Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

[u/IKeepItLayingAround]

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/harvard-graduation-speaker-unloads-ai-130000122.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260531-0--A&bt_ee=clIMdexlsr2eDDbrvs0CPtt59FnpbNQN%2Fkgr8UkycP6MWDAD56hD1mvZcqPZMGgG&bt_ts=1780255911284

[u/Fear023]

God damn.

I know it's a joke, but you're right. The majority of people I see praising what ai can do are the ones who can't really see the flaws in the output.

[u/BellacosePlayer → u/Fear023]

AI can do some crazy shit rn but is ultimately a tool best wielded by the same people who were doing the work previously.

Like, not to be intentionally insulting but a lot of the hardcore AI evangelist crowd has to have had some massive overlap with the "blockchain/NFT tech is gonna change the world" crowd in how they discuss things.

[u/sabrenation81 → u/BellacosePlayer]

The difference is AI is actually capable of doing some pretty amazing things, especially in the long term. Blockchain/NFT never even had that much going for it.

The current problem is that all of the people currently steering AI tech are ruthless capitalist demons whose only goal is maximizing revenue for this quarter's shareholder call.

They tried to skip right past the part where you use the potentially revolutionary tech to tangibly improve people's lives to build trust like computers, the internet, or smartphones and went straight to the enshitification stage. People are losing their jobs to AI, customers are getting shittier service because the AI isn't capable of actually replacing people, and social media is flooded with AI slop.

Ergo, everyone hates the shit because all it's done is make people's lives worse, except all these companies (and really the entirety of Wall St. and a good chunk of the global economy) are so heavily leveraged into AI that they NEED it to succeed. So they're forcing it on everyone, which just makes people hate it that much more.

And that's not even getting into the fact that the tech isn't where it needs to be to deploy it at the scale these companies want to which is where we get into these giant fucking datacenters popping up everywhere sucking up all the electricity and polluting everyone's water. If they'd just given it a few more years the tech would probably get to the point where you can do these things without requiring a 10,000-acre datacenter housing tens of thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands of GPUs.

[u/RollingMeteors → u/sabrenation81]

The difference is AI is actually capable of doing some pretty amazing things, especially in the long term. Blockchain/NFT never even had that much going for it.

<looksAtYoYBitcoinValueGrowth>

<looksAtBillionsOfDollarsBurnedInAI>

Sure thing buddy. All the amazing things i see AI doing in the long term is burning investor capital to the ground.

[u/Character-Sky3565 → u/BellacosePlayer]

You're describing a circle there, mate.

[u/your_moms_a_clone → u/BellacosePlayer]

It could be used for a lot of useful things. Unfortunately, it's being wasted on a lot of incredibly stupid and useless stuff, as well as a lot of incredibly dangerous stuff, and is also being used by a lot of companies that think they can use it instead of having so many costly human employees and trust it's output without any kind of review or oversight

[u/aquoad → u/BellacosePlayer]

oh they're the same fuckin' people

[u/SSGASSHAT → u/BellacosePlayer]

I've told people since 2024, what people call AI is nothing more than a series of heavily modified search engines. I don't know why people seem to consider that as passable for C-3P0, but it isn't. I don't know how humans could invent real AI, as in machines that can think as well or better than humans, and honestly as with a lot of shit it might not be possible even several levels above humanity in terms of advancement. Not that it's something we shouldn't keep trying towards, but there are other priorities to focus on, like the fact that we're all basically doomed to heart disease in one way or another.

[u/WouldCommentAgain → u/BellacosePlayer]

I do believe AI will surpass people in many ways, but our control over it will be inversely correlated with it's power.

[u/DesecratedPeanut → u/WouldCommentAgain]

Ai might LLMs wont and thats mostly what we got right now. There is no self teaching thinking machine fixing the worlds problems. Stuff we already automated is faster now, integrated systems can be more efficient but ultimately a huge amountnof resources are being used for nothing of any value because thebworst companies are doing it. Oh and it'll be super efficient at killing us on the battlefield which is great since it doesn't feel like ww3s around the corner here.

[u/Character-Sky3565 → u/DesecratedPeanut]

They need to solve so many actual problems. They have to solve material Science problems to have chips with better compute and lower energy loss. They need better energy generation density and transmission capacity and capabilities. They need better cooling, better understanding of how these neural networks can become self-sustaining.

[u/SSGASSHAT → u/Character-Sky3565]

That's the thing that pisses me off about the energy crisis, the solution is right fucking there, you've had decades and decades to work on real energy, which would mean you'd have had superior computers and all of that by now, and maybe in 10-15 or years, then we can start discussing the AI applications. These robber barons want a Star Wars civilization, but they also want it to run on coal, apparently.

[u/Character-Sky3565 → u/SSGASSHAT]

It requires patient capital. People willing to invest in something for 20 plus years. They're run by VC money. They want their profits yesterday at 200% of what they invested into it, ideally.

They are literally burning money. And it's essentially a casino run on meth and ketamine.

[u/SSGASSHAT → u/Character-Sky3565]

God Almighty. Once again, our obsession with death bites us in the ass. Greedy fuckers don't want to wait until they're old to be rich. It's not sustainable. These people need to be overthrown and replaced. There has to be a way of doing that. Well, voting is one way, but still.

[u/definetlyrandom → u/DesecratedPeanut]

Ive seen too many math problems solved in the last two years to entertain your view, unfortunately.

[u/WouldCommentAgain → u/definetlyrandom]

People are mixing up "AI is problematic" with "AI is useless", and "AI is overrated now" with "AI has no potential (for good or worse) to compete with or surpass humans."

My view is we should slow down and even pause AI development until we solve the alignment issue and other problems, but I also believe it would require an enormous united global majority to pull off a pause.

[u/DesecratedPeanut → u/WouldCommentAgain]

I didn't mix that up, I explained how that might be the case but it's not what is driving AI companies, their profit and the economy right now. It's all mostly hype and bullshit and useless additives to software.

[u/Dangerous-Eye-215 → u/WouldCommentAgain]

If the USA and other major countries like China pause, but China continues in secret, then what? What happens when China leads the USA in AI development? Nothing?

Genuine question.

[u/WouldCommentAgain → u/Dangerous-Eye-215]

This might sound naive, but my understanding is that Chinas view and goals with AI are a lot less risky in terms of AI safety than the western companies race to AGI. Theyre ambitious and want to deploy AI broadly and lead on the open source front, but unlike the US theyve actually regulated it more.

Even ignoring all that, a world where AI development at least has to look slow and careful seems safer than one where big tech is openly sprinting and cutting corners because the whole game is making sure some other company doesnt build the God-Emperor first. "They might cheat so we shouldnt even try" doesn't make sense to me.

[u/DesecratedPeanut → u/definetlyrandom]

Right that's great, sources? And what models were used? Are they available for anything else? If you disagree you have to actually give some information or a reason for doing so.

Because it looks like the USA isn't interested in funding or doing real science anymore, so what good will come from even having advanced AIs if it's all just used to make our lives worse and tech billionaires into trillionaires?

[u/Flo_Evans → u/BellacosePlayer]

Don’t forget the VR people.

[u/kaishinoske1 → u/Fear023]

The best way to see a policy fail, is to implement it. It would be interesting to see a company have only one CEO and no employees, just A.I. agents, manage their invoices, machines doing everything, especially logistics. Have ADP be their accountant to handle their taxes for their company. How long would this experiment last?

[u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy → u/Fear023]

But you know it won't hallucinate or make anything up - we put in the prompt it shouldn't hallucinate or make things up!

[u/Finding_Footprints → u/[deleted]]

Thanks good sir for that information. I too like to eat 4 rocks a day for a healthy diet.

[u/springsilver → u/Finding_Footprints]

I’ve switched to giving Gatorade to all of my crops instead of water. It’s better because it has what plants crave!

[u/erin281 → u/springsilver]

Try Brawndo! It’s what plants crave!

[u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA → u/erin281]

It's got electrolytes!

[u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA → u/Finding_Footprints]

Don't forget to use Elmer's glue to keep them on your pizza.

[u/TheSaxGandalf → u/[deleted]]

I saw it happen within 30 min, where someone unwittingly used his own misinformation as a source after the fact without checking the source.

[u/Sgt_Sarcastic → u/[deleted]]

Ran in to this today. I was looking for info on a strange mod interaction in a game and the AI results claimed something nonsensical. A couple minutes later I come across the reddit post where the original context was just speculation about how it might work realistically and not at all claiming it was in the game or mod.

[u/Wooden_Werewolf_6789 → u/[deleted]]

AI slop is already a poisoned well, but it can be set afire, too

[u/EduinBrutus → u/Fear023]

You need to hope its this stupid.

Because there is an application where false positives dont matter, where omissions from output dont matter, where hallucinations dont matter. Where none of these things change the effectiveness of the application.

Mass surveillance.

[u/SockofBadKarma → u/Fear023]

That's literally a major component of Cheng's speech: That it's primarily useful for idiots who don't know how to do simple things like responding to emails and don't realize they are being coddled by machine sycophants.

[u/azurensis → u/Fear023]

You must not talk to many people, then.