Ask Lemmy

Seeking communities to reinforce an existing bias or emotional response to something is like saying "Where can I find less healthy food?"

Yes, it feels good and you get little dopamine hits when you say things that make people give you little up-arrows, but you're literally walling off entire sections of your mind from growth and development.

I say this as a fierce AI critic. I could speak for hours about how it's being used as a tool from fascists to support hate, how it's being exploited by commercial companies to inflate stock value, how it's being shoved into every product and system not to make our software better but to validate that inflating bubble. I could say how delusional people are about it and how it's harming the minds of our population.

But I don't hold these opinions as values. It's analysis of a situation, of an intersection of ideas and socio-economic trends.

It may change tomorrow. Someone might develop an AI tool that actually benefits society. Someone might prove some aspect of it is doing more good than harm with peer-reviewed data. If that happened, and I sneered at it reflexively and ignored data and said "I don't care what the data says, I know what I feel!" what would that make me?

It's a technology like the internet. It's not going away. We may rightfully hate what it is now and how it's being used or misused, but we're not escaping it. It's not fucking going away.

Your choice is to be someone adapting as the environment changes, or being the old grump who whinges and whines endlessly how they don't understand anything, just watching as the world passes by.

Use your head to guide your heart, not the other way around.

Your quest is flawed from the outset.

You should be looking for a community to honestly and openly discuss AI, not one with a prescribed viewpoint from the outset.

The fuckai and fuckcars and fuckwhateverelse communities can be satisfying but they are fundamentally biased, and tend to reinforce self righteous viewpoints that are emotionally satisfying in the short term, but reductively mischaracterize the situation and motives involved to the point that it leaves people with an angry, hollow, and unsatisfying perspective on the world.

!techtakes@awful.systems has a lot of criticism of AI, though it extends toward all the silliness of the tech industry. There is a weekly thread called stubsack for things that don't warrant their own post.

You can search all Threadiverse communities on https://lemmyverse.net/communities.

EDIT: One place you might try would be !futurism@lemmy.ca. Not much going on there at the moment, but as per its description:

A place to discuss the ideas, developments, and technology that can and will shape the future of civilization.

That's not specific to AI alone, much less pessimistic views, but how technologies like it will impact society would be in scope.

EDIT2: As to moderators being active, there's not presently much there to moderate. One mod seems to have been inactive for two years, but @troyunrau@lemmy.ca looks to be alive, commented somewhere three days ago. And there aren't any memes or rage-stuff presently on there, if that's what you're hoping to have moderated away.

/c/fuckai has two dozen mods

I blocked that place long ago, but randomly when I go to block someone for trolling, they mod /fuckai

Seemed pretty obvious they're pro-ai larping as the charecture of what they think people who don't like ai are like.

At least, I hope those aren't real people acting authentically.

I just did a scroll through the posts returned for a search of "gary marcus" and didn't see too much. His newsletter hits a lot of the main beats if you just want occasional updates when something happens. It doesn't look too much like a channel exists though