Ethical and environmental problems with LLMs
If someone is considering using or already chooses to use LLMs, here is a list of issues they need to turn a blind eye to...
(And by extension, the same can be said for anything in the cloud or sold as a service, as seen in the last topic on this page.)
Problematic training methods
- AI art is theft: labour, extraction, and exploitation
- AI is theft
- The platform proletariat
- Data workers' inquiry
- Behind every “smart” AI tool lies a human cleaning up its chaos
- How Big Tech hides its outsourced African workforce
- How we investigated the human labor behind AI
- Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models
- Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI
- Flock uses overseas gig workers to build its surveillance AI
- Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs
- The workers who train AI are fighting back
- Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI
- AI firm Anthropic agrees to pay authors $1.5bn to settle piracy lawsuit
- OpenAI did not respect Canada's privacy laws when launching ChatGPT
- Meta is so desperate for data sources to train its AI it weighed risking copyright lawsuits
- Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of ‘pirated’ books to train AI models
- A new list reveals top websites Meta is scraping of copyrighted content to train its AI
- The unbelievable scale of AI’s pirated-books problem
- Rare book dealers fear tech firms are destroying obscure editions to train AI models
- Anthropic didn’t want us to know that they were destroying millions of books to feed their software
- Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping
- AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content
- AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline
- AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed for everyone
- Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
- The AI age is the "age of no consent"
- AI cannot self improve and math behind proves it
Problematic model behaviors
- LLMs will always hallucinate, and we need to live with this
- OpenAI admits prompt injection may never be fully solved
- One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave
- Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs
- AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations
- The rise of AI recommendation poisoning
- Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
- Analysis finds that Google’s AI overviews are providing misinformation at a scale possibly unprecedented in the history of human civilization
- Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped
- AI chatbot falsely accuses journalist of crimes
- Anthropic says ‘evil’ portrayals of AI were responsible for Claude’s blackmail attempts
- Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real
- Doctors who used AI assistance in procedures became 20% worse at spotting abnormalities on their own
- AI is entering health care, and nurses are being asked to trust it
- As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts
- Companies that adopted AI agents alarmed to discover they’re botching incredibly important tasks
- Most Ontario-approved medical AI scribes erred in tests
- Hackers simply asked Meta AI to give them access to high-profile Instagram accounts
- Grok's coding CLI uploaded your whole repo — and your git history
- Claude code hides information using invisible Unicode markers
- An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Problematic usage effects
- What is AI slop?
- AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster
- Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good
- ChatGPT may be eroding critical thinking skills, according to a new MIT study
- AI was supposed to save coders time. It may be doing the opposite
- Software developers say AI is rotting their brains
- AI-powered welfare system fuels mass surveillance and risks discriminating against marginalized groups
- Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI
- Brussels knifes privacy to feed the AI boom
- UK police to use AI facial recognition tech linked to Israel’s war on Gaza
- Scientists are increasingly worried AI will sway elections
- Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image
- Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion
- The scientist who predicted AI psychosis has issued another dire warning
- OpenAI employees raised alarms about Canada shooting suspect months ago
- Evidence grows that Google’s AI overviews have eviscerated the media industry
- Adults lose skills to AI. Children never build them
- Texting a stranger reduces loneliness more than using AI chatbots
- Thousands of vibe-coded apps expose corporate and personal data on the open web
- Police let an error-prone AI system stand in for an investigation
- Facial recognition error prompts police to arrest Asian man for burglary 100 miles away
- Teen handcuffed after AI system mistakes bag of chips for gun
- There’s no clear connection between AI usage and productivity
- Harvard Business Review warns AI ‘workslop’ is rotting companies from the inside
- How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization
- How surveillance technology is helping criminalize resistance
- Bosses horrified as “AI native” college graduates hit the workplace
- Github's AI agent tricked into leaking private repositories
- AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing
- Confronting A.I. as misappropriation
- AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge
- The slow death of the power user
- The Colonization of Confidence
- GenAI has an alignment problem
- The AI great leap forward
- AI mania is eviscerating global decision-making
Problematic ownership issues
- Timnit Gebru was fired from Google for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened
- Thousands more back Dr Timnit Gebru over Google 'sacking'
- Palantir CEO says making war crimes constitutional would be good for business
- Sam Altman’s dirty DRAM deal
- Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
- Peter Thiel warns the Antichrist and apocalypse are linked to the ‘end of modernity’ currently happening — and cites Greta Thunberg as a driving example
- Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians
- Google to pay $68 million over allegations its voice assistant eavesdropped on users
- Palantir pays zero federal income tax despite explosive growth
- Sam Altman may control our future — can he be trusted?
- Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
- Altman said no to military AI abuses — then signed Pentagon deal anyway
- Meta won’t let morality get in the way of a product launch
- Ex-Meta lobbyist put in charge of EU's digital rules
- Palantir’s ‘manifesto’ and the digital sovereignty of other nations
- Palantir CEO makes shocking confession on disrupting democratic power
- Palmer Luckey is our most terrifyingly deranged billionaire
- AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
- How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres’ environmental toll
- Meta in row after workers who say they saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs
- Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop
- Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane
- 99 percent of CEOs are preparing to lay off workers and replace them with AI within two years
- Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
- Microsoft wants to 'make people addicted' to its new AI assistant
- AI, Argentina and the antichrist: Thiel’s vision blooms
- The world’s first trillionaire is a killer
- Meta’s new AI unit is a total mess
- Pentagon used Elon Musk’s Grok AI to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran
- Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly
- Palantir sues Swiss magazine for accurately reporting that the swiss government didn’t want Palantir
- Meta contractors posed as teens to prompt rival chatbots about suicide, sex, and drugs
- Secret Claude tracker shocks users after Anthropic’s anti-surveillance stance
- Flock repeatedly lies to city councils
- Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65tn on opaque AI funding
- Apollo’s chief economist warns the AI bubble is even worse than the dot-com bubble
- New report on the militarization of tech
- Karen Hao on AI tech bosses
- The authoritarian stack
- AI as a fascist artifact
- We should all be luddites
Problematic resource impacts
- Why are communities pushing back against data centers?
- Communities pay the price for ‘free’ AI tools
- AI is threatening natural resources for billions
- UN report warns AI could soon use 3% of world's electricity and more water than we need to drink
- Text to video GenAI will help drive energy consumption of OpenAI to same level as India
- AI data centers projected to strain US energy and water resources by 2030
- OpenAI’s colossal AI data center targets would consume as much electricity as entire nation of India
- Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret
- Google strives to keep data center water use secret after judge orders records released
- How much energy do Microsoft and Google consume? The Dutch don’t know
- Microsoft pledged to save water. in the AI era, it expects water use to soar.
- Thermal drone footage shows Musk's AI power plant flouting clean air regulations
- AI chip boom sparks BT substrate materials shortage
- Tech companies defeat bill as AI drains local water supplies
- New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses
- Officials hugely underestimated impact of AI datacenters on UK carbon emissions
- A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed — until residents complained about low water pressure
- AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound
- Big tech burning more fossil fuels than ever to power AI
- Power prices in eastern US spike 76% thanks to AI data centers
- The AI explosion means millions are paying more for electricity
- AI in Wyoming may soon use more electricity than state’s human residents
- Texas AI centers guzzle 463 million gallons, now residents are asked to cut back on showers
- Data Centre which would use the equivalent energy as half Scotland’s households submits planning permission
- Data centers are so hot their ‘heat island’ effect is raising temperatures up to 6 miles away and impacting 343 million people worldwide
- Amazon data centers in Mississippi have already raised electricity rates for local customers
- AI is draining water from areas that need it most
- The land and water impacts of the AI boom
- Data center neighbors grapple with noise, air pollution
- Behind the curtain of how big tech greenwashes impacts
- Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says
- The pollution being churned out by ai data centers is so severe that it’s almost incomprehensible
- AI data centers' hidden water use alarms Korea
- Meta data center water discharges suspended after contaminating the city's reclamation water supply with bacterium
- Data center that vowed to avoid Colorado River water is now suing for 260 million gallons per year
- Peer-reviewed study exposes how big tech and big oil work ‘hand-in-glove’ to profit off AI
- This data center is everything that everyone hates about AI
- The cost of doing business
Remember that all technology is political!
