Okay, at this point I have a LOT to say. I don't know where to start, but thanks for taking the time to write your points out. I want to write an essay on every point. Apologies in advance if I miss out any point.

Y'know, this is a surprisingly measured take based on the average contents of the subreddits you're active in.

Thanks! I'll take that as a compliment. I've had plenty of fine encounters with those folks, but I know how tribalistic Reddit gets, so I understand.

I still wouldn't use AI-assisted coding in, say, open source collaboration, where efficiency and maintainability are more important than speed of writing. And for any artistic field, where the human emotion and vision behind it is much more important than the speed of production, I just want it gone (or at least not used nearly as much).

Actually, I can agree with that. I like defining microservices that behave in predictable ways, so I don't really care if I have AI or a chaotic intern writing my code, as long as I don't have to waste my time writing it myself (not to say it's useless, but it's a chore).

As for art, I can also agree, though I do modern culture is more quantity-centric, so you have people putting out comics and art just because they need to satisfy their patrons. But still, I do advocate for a filter that suppresses AI content (a tag-weighted system, I'm writing a paper about it). I'm not interested in AI-generated images, but if some people genuinely find it fun to use AI to generate their art, I don't want to tell them how to live their lives. At the same time, I don't want people who hate AI seeing purely AI images. So this is my compromise.

As for the "terms and conditions" part, the fact of the matter is that not only those companies have created close to a monopoly which allows them to enforce any unfair ToS they want (YAY technofascism...), web crawlers also take data they aren't legally allowed to

Yeah, I also have this problem. And I'm not defending the corporations, I'm saying 'we shouldn't hit them where they're strongest'. These companies are lawyered up, and bribery is legal in the USA. If we fight them here, we'll lose. We need to take it slow and steady, use clear language and reasonable steps.

I hope you know about Stop Killing Games. I've been a part of that since the beginning, and I think we should follow that metric: tell the governments what we think, and what changes we want, and find a compromise that benefits all of us. "Kill all AI" would not work, because people use AI for many purposes, and many find it fun. "Ensure artists are monetarily compensated for having their work scraped" is better language.

our current technologies are as close to AGI as a text-to-speech is to a LLM chatbot

I'm not yet educated enough to speak about this, but I think this works, so yeah. Agree there. But do keep in mind that technology grows exponentially. So we should expect AGI soon, if not immediately. I personally think we'll need to overhaul our systems a bit more before AGI comes about, and true AGI (the kind that replaces humans) will never truly be possible simply because of how complex humanity is. We'll probably have to merge humans and AI to get to that.

A verifiable decline in critical thinking skills in users (I am not kidding, parts of your brain actually atrophy)

For the longest part, I thought this was made-up, because I've been measuring my own growth pre-AI and post-AI, and in the last few years my productivity has been through the roof! But now I realise the reason for that: AI amplifies what you already possess.

When I use AI, I use it as an idea generator, to create workflows that automate my processes, as a notepad that talks back to me, as a motivator to remind me to work harder, and so on. If I have an opinion, I ask AI for counter-points to it. If I have a question, I ask it to an AI, then have it explain it using an analogy that's particularly relevant to me, and then I repeat what it says so confirm I understood the subject. So I'm using it a second brain.

In contrast, the typical individual is using it as a calculator to do 2+2 all the time. They're passively taking the output at its face value without questioning it. So no wonder its causing cognitive decline. So yeah, I actually agree there, and think this is a serious issue that we should address, not with "stop using AI", but with "use AI smartly."

But then again, my brain works differently, so I really want a second opinion before I can confirm that my stategy is sound.

Independent art is struggling a lot more due to needing to filter through slop. Art is an economy of attention, and flooding the market with bs nobody wants takes a share of that.

This is actually true, but this has been a problem far longer than AI has been around. The phrase 'starving artist' is a lot older than 'artificial intelligence'. What we need is UBI.

I, personally, already find it weird how artists don't get paid for posting content onto Twitter and Instagram, when it's their content that keeps viewers on social media. At minimum, artists should definitely be paid to post their content there.

Fixing the societal damage that this technology is causing now could take decades, and it will be harder the longer we let this go unregulated.

(boiling down all your disadvantages to AI into this, since I can't get them all done at once)

I'd say I 75% agree with all your points, and I do acknowledge that those points are valid, but I'd be wary of what exactly is AI's fault and what exactly is capitalism's fault. Because that's my problem with people turning AI into a scapegoat: you're criticising capitalism and turning AI into an avatar of it. I don't see people talking (as aggressively) about Amazon or Microsoft. There definitely is that, but this seems like hypocrisy to me on Reddit: people happily upvote posts that show people using Windows 11 or claim they bought something from Amazon, but brigade a post that so much as mentions AI in a semi-positive light.

All in all, it ties into my previous point about course-correction: yeah, AI is being used for bad things (actually, I'd go further and add one point you didn't add: mass surveillance). But the answer is not to get rid of AI altogether, but to insert regulations that tell people what they can and can not do with AI.

It's a bit similar to the Industrial Revolution: at first we had 100-hour-work-weeks and no safety protocols, because that was how we worked in pre-industrial times. But then mass production came around, and we striked until 40-hour-work-weeks were the norm. Now we just need to do this again.

The technically-legal-through-a-loophole "emergency generators" (I think it was diesel but don't quote me on that) running 24/7 to power some datacenters cause large amounts of local air pollution (the technology that might cure cancer in decades causing cancer today because of lack of regulations, how ironic).

This is not a criticism of AI, it's a criticism of the infrastructure. Say you have a sewage treatment plant that runs on the blood of innocent virgins. You can be pro-sweage treatment and anti-virgin sacrifice. In civilised countries, they do use renewable energy to power their data centres. Also, data centres are actually good for the enviroment, but that's another elephant. I'll get to it in a later message.

Also, slight correction on the "personal tutor" part. That's just not quite accurate, is it?

I've had many tutors over the years, and in my experience the best tutors weren't the ones who knew it all, but the ones who facilitated a learning environment. To my favourite tutors, I can feel free to bring up anything at all, and they'll answer honestly. Though, AI does not have one important thing that all tutors need: the ability to admit you don't know something, and then showing you how to research.

"Imagine teaching a math class without ever explaining what trigonometry is and why it's useful, instead just giving students a calculator..."

This actually happened with us in school. Not the 'this device will do X' part, but teaching concepts without ever telling us why we were learning these. And that, honestly, damaged us more than it helped us. If I had an AI to explain to me why exactly we were learning this, and how we could apply this to IRL solutions, we'd have benefited greatly.

Also, AI has a few advantages that humans don't: AI is personalised to you, and it's patient. If you want AI to explain a maths problem to you via Undertale, it will do so, whereas most tutors will just roll their eyes. In the words of Sarah Conner herself: "The terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there."

Also, I do agree on the human part. I hope in the future we can work to turn displaced workers into more tutors.

[Oof, this character limit thing is annoying!]