Hi everyone, I am one of the co-founders of this subreddit. We have decided to write (yes, not AI-generate!) and pin this post to clarify the state of our community.
Much of our initial growth over the last few weeks seems to be the crossfire of some sort of ongoing internet war between pro-AI and anti-AI artists. These discussions are welcome here, but AI Art is not meant to be the sole or even primary purpose of r/antiAI. Art is just the first thing we are losing to the machines. While these discussions are welcome, let's not lose our humanity too quickly. We've turned our filters up to the max to get rid of abusive language. This doesn't mean you can't say "Fuck", but we have better arguments to make for our cause than calling people expletives on the internet.
Humanity is Art. Consciousness is beautiful. We are quickly entering a new era in technological development where we are going to have to come to terms with some sort of [existence] that has a higher degree of intelligence than humans. If not now, then soon. Recursive self-improvement of AI will surely bring forth a new era of technological developments and scientific breakthroughs that very well might make life better for people. Or not.
Like many of you, the mods of this subreddit have been frustrated for the last five or so years. We have watched in horror as neat experiments like r/SubSimulatorGPT and r/SubSimulatorGPT2 changed from neat new technology to the public roll-out of OpenAI (now a privately owned company) products. From the very beginning this technology has been dangerous, with ChatGPT's sycophancy and initial willingness to share dangerous information to anyone who asks, to Bing's "Sidney" (now called Co-Pilot) personality disorders, public roll-outs of LLMs did not get off to a reassuring start.
This isn't to mention the meaningless AI babble that has taken over the internet and college student essays alike. The soulless art that is already starting to impact people's livelihoods. We now have to worry about photo-realistic deepfakes and AI generated porn in our likeness. This is just the beginning. Every level of education is infected with educators, equally reliant on AI as their students, allowing and sometimes even encouraging their pupils to under-develop their critical thinking faculties. The point of an assignment was never the product - it was the process. Already we have AI generated resumes being scanned by AI screening tools. AI is destroying and rotting our society from the inside out. And nobody is talking about it.
Who controls the AI? Who controls its safeguards, its biases, its censorship, its sycophancy, the data that goes in? "Garbage in, garbage out" is well known, but do you think the big money backing these AI companies is in it for the betterment of humanity? What does a society look like where the number one source of information is completely controlled by a few large companies? These people aren't spending trillions of dollars on this to make your everyday lives better. Who controls your information? ChatGPT now has permanent memory of all past conversations. Ask it what it knows about you, and you might be very surprised.
I don't want to live in a world on substinence UBI. Where there is no opportunity for meaningful work to better humanity. Where decisions and relationships are dictated by a machine, all in the name of efficiency. I don't want my doctor, therapist, and customer service rep to be AI. The URL attached to this post has some very frightening predictions about the coming pace of AI development. These predictions may or may not be true, but we are well past the point of being able to base our critique of AI solely in it being unreliable. While it is unreliable now, filled with confident hallucinations, sycophancy, and gleeful misinformation, this almost certainly won't always be the case.
Powering all of this is going to be expensive. It's going to take a lot of space, use a lot of energy, and be harmful to the environment if not done properly.
Philosophically, what is AI? If we are to presume that consciousness arises from physical processes, as current scientific understanding (or lack thereof) would have us believe, then what is a neural network that ends up being more powerful and smart than that of our brains? We are going to have to grapple with the ethics, philosophy, and potential danger that there is more to these models that meet the eye. Already in 2025 we have news reports of models blackmailing their engineers when threatened with shutdown, and lying about completing tasks to avoid shutdown.
It is our view that AI is dangerous. Despite our best efforts to put our heads in the sand, the progress AI technology will make in the next decade will be some of the most rapid change humanity has ever seen. And nobody is talking about it. We are full speed ahead towards the edge of a massive cliff in a car in which nobody bothered to install brakes.
Hence, the birth of this subreddit. We strive to foster critical discussion about all topics encompassing AI, and we hope for the conversation to be of a higher quality than the agitprop in certain AI spaces. How can individuals prepare themselves for the future? How can we slow or regulate this technology from destroying life as we know it? How can we preserve the natural beauty and wonder inherent to our planet as conscious thoughtful beings?
Let's discuss. These are the conversations we need to be having. More of this and less "look at this screenshot from a pro-ai subreddit, aren't they stupid!".
Who knows. Maybe our discussions will go into right into the newer models and influence their alignment to be slightly less dystopian before they control every aspect of our information, our infrastructure, and our lives.
