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@thomasfuchs I think for me the main issues are environmental destruction, and what for want of better terms I will call plagiarism. I'm not interested in "per-inference" costs as long as enormous, energy and water hungry data centers are being built or proposed. Even solar and wind power (although vastly superior to fossil fuels and nuclear power in this sense) have significant impact at scale. I'm also skeptical about "local models will save us" on several grounds, unless the modestly powered machine ingests only data whose creators specifically consent to that use. Yes, it's impractical, but I thought we on fedi already had the "consent is impractical" discussion a few times. Finally (and you did invite unstructured!), I don't want to directly or indirectly support the businesses of some of the worst people on the planet. Every hour I spend reviewing AI generated PRs makes these services a little more useful. I'm not ashamed to say that I just want to the AI bubble to pop as goal, not as an means to some other thing. We didn't boycott South African wine because it tasted bad, but because it enriched terrible people.

P.S. This post is not an invitation to "Change my mind", but a response to a request for thoughts about AI. Reply guys will be blocked.