"AI helps with my disability"
AI *causes* disability. But that's in poor black kids, and fuck them, right?
this is not new information, you knew this already. don't pretend to ethical values.
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@davidgerard This discussion reminds me of the plastic straw thing a decade ago. Plastic waste in the ocean harms marine life, and that waste overwhelming comes from the fishing industry. But the public discussion focused on personal use, especially plastic straws. Why were they available everywhere? Why were people using them? Weren't the people who claimed to need them selfish and shallow and unethical?
Disabled people became footballs in that conversation, on both sides. We were a convenient lightning rod and smokescreen, while the industry truly responsible could be ignored.
Who is using the majority of AI tokens? Who is shoving LLMs into everything and making them inescapable? It's not individuals with disabilities.
But you knew that already.
@davidgerard
I'm reading a lot of this sort of sentiment lately. I'm concerned that this is obscuring the greater truth: a small number of people are being allowed to run around destroying the environment and people's lives without consequences.
Yes, they are doing it with AI currently. It's true, at least in the English speaking world, if you are using AI you are contributing to all this. Yes, functionally, blaming AI is more or less true at this point. There will come a point soon enough where they will dump AI and switch to something else. The whole thing starts again.
I've read about some sustainable stuff with AI in China, not sure how prevalent it is, but it shows it can be done without destroying the environment. AI isn't the problem, just the current vehicle. The problem is the arseholes doing things the way they are doing them with no regard for anything except profit. The problem is that they get away with this with nothing but massive piles of money.
@davidgerard This is a tough one for me. I think it’s indisputable that AI harms people far more than it helps anyone, but using *some* forms of AI (likely more modest applications like ML classifiers, captioning, text-to-speech, and image- or video-to-text transformers) for accessibility falls within my “acceptable use” bucket.
The pollution and sickness inflicted by data centers are by a huge margin *not* coming from people using AI compute for accessibility. I wish there were a way to provide accessibility compute without also enabling the slop machine.
@drahardja it's the AI companies using them as cover, often extremely blatantly. e.g., this is one of Meta's covers for the pervert glasses.
@davidgerard 100% agreed there
@drahardja @davidgerard I dislike AI with a passion but I have listened to talks and witnessed conversations on here where actual blind people are talking about using meta glasses and how helpful they have been. Big terms like "game changer" and "independence" are in use.
I wish it wasn't meta making and selling them. But the blind people are using them regardless because it's such a leap forward for them.
Ditto deaf people, using the glasses for real-time captioning of people talking to them.
@davidgerard I'm not going to make the claim without stronger evidence but I am extremely interested in whether or not studies are going to find that AI usage specifically worsens the symptoms of ADHD.
I see it promoted so often as an ADHD helper - "it just helps me get started on things."
I have my own instincts about the long term effects for ADHD critters in regards to executive dysfunction. It needs actual study, I'm just saying, I sure as hell am not using it.
@shnizmuffin @davidgerard X3 I know some critters have a hard time getting diagnosed with ADHD, but with that caveat -
The funny thing is I have seen some pretty well-off programmers with abundant resources and good health insurance say "well this helps me with ADHD" and I have replied before, "you know if you get diagnosed, they will literally prescribe you methylphenidate to help with that, right?"
"Claude helps with-" bitch we already invented ritalin!!
@shnizmuffin @davidgerard like yes yes I know, meds aren't right for everyone, and also not everyone has access but.. if someone *does* have access and they haven't tried them.. medication is really good. I take adhd meds, they work. For a lot of critters with ADHD they work; before ADHD folks go all in on Claude code, my advice is literally that they should first at least try out drugs.
I wouldn't accuse someone of hating poor, black kids for liking AI, but I would share that article with them, and demand they explain themselves.
@cy nah, they just have contempt for the idea it's an issue
the server space is being used by anthropic and gemini
I can understand your point, can you really understand theirs?
Many disabled people are isolated and don't get help due to the majority of the world being ableist.
Many of them keep asking for help and get ignored.
For some, using technology is the only help they get.
Maybe if the world wasn't so ableist they wouldn't need to use these tools.
There is no need to punch down.
Any benefit genAI provides to the disabled is only to provide a "legitimate" cover for the perpetration of evil. Yes, actual "evil". They are comic book villains.
@jrdepriest @davidgerard remember when electronic voting machines without a paper trail were necessary "to make sure voting is accessible" to those with disabilities?
Very popular play, find a real problem your tech is the most evil solution for, then pretend you've never seen or can't understand the criticism.
