Meet the AI vegans. They are refusing to use artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons
-
Eh. Factory farming is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, particularly through methane released by large livestock herds.
But the industry is so saturated with subsidies and shielded from liabilities and exempted from taxes and so comically wasteful in its surplus production that there hasn't been any material benefit to veganism as a social movement. You can take a moral position (and you should, eating meat is awful for a variety of reasons). But there's no actual correlation between an increase in vegan eating habits and a decrease in agricultural emissions. All we ever get is more meat shipped abroad or thrown in the trash.
The real curb to agricultural production has been raw materials constraints - limits on arable land, potable water, and slaughterhouse workers - that have (directly or indirectly) emerged from a changed climate. Outside these limits, all we've really achieved is "Grapes of Wrath" style surplus destruction to keep retail prices up.
If a factory farm can produce another dead cow, it does, even if it can't reliably bring the carcass to market. The profit margins are set so artificially high that they'd be fools not to do so. Only herd die-offs resulting from heat waves, water shortages, and a lack of below-market migrant labor seem to dissuade them from trying to expand.
thank you. no matter how many times I point out the inefficacy of consumer choices or how I word it, I end up with bad faith and fact-avoidant responses like you got.
-
20 years ago you could have said "Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it's absolutely futile."
Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.
I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won't have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.
Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.
The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That's true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.
Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier.
there is no causal link between any of those events, and increased demand decrease availability.
I don't really believe what economists claim, v but you don't even seem to know what they say in the first place
-
the harder it is for AI developing companies to improve on previous models.
They all use each other's data to improve. That's federated learning!
In a way, it's good because it helps have more competition
I was talking about ai training on ai output, ai requires genuine data, having a feedback loop makes models regress, see how ai makes yellow pictures because of the ghibli ai thing
-
No an Image generation is not ten times the impact pf a Google search, a ChatGPT query is. Image generation is probably a lot more.
-
Why does this use of the "vegan" word sound so condescending?
-
Have you tried Ecosia?
Not OP. I've been using Ecosia for years and was glad they didn't do the AI summary shit so far... But a few days ago I got an AI summary on Ecosia as well. I fear they're also hopping on this train and in that case I'll look for another search engine.
-
Someone should launch a Project Poison which offers information to websites to protect themselves from scrapers and to poison and devalue AIs and companies that ignore their restrictions. I'm sure there are plenty of ways it could be done - nonsense about niche subjects, libelous facts about celebrities and people with money, false attribution for quotes & art, images captioned with things they do not contain, offensive slurs. Just feed AIs with sufficient trash and it will output trash.
-
Can we please stop coming up with words that describe that we do not do a thing like it is not normal?
Just like having to call yourself an atheist because you do not believe. You should call yourself a theist if you believe, because you actively do it. Call yourself what you are, do, or see fit, not what you are not. -
Not AI vegans. More like LLM deniers. They know how to use it, they know what it does, they know how to trick it, they know how to abuse it.
-
This makes about as much sense as calling Linux users "Windows vegans".
Choosing to not use AI isn't some wacky contrarian position, it's a tame position that can easily be justified. (Don't want to use AI? Then don't.) If anything, trying to assert that constantly using AI for everything would be the new normal is the wacky position.
-
"Newspaper which uses AI to write its articles concocts derogatory term for people who doesn't use AI"
-
This makes about as much sense as calling Linux users "Windows vegans".
Choosing to not use AI isn't some wacky contrarian position, it's a tame position that can easily be justified. (Don't want to use AI? Then don't.) If anything, trying to assert that constantly using AI for everything would be the new normal is the wacky position.
Not eating animals is not a wacky contrarian position either, and I'm not even vegan
-
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a decade, the results are fine, and !bangs are extremely useful for piping queries directly to specific sites, !w for wikipedia, !aw for archwiki, etc. The Duck.ai function is a recent addition, and it can be easily disabled if you don’t want it. By default it doesn’t usually pop up by itself. You can also use lite.duckduckgo.com for a much leaner search and absolutely no AI.
I was trying to use it for a long time, but the results are never fine for me. The situation when I search for something specific, the duck shows me nothing, and the google shows me exactly what I need is far too often for me to completely switch.
Granted, I don't keep cookies, I use all the adblocks possible, and I disabled google's LLM bullshit, otherwise google is borderline unusable. -
Not eating animals is not a wacky contrarian position either, and I'm not even vegan
So I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and say that it is. Look at your teeth, humans are omnivores. Cutting out half the diet you evolved to consume is in fact a contriarian position. Not that I have any issues with vegans or vegetarians, just from an anatomical point of view we were designed to eat some meat! I do think calling people who don't use AI "AI vegans" is absurd though, as diet has absolutely nothing to do with use of AI. Would be more accurate to say their AI fasting if we're gonna use food related terms.
-
So I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and say that it is. Look at your teeth, humans are omnivores. Cutting out half the diet you evolved to consume is in fact a contriarian position. Not that I have any issues with vegans or vegetarians, just from an anatomical point of view we were designed to eat some meat! I do think calling people who don't use AI "AI vegans" is absurd though, as diet has absolutely nothing to do with use of AI. Would be more accurate to say their AI fasting if we're gonna use food related terms.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's natural to eat animal products, but many humans try to live by ethical standards, not just instincts and traditions. Just because the stronger caveman used to be able to just bash their neighbor's head in and take their belongings, doesn't make it acceptable by today's standards.
So while I do agree with your initial assessment, considering that we have the option nowadays to have a healthy diet based on non animal products, I would also agree with the previous comment saying that it is not wacky contrarian to eat / live vegan. -
The better term would be "LLM gobbling fuckheads" for those who use that stuff and believe it has anything to do with "AI"
-
Let's not call it that
-
Journalists constantly trying to be the origin of a term.
-
You can ask it to turn off the summaries. It still shows them but you can ask.
You know what I was thinking about the big summary at the top and completely forgot about the summaries in the result descriptions. But I'm not sure if that's DDG doing it, Bing (who they use as a backend), or the sites itself since I only see it on results from reddit and such.
-
This is deeply cynical.
The Platonic Ion makes similar cynical claims. The idea that art is mimetic is compelling enough without gen AI.
