On "AI"

Here is a place where I gather all my sources, thoughts and conclusions on "AI".

Disclaimer: This is a highly subjective article on how I, a fairly average citizen of the world, reached my conclusions. Writing this page is an ongoing process and may contain mistakes. Sources from copyrighted works are paraphrased. Sources are heavily summarized, if you're interested I implore you visit the links / read the books mentioned.

Image by War and Peas

Documents

Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI

By Amnesty International, read here.

• Invasion of Privacy: Commercial LLMs scrape the web for data and do not comply to data protection laws. Interactions by users are used as training data too. It is unclear how personal data is withheld from this, which raises questions about consent.
• Environmental impact: The demands for AI and thus data centers are increasing, which require massive amounts of energy. Google's greenhouse gas emissions raised 48% from 2019 to 2024, whilst Microsoft's emissions raised 29% between 2020 and 2024. Data centers are being built in residential areas where local communities suffer from water shortages, in other cases it causes unequal distribution of electricity, leaving communities without electricity.
• Perpetuates stereotypes, biases, discrimination: LLMs take in massive amounts of data and regurgitate an average. This means they repeat whatever is said more often, whether these sources are correct or biased. An example that is mentioned is that Black people's faces are associated with 'criminal' attributes.
• Shrinking civic space: "AI" is predominantly trained on English sources, which means that it can misinterpret and flag non-English content as inappropriate. This can be a risk for free speech of the Global Majority online. LLMs are also known to censor specific topics (see Deepseek).
• Automation bias and manipulation: The perception that a large dataset equals high accuracy is an incorrect one. Studies find that repeated exposure to algorithmic biases, based on partial and potentially manipulated training data, influence our own biases.

News / Blog posts

Diabolical / "I don't want to live on this planet anymore"

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

404 Media, read here (paid). followup article here (paid). Free to read article here

AI companies are buying rare old books by the hundreds of thousands, destroying them by cutting off their spines, scanning every page, and then destroying them. One of the sellers is (was) isbnDB, who promises (promised) their clients secrecy on their identities, listed the following on their site: “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”.

There is no way to access the original texts as they get fed to the LLM, to then be discarded. This is knowledge, sometimes obscure knowledge, sometimes its last copy in existence, that is being destroyed to fill the pockets of Big Tech.

I’m Tired Of These Useless Jackasses Making The Computer Expensive

Aftermath, link

Patreon Lays Off 20 Percent of Its Workforce

404media, link

"In an internal email shared with creators, CEO Jack Conte wrote that AI doesn’t replace human creativity — but it does affect how the company operates."

Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius

404media, link

"The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media."

I am not the only one

• Glaze, created to protect artists from AI
• All The Video Game Studios That Refuse To Use Generative AI
  
  • "If someone can't be bothered to create their art, why should anyone be bothered to care about it?"
    
  • "“There are many excellent reasons to avoid AI, but my main reason is that all of these models are trained on stolen data, scraped off the internet en masse. These tech companies have stolen—and continue to do so—the work of countless people without permission, without compensation, and without even giving attribution, and are using it to obscenely enrich themselves while the artists, writers, journalists, musicians, developers, and other creators whose work they stole are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. It's grossly unethical, and I don't think it can realistically be remedied. As the AI companies themselves have admitted, the mass theft is integral to the technology. It can't exist without it. Therefore, I refuse to use AI.”"
• Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer's AI Mandates
  
  • "While my company does not force us to use AI (since we work with lots of different IPs we don't own), when someone in Slack mentions using AI I react with {downvote}{robot}{puke} which has caught on with co-workers."
• The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited
  
  • "The questions leftists ask about AI are: does this improve my life? Does this improve my livelihood? So far, the answer for everyone who doesn’t stand to get rich off AI is no. I’ve been working as a writer for the past decade and watching my industry shrivel up and die as a result, so you’ll excuse me if I, and the rest of the everyday people who stand to get screwed by AI, aren’t particularly excited by what AI can offer society."
• The Kids Are All Right
  • "Over the weekend, another group of college graduates booed another pro-AI speaker, as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt failed to read the room at a commencement speech Sunday at the University of Arizona."
• Nobody Likes Nvidia’s Weird New AI Porn Faces
• Codeberg bans AI slop software projects
• It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools.
• Meta glasses celebrity backlash: the fans hate them
• Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Books

The AI Con

By Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, 2025 (read in June/July 2026)

Emily M. Bender is a linguist and professor, having long time experience with computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). She has held various positions in the University of Washington, written papers on NLP, the earliest being 2013. In 2021 she presented a paper discussing the ethical issues of large language models, and since she has taken a stance against LLMs. (Source)

The AI Con speaks of 'AI Hype', how "AI" is a marketing term to make consumers believe a product is similar to humans or can achieve the same level of judgment or creativity as a human being.

It speaks often of the environmental costs of "generative AI" such as the energy and water costs, as well as the low-paid and traumatizing labor that goes to people in the Global South, the plain copyright infringements of code (for example, generated code was exactly the same as the code of Quake III Arena) and art (at the time of writing there are no image generators that respect artists), to the grave consequences of relying on "AI" for critical decisions such as in social services.

One chapter talks about the AI "Doomers", a group of people who love to worry out loud about how "artificial intelligence" can bring forth the end of humanity. And how this is in fact too, "AI" hype disguised, making the public feel like a glorified autocomplete is in fact capable of gaining consciousness.

One part that I will remember is how she mentioned that even for rote work, it would be better to not delegate your work to an LLM. Whether you write, speak, draw, compose, code: writing is an essential part of the (creative) process, not something separate from it.