I got into an argument in a discord the other day. I didn’t want to, but someone (the server owner) was being very pro-“AI” in a way that was frankly kind of insulting to the people who didn’t share his opinion, so I lightly weighed in and lent emote-based support to the people arguing against him. He kept shifting his position, arguing on behalf of “AI” being inescapable and a forever part of our future now while also hedging every time someone confronted him about its various issues with some variation of “I never said it didn’t have issues!” So, when he tried to pull me in following a comment where I said I completely agreed with someone’s lengthy, well-reasoned statement, I tried to disengage and my attempt do so only led to another branch of the argument forming since he turned to trying to pin me down to saying “AI” is impossible to remove. I can’t agree to that statement because I think that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist and might never while the algorithmic bullshit that is modern ML-based “AI” is bad enough that I think it might be worth doing whatever it takes to eradicate completely. Other than the programs modern “genAI” are built from, which always had a use and still have a use in their very specific contexts, of course. So I tried to split the hair because my stances requires it and he didn’t like that. Then things took a turn for the worse between him (as he continued to shift his position such that no one could ever tell him that he was wrong without ever really engaging with the arguments other people brought up) and another person (who was much less polite in his arguing than the rest of us were and has a bad habit of dismissing viewpoints he disagrees with) and now a friend of mine has been demoted in that server for doing their job as a moderator and forcing the argument to end by deleting comments after the final two refused to stop.