GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.

We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.

  • Shifty Eyes@leminal.space
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    11 days ago

    I’m with Linus Torvalds and GrapheneOS on this. AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.

    • stopforgettingit@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      I am sure I will be down voted on Lemmy for this but using AI for development by a team who is already experienced in development of the product they are working on is not a moral failing.

      • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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        10 days ago

        My personal experience but the people who blindly bitch about AI are, quite frankly, idiots.

        I use AI daily for work it’s an extremely helpful tool as you stated. I still have concerns with it.

        The difference is I understand human nature and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. We need governance and standards and it needs to be a utility just like hydro, water and The Internet. There also needs to be a global UBI yesterday.

        What people are bitching about with AI amount to the lack of control we the people have over it.

        I’m surprised you haven’t been downvoted but I bet I will for calling a spade a spade in these people so rigidly opposed.

        • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
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          10 days ago

          I don’t think anyone is “blindly bitching”. I think people have understandable concerns regarding its development, use, and proliferation.

          The other idea that it needs to be a utility is straight from the wet dreams of every AI company. Realistically, the average person has little use for AI and it’s much more likely to be a detriment to them than otherwise. I know someone who is an exec in a big company and they get AI through their work. They use it for inane things mostly, but recently they used it to generate a list of reasons that their kids *dont need to go to school. This is an educated person with a good job who can’t figure out that AI has no idea what their kids need.

          I don’t think AI needs to be used by nearly the number of people currently using it, but my bigger concern is letting anyone, be it a private company or a government, have access to something people treat like a magic answer anything machine.

          • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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            10 days ago

            I disagree in part. Many people have replaced searching with AI.

            Take a pic of something in chatGPT. “What is this?”

            It’s highly useful in everyday life.

            The problem is that people my age were skilled before AI so it is literally just making things easier for us which is the point.

            Kids on the other hand, it is taking away their opportunity to learn as my generation did and that’s a huge problem.

            Then we get back to the underlying problem. Governance and standards.

            Should AI be allowed in school? Should companies be forced to continue entry level jobs that could be phased out by AI?

            You could ask a million questions.

            The problem with human nature is we are great at figuring out if we can do things we don’t stop to think of we should do things.

            • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
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              10 days ago

              If you think taking a picture of something and having AI identify it for you is something that 1) people should do on a daily basis and 2) the government should support AI as a utility for, then we have such different concepts of the world we want to live in that I don’t think we’ll come to an agreement here. I cannot imagine how that would be “highly useful in everyday life” for the average person.

              The whole “You could ask a million questions” while supporting the idea it should be a utility is so weird to me. Like, yes, we could ask a million questions, and I think we should before suggesting it is a service that every citizen should be somewhat entitled to access from the government in some way (with all the caveats that come with a utility etc etc). It seems like you have fallen into the trap you suggest is inherent to human nature and you haven’t bothered to ask if we should do that.

              • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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                10 days ago

                The problem with your argument is it runs counter to the facts.

                AI adoption is here. You can bury your head in the sand and pretend that’s not so, or you can acknowledge it and know there is work still to do.

                https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/artificial-intelligence-ai-usage-statistics/

                https://hbr.org/2026/06/how-people-are-really-using-ai-in-2026

                https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/artificial-intelligence-in-daily-life-views-and-experiences/

                • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
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                  10 days ago

                  What argument do you think I’m making and what facts does it run counter to? So a lot of people use AI. That has no relevance to my point at all. Unless you’re using popularity of a tool as a proxy for if it’s good or not, it’s irrelevant to my position. Nuclear proliferation was here at one point, CFCs in everyday consumer products, smoking. There are plenty of things that were popular that we decided were not good for us as a society and we worked to make things different.

                  I never said it was unpopular, I said that many people using it have no real need of it and it may be doing more harm than good in many cases. I can say for a fact I know several people who use AI and are worse for doing so. Your own links suggest a majority of the people using it don’t find it actually helpful and that they want more control over their interactions with it. That doesn’t strike me as a population of people who can’t wait to embrace AI or embrace having their governments responsible for ensuring access to it. To be clear, even if they did mostly find it actually helpful, I don’t think it means that we need to be providing it.

                  Full disclosure, your second link was inaccessible to me so I am going off the data in the other links.

                  • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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                    10 days ago

                    If people have no need for it then they wouldn’t be using it. Full stop. I don’t get your argument.

                    Clearly the statistics are showing people need it. It is making tasks quicker and/or easier. That’s the point.

                    You thinking otherwise doesn’t change statistics.

                    Yes I can do the same shit without it but that means more work and more time. Why would I do that? (I’m saying this as a proxy for the average person)

        • Pirate2377@lemmy.zip
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          10 days ago

          I mostly agree, but instead of better regulating AI governments and corporations have just been using it as an excuse to lay people off

    • Rioting Pacifist@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Don’t forget the negative internalities (it makes it’s users dumber and the codebase less maintainable).

      But yes it is useful, and the knee jerk hate comes mostly as a reaction to the marketing lies told by the companies selling it.

      • Trilogy3452@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        Experienced developers benefit from it, my guess is because they’ve already formed their knowledge, habits, opinions, etc.

          • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
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            8 days ago

            Devs are lazy. Any productivity gains are negated by them simply choosing to work less and have more free time. Which is not a bad thing.

            • Rioting Pacifist@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              That hasn’t been my experience, my experience is that you end up babysitting the LLM so much that you aren’t able to get more done.

              I’m not able to spend less time working either as the LLM requires constant supervision.

        • General_Effort@lemmy.worldOP
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          11 days ago

          It’s pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the economy. Focusing on AI to the exclusion of bigger issues is actively harmful.

          • Feyd@programming.dev
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            11 days ago

            It also didn’t exist at all 5 years ago. Why are we as a society allowing new ecological damage? When will we stop? The billionaires want it to be never as long as it gives them money and power.

            • General_Effort@lemmy.worldOP
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              11 days ago

              Renewable energy makes good progress, but as you can see here, many people have other priorities.

              • Feyd@programming.dev
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                11 days ago

                So AI data centers are being built powered with renewable energy, right?

                • General_Effort@lemmy.worldOP
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                  10 days ago

                  One rarely builds a dedicated power plant for a single building. It is more efficient to build large power plants for general use and use cable to transmit the electricity to where it is needed.

                  • Feyd@programming.dev
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                    10 days ago

                    That didn’t answer by question at all, I suspect because you couldn’t think of way to twist running new gas turbine generators specifically to power these monstrosities into a good thing.

          • Wakko@hell.cloud
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            11 days ago

            It’s pretty insignificant

            Citation needed. You’re just straight-up lying or clueless as to what’s actually going on.

              • Wakko@hell.cloud
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                11 days ago

                That’s an “I have no idea what I’m talking about” if I ever heard one.

                “Citation needed” IS polite. You claim it’s not polluting, so clearly you know the CO2 emissions numbers from SpaceX’s datacenters that are being run off direct-connect to natural gas generators. So, how about it? How “not polluting” are they?

                • setsubyou@lemmy.world
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                  11 days ago

                  It’s a matter of framing. If you compare them to older datacenters they are atrocious because they’re bigger and consume more energy. But in the grand scheme of things all things IT pale in comparison to e.g. producing beef. Now with that framing you can’t sell AI hate though because people like beef, so it’s always just comparing large datacenters to smaller datacenters with the obvious results.

                  • Wakko@hell.cloud
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                    11 days ago

                    That’s an awful lot of typing instead of just saying “I’m a lying liar who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s why I offer no actual data - because the actual numbers destroy my entire argument.”

                • General_Effort@lemmy.worldOP
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                  11 days ago

                  Unfortunately, as you can see, you are in a crowd of liars. Now, I am certainly not accusing you personally of being dishonest, but it does tend to bias your audience against you. Sorry.

                  The numbers aren’t particularly bad. It’s not for nothing that the EU has classified natural gas as green energy.

                  • TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml
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                    11 days ago

                    Hey, I think ai can be a useful tool and I use both cloud hosted and local models.

                    The ecological impact is god awful.

                    Datacenters run on fossil fuel turbines to meet demand when there isn’t enough capacity on the grid or just 24/7 because the residents of the nearby municipality said they don’t want brownouts.

                    Fundamentally ai datacenters transform expensive to transmit electricity into cheap to transmit data, financializing what was previously a relatively insulated commodity whose pricing and production reflect local demand into a globally traded commodity whose pricing and production reflect global demand.

                    If you don’t have a background in the history of industry and environment: that’s bad news for the environment (and anyone who relies on stable power rates).

                    Production of ai computing components requires mining rare earth minerals and phenomenal amounts of power. This is the same process with nearly the same inputs as the production of general purpose computing parts (if you leave off the increased rare earths needed to mitigate electromigration in single digit nanometer processes!) but the increased demand has already brought more fabs up to meet it meaning more use of resources and energy in production before the first kilowatt of inference is run on those chips.

                    Turbine blades for datacenter generators are also limited by production and are currently years out for delivery. These are components produced by advanced aerospace manufacturing shops which use massive amounts of energy to shape alloys of metals that have to be yanked out of the ground and smelted into some esoteric type of steel or aluminum first.

                    So even without the water concerns datacenters have tremendous impact on the environment.

                    But the water concerns are legitimate. Swamp chillers divert flowing water into the air where it is blown anywhere but where it would have flowed. Which is fine if you aren’t downstream of one I guess.

                    All this is to say: if you don’t care about the impacts you can rationalize that however you like, but they exist.

      • Bristlecone@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        Reality altering disinformation as fact, using a machine that is essentially plagiarism incarnate? You are pushing a false narrative OP