material mined almost exclusively using slave labor which needs regular replacement and which runs exclusively on a smelly gasoline engine which everyone around you then has to breathe is not a tool "like any other" and using it is not a neutral act. When you use Claude, you are giving money and support to a company that buys, scans, and then shreds physical copies of rare books; scrapes independent websites until their servers give out, actively circumvents webmasters' attempts to block them, and then lies about respecting opt-out signals; builds datacenters in disadvantaged areas that do everything from raising power bills and making power service less reliable for nearby residents to raising the temperature of places up to a mile away and producing inaudible infrasound that causes everything from irritability through hearing loss to siezures; powers those datacenters in part using natural gas turbines that produce significantly less electricity and more pollution than the same amount of natural gas in a natural gas power plant; and sells their technology to militaries which use them to design guided bombs.
And that's before we even get started on what every single study on the cognitive effects of prolonged LLM use, even by trained professionals automating things they can do themselves, has revealed (in a sentence, use that muscle or lose it).
Fair enough. In a broader sense, all of that is true. The current implementation and business practices are completely rotten to the core. That’s why I’m not going to pay any company for AI, unless they publish a report about using renewable energy. Mistral AI is pretty transparent about their emissions, and that’s a step in the right direction. Still not good enough until they actually power their data centres with renewable energy.
Anyway, I was mainly talking about LLMs specifically, not the entire AI industry and their destructive habits. None of the current AI companies deserve any of my money, especially the American ones.
Sure, "LLMs and GPTs are just tools" is a potentially defensible take.
But, Copilot and Claude and Gemini and Apertus and every other model, "open weight" or not, that has been studied enough will (unknown the the user) sometimes generate output that infringes on the copyrights of the training data AND most, if not all, of the models with high-quality output involved human rights abuses as part of their training process (per Amnesty International).
Maybe, in the future, we'll have models that are trained only on freely redistribute content without human rights abuses and without setting environmental goals back 10-15 YEARS. Maybe.
If that happens, I might be willing to use those tools myself, and I'll certainly stomach their output as part of my won workflows. Until we have those ethical models, FUCK all of them and their output, they aren't just tools; using there output is apologia for immoral acts and using the models is collaboration immoral people.
EDIT: Reworded for clarity: ~~fails to generate output that will not infringe the copyright terms of the training data~~
First of all, not giving them money is like pirating a Harry Potter show and then posting about how much you liked it on social media. You're still giving it free advertising to people who will spend money on it.
Second of all, see what I said about the cognitive effects. If you don't practice doing things without the AI, you will lose the ability to do them much more quickly than you think you will, and if you start relying on it to make tiny decisions, at best your work and at worst your thinking will slowly start to reflect the model's biases.
More importantly, programmers who use LLMs to complete programming tasks demonstrate less complete understanding of their code, which is important because eventually you need to maintain it and even LLMs' most ardent defenders admit that all of them are dogshit at software engineering. If you use AI to maintain an AI codebase, you'll do great for a couple of months before it loses the ability to remember all the parts and starts duplicating work and not syncing up state with other components and before long it's a buggy unmaintainable mess.
Those scenarios are very realistic, and I think many people will suffer from these problems. I don’t expect that people will use LLMs responsibly. If they did, many of these problems could be mitigated, but obviously that’s not going to happen.
It’s basically very similar to what happened to physical health when work was done by machines instead of muscles. Nowadays, people don’t carry hay bales or buckets of water, and it shows. Undoubtedly, the same thing will happen to the mind as people rely on LLMs to do the thinking for them. As a bonus, you’ll get voters who are even more ignorant than they currently are. What could go wrong with democracy at that point… Mussolini showed how to decommission the whole system through democratic means.