Riskable

No, the vulnerabilities were always there, AI is just pointing them out publicly.

I used to work as a professional hacker. Let me tell you something that the news never, ever talks about: If a company doesn’t have a bug bounty program, we kept those vulnerabilities to ourselves.

A government has vast resources to do just that: Keep the vulnerabilities to themselves until they feel like using them. They will not disclose them. They will keep them in their back pocket until the day comes when they need them for an op.

The only time they disclose vulnerabilities is when they think they’re too easy to find and there’s a public interest benefit to getting the problem fixed (e.g. the government is using those products).

What this means is that AI really is making FOSS vastly more secure than it ever was. This is probably pissing off government red teams to no end.

What we’re not hearing about as much is AI finding vulnerabilities in closed source products. Not because it’s not finding them, but because the disclosures are kept private (because companies treat it as bad PR and they’re assholes about it).

You can bet your ass that AIs run by state actors are building up massive war chests of vulnerabilities in closed source products right now. We’ll only hear about them after these products get exploited and maybe not even then because so, so many companies have no idea WTF they’re doing in regards to infosec. Think about it: How many CEOs are right now demanding their teams reduce the amount of FOSS they use because of the recent news? These people are idiots and apparently never heard that old joke about a new employee making a $100,000 mistake… “We just spent $100,000 training them!”

Good news: We’re rapidly making FOSS the most secure software ever.

Bad news: We’re doing it in the most painful way possible.

AI isn’t inherently unethical. The very premise of saying such a thing is flawed.

Is it unethical to use AI to find new drugs and medical treatments? To use it for physics research? What about regular research? Writing code?

Where do you draw the line?

Also, AI was used to design the current crop of fusion reactors and the full potential of that is only just getting started. If it turns out that AI solves all the issues and generates a working fusion reactor design, it’ll make every one of your arguments moot. Because that one achievement will be worth everything. It would “save the world” so to speak (from an energy/emissions standpoint).

Chatting with an LLM is less impact than driving a car. Think about that for a second before you say using it is unethical. It’s literally more negative for the world for someone to drive a car every day to work than it is to ask an AI to find something on the Internet or write a program in Python.

Or perhaps your underlying complaint is more about capitalism than it is about AI?

Put it into perspective:

• Everyone doing their laundry uses more water than all data centers combined. Golf courses also use vastly more water.
• Data centers use about 1-2% of global electricity.

People driving cars pollutes more as does global shipping, regular old consumerism, etc. The environmental impact of data centers is negligible in the grand scheme of things.

Now that AI is making open source software the most secure software ever written (the hard way, hehe), not using it to scan your stuff is now considered worst practices and basically idiotic negligence. No company that uses software or anything with firmware can afford to ignore it anymore.

There’s no way out of it. Accept the new AI reality and push for good regulations. Example: If we made it so that all AI data centers had to be powered via renewable energy on site that would allay most of the energy use/environmental concerns.

The anti-AI sentiment here is ridiculous. They were asking a legitimate question!

I just use ollama locally but I keep meaning to setup OpenRouter because I like to play with larger models that my hardware can’t handle and I’d like to be able to pick the best deals 🤷‍♀️

It sounds like it’s messing with the reward center of the brain which is what ADHD is all about.

LLMs give people ADHD?

No, no. You’ve got the wrong idea.

Will AI completely ruin a zillion people’s ability to think (beyond what social media already accomplished)? Quite possibly!

I’m just saying there’s nothing we can do to stop it at this point.

You’re about to head down a long, lonely road as normies start using and accepting AI more and more into their lives while you scream into the abyss. I’ve been there with fossil fuels, copyright, software patents, and Linux.

People saying “Just use AI!” Is about to live rent free in your head as your most-hated phrase. Just like, “stop driving gas guzzlers!” Or, “stop bitching about Windows and just install Linux already!” Lives in so many others.

At least most people don’t think of AI as a core part of their identity (e.g. pickup trucks) 🤷

It’s too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.

On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that’s actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It’s actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).

Let’s say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone’s computers be scanned regularly for AI models?

No. It’s unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won’t be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.

As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is “slop”, it really does do useful stuff! It’s just most of the useful stuff doesn’t make the news. It’s boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it’s supposed to have or follows the correct format.

AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who’s not using AI for that is an idiot. It’s just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.

There’s fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We’d be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn’t good for a lot of things.

We can regulate its use but that’s not really “regulating AI” as much as it is “regulating capitalism” or “regulating people”. Because the AI isn’t just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.

What we need isn’t “AI regulation” is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.

Individuals using AI are a tiny drop in the bucket. Think bigger: Businesses and government.

There’s government agencies racking up token usages to the point where Google had to build an entire data center on Christmas Island (the place with the cool crabs) and that still won’t be enough! And that’s just one government!

Companies are using AI in automations now and it’s working so well that they’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month (on tokens) just on that one automation.

These usages are where demand is growing. Not regular people or even developers using AI to help them write code.

Given the monumental difference between those two figures, investors across the world of finance are taking it as a sign that demand for AI is much lower than previously thought

No. Demand for OpenAI’s services is lower than they thought.

Every day, the open weights models get smarter and cheaper and new competitors are coming online every few weeks. They cost a fraction of what OpenAI charges.

Demand for AI products and services is continuing to grow at a break-the-world pace. It’s just these big “AI first movers” are in trouble because it’s too easy to copy what they do. They expected an enormous “first mover advantage” (which is a real thing) but it turns out that AI is trivial to train and replicate (just have to scrape the Internet and scan a lot of books).

In other words, it’s turning out that “first mover” is a disadvantage in this (AI) industry.