New rule at BSD Cafe: Do not promote AI
BSD Cafe prefers to define itself by what it supports, rather than by what it opposes.
We support people, open technologies, decentralisation, technological independence, privacy, user control, the sharing of knowledge, and communities where technology remains a tool rather than becoming the authority.
For these reasons, we cannot support the current direction of AI and the ecosystem surrounding it.
Much of today's AI technology is developed and controlled by a very small number of extremely large companies, through an unprecedented concentration of computing power, data, infrastructure, and capital. This creates dependencies that are fundamentally at odds with many of the values this community was built around.
We are also seeing increasingly direct consequences for people. Skilled professionals are losing work to automated systems. Organisations are becoming dependent on services they cannot inspect, understand, or control. AI-generated technical advice is often presented with confidence while lacking essential context. Automation is being used to scale abuse, manipulation, spam, and attacks.
At the same time, fear of these threats can itself push people and organisations towards a handful of large centralised providers, further reinforcing the same concentration of power.
The problem is not simply the existence of artificial intelligence as a technology. The problem is how these technologies are currently being developed, deployed, controlled, marketed, and increasingly presented as an inevitable replacement for human skills, judgement, creativity, and interaction.
Too often, the message coming from the companies selling these systems is essentially: this is inevitable, it will replace what you do, and you will have to adapt to it whether you want to or not.
At the BSD Cafe, we believe there must always be another choice.
For this reason, we ask members not to use BSD Cafe to promote, advertise, or evangelise AI services, or the idea that replacing human work and decision-making with AI is inherently desirable, inevitable, or something everyone should simply accept.
This does not prevent discussion.
But please do not use this community to promote the current AI-driven model of technological centralisation and human replacement.
"Own your data" and the current state of AI are simply not compatible.
