First off, sorry if this is the wrong to community to post to - I'll move it somewhere else should it not fit the community.
My best friend quite often is a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, I feel like. Discussing politics, veganism, the problems with using Amazon, what have you, with him is nigh impossible because he insists on his opinion and won't budge. I feel like he just feels superior to other people, or at least to me, in a way that he just won't change his mind, doesn't hear other sides, and argues for the sake of arguing.
Now, in a recent discussion, I asked him if he knew why images aren't displayed properly in my Firefox-fork browser (Mull). He gave an answer and asked why I would use a custom browser instead of Firefox itself to which I responded that it's more privacy-focused and that I didn't like Mozilla's implementation of AI in their browser.
Long story short, it devolved into a lengthy discussion about AI, how the fear of AI is based on ignorance and a lack of knowledge, that it's fine that AI is used for creative projects because in most cases it's an assisting tool that aids creativity, doesn't steal jobs etc. essentially that it's just a tool to be used like a hammer would be.
What pisses me off the most about all this is that he subtly implies that I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it and that I don't have any sources to prove my points so they're essentially void.
How do I deal with this? Whatever facts I name he just shrugs off with "counter"-arguments. I've sent him articles that he doesn't accept as sources. This has been going on for a couple hours now and I don't know what to tell him. Do you guys have sources I could shove in his face? Any other facts I should throw his way?
Thank you in advance
Edit: A thing to add: I wasn't trying to convince him that AI itself is bad - there are useful usages of AI that I won't ignore. What I was concerned about is the way AI is used in any and all products nowadays that don't need AI to function at all, like some AI-powered light bulbs or whatever; that creative jobs and arts are actively harmed by people scraping data and art from artists to create derivative "art"; that it's used to influence politics (Trump, Gaza). These things. The way AI is used in its unmonitored way is just dangerous, I feel like
You're probably out of luck trying to convince this person of your opinion. However if it comes up again and you want this person to walk away, I'd recommend mentioning the horrible working conditions that content moderators have to go through. Contrarians don't like unassailable facts.
Could you elaborate what working conditions you mean specifically? Not sure I know what you mean
Content moderators are superexploited. These employees primarily work from African countries like Kenya, so there's a whole second layer of neo-imperialism that I won't get into right now. They're given poverty wages, sometimes as low as $1.30/hr. Because they're content moderators, they have to look at images and read descriptions of traumatic events without respect for mental health. OpenAI, Amazon, and Facebook have engaged in aggressive union busting tactics for these workers as well, though workers were still successful in organizing one of the largest labor unions in Africa.