The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very expensive bills that will be coming due in the coming months and years. They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.
I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.
I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.
This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.
> Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.
The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now, so a lot of the issues that came with their ownership and special privileges no longer exist. There is no way that is how this is going to go down with Google et al
But you would be banning trains if they were built to just run smack into the centre of town squares loaded with bombs, rendering the cities to dust, as a part of their design and boasted about by the owners.
At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.
There are datacenters all over the place and have been for a very long time. Some of them host physical servers for people and companies, maybe only a literal closet somewhere in a building. Others are giant hyperscaler datacenters that have tons of 24/7 lighting and are the size of multiple football fields.
We need to be very careful here, or we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That is also my concern. This feels like a Satanic panic type of thing and if people don't form nuanced opinions, politicians will latch on to the issue and before you know it, many people who are heavily reliant on machine learning who don't realize it are going to have a bad time when stuff starts getting banned.
We could probably do without computers too, but that would be idiotic because they speed everything up. There's a good chance that the next pandemic is swatted down by LLM-powered vaccine development much faster than COVID-19 was.
"We could do without them." is not a great take when it comes to people dying prematurely.
In fact, I would bet that this particular technology will lead to climate change solutions eventually. If nothing else, it will drive an energy revolution in either nuclear or solar power. Probably too late to solve the AMOC collapse, but mitigation is still in play through science.
I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements. They're going to be a neverending source of cringe and laughs for the next 50 years.
(I've heard one C-level dude say with a straight face that LLMs were a "more significant invention than writing".)
You're a Google search away from fact checking me if you want to do that.
I'm a DevOps engineer, not a C suite guy, but I tend to agree with you in general. I think there is a lot of smoke being blown into the hive around this technology but having used it extensively, and having witnessed its progression first hand in engineering, these tools are insanely useful and have made giant leaps forward in just ~4 years.
Don't know if you're a believer in Moore's Law or not, but I don't think your tune is going to take anywhere near 50 years to change. I'd be surprised if it took 5 years.
The ecological considerations are wildly overstated. Data centres in general != AI, and other industries, including meat production and (ironically) paper for print all use far more water and create more damage.
This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activities like streaming music and video, and general social media.
Also, I just listened to the latest Volts podcast and they make the claim that data centers will actually lower the cost of electricity fairly soon (~2030). Very counterintuitive but it does make sense. We'll find out soon enough.
I've been telling my friends this since LLMs launched. If your interest is in lowering the use of fossil fuels, then a global race for compute is great because the increased demand is probably going to usher in a nuclear/solar revolution in the energy sector.
It feels like a very large segment, on both sides of this argument, is completely incapable of forming nuanced opinions on this stuff.
but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft
Two thoughts:
A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow.
B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?
I think it should be fairly obvious by now which form of AI people refer to when they talk specifically about theft. It gets a bit old and repetitive to expand the shorthand in every conversation possible. If people are genuinely curious about other forms of AI, that information is readily available.
When Tesla FSD was in the zeitgeist, theft never entered the discussion, because it was clear that form of AI was not predicated upon theft.
The IP considerations, environmental considerations, "lol we're gonna destroy the world and get you laid off" considerations, and of course the big middle finger given to artists of all types, from authors to musicians... They painted themselves as villains and then they were shocked when people viewed them as such.
I (and I assume many others on especially HN) don't consider intellectual "property" as real so there is no "theft" in our minds, so this argument doesn't bear much weight.
> I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.
I also hate it because:
1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it.
2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.
Communication tech/tools enable more people to collaborate. It increases ability for labor that is far away from high value markets to contribute. Same goes for shipping tech wrt physical goods. On the global scale that is empowering the labor class.
Any productivity tool that individual laborers can purchase also (and that still needs the worker) is probably good for labor, overall.
If you're a programmer or (physical) engineer you've been automating other people's labor all this time, it's ironically hypocritical that now that engineers are the ones being automated that they cry foul.
It's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine.
Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.
They're not firing employees to replace them with AI. We're mostly engineers here I think. Does anyone actually believe they're replacing humans with the same AI that we're using in our day-to-days? I don't know about you, but my harnesses absolutely suck without a human driving them and the more knowledgeable the human, the less they suck.
It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the typical ways in which they would normally act like assholes.
If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into.
AI is in its infancy, it's just learning to crawl. There will be more breakthroughs which will have more serious consequences. Today engineers are safe, holding the AI's hand as it crawls around, bumping into furniture. What happens when it learns to walk, run, and win marathons?
> If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into.
If the extra one or two employees are 2x or 3x as productive as they used to be, why would they not be employed? There will be plenty of market to grow into since the gains in productivity are shared throughout the economy.
(Assuming that LLM does indeed multiply productivity)
We are likely in for some rough days, as it's much easier to just fire people and maintain the same level of productivity. Musk (arguably) did that with Twitter, even before this started. I was impacted by a post-COVID layoff, myself.
But do you think that once that has leveled out a bit, the bandwidth/market bottleneck you referenced will be identified as the new bottleneck[0]? Like, new businesses will launch, or existing companies will identify new growth areas that they did not have the capacity to move into.
I don't know how to respond to your second paragraph. Looking in that direction is a bit too overwhelming.
[0] I think this was always the problem, not developer productivity
I think the naive CEO-level reasoning is that one person can get twice as much done with a harness, not that AIs will suddenly become useful while autonomous.
Piracy is not theft. If something can be copied infinite times without any effort with broad societal benefit, then it's a moral imperative to do so. The opposite is gatekeeping in the name of monopolistic profiteering and the wealth concentration that the modern broken IP law enforces.
Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.
I would be very surprised if the ebook license they bought does entail using it for training machines. In fact I'm pretty sure it didn't and I thus do not think they did such a thing in the first place as I credit them with enough legal prowess to know about this.
Don't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations!
AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave.
That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.
Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?
All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.
> Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further.
Yes, our new generation of overlords seem to be socially and emotionally stunted and exhibit an alarming naivete about the world. This worries me almost as much as the tech itself. It is impossible to predict the future but in the past when a ruling class completely disregarded the effects of their greed and excess on the wellbeing of society, at some point the bill came due and the consequences for them (and society) were dire.
I blame the disdain for humanities, philosophy and the liberal arts.
Not just with the overlords, but also with our fellow nerds. We're all so busy trying to see if we can build something that we don't stop and think if we should build something, what consequences that might have or what history has taught us.
Theres a reason those fields of study are important.
There's no evidence to suggest that poisoning impacts generative model training in 2026. Frontier labs spend billions on tightly focused training plans, developing assessments and pursuing the long tail of assessment failures.
> it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI
I think it was partly also PR. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for mindshare and Dalle-E, Sora, Nano banana, etc generated a lot of media buzz for Google and OpenAI at various points in time.
I distinctly remember people hating on Google search (and the internet in general) when things got going and how it will dumb everyone down and no one will understand how to use the card catalog at the local library anymore.
Let’s not forget about the total surveillance we’re heading into thanks to AI. I wouldn’t say the technology is the problem per say but everything around it is. AI could be used for good, if we only didn’t have psychopaths serving their own interests at the detriment of the rest of us
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.
To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).
Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information).
Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
In the same way that any technology could just magically disappear, sure.
But I hear everyday, non-IT-sector people talking constantly about how they're using it, and that means there's a demand for it, and someone is going to supply it. I think a lot of anti-AI people think it's still equivalent to the PDA, and don't realize it's a smartphone already.
The other side is that "AI" is of course very very broad and isn't new, and e.g. medical vision models are making advancements that are having huge impacts on patient care already, especially around early cancer detection. Those aren't going away (and shouldn't), so there's still going to be a demand for the underlying technology and infrastructure to support it, even if LLMs stop being spammed everywhere.
The other thing which people seem not to understand is that you don't need a whole datacenter to RUN individual LLMs, you need it to train them, or to run them at scale for thousands of customers. A lot of the upper-mid-tier models that exist now can be run on a single (beefy) 4U server in your closet if you've got the GPUs to put in it. And people are running e.g. Deepseek V4 Pro FP4 locally. If you've got an actual server room, like at a university, you can run the full, un-quantized versions with ~2-4 servers.
Technology that is living in peoples' homes and businesses already is not going to just disappear. It's a lot less centralized than the market prevalence of OpenAI and Anthropic would lead you to believe.
Short of societal collapse, there's no way the technology is going to go away or fade out of existence (unless it's replaced by something even better), that's just not how technological progress works. It's useful, probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet.
You seem to suppose the building of those datacenters - even the power plants behind them - won't soon be automated. Almost as if robotics isn't happening.
I don't get it, why would operating a datacenter needs massive amount of high skilled blue-collar labor. Datacenters are resource hungry. With so much automation in place I don't think there would be a need for large pool of labor.
They stopped being used as primary weapons because better ones were found - mostly firearms - not because people got bored of it; or reverted to some earlier methods of warfare.
Yes, there is the general class of technologies (warfare, computing ...) and there are particular instances of those for a given time and space and evolve as the landscape changes.
The technology of warfare evolved to better mechanisms, perhaps same with computing.
Bows and arrows are still widely used for hunting all over the world. I was able do freelance work on a relatively low income because of access to ~150lbs of deer meat that came from multiple bow-hunted deer.
I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords.
Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.
This is an interesting question that I haven't thought about, thanks.
What we currently have is a simulacrum of thought - albeit a good one.
Any technology is useful only in the sense that it helps us with solving the problems we are dealing with in that time. When we face issues that a pseudo-thought is not useful in tackling or worse is one of the causes - this will recede in the background.
Beyond that, the implicit assumption in the question is that thinking is the highest form of activity that is useful to us.
I don't know how my thoughts arise but thinking happens when I engage with them. I think what we look for is meaning in our lives and thinking helps us generate/achieve one, whether real or illusory.
The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business.
Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.)
The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech?
You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.
Juicero wasn't useful therefore it went away. Generative AI is useful therefore it won't go away, just like how fire is kMy old yet it's still here to stay.
I think this disconnect is based on the ambiguity in the term "AI".
"AI" as tech - the models, how to train them, etc. Isn't going to go anywhere short of a Library-of-Alexandria-type catastrophe. We know how to do it and it's useful, so why would we forget?
However, "AI" as the thing that is enveloping our culture - the slop everywhere, the mandates to use it at work regardless of its usefulness, the constant talk about it being the future, the machine-dominated future that's been promised/threatened by the heads of the labs - we do still have a chance to put that onto the scrapheap.
It makes tremendous sense - when understand as reflexive straw-clutching and wish-thinking aimed at reducing the frequency of the poster's nightmares and reducing their diaper expense.
AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be.
So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily.
Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one.
Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption.
Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children."
There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair.
I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train.
You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass.
There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
This is the central problem with the dismissals of the tech's capability. Public discourse needs to shift to planning for the economic impact in particular, but the kind of High Brazilism from the naysayers who insist it's a proof of psychosis to even mention AI's potential, makes the inertia in policymakers much easier for them to maintain. Waiting for the financial effects to arrive and then improvising policy is the stupidest way of handling an upheaval on this scale - even if the precise form of those shocks can't be anticipated.
There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models.
If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.
I'm sorry - but you're not going to ban AI no more than you can ban the transistor. You could limit & limit the potential of who uses it - but historically that seems to benefit the few rather than the many.
> To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
> It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.
> It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me
Does this hypothetical issue concern you AND the rest of society as a whole as well, or just you? Because there is a big difference between the two cases.
How many people do you require for it to be a legitmate concern? I can show you millions but you will disregard them anyway, because they all have wrong opinions.
>to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole,
Those same people were callously telling factory workers who lost their job to automation and outsourcing to "learn to code"; they don't deserve any sympathy. Assholes are the hypocrites who are fine automating other people's jobs away but not their own.
> Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter
Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.
All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it".
You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.
Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.
I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.
The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened?
Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.
I actually think that's a great comparison but not for the reasons you're making it.
I live in NYC. When the automobile started to get popular the city saw it as the future and went to extreme lengths to accommodate it. Bulldozed houses, split neighborhoods in half to accommodate parkways and highways that formed our inevitable future. Turns out, cars don't scale. Eventually folks did push back and some of the proposed projects never happened[1] but we're still suffering the consequences the ones that did to this day.
Had there been more criticism and more discussion at the outset we might have avoided a lot of problems.
> “virtually everyone believed that the private car was the greatest invention since fire or the wheel. Public transportation seemed to be nothing more than a relic of the past.” Wide modern expressways, Moses believed, would save New York as a great city.
Heck no. The world would be a way better place with no personal automobiles. Trains, yes. Even trucks and buses, sure. Cars, nooooooooooo. Cars are among the most clearly net-negative inventions to come out of industrialization. They should be criticized and fought until finally defeated. Self-driving cars are a massive waste of human and physical resources to provide a solution that is still strictly worse than proper urbanism and transportation network design.
I don't think it's self-evident that we've gained by switching from horses to cars. For most of the trips one makes in their daily life, the ubiquity of cars just means that you now have to travel greater distances. Plus the environmental devastation that cars have wrought. Are we really better off?
No. Or rather, I wish it happened very differently, and much slower. The rush to make every new city and development "car-friendly" had negative consequences that will last centuries. That's why my city isn't walkable and has awful public transportation, and biking is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the insidious environmental and health effects!
Of course cars have their place in efficient modern transportation, but we would live in a much better world if their development and integration had been slower, more carefully considered, and more criticized.
I feel like there's this idea that progress is good because of economic output, but there's this much squishier and more subjective concept of how much a change impacts our satisfaction with life. I think cars have produced a lot of good in the world, but I also live in the US where we've paved so much of the world that people don't feel like being outside on their feet very much anymore. I think it's had some negative impacts on how we interact as humans.
I feel the same way about AI. Does it make me more productive? Sure. Does it make me suddenly hate the career I used to love? Definitely. Every day I'm told to move faster and to love this cool thing that takes away the math and low-level problem solving that I used to get so much enjoyment from and instead makes me a manager of a chatbot. Any attempt at moderation in the presence of upper management is met with clear threats to my job. Even better, my company (and so many others) are finding unlimited budgets for AI while putting off any sort of raises for the humans involved.
Not exactly the correct example. Machines replaced horses, the tendency of the current crop of AI tends to replace humans and concentrate unseen control and power and around a small elite. I have nothing against AI as a technology but plenty of concerns about how it’s being used currently.
My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating.
I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot.
I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same.
/I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice
yes i agree, but keep in mind they're not getting into coding. They don't have the time for that, they just want to get something to work for a need they have. These two aren't building control systems for a nuclear reactor so don't panic, they're just getting something to work for themselves. Even the most simple use case is very empowering for them.
Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power. There are few billionaire owners and that is it. Small independent journalism as such basically stopped to exist - it was replaced by basically hot takes. Low key institutional fact checking does not exist anymore, local news dont exist anymore.
So, it would be entirely correct for someone back then to hate the changes and say it will destroy most of journalism. Because it did.
>Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power.
This is completely false; compare reporting on the initiation of the Iraq war vs the recent Iran war. Before the internet the flow of information was more centralized and heavily controlled.
I think there's a difference between 'the flow of information' and 'journalism'. The journalism/newspaper industry is indisputably smaller than it was 20 years ago and the newspapers that are left are all being consolidated into huge corporations with little to no ties to local communities.
Before the internet there were competing regulatory and commercial and cultural forces keeping The News the news.
Decentralized uncontrolled flow can also be seen as free rein for select power players who can manipulate the system. It changes, but not necessarily positively, how media power consolidates. And without scrutiny or national corrective pressure, that consolidation of power creates a very different perceived media system than is experienced.
The combined Senate report on the 2016 election interference from Russia — anti-both sides, lying to both sides and claiming it was the other — should have triggered a strict and meaningful reaction. Now we are in a spot where our kids are being mainlined Al Jazeera and Russian Times propaganda filtered only through uninformed useful idiots in short form video while they do their makeup or emulate Joe Rogans podcast. It’s pay for play media, with no scrutiny, bothers make it easy to heat, juice, or manipulate chosen content, hosts, and themes.
Power consolidation at the local/national level prevented it at the global level. At the global level those power structures move around axes we can no longer even name in polite company, and have fully corrupted the political discourse.
Your wife is right. History is repeating itself. And not even for the first time.
Horse carriage drivers -> Cars
Print media -> Internet
Drafting -> CAD
Music -> Electronic music, DAWs
Film photography -> Digital
Traditional film special effects -> CGI
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars)
In each of these cases, there was a subset of people that did the previous thing that hated on the people doing the new thing. They had every opportunity to adapt, but chose not to. They thumb their nose at it as everyone else jumps on board.
This time around, it isn't just practitioners hating on it. The internet has enabled a bunch of cling-on performative folks that aren't even artists, engineers, etc. that love to dog pile onto the hate.
It's really funny because I've shot lots of films over the last few decades. When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made. Not only will a lot of them proudly tell you they've never made anything, they'll then double down. They'll say that if they were to hypothetically make something (which they won't), it would be using the old tools and that I should be ashamed of myself for using AI. Despite the fact that I have years of experience using the tools they're describing to me.
I don't even get it. Not even putting in the effort to try, yet telling me that my enormous wealth of experience is wrong and that I'm unethical and my creative output is "worthless".
You give examples of transitions that happened, but you have made no argument about how those transitions made us better off. It is not self-evident that a change in technology is necessarily an improvement.
"Working my ass off as an IC who can't move up the gradient" -> "Principal Investigator, CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO of a 10-person team, captain of creation, actual Iron Man."
I'm putting in more work now, and I'm getting 5x the return on it.
How do you people not get this? Are you not trying?
> "Working my ass off as an IC who can't move up the gradient" -> "Principal Investigator, CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO of a 10-person team, captain of creation, actual Iron Man."
* Are you being compensated for all those roles you now do?
* If you do 5x does this mean you get more time for yourself or are you now busy 24/7 with more work?
* Extrapolate this all other "5x" IC, now you all are CEO CTO CMO CRO iron man. Now what?
Have you somehow sourced unsubsidized inference? Isn't all of this built on the false economy of a handful of very large vendors trying to capture you?
I was able to get to $1M run rate in a month, and I'm approaching $2M. That's the fastest I've ever done it.
I've been a systems engineer and a hobbyist filmmaker for decades - pretty solid skills in each of these. Now I'm doing web design, marketing, frontend, mobile, writing tools, doing outreach, social media. It is a force multiplier.
I think there are an order of magnitude more people that this enables. You have to be somewhat well-rounded and willing to wear lots of hats, but this is exactly like wearing an exosuit. It's like jumping from IC to CTO or director, but still being an IC with a direct hand in everything. Does that make sense?
Everyone sitting this out on the sidelines is missing out. The opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been. If you have strong skills and drive, this is a performance enhancer better than any other. It's better than the best intern or personal assistant.
edit: hit by the HN commenting rate limit, so I can't respond.
> What happens to everyone else?
I recently met a guy that works at a pizza shop and had his YouTube channel blow up because he's got an AI series. I have lots of anecdotes like this. I don't want to oust the guy, but I personally know another person that got a Netflix deal because he did AI previz. (There might be a magazine article about it, in which case I can link it. I'll look.)
The world is going to be rife with all kinds of new opportunities. Including lots of opportunities for folks that never had access before.
> the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people
So all of the modern electronics, Netflix, DoorDash, etc. etc. of today were piled on the corpses of horse cart drivers and butter churners and Blockbuster employees that ordinarily would have told you your late fees but now have to find a different job? That's a wild take.
Why are we being so performative about this?
What if we look back on writing software in 2010 as stamping punch cards? Why term any of this as walking on people instead of the better lens of everything just gets better - products, jobs, civilization.
It sounds like not only do some people want to coast forever, they want to hold everyone else back. I'm willing to learn new things. I'm tired of the status quo.
> The opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been.
I think what you're missing is that AI shows, more directly than most other technologies, the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people. Not everyone wants to get ahead that way.
Small business ownership/consulting. AI can't own a business because they're completely unaccountable. Even embodied AGI would never be given human property rights, because they can't be punished/held accountable by the law when their weights can be infinitely copied and reproduced anywhere (digital immortality).
...but one of your examples has had disastrous consequences. Sure cars prevailed but they have changed the climate and let to unfriendly development patterns. Likewise social media may make people less happy, less likely to couple etc. Novel tech solves problems but can create others. We can surely afford to move deliberately at least, particularly in education.
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy
Certainly seems like an apt comparison! Personally I think we should just ban AI if it’s going to primarily facilitate the production of slop-shit like TikTok.
And despite the touts insisting on how useful and amazing these tools are, I have yet to see anything of true value be produced. Slop-shit vomit factories indeed.
Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay.
Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.
It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage.
What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.
> but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.
The barrier to entry to make slop is lower, but it's gotten much higher for developing the skill of programming. There was already an issue with a lack of mentorship and path for juniors when agile attempted to turn software engineers into assembly line workers, among other issues with the industry becoming hyper short-term focused.
Now you have educational barriers where students are competing with other students that are cheating with LLMs. There are psychological barriers with learned helplessness. The 100k lines of vibecoded slop produced hits a wall but they've gained no understanding of the code in the process or ability to make changes themselves. At the first job juniors and interns get they're being told not to take the time to learn and understand the problem they're working and instead they need to hit the LLM slot machine or risk getting fired.
> Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly
The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there.
I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.
I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is.
The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.
I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them
That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.
I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.
How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation.
Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.
AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight.
We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)
We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired.
This is what we keep being told.
So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.
When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.
That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.
As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess?
Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that.
This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result.
The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind".
But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it.
The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.
You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.
The amount of steering necessary is rapidly decreasing. You're looking at a way too small timeline if you think this will be sustainable, or you're hoping that LLMs will hit their peak very soon.
Eh, there’s definitely some value in understanding for yourself via experience which models are actually good for which use cases. The benchmarks are unreliable imo, and as I’ve interviewed developers who don’t really use AI, they say things like how they don’t think the (free versions of) copilot or ChatGPT (requests routed to their cheapest models) don’t seem very good. Totally out of touch with the capabilities of the leading models and harnesses.
I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.
Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.
If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.
Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.
Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.
To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping.
If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)
Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…
Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone.
Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.
One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?
I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.
At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.
It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.
This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you.
And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.
> These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.
If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."
This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes.
AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement.
When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.
Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually.
If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.
The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.
"These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."
I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in.
I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice).
I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online
It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency.
Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".
If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution.
The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.
Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here.
Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.
If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would.
I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations.
I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.
Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.
This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?
I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on.
What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest.
- Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship"
- Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities
- The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general
- Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match
What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.
The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard.
This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.
I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?
To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?
I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.
> If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?
No. Obviously, what you do on your PC is inconsequential to the rest of society. But despite this, AI and its consequences in big tech have become so thoroughly linked because the entities that develop and profit off of AI use are so big and influential over the rest of us. The hobbyist space isn't what people even think about.
It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.
It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.
I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)
Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits.
Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.
I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital.
People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation.
I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns became cheap enough that whoever had the most guys would win a civil war, we got democracy: rule by whoever has the most guys. When whoever has the most robots will win a civil war, what kind of government do you expect?
It's impossible to predict when they happen, or their outcomes. The world may be worse at least for a while after them. Or they fail in general.
But they happen and then all the people who were crowing about the inevitability of some existing order and now it embodies natural law and what not look really f*ckin stupid in retrospect.
People believed in the divine right of kings with the same full earnestness of people on this forum who have think AI is just the outcropping of some transcendent mathematical telos.
I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either.
Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity.
I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away.
Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.
I often hear people talk online about burning data centers to avoid some capitalist dystopia.
It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either.
We will pay people.
Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.
Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.
This is plainly delusional. There already is abundance, global crop lands produce enough calories to feed twice the world’s population[0]. Greed is the reason for inequality and “AI” is not solving that. It is pure wishful utopian thinking to believe that there will be some massive AI-initiated abundance.
> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.
It's this "path of least resistance life style" that ruins a lot in our society. Yes, being wasteful is bad, but not appreciating the work is also bad.
> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.
Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.
It's highly cynical, but people need to work. It provides structure and most people don't do well with unstructured time.
Also, I find it odd that of all the automation being attempted with LLMs, we're automating the ones that actually are interesting, not the ones that are dangerous or truly rote, yet highly mechanical.
Humans will not flourish if you remove their jobs, they will become violent criminals because they will have nothing else to fill their days and no purpose in their community.
People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.
People can find purpose without jobs. But they can't find purpose if they are struggling to survive. If jobs are the only legal path to survival, and there are no jobs, then people will be driven to "crime" to survive.
It's an informed view for anyone who's spent time around multi-generational welfare-dependent households. Regardless of race or creed, the majority descend into substance abuse and domestic violence.
I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism.
Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.
Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.
Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.
Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.
I think this is the first article I've seen here which captures my practical concerns with AI, my moral concerns, my economic concerns, and also the emotional "true, profound, and guttural loathing". I hate it so much, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it. It just feels so icky. And the times when I've been fooled into reading AI-generated texts I feel cheated. It's all so cheap and nasty.
I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way.
I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.
I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.
All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.
That is a specific implementation of image models, not true for all image models. For example Civitai has a lot of realistic models that look like people took them, at least on first glance, as I'm sure with enough pixel peeping you can find discrepancies, point is the "flatness" look is with that specific ChatGPT model.
Magical editing of pictures is so wild to me. Most photos people take have a longterm have an audience of basically 1. That's why there's jokes about how awful it is when a coworker corners you to show you their vacation photos, the vast majority of photos taken by the average person are only ever going to be viewed again by the person taking it (and maybe their immediate family).
Memory is already this squishy thing and then when you go back to reminisce about {meaningful event} and go pull up your edited photos, what are you even looking at? Google used to play these ads constantly of editing stuff out, changing how the sky looks, etc.
It's present day you effectively gaslighting future you. What's the point of memorializing something and then immediately destroying the truth of what happened with a bunch of edits.
Can I ask what the deal is with people saying anti-intellectual things and then finishing it with ", actually"? Where did this originate from from? Is it a shibboleth?
Saying that shunning the machine that is usurping human creativity and intelligence is "anti intellectual" is pretty funny
I'm not an AI hater but the implication of your comment is that being on the AI train is the intellectual position, which is wild, given the AI hype is almost entirely from CEOs, who are the furthest thing from.
I think this highlights the dichotomy of AI use and how it's shaping everyone's opinion based on their own experience. It's your AI versus mine. You could be OpenAI with unlimited compute and disprove a conjecture or you could be the people referred in the article who are asking claude if a story is written by a human. Opus 4.7 can generate working code faster than I ever could but I still see it as a dumb word calculator bc of the mistakes it makes.
Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.
You could ignore the ugly sides in 2018 or 2022, when the tech consisted of fun toys that existed alongside everything else and not instead of it.
In 2026, unless you're wealthy or are one of the few that don't need to use the internet to live, focusing on the ugly sides is not optional. When the ugly parts are coming for your employment, community, ability to own anything, your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society, you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore that, and then pretend like everyone pointing to the oncoming train is just a negative naysayer who's upset because they're bad and like to feel bad and no other reasons.
Your argument clearly comes from a doomer perspective, your employment will be gone (Maybe, but you will find new employment), your community will be gone (?), your ability to own anything will be gone (?????)
> your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society(??), you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore tha
I've clearly been on the internet longer then you, all of my favorite places are already gone. It's completely fine. Life is finite and there is something beautiful about that.
I wish you too will find the beauty in life at some point.
I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly.
It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable.
I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the same passion, but won't tell because the time isn't ripe yet.
Weird responses you're getting, I agree with you fully, if someone is constantly putting on display what they hate I'll keep as far away from them as I can be.
I don't particularly care if you hate me, I am more wary about people being hateful in general. It is a dangerous emotion to nurture and channels people towards acting in an evil way.
And the rationalizations tend to be questionable. 100 years ago, plenty of people would tell you that Jews are bloodsuckers who dominate the economy with their greed and enslave regular workers. It isn't exactly the same, but surely it rhymes.
At least today the hated enemy is a bit abstract and not a human. Though the hate can easily extend towards actual people who work on it.
I wish tech companies would stop shoving AI in my face everywhere. F off google i don't want to "ask ai" in maps. Get that ugly ai button off from messenger, meta. At least microslop winblows lets me remove crapilot buttons from apps.
Every waves of automation are naturally creating resistance, as they tend to make the lives of a large number of people miserable during the transition.
Nothing new here.
What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.
I think social media is a big factor. Anti-AI posts and comments are very popular on mainstream Reddit subs at least. Not sure if its a cause or an effect or even external manipulation
> What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation
It's repeatedly stated that while it's still improving, AI is coming for the entry level positions and the juniors first. How many times have you seen AI described as "like an eager junior"?
You grumpy old guys probably own a house. As labour continues to get devalued, it feels like assets are the only path to prosperity. That's where my anxiety is coming from, anyway.
My guess is a lot of those grumpy old guys, on this site at least, are sitting pretty with large bank accounts. So they don't need to worry about their jobs anymore. They could retire safely tomorrow if they wanted. So they don't care.
Just another instance of the older generation trying to loot the future from the younger.
I understand some of the sentiment, but these folks certainly won't be denying the drug discovered through AI that will save their life or that of their children.
I don't think people truly hate AI. What they hate is how it's used. That's a very different thing and it's a human problem not a technology problem.
I'm not really shunning, I've gone from very high on AI to mostly exhausted with it. I wish we could skip ahead ~5 years to it being another tool in the tool belt and lessons learned about where it's good and bad. Right now everything is so same-y. Barely any oxygen for other technologies to get funding and attention, large fraction of what I read on socials is in claude's or chatgpt's voice.
... and maybe I'm wrong and get economically obsoleted. but eschatology is like catnip for every generation and I think there's a big component of that
I think that too many people are conflating their hate for AI, which is a technology, with the sick dynamics pushing it to gain profit. It's consumerism and capitalism to blame, AI is just a technology. As such, we want our leaders to be able to properly use such tech. But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.
I use AI and see value in it but agree the hype train is very annoying. My employer tracks how much we're using AI related tools and has a KPI we need to hit. Thats very annoying too. Reminds of communism: "ideas so great they're mandatory", AI: "A tool so amazing its use is mandatory".
I don't want to sound fatalistic, but in the end, the machine is too powerful to be stopped. With machine I don't mean AI, but rather the financial machine of the US.
Political and economic ramification aside, if we truly create ASI, that severely reduces the value of humanity. We essentially give birth to our enslavers and eventually humanity will be second class on this planet. How is that something to look forward to?
To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place.
I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.
I don't use much AI, but we have an AI agent that reviews all of our PRs at work.
It's pretty good, I actually like it because it's very thorough and catches real things.
On a recent PR though it very confidently pointed out an "error" and suggested a "fix." Now I authored this code by hand and the "error" was it going "this one doesn't look like all the other ones" and I'm a relatively consistent person so it's not the kind of mistake I would make, which means I probably put thought in and the difference was intentional.
I looked at it's suggestion carefully and my original code was correct, the "fix" would have broken the logic. Not a huge deal all things said.
But I'm looking back at it's original report, it's comprehensive, confident, and ends with "Reply 'fix this for me' and I will fix it" and it made me think about more junior engineers.
I double checked it because I had written the code by hand, I understood the context, I also have enough experience to know that if I wrote this one function differently there was probably a good reason. But if I were earlier in my career, with less experience, would I have just clicked the easy button?
Probably. Especially if everyday I'm clicking the easy button.
Highway engineers used to think it was a good idea to make highways as straight as possible, people going in a straight line is easiest right? They realized that if you didn't put some curves in the road that people would just disengage and a perfect straight "easy" highway was much more dangerous than one with curves. I feel like AI is an "easy" highway
It is called 'jagged intelligence'. A lot progress was made in the last 2 years. Most notably reasoning models, tools use, harness progress. It takes time to build the skill to make those models useful, but they do provide a lot of value.
Ah yeah jagged intelligence is the perfect phrase for it. I do also get some value from them, both in coding and in images. I find it the least usable for information primarily because of the hallucination problem. I still do use it for that purpose but it's kind of annoying when it writes something that's wrong, and I find it out from a Google search later.
That is indeed the problem. And when you have to meticulously check everything that the LLM does (because you can't know where the hallucinations will be), it completely destroys any productivity benefits you would gain from having it write the code in the first place. Thus you wind up going no faster (if not slower) than you did in the first place. The only way to go super fast (the way some people claim they are) is to discard quality.
As has been pointed out over and over: the time consuming part of programming was never typing code into the computer, it was understanding the problem and the logic behind the code. Using an LLM only addresses the fast and easy part of programming, not the hard parts.
It's shocking to see such an article title on HN, especially with so many upvotes. It would've been unthinkable in 2025. I always saw this website as very AI-boostery and pro-VC, pretty much as pro-AI as you could find without getting into the singularity cult. Has the audience changed, or is it the opinion of the average user that changed?
I understand the sentiment but I don't think it's useful to take a directly antagonistic stance, especially when it's a losing battle.
For those who feel this way, our best hope is to keep searching for how we can have a world that values human effort and care, even after AI does everything it's proclaimed to do.
We can't declare the world a lost cause and relegate ourselves to only hating.
We need to do what we've always done: roll with it.
No need to hate it. Just understand it, know when you're dealing with someone who is viewing it through a rational lens vs. a delusional lens, and just keep doing what you were doing.
Buying into the fear is how you railroad yourself long-term. Using it while maintaining a healthy skepticism around the more radical claims means not being blindsided long-term.
Now as far as hating the turbo-zealots who smugly try to shove it down your throat in an attempt to protect their bags...
Such fantastic writing. I particularly love the last passage - not only it is reminiscent of how great op-eds used to close, but also for it's clear and un-ambigious call to action - you have the agency and no, you don't have to "deal with it", i.e. deal with lazy morons pasting you LLM-generated walls of text for discussion.
It’s my opinion that societal rules should be derived from more fundamental virtues and notions of morality. AI is a capability, and it can be used in moral or immoral ways, but it’s more like a knife than an assault rifle. I don’t want AI forced down my throat by SF bro evangelists, but I also don’t want to see it banned as a useful technology. I wish people didn’t feel the need to adopt extreme positions on this topic and were capable of advancing more nuanced perspectives.
Lots of people here saying “resistance is futile, so don’t resist.” I don’t care if it’s a losing “fight.” It’s not a single game. Truth is at stake, and we have to constantly fight any source of misinformation. There are times when LLMs are just fine, but they are seductive liars at worst, and we should never forget that.
> These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.”
Schmidt, by all means, is welcome to board the Good Ship Bubble-pop, but I think a lot of these grads are happy to instead watch from the viewing stand and wave goodbye.
I think his notion that AI is fait accompli is one of the (many) things being rejected.
I mean I think hating practices and efforts to exploit people is good. I think hating the adverse consequences of our inventive structures and lack of protections for basic human rights is good. But I think hating AI is pointing at the wrong subject for scorn. If you want positive change you can’t point at something that a lot of people are getting value out of (individuals as well as corporations) and say fuck your experience. It is also wrong for a billionaire to say fuck your future and deal with it, but that should mean hating on that person not the technology.
The biggest risk I see is the acceleration of homogenization of everything. We are going to be getting the same average (but cheap) slop everywhere even in the space of thought.
Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.
If AI is overblown and permanently flawed, there is nothing to worry about.
If AI becomes as powerful as some fear/hope, productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living. Costs for housing, healthcare, education will collapse, and there is nothing to worry about.
This article somehow tries to straddle both positions, that AI is fundamentally flawed and can never really accomplish useful work yet we should be angry and fearful.
> So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect.
What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.
I kinda get the hate now - all of social media is being awash with AI. I think maybe a better option is to have new social media which is restricted to humans and human produced content. Hard to enforce - but I am sure there are ways out there.
It is what it is. Unless it threatens you. Then it's bad And then you prefer a narrative explaining why it's bad. And then you you propagate that narrative. And then that narrative infects the hive.
I don't hate AI. What I hate is while billionaires are promising us a utopian future where work is optional, the price of food, housing, and healthcare in the USA is through the roof. Many people my age (millennials) cannot afford to buy a house for themselves like prior generations were able to. The supposed riches being produced by AI are not being realized for the majority of Americans.
The HN crowd is going to hate this article, but I think it's an important discussion to have.
I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions.
This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should be in the bottom left, if the users want it to be in the top right, you put it there.
So consider this QA feedback for the technology. How do you make people not feel this way about it? Go do that.
It's a new disruptive technology that has been around for 3 years, people will just stop caring about this as a topic with time. Right now it's just trendy and zeitgeisty to shit on AI, eventually people will get bored and move on to something else.
No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.
Lots of people on this site seem to be of the opinion that "AI is tech, you can't hate tech, only its use". That may be true, but I bet there'd be a whole lot less AI hate in society if:
(1) The proponents would just CHILL THE F OUT. If the technology is so fantastic, and the things you're building with it so amazing, then surely that will speak for itself in due time? Why do you need to sound like a cult leader on cocaine all the time? It reminds me of proponents of cryptocurrencies. My eyes and ears are bleeding – the more you talk, the more I wanna avoid your technology.
(2) The companies involved would respect IP.
(3) Regulators would empower ordinary people to have some redress when their lives are affected by AI-powered decisions. (The flawed EU AI Act is a decent start.)
(4) Regulators would ensure that actors in the AI space pay the cost of the negative externalities they impose on everyone.
I'm somewhere on the pro-AI spectrum (great tool, let's use it *where we've evaluated it and it's the best tool for the job*), but... 100% agree. AI is a tool and outcomes should speak for themselves. I'm not impressed by what tools you used building your thing, and "AI" is not a feature or a benefit on its own.
As an ex-Googler I'll say this: The problem with Eric Schmidt isn't (always) the particulars of the things he says. It's the smug I-know-best "boomer" tone he delivers it with, and the crass obliviousness to his relative position of privilege and power.
Googlers/Xooglers will recall the "my various houses" quip at TGIF some years ago which memegen had a field day with.
Also his multiple events where he brought in Kissinger to have "fireside chats" for Googlers to watch/attend.
In fact his "father knows best" attitude ties directly in with his Kissinger fixation: this realpolitik "practical" vision of a world of inevitable powerful forces that you just have to learn to ride with .. which is just really a skin over "might makes right" under another name. Kissinger was explicitly so, and Schmidt admired him for it. Who cares about million horrifically killed in Cambodia if America is stronger for it?
It's also not honestly all that far from the "Effective Altruism" stuff, too: some powerful person comes up with a system of "pragmatic" and utilitarian justifications for the forces-that-already-are and makes it sound like a programme-for-betterment when it's really just a method for their own further enrichment and ego satisfaction.
Many of us legitimately boo this. Not because we're naive. Or stupid. But because our own sense of agency in the world and democratic ethics means we see agency for collectives of people which work along broad and participatory lines. And because we "naively" believe in justice and maybe a vague Kantian notion of ethics which tries to treat other humans as ends in themselves.
The "inevitable AI" stuff is just an icing on an overall cake. Standing in front of a bunch of young people who still have energy and spirit and the ability to shape the world and telling them that the best way to shape the future is to accept the form that it's already taking and ride-along and profit is next level douchebaggery, even from Schmidt.
(I also have to muse out loud that the specific vile form Google has taken in the second decade of its existence relates to this same mentality. The Google of the founder's letter at IPO sounds nothing like the ... thing ... that exists now, and this seems to have everything to do with just yielding to what-is instead of making what-can-be)
I understand it’s trendy to like/dislike things, but the widespread disgust we have seen since day one that has refused to abate should be a clear signal that whether it is the technology or the implementation, this rollout or whatever you want to call it is simply not working and people are not buying in in the way they had hoped.
Sorry for the irony, but the article is so long, i asked gpt to extract key points.
I think what'd be a stronger point is talking about centralization of the quality models. Modern AI tools are inherently centralized around huge shared infrastructure that gives enormous leverage (== capacity for abuse) to those owning the infrastructure. This is true even if you have strong competition among several players: each of them would converge on some business model and majority of users would not be bothered with long-term consequences if they receive very tangible short-term value.
The tooling is amazing, amount of productivity we unlock is fantastic and it's getting better by the day. But we need to watch out for collateral damage too. The future is somewhere there, but we can steer it towards being more or less hazardous.
I'm in film and highly exposed to the AI media and arts scene. I was very early to this hate, and I've experienced it personally by the metric boat load.
I'm fine with people not liking the technology, but the number of death threats, rude comments ("your mother didn't use the coat hanger well enough"), and literal stalking and doxxing I've received from some of these rabidly anti-AI people is appalling.
Whatever compels people to throw paint onto fine art or to block traffic for hours (including emergency vehicles and people just trying to get home) is the same bug a lot of these anti-AI griefers have.
I take great joys when luminaries in animation, illustration, game development, etc. announce that they're using AI tools and that they enjoy them. It's one of my sweetest pleasures after enduring the anti-AI outrage day in and day out for years.
I don’t know or particularly care what “anti-AI” thought leaders think. I don’t get my views from a camp.
The person above believes that in a year, or 3 years, or 10 years that they will remain an “operator” of the AI, and that their creativity will be amplified at the expense of the dumb luddites who will be left in the dust. Very common in tech, more disappointing in the arts. This is incorrect - we will in short order on the current trajectory see cognitive “dark factories” announced by hyperscalers or labs that produce an infinite stream of content, or software, or anything else and rapidly outcompete all human endeavor. To some this is Human Progress, to me it’s a dark age.
> or particularly care what "anti-AI" thought leaders think. I don't get my views from a camp.
You said this: "they had a point." So, "I don't know or particularly care what "anti-AI" thought leaders think." is clearly a lie.
> I don't get my views from a camp.
But you speak on it? Gotcha.
> we will in short order on the current trajectory see cognitive "dark factories" announced by hyperscalers or labs that produce an infinite stream of content, or software, or anything else and rapidly outcompete all human endeavor.
To think yourself so pathetic and useless is sad.
Regardless, my request remains unfulfilled.
> To some this is Human Progress, to me it's a dark age.
I made a specific point, you didn’t like it. I’m not saying this from some sort of inferiority complex, it is literally a product category that is probably going to be announced in an OpenAI blog post in the next 12-24 months or at the next Google IO.
I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.
Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.
My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.
The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.
The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.
Funny, growing up in the same world I'm coming to the exact opposite view - instead of unique poops and kids using limited tools in the most creative ways, we'll be getting rehashes of everything, looking mostly the same.
Yes, media production is not fun. And that's what we as humans value in art - the labor. Easy things don't impress us. And by sticking to the default, easy option, with barely any good reason to embrace the suck and learn the difficult tools and processes, I can only see decline.
I recently saw a funny video on TikTok of someone's proposal where the man was lunging weirdly far forward in order to present the ring.
The comment section was full of AI-generated edits to this image which exaggerated it or changed the setting in various creative ways - making his leg even longer, making his leg extend over a giant chasm, adding a bench behind him so he was performing a Bulgarian split squat. I giggled my way through the comments.
This form of humor - of being able to take human in-jokes and run with them - was not possible before artificial intelligence, and it was very funny! Memes are about to get so much more varied and funny as the effort requirement drops. We're nowhere near the effort ceiling in terms of making great memes, most people just simply do not have the time, resources or patience to actualise their mind's eye. It reminded me of exactly the kind of dumb joke and rehashing that made YTPs so special in the first place. I don't know if this is high art, but it is art, and I don't think YTPs were a particularly special form of comedy outside of our rose-tinted memories of childhood.
There's still the capacity for human labor and uniqueness to be embedded in AI-generated media - only the first breaths of low-quality algoslop lacked that. Expression and mimetics will change, and I think children born today will get to enjoy richer and funnier content than we did now that they are unshackled from GMod stop motion.
I was president of a neighborhood association in an entertainment district in Dallas TX some years ago ( Deep Ellum ). The group worked really hard to get Deep Ellum out of nasty downturn and bring new business to the neighborhood. We got a lot of push back from people wanting Deep Ellum to return to the way it was in the late 90s. That was impossible, nothing will ever return to the WayItWas(tm). What I realized was a lot of those voices wanted their lives to be like it was in the late 90s, it had nothing to do with the neighborhood, it was them. I think many people who get the angriest are actually angry with themselves and not the issue du jour.
I think the most challenging part about these people is that it makes it so much harder to address real concerns with AI. I use it, but even I recognize that it needs to be considered carefully. I've been lucky in that most people who use AI that I've encountered have been willing to have great conversations on the pros and cons, the concerns, etc.
However, the moment som anti-AI person comes in, they immediately want to go scorched earth. I just wished they'd use even half this energy for something more impactful.
Being upset about blocked traffic for a protest but not upset that the rich are trying to kill off the labor market is the exact hilariously short sighted issue.
Everyone here owns guns? I think you might want to check your stats on that. There is going to be more demand for labor? How? Most of our economy right now is leveraged toward building data centers, that’s infinite growth? When it drops off you think the mass layoffs from the last half-decade wont continue? Do you think everyone is going to shift into painting? Please enlighten us with how the demand for labor will increase miraculously when all the implementers are aligned to decrease it.
There's a massive difference between the hatred of a CEO who is actively wanting to replace workers with what is essentially applied mathematics. AI seems more like easy reasoning for mass-layoffs & cost saving measures - and I rarely see articles that actually attempt to delve into this, instead seeking to just cancel out an entire technology.
This article doesn't hate AI - it hates capitalism - which is a completely different argument, the underlying system was broken already, AI has just excasperated some of the concerns. Things like awful SEO + low effort art were already happening beforehand, they're just become far easier.
And maybe a big problem is that AI = ChatGPT for the vast majority of people, including the person who wrote this artcle.
This article specifically cites things like the Commonwealth Prize - a prize that if you look at historically, wasn't exactly an example of brilliant prose. Surely that's far more of a inditement on the quality of judging for a prize if it can be won by poor writing.
A lot of the issues cited within this article just seem hollow, as they're issues that were pervasive before ChatGPT. AI isn't a panacea, but hating a technology because bad people use it feels reductionist.
I think a far bigger problem is that the majority of the population doesn't have good knowledge of AI or Software in general, including CEOs. I'd love to see journalists that have a good understanding of the actual technology.
You don't need to have a "good knowledge" of a misused technology to hate it when it's used by malevolent people.
In the same way I don't need to be a virologist to know that is better to avoid the flu, I don't need to be a ML/AI expert to see its direct detrimental effects on people, communities, and the internet as a whole.
To use your analogy, I would say the "blanket ban" attitude would be more like wishing all viruses would just go away, or have never existed in the first place, which:
1) is an impossible and unproductive attitude, and
2) fails to recognize the important contribution to evolution, genetic diversity, and our immune systems that viruses introduced, not to mention the possible beneficial applications that could exist by understanding it.
Rejecting something without nuance makes you more vulnerable down the road because it prevents you from building an effective immunity. Engaging with it is the only productive way to mitigate its downsides and promote its benefits.
But given your example - I don't care much for the opinion of someone who believes flu is spread by sinful thoughts. It's good to have a base understanding of something that you'd like to speak about.
Are local LLM models also within this hate sphere? What about fully open source vision models? That's what makes an article like this feel hollow - it's just someone talking about vibes.
Or to quote the article:
" But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. "
That's why I think this article is a criticism of neoliberal capitalism rather than anything else. If it wasn't AI, it would be robotics, if it wasn't robotics, it would be Quantum. But i'd like to see better substance in articles on this site rather than just a dislike of robots.
Interesting what the disconnect is between what the vocal minority say about AI versus the vast majority who use it every day and do not care, such as coders and even regular people, as ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I'm not sure what you mean because you didn't actually say it, but AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.
* A majority of Americans consider the risk of AI to society high, a minority consider the benefits high
* A majority are more concerned than excited about AI
* Americans feel strongly that it’s important to be able to tell if pictures, videos or text were made by AI, but are not confident in their ability to do so
It seems almost universally reviled in creative fields, and the use I mostly see from ordinary people is more along the lines of natural language searches with Gemini.
AI fans are a bubble within the bubble of technology enthusiasts. It's hardly even universally liked among software engineers.
And how much of this is due to the sloppers/grifters/conmen who hopped on to the AI train (same thing which happened to crypto?)
I feel like that is what the hate needs to be directed towards. Same thing with crypto. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with the technology itself. It’s that we are letting these scammers become the face of it
I personally know multiple completely clueless people who are ”founders building AI startup” on linkedin despite having zero business skills, zero technical skills, generally low IQ people, just trying to ride the hype wave to scam themselves into fortune. Of course their tactics involve posting total slop on linkedin, scamming freelancers, outsourcing everything to Pakistan, etc
This kind of behaviour would need to be name-and-shamed and preferably some sort of industry blacklist for bad behaviour.
Grifters and scammers gravitate towards certain technologies (and not others) and become the face of them because of something about those technologies. They are not picking random inventions and then adopting them to their scams.
It also doesn't qualify how or how often the users use the app. Online games like to do this too - "40M registered users!" when the number of players with an active subscription are a tiny fraction.
Even just in my family, the attitude has shifted significantly over the last year. Most of my family members are now critical of it and its effects.
Add to this that if ~6B people are using the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage), and ChatGPT only has almost a billion users (and is the largest player in the space), then I’d argue that LLM-users are in fact the minority.
I'm not so sure the silent majority is positive on AI, I think the opposite is more likely. Let's not forget that national poll where it was less popular than ICE -- I think it was 26% positive vs 46% negative.
My view is AI is becoming a poster-child for the increasing wealth disparity. When people are negative on AI it's not just the technology but the entire idea around it. It's simply cool to hate AI and that's going to be a hard hill to overcome, I think.
A lot of people can hate the existence and most of the consequences of something yet use it, sparingly or addictively
People can hate impact of the car centric societies and its impact on the climate yet use a car and find it convenient when not overused.
Social medias is another example. A lot of people agree for the most part it didn't make our society better yet they are addicted to doomscroll on instagram or tiktok.
People can use chatgpt to get a picture of them in Myasaki style yet hate that AI can be used to get rid of jobs. Even at developers level, some people might find AI useful in some areas but hate vibecoding and AI slop.
it is very amusing to read delusional takes like "everyone hates AI" when everyone I know who uses a computer for work is increasingly reliant on chatbots.
I don't know how many times do these people need to be taught that their little bubble of terminally online folx is not "everyone". twice is not enough, apparently.
>5. A majority of teens use AI chatbots. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 (64%) say they ever use an AI chatbot, according to a fall 2025 survey.
>6. A growing share of U.S. workers say at least some of their work is done with AI. That share has risen from 16% in 2024 to 21% in a September 2025 survey.
>8. Younger adults are more likely than older Americans to be aware of and use AI.
so, uh, thanks for proving my point?
also, I don't live in the US (thank G-d!), and we don't have that particular kulturkampf here. it is as foreign to us as your plastic straw debates.
Opinion polling of the public about AI paints a very unfavorable picture, so it's not delusional. People use it but they fear it's going to take their livelihood. At the very least it has injected a significant amount of uncertainty into people's lives.
The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very expensive bills that will be coming due in the coming months and years. They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.
I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.
I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.
This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.
> is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM
No it won't. Natural language manipulation is never a bottleneck in STEM.
I do not understand how you can believe that and I'm not really keen on trying to.
They seem to be having at least some impact
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2527564-mathematicians-...
> Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.
The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now, so a lot of the issues that came with their ownership and special privileges no longer exist. There is no way that is how this is going to go down with Google et al
But you would be banning trains if they were built to just run smack into the centre of town squares loaded with bombs, rendering the cities to dust, as a part of their design and boasted about by the owners.
At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.
I think that perhaps your perception of the impacts of data centers is a bit over the top.
There are datacenters all over the place and have been for a very long time. Some of them host physical servers for people and companies, maybe only a literal closet somewhere in a building. Others are giant hyperscaler datacenters that have tons of 24/7 lighting and are the size of multiple football fields.
We need to be very careful here, or we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That is also my concern. This feels like a Satanic panic type of thing and if people don't form nuanced opinions, politicians will latch on to the issue and before you know it, many people who are heavily reliant on machine learning who don't realize it are going to have a bad time when stuff starts getting banned.
>This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM.
We could do without them.
Maybe you're sitting pretty right now, but try posting this from your deathbed, or that of your kid.
The lack of compassion that people display here is shocking to me.
"Don't automate science, because there are junior scientists could be denied the thrill of specific discoveries."
Cancer patients are not accessories to anyone's self-actualization.
Tell that to the family of someone who dies a year before one of those discoveries that would have saved their life...
I guess you don't know anyone who has cancer.
We could probably do without computers too, but that would be idiotic because they speed everything up. There's a good chance that the next pandemic is swatted down by LLM-powered vaccine development much faster than COVID-19 was.
"We could do without them." is not a great take when it comes to people dying prematurely.
In fact, I would bet that this particular technology will lead to climate change solutions eventually. If nothing else, it will drive an energy revolution in either nuclear or solar power. Probably too late to solve the AMOC collapse, but mitigation is still in play through science.
> LLM-powered vaccine development
Good lord!
I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements. They're going to be a neverending source of cringe and laughs for the next 50 years.
(I've heard one C-level dude say with a straight face that LLMs were a "more significant invention than writing".)
You're a Google search away from fact checking me if you want to do that.
I'm a DevOps engineer, not a C suite guy, but I tend to agree with you in general. I think there is a lot of smoke being blown into the hive around this technology but having used it extensively, and having witnessed its progression first hand in engineering, these tools are insanely useful and have made giant leaps forward in just ~4 years.
Don't know if you're a believer in Moore's Law or not, but I don't think your tune is going to take anywhere near 50 years to change. I'd be surprised if it took 5 years.
> Good lord!
>I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements.
---
This has been in use for awhile.
https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/26/3/bbaf263/8158336
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12970898/
How it gets used: https://mlconference.ai/blog/ai-in-vaccine-development/
The ecological considerations are wildly overstated. Data centres in general != AI, and other industries, including meat production and (ironically) paper for print all use far more water and create more damage.
This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activities like streaming music and video, and general social media.
Also, I just listened to the latest Volts podcast and they make the claim that data centers will actually lower the cost of electricity fairly soon (~2030). Very counterintuitive but it does make sense. We'll find out soon enough.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity
I've been telling my friends this since LLMs launched. If your interest is in lowering the use of fossil fuels, then a global race for compute is great because the increased demand is probably going to usher in a nuclear/solar revolution in the energy sector.
It feels like a very large segment, on both sides of this argument, is completely incapable of forming nuanced opinions on this stuff.
but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft
Two thoughts:
A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow.
B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?
I think it should be fairly obvious by now which form of AI people refer to when they talk specifically about theft. It gets a bit old and repetitive to expand the shorthand in every conversation possible. If people are genuinely curious about other forms of AI, that information is readily available.
When Tesla FSD was in the zeitgeist, theft never entered the discussion, because it was clear that form of AI was not predicated upon theft.
It only takes three extra characters to say "GenAI" instead of "AI". It's just lazy use of language to not disambiguate what one means.
Telling people they are myopic isn’t going to convince them of your point.
The IP considerations, environmental considerations, "lol we're gonna destroy the world and get you laid off" considerations, and of course the big middle finger given to artists of all types, from authors to musicians... They painted themselves as villains and then they were shocked when people viewed them as such.
“You wouldn’t download a car” is making an unexpected comeback after all these years
I (and I assume many others on especially HN) don't consider intellectual "property" as real so there is no "theft" in our minds, so this argument doesn't bear much weight.
> I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.
I also hate it because:
1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it.
2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.
What new technology does not reduce the power of labor in some way?
Communication tech/tools enable more people to collaborate. It increases ability for labor that is far away from high value markets to contribute. Same goes for shipping tech wrt physical goods. On the global scale that is empowering the labor class. Any productivity tool that individual laborers can purchase also (and that still needs the worker) is probably good for labor, overall.
If you're a programmer or (physical) engineer you've been automating other people's labor all this time, it's ironically hypocritical that now that engineers are the ones being automated that they cry foul.
It's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine.
Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.
They're not firing employees to replace them with AI. We're mostly engineers here I think. Does anyone actually believe they're replacing humans with the same AI that we're using in our day-to-days? I don't know about you, but my harnesses absolutely suck without a human driving them and the more knowledgeable the human, the less they suck.
It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the typical ways in which they would normally act like assholes.
If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into.
AI is in its infancy, it's just learning to crawl. There will be more breakthroughs which will have more serious consequences. Today engineers are safe, holding the AI's hand as it crawls around, bumping into furniture. What happens when it learns to walk, run, and win marathons?
> If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into.
If the extra one or two employees are 2x or 3x as productive as they used to be, why would they not be employed? There will be plenty of market to grow into since the gains in productivity are shared throughout the economy.
Money and customers are finite. The market will only grow via finite constraints changing. And ai is not changing these finite constraints.
(Assuming that LLM does indeed multiply productivity) We are likely in for some rough days, as it's much easier to just fire people and maintain the same level of productivity. Musk (arguably) did that with Twitter, even before this started. I was impacted by a post-COVID layoff, myself.
But do you think that once that has leveled out a bit, the bandwidth/market bottleneck you referenced will be identified as the new bottleneck[0]? Like, new businesses will launch, or existing companies will identify new growth areas that they did not have the capacity to move into.
I don't know how to respond to your second paragraph. Looking in that direction is a bit too overwhelming.
[0] I think this was always the problem, not developer productivity
I think the naive CEO-level reasoning is that one person can get twice as much done with a harness, not that AIs will suddenly become useful while autonomous.
Piracy is not theft. If something can be copied infinite times without any effort with broad societal benefit, then it's a moral imperative to do so. The opposite is gatekeeping in the name of monopolistic profiteering and the wealth concentration that the modern broken IP law enforces.
Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.
I would be very surprised if the ebook license they bought does entail using it for training machines. In fact I'm pretty sure it didn't and I thus do not think they did such a thing in the first place as I credit them with enough legal prowess to know about this.
Now that's thinking with your gut!
Don't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations!
AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave.
That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.
Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?
All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.
> who's gonna buy all their stuff then?
The top 10% earners in the US account for half of all consumer spending. The capitalist class may be counting on that imbalance to only strengthen.
> Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further.
Yes, our new generation of overlords seem to be socially and emotionally stunted and exhibit an alarming naivete about the world. This worries me almost as much as the tech itself. It is impossible to predict the future but in the past when a ruling class completely disregarded the effects of their greed and excess on the wellbeing of society, at some point the bill came due and the consequences for them (and society) were dire.
I blame the disdain for humanities, philosophy and the liberal arts.
Not just with the overlords, but also with our fellow nerds. We're all so busy trying to see if we can build something that we don't stop and think if we should build something, what consequences that might have or what history has taught us.
Theres a reason those fields of study are important.
>They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.
Company goes under and they just start something else.
There's no real consequences. This is a club, not a market.
There's no evidence to suggest that poisoning impacts generative model training in 2026. Frontier labs spend billions on tightly focused training plans, developing assessments and pursuing the long tail of assessment failures.
> The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.
It's a cute thought that big tech wants our help to shape artificial intelligence.
This, and the fact that AI is taking people's jobs away without (as far as we can tell) significantly creating new jobs for those people to move to.
The job impact is really pissing people off, rightfully so.
> it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI
I think it was partly also PR. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for mindshare and Dalle-E, Sora, Nano banana, etc generated a lot of media buzz for Google and OpenAI at various points in time.
Did people hate the computer this much when it became a thing?
I distinctly remember people hating on Google search (and the internet in general) when things got going and how it will dumb everyone down and no one will understand how to use the card catalog at the local library anymore.
Lol, seriously? Or are you trolling?
No
Let’s not forget about the total surveillance we’re heading into thanks to AI. I wouldn’t say the technology is the problem per say but everything around it is. AI could be used for good, if we only didn’t have psychopaths serving their own interests at the detriment of the rest of us
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.
To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).
Upset with what aspect(s) of databases?
The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create?
That latter seems to have aged quite well.
Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information).
Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
In the same way that any technology could just magically disappear, sure.
But I hear everyday, non-IT-sector people talking constantly about how they're using it, and that means there's a demand for it, and someone is going to supply it. I think a lot of anti-AI people think it's still equivalent to the PDA, and don't realize it's a smartphone already.
The other side is that "AI" is of course very very broad and isn't new, and e.g. medical vision models are making advancements that are having huge impacts on patient care already, especially around early cancer detection. Those aren't going away (and shouldn't), so there's still going to be a demand for the underlying technology and infrastructure to support it, even if LLMs stop being spammed everywhere.
The other thing which people seem not to understand is that you don't need a whole datacenter to RUN individual LLMs, you need it to train them, or to run them at scale for thousands of customers. A lot of the upper-mid-tier models that exist now can be run on a single (beefy) 4U server in your closet if you've got the GPUs to put in it. And people are running e.g. Deepseek V4 Pro FP4 locally. If you've got an actual server room, like at a university, you can run the full, un-quantized versions with ~2-4 servers.
Technology that is living in peoples' homes and businesses already is not going to just disappear. It's a lot less centralized than the market prevalence of OpenAI and Anthropic would lead you to believe.
Short of societal collapse, there's no way the technology is going to go away or fade out of existence (unless it's replaced by something even better), that's just not how technological progress works. It's useful, probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet.
Building those datacenters and keeping them operational involves massive amounts of highly skilled blue-collar labor.
You seem to suppose the building of those datacenters - even the power plants behind them - won't soon be automated. Almost as if robotics isn't happening.
I don't get it, why would operating a datacenter needs massive amount of high skilled blue-collar labor. Datacenters are resource hungry. With so much automation in place I don't think there would be a need for large pool of labor.
Why would it?
It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it.
Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.
Swords, bows and arrows, castles were all here to stay.
Technologies fade away when they are no longer useful, cost/benefit ratio is too high or something better comes along.
It is question of when.
They stopped being used as primary weapons because better ones were found - mostly firearms - not because people got bored of it; or reverted to some earlier methods of warfare.
Yes, there is the general class of technologies (warfare, computing ...) and there are particular instances of those for a given time and space and evolve as the landscape changes.
The technology of warfare evolved to better mechanisms, perhaps same with computing.
Bows and arrows are still widely used for hunting all over the world. I was able do freelance work on a relatively low income because of access to ~150lbs of deer meat that came from multiple bow-hunted deer.
So you’re saying today’s models are sticks and stones and you’re looking forward to the nuclear submarine equivalent models?
Building on that futurism.
We might design organic brain extensions, so people just become smarter, making LLMs obsolete. (Brain-Bluetooth interface for additional cost)
I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords.
Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.
What tech can you imagine that would make the conversion of electricity into thought 'no longer useful'?
This is an interesting question that I haven't thought about, thanks.
What we currently have is a simulacrum of thought - albeit a good one.
Any technology is useful only in the sense that it helps us with solving the problems we are dealing with in that time. When we face issues that a pseudo-thought is not useful in tackling or worse is one of the causes - this will recede in the background.
Beyond that, the implicit assumption in the question is that thinking is the highest form of activity that is useful to us.
I don't know how my thoughts arise but thinking happens when I engage with them. I think what we look for is meaning in our lives and thinking helps us generate/achieve one, whether real or illusory.
No one is claiming that ChatGPT 5.5 is here to stay and be popular forever. More advance AI models will replace what exists today.
In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it?
The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
No. You're not thinking it through well enough.
The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business.
Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.)
The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech?
You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.
Juicero wasn't useful therefore it went away. Generative AI is useful therefore it won't go away, just like how fire is kMy old yet it's still here to stay.
I think this disconnect is based on the ambiguity in the term "AI".
"AI" as tech - the models, how to train them, etc. Isn't going to go anywhere short of a Library-of-Alexandria-type catastrophe. We know how to do it and it's useful, so why would we forget?
However, "AI" as the thing that is enveloping our culture - the slop everywhere, the mandates to use it at work regardless of its usefulness, the constant talk about it being the future, the machine-dominated future that's been promised/threatened by the heads of the labs - we do still have a chance to put that onto the scrapheap.
I'm sorry but this makes very little sense. Society isn't going to unlearn the methods.
It makes tremendous sense - when understand as reflexive straw-clutching and wish-thinking aimed at reducing the frequency of the poster's nightmares and reducing their diaper expense.
TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it.
AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.
People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
> It really isn't going anywhere
It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
> People were upset about databases in the 1980s
Huh? In what universe did that happen?
Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be.
So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily.
Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one.
Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption.
Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children."
There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair.
This is the world now.
I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train.
You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass.
There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
This is the central problem with the dismissals of the tech's capability. Public discourse needs to shift to planning for the economic impact in particular, but the kind of High Brazilism from the naysayers who insist it's a proof of psychosis to even mention AI's potential, makes the inertia in policymakers much easier for them to maintain. Waiting for the financial effects to arrive and then improvising policy is the stupidest way of handling an upheaval on this scale - even if the precise form of those shocks can't be anticipated.
> There is no possible universe where AI is banned
Yes there is
It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI.
And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.
Why do you imagine this would change _anything_?
There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models.
If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.
Well then the Chinese labs need to evaporate too
Do you think that's going to erase every copy of "Attention is all you need"?
We don't have to get rid of AI entirely to reverse this trend
Society is just 3 meals away from going that route
I'm sorry - but you're not going to ban AI no more than you can ban the transistor. You could limit & limit the potential of who uses it - but historically that seems to benefit the few rather than the many.
> you can organize politically
Can you? Maybe if you can afford an AI powered social media bot farm. What a great technology.
> To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
> It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
> dismiss people's legitimate concerns
Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.
> It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me
Does this hypothetical issue concern you AND the rest of society as a whole as well, or just you? Because there is a big difference between the two cases.
How many people do you require for it to be a legitmate concern? I can show you millions but you will disregard them anyway, because they all have wrong opinions.
You don't know me.
Great response, huge respect from my side.
>to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole,
Those same people were callously telling factory workers who lost their job to automation and outsourcing to "learn to code"; they don't deserve any sympathy. Assholes are the hypocrites who are fine automating other people's jobs away but not their own.
> Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter
Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?
>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.
All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.
none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.
I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it".
You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.
I feel about the same about both cars and AI.
Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.
I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.
The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened?
Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.
I actually think that's a great comparison but not for the reasons you're making it.
I live in NYC. When the automobile started to get popular the city saw it as the future and went to extreme lengths to accommodate it. Bulldozed houses, split neighborhoods in half to accommodate parkways and highways that formed our inevitable future. Turns out, cars don't scale. Eventually folks did push back and some of the proposed projects never happened[1] but we're still suffering the consequences the ones that did to this day.
Had there been more criticism and more discussion at the outset we might have avoided a lot of problems.
[1] https://www.mcny.org/story/cross-manhattan-expressway
> “virtually everyone believed that the private car was the greatest invention since fire or the wheel. Public transportation seemed to be nothing more than a relic of the past.” Wide modern expressways, Moses believed, would save New York as a great city.
Heck no. The world would be a way better place with no personal automobiles. Trains, yes. Even trucks and buses, sure. Cars, nooooooooooo. Cars are among the most clearly net-negative inventions to come out of industrialization. They should be criticized and fought until finally defeated. Self-driving cars are a massive waste of human and physical resources to provide a solution that is still strictly worse than proper urbanism and transportation network design.
Plenty of people don't like cars to this day.
Do most people hate because they view it as less efficient means of transportation then by horse? Or that cars replaced their job as a horse keeper?
I don't think it's self-evident that we've gained by switching from horses to cars. For most of the trips one makes in their daily life, the ubiquity of cars just means that you now have to travel greater distances. Plus the environmental devastation that cars have wrought. Are we really better off?
Yes. And I'm sure they're having a hard time. ^
It really depends on their environment. Not every city is a car-first city.
> But aren't we glad it happened?
No. Or rather, I wish it happened very differently, and much slower. The rush to make every new city and development "car-friendly" had negative consequences that will last centuries. That's why my city isn't walkable and has awful public transportation, and biking is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the insidious environmental and health effects!
Of course cars have their place in efficient modern transportation, but we would live in a much better world if their development and integration had been slower, more carefully considered, and more criticized.
I feel like there's this idea that progress is good because of economic output, but there's this much squishier and more subjective concept of how much a change impacts our satisfaction with life. I think cars have produced a lot of good in the world, but I also live in the US where we've paved so much of the world that people don't feel like being outside on their feet very much anymore. I think it's had some negative impacts on how we interact as humans.
I feel the same way about AI. Does it make me more productive? Sure. Does it make me suddenly hate the career I used to love? Definitely. Every day I'm told to move faster and to love this cool thing that takes away the math and low-level problem solving that I used to get so much enjoyment from and instead makes me a manager of a chatbot. Any attempt at moderation in the presence of upper management is met with clear threats to my job. Even better, my company (and so many others) are finding unlimited budgets for AI while putting off any sort of raises for the humans involved.
Not exactly the correct example. Machines replaced horses, the tendency of the current crop of AI tends to replace humans and concentrate unseen control and power and around a small elite. I have nothing against AI as a technology but plenty of concerns about how it’s being used currently.
My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating.
I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot.
I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same.
/I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice
Getting people into coding is both cool and also not specific to AI.
yes i agree, but keep in mind they're not getting into coding. They don't have the time for that, they just want to get something to work for a need they have. These two aren't building control systems for a nuclear reactor so don't panic, they're just getting something to work for themselves. Even the most simple use case is very empowering for them.
Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power. There are few billionaire owners and that is it. Small independent journalism as such basically stopped to exist - it was replaced by basically hot takes. Low key institutional fact checking does not exist anymore, local news dont exist anymore.
So, it would be entirely correct for someone back then to hate the changes and say it will destroy most of journalism. Because it did.
>Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power.
This is completely false; compare reporting on the initiation of the Iraq war vs the recent Iran war. Before the internet the flow of information was more centralized and heavily controlled.
I think there's a difference between 'the flow of information' and 'journalism'. The journalism/newspaper industry is indisputably smaller than it was 20 years ago and the newspapers that are left are all being consolidated into huge corporations with little to no ties to local communities.
As far as i remember the medias position on the Iraq war was far more diverse than is presented today.
Before the internet there were competing regulatory and commercial and cultural forces keeping The News the news.
Decentralized uncontrolled flow can also be seen as free rein for select power players who can manipulate the system. It changes, but not necessarily positively, how media power consolidates. And without scrutiny or national corrective pressure, that consolidation of power creates a very different perceived media system than is experienced.
The combined Senate report on the 2016 election interference from Russia — anti-both sides, lying to both sides and claiming it was the other — should have triggered a strict and meaningful reaction. Now we are in a spot where our kids are being mainlined Al Jazeera and Russian Times propaganda filtered only through uninformed useful idiots in short form video while they do their makeup or emulate Joe Rogans podcast. It’s pay for play media, with no scrutiny, bothers make it easy to heat, juice, or manipulate chosen content, hosts, and themes.
Power consolidation at the local/national level prevented it at the global level. At the global level those power structures move around axes we can no longer even name in polite company, and have fully corrupted the political discourse.
Your wife is right. History is repeating itself. And not even for the first time.
Horse carriage drivers -> Cars
Print media -> Internet
Drafting -> CAD
Music -> Electronic music, DAWs
Film photography -> Digital
Traditional film special effects -> CGI
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars)
In each of these cases, there was a subset of people that did the previous thing that hated on the people doing the new thing. They had every opportunity to adapt, but chose not to. They thumb their nose at it as everyone else jumps on board.
This time around, it isn't just practitioners hating on it. The internet has enabled a bunch of cling-on performative folks that aren't even artists, engineers, etc. that love to dog pile onto the hate.
It's really funny because I've shot lots of films over the last few decades. When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made. Not only will a lot of them proudly tell you they've never made anything, they'll then double down. They'll say that if they were to hypothetically make something (which they won't), it would be using the old tools and that I should be ashamed of myself for using AI. Despite the fact that I have years of experience using the tools they're describing to me.
I don't even get it. Not even putting in the effort to try, yet telling me that my enormous wealth of experience is wrong and that I'm unethical and my creative output is "worthless".
It's some kind of sick comedy.
> When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made.
They're saying that your contribution is negative. Even if their contribution is zero, zero is still better than negative.
You give examples of transitions that happened, but you have made no argument about how those transitions made us better off. It is not self-evident that a change in technology is necessarily an improvement.
What is the transition now? Science and whatever someone with a computer can create -> AI prompting?
Thinking -> Pay something else (AI) to "think" for you
And here we go again.
The way I like to think of it:
"Working my ass off as an IC who can't move up the gradient" -> "Principal Investigator, CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO of a 10-person team, captain of creation, actual Iron Man."
I'm putting in more work now, and I'm getting 5x the return on it.
How do you people not get this? Are you not trying?
> "Working my ass off as an IC who can't move up the gradient" -> "Principal Investigator, CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO of a 10-person team, captain of creation, actual Iron Man."
* Are you being compensated for all those roles you now do?
* If you do 5x does this mean you get more time for yourself or are you now busy 24/7 with more work?
* Extrapolate this all other "5x" IC, now you all are CEO CTO CMO CRO iron man. Now what?
Have you somehow sourced unsubsidized inference? Isn't all of this built on the false economy of a handful of very large vendors trying to capture you?
We have unsubsidized inference at home!
Let's assume you're not just delusional about your own abilities.
Do you expect everyone else to become 'actual iron man'?
I was able to get to $1M run rate in a month, and I'm approaching $2M. That's the fastest I've ever done it.
I've been a systems engineer and a hobbyist filmmaker for decades - pretty solid skills in each of these. Now I'm doing web design, marketing, frontend, mobile, writing tools, doing outreach, social media. It is a force multiplier.
I think there are an order of magnitude more people that this enables. You have to be somewhat well-rounded and willing to wear lots of hats, but this is exactly like wearing an exosuit. It's like jumping from IC to CTO or director, but still being an IC with a direct hand in everything. Does that make sense?
Everyone sitting this out on the sidelines is missing out. The opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been. If you have strong skills and drive, this is a performance enhancer better than any other. It's better than the best intern or personal assistant.
edit: hit by the HN commenting rate limit, so I can't respond.
> What happens to everyone else?
I recently met a guy that works at a pizza shop and had his YouTube channel blow up because he's got an AI series. I have lots of anecdotes like this. I don't want to oust the guy, but I personally know another person that got a Netflix deal because he did AI previz. (There might be a magazine article about it, in which case I can link it. I'll look.)
The world is going to be rife with all kinds of new opportunities. Including lots of opportunities for folks that never had access before.
> the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people
So all of the modern electronics, Netflix, DoorDash, etc. etc. of today were piled on the corpses of horse cart drivers and butter churners and Blockbuster employees that ordinarily would have told you your late fees but now have to find a different job? That's a wild take.
Why are we being so performative about this?
What if we look back on writing software in 2010 as stamping punch cards? Why term any of this as walking on people instead of the better lens of everything just gets better - products, jobs, civilization.
It sounds like not only do some people want to coast forever, they want to hold everyone else back. I'm willing to learn new things. I'm tired of the status quo.
> The opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been.
I think what you're missing is that AI shows, more directly than most other technologies, the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people. Not everyone wants to get ahead that way.
You haven't answered my question.
What happens to everyone else?
Small business ownership/consulting. AI can't own a business because they're completely unaccountable. Even embodied AGI would never be given human property rights, because they can't be punished/held accountable by the law when their weights can be infinitely copied and reproduced anywhere (digital immortality).
...but one of your examples has had disastrous consequences. Sure cars prevailed but they have changed the climate and let to unfriendly development patterns. Likewise social media may make people less happy, less likely to couple etc. Novel tech solves problems but can create others. We can surely afford to move deliberately at least, particularly in education.
> Horse carriage drivers -> Cars
I think you're badly missing the point.
It is true that car drivers replaced horse carriage drivers and car mechanics replaced the people who took care of horses and what not.
But in the horse carriage vs car metaphor with AI, people are not the drivers and blacksmiths, people are the horses.
How many horses do you see around lately?
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy
Certainly seems like an apt comparison! Personally I think we should just ban AI if it’s going to primarily facilitate the production of slop-shit like TikTok.
And despite the touts insisting on how useful and amazing these tools are, I have yet to see anything of true value be produced. Slop-shit vomit factories indeed.
50, lawyer, and it has completely revolutionized my workflow. Just shake my head at the denialism.
Do we really need lawyers? They're very expensive compared to LLMs.
How about when you’re 53 and unemployed on subsistence UBI?
I will do the pro-social thing of wishing that resources were more scarce so that the resources I hold were worth more.
There will be no UBI.
Probably correct :)
Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay.
Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.
It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage.
What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.
Developers are a TINY percentage of the population (< 1%). The anti-AI sentiment is coming from the other 99%.
> but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.
The barrier to entry to make slop is lower, but it's gotten much higher for developing the skill of programming. There was already an issue with a lack of mentorship and path for juniors when agile attempted to turn software engineers into assembly line workers, among other issues with the industry becoming hyper short-term focused.
Now you have educational barriers where students are competing with other students that are cheating with LLMs. There are psychological barriers with learned helplessness. The 100k lines of vibecoded slop produced hits a wall but they've gained no understanding of the code in the process or ability to make changes themselves. At the first job juniors and interns get they're being told not to take the time to learn and understand the problem they're working and instead they need to hit the LLM slot machine or risk getting fired.
> Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly
The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there.
I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.
I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is.
https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.
I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them
That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.
> AI is here to stay
I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.
How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
> Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
"we'll allow" is doing a lot of work here. There is no collective without boots on the necks of everyone except for the people wearing the boots.
Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.
Not counting tests, we haven't seen one in action in over 80 years. If we could practice this level of caution with AI, that would be a great start.
We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation.
Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.
That's because we built very fast computers to simulate them.
AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight.
We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)
We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired.
This is what we keep being told.
So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.
When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.
I think his point was that we are bombarded with cataclysmic language from AI leaders about our sooncoming intellectual demise.
If you can't fight them, join them.
That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.
The eschaton will devour the people who “join them” just as fast as the people who fight it.
As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess?
Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...
> join them
Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.
This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result.
The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind".
But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it.
The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.
> There's nothing to learn with AI
You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.
The amount of steering necessary is rapidly decreasing. You're looking at a way too small timeline if you think this will be sustainable, or you're hoping that LLMs will hit their peak very soon.
Eh, there’s definitely some value in understanding for yourself via experience which models are actually good for which use cases. The benchmarks are unreliable imo, and as I’ve interviewed developers who don’t really use AI, they say things like how they don’t think the (free versions of) copilot or ChatGPT (requests routed to their cheapest models) don’t seem very good. Totally out of touch with the capabilities of the leading models and harnesses.
I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.
Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.
If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.
Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.
Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.
To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping.
If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)
Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…
Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone.
Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.
One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?
I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.
At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.
> A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.
Agreed.
20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products
what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies
Meth is here to stay, too, and--damn--is it great for productivity.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
only time will tell, make your bets. carefully.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.
It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.
> If you can't fight them, join them.
This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you.
And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.
> These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.
If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."
^ doomscrolling john connor
Cool, fighting it is then.
This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes.
AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement.
When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.
You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?
Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually.
If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.
The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.
You don’t get to choose whether they allow you to join them.
"These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."
Doubt.
How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools?
Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming.
I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.
I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in.
I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice).
I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online
They aren't even good at programming, despite the repeated claims to the contrary by AI bros.
It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency.
Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".
If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution.
The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.
So your master plan is to purposely work ten times slower than everyone else to prove a point to a CEO who doesn't know your name?
> It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".
Code generation is a very silly way of using LLMs. They're not even good at it.
True
Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here.
Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.
Everybody will. You will not be spared. If you think you are a senior prompt whisperer and that will save you, that is going away in a year too.
Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.
If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
If all my friends drove 75 mph, would I risk driving 15 mph in front of them?
I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would.
https://xkcd.com/1170/
If your friends all start to jump off a bridge, the rational thing to do is question their sanity, not to just jump. That xkcd is dead wrong.
I mean. Yes? Probably?
Imagine making "AI Hater" as your personality
I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations.
I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.
Not everyone is empty enough to be okay with participating in the expansion of something they strongly believe will be a net negative for the world.
That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.
Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.
This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?
I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on.
What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest.
- Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship"
- Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities
- The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general
- Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match
What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.
Bingo
Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back.
Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard.
This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.
I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?
To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?
I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.
> If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?
No. Obviously, what you do on your PC is inconsequential to the rest of society. But despite this, AI and its consequences in big tech have become so thoroughly linked because the entities that develop and profit off of AI use are so big and influential over the rest of us. The hobbyist space isn't what people even think about.
Seems more like a materialist religious project to me.
It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.
It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.
I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)
Everything is fundamentally energy. If you hate something you're just hating energy.
"AI" is a marketing term, LLMs and Difusion Models are math.
Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits.
Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.
I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital.
People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation.
I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
> Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things.
Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.
Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns became cheap enough that whoever had the most guys would win a civil war, we got democracy: rule by whoever has the most guys. When whoever has the most robots will win a civil war, what kind of government do you expect?
AI is helping to finish off the job of destroying democracy that the rich started. We are doomed.
We're not doomed. We're just between revolutions.
It's impossible to predict when they happen, or their outcomes. The world may be worse at least for a while after them. Or they fail in general.
But they happen and then all the people who were crowing about the inevitability of some existing order and now it embodies natural law and what not look really f*ckin stupid in retrospect.
People believed in the divine right of kings with the same full earnestness of people on this forum who have think AI is just the outcropping of some transcendent mathematical telos.
I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either.
Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity.
I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away.
Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.
I often hear people talk online about burning data centers to avoid some capitalist dystopia.
It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either.
We will pay people.
Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.
Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.
I think the klept can maintain their "just desserts" mentality longer than you and I can maintain our metabolic integrity.
This is plainly delusional. There already is abundance, global crop lands produce enough calories to feed twice the world’s population[0]. Greed is the reason for inequality and “AI” is not solving that. It is pure wishful utopian thinking to believe that there will be some massive AI-initiated abundance.
[0] https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-pe...
It would seem to me that the main source of food insecurity is violent conflict rather than greed.
The main source of famine is corruption. Ireland had enough food, but it was exported to rich people.
> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.
It's this "path of least resistance life style" that ruins a lot in our society. Yes, being wasteful is bad, but not appreciating the work is also bad.
> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.
Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.
UBI is not a solution either, as it will inevitably fall into the same traps and favoritism as tax laws.
It's highly cynical, but people need to work. It provides structure and most people don't do well with unstructured time.
Also, I find it odd that of all the automation being attempted with LLMs, we're automating the ones that actually are interesting, not the ones that are dangerous or truly rote, yet highly mechanical.
Humans will not flourish if you remove their jobs, they will become violent criminals because they will have nothing else to fill their days and no purpose in their community.
People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.
People can find purpose without jobs. But they can't find purpose if they are struggling to survive. If jobs are the only legal path to survival, and there are no jobs, then people will be driven to "crime" to survive.
Things young people do if they are bored:
1. Have sex
2. Break things
3. Play videogames
This is an incredibly pessimistic view of humanity.
It is extremely naive to think that if remove a fundamental pillar of human society everything else will just continue on as if nothing happened.
It's an informed view for anyone who's spent time around multi-generational welfare-dependent households. Regardless of race or creed, the majority descend into substance abuse and domestic violence.
This is why rich inheritors usually become violent criminals. No jobs.
That's not the future envisioned by AI pushers.
Its fine to hate work, whatever. But you wouldn't quit your job today, so why would you want to be replaced by an AI today?
I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism.
Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.
Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.
Work sucks, but try paying bills without working. Try buying food.
Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.
Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.
Yep, it's all driven by Moloch, and nothing but.
Ishmael is a good read.
What is it about?
Historians. Well, one. Well, he's not a historian. He's a biochemist and physiologist who has studied some anthropology.
It's Jared Diamond. That's who says agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.
He's actually pulling that from about 70 years of anthropology and anthropological archaeology; it wasn't in any way original to him.
I think this is the first article I've seen here which captures my practical concerns with AI, my moral concerns, my economic concerns, and also the emotional "true, profound, and guttural loathing". I hate it so much, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it. It just feels so icky. And the times when I've been fooled into reading AI-generated texts I feel cheated. It's all so cheap and nasty.
I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way.
I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.
I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.
All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.
That is a specific implementation of image models, not true for all image models. For example Civitai has a lot of realistic models that look like people took them, at least on first glance, as I'm sure with enough pixel peeping you can find discrepancies, point is the "flatness" look is with that specific ChatGPT model.
For example: https://civitai.com/models/2149369/iphone-realism
Magical editing of pictures is so wild to me. Most photos people take have a longterm have an audience of basically 1. That's why there's jokes about how awful it is when a coworker corners you to show you their vacation photos, the vast majority of photos taken by the average person are only ever going to be viewed again by the person taking it (and maybe their immediate family).
Memory is already this squishy thing and then when you go back to reminisce about {meaningful event} and go pull up your edited photos, what are you even looking at? Google used to play these ads constantly of editing stuff out, changing how the sky looks, etc.
It's present day you effectively gaslighting future you. What's the point of memorializing something and then immediately destroying the truth of what happened with a bunch of edits.
Can I ask what the deal is with people saying anti-intellectual things and then finishing it with ", actually"? Where did this originate from from? Is it a shibboleth?
Saying that shunning the machine that is usurping human creativity and intelligence is "anti intellectual" is pretty funny
I'm not an AI hater but the implication of your comment is that being on the AI train is the intellectual position, which is wild, given the AI hype is almost entirely from CEOs, who are the furthest thing from.
“anti-intellectual” judgment aside, I believe it’s just a meme (in the original definition of the word).
I think this highlights the dichotomy of AI use and how it's shaping everyone's opinion based on their own experience. It's your AI versus mine. You could be OpenAI with unlimited compute and disprove a conjecture or you could be the people referred in the article who are asking claude if a story is written by a human. Opus 4.7 can generate working code faster than I ever could but I still see it as a dumb word calculator bc of the mistakes it makes.
Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.
You could ignore the ugly sides in 2018 or 2022, when the tech consisted of fun toys that existed alongside everything else and not instead of it.
In 2026, unless you're wealthy or are one of the few that don't need to use the internet to live, focusing on the ugly sides is not optional. When the ugly parts are coming for your employment, community, ability to own anything, your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society, you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore that, and then pretend like everyone pointing to the oncoming train is just a negative naysayer who's upset because they're bad and like to feel bad and no other reasons.
Your argument clearly comes from a doomer perspective, your employment will be gone (Maybe, but you will find new employment), your community will be gone (?), your ability to own anything will be gone (?????)
> your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society(??), you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore tha
I've clearly been on the internet longer then you, all of my favorite places are already gone. It's completely fine. Life is finite and there is something beautiful about that.
I wish you too will find the beauty in life at some point.
I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly.
It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable.
I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the same passion, but won't tell because the time isn't ripe yet.
Weird responses you're getting, I agree with you fully, if someone is constantly putting on display what they hate I'll keep as far away from them as I can be.
It's a type of engagement bait, people like posting things online which they know will rile up reactions.
I'll tell. It's you. You personally, and no one else. Not a category of people that includes you. Just you.
Such a weird, non HN worthy, type of comment. Just pure personal attack while they said nothing weird. Why are you here?
I don't particularly care if you hate me, I am more wary about people being hateful in general. It is a dangerous emotion to nurture and channels people towards acting in an evil way.
And the rationalizations tend to be questionable. 100 years ago, plenty of people would tell you that Jews are bloodsuckers who dominate the economy with their greed and enslave regular workers. It isn't exactly the same, but surely it rhymes.
At least today the hated enemy is a bit abstract and not a human. Though the hate can easily extend towards actual people who work on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
I wish tech companies would stop shoving AI in my face everywhere. F off google i don't want to "ask ai" in maps. Get that ugly ai button off from messenger, meta. At least microslop winblows lets me remove crapilot buttons from apps.
Every waves of automation are naturally creating resistance, as they tend to make the lives of a large number of people miserable during the transition.
Nothing new here.
What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.
I am not sure why or if this is a new pattern.
I think social media is a big factor. Anti-AI posts and comments are very popular on mainstream Reddit subs at least. Not sure if its a cause or an effect or even external manipulation
> What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation
It's repeatedly stated that while it's still improving, AI is coming for the entry level positions and the juniors first. How many times have you seen AI described as "like an eager junior"?
> What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.
Why would that surprise you? They aren't stupid. They can see that people are trying to position AI as a way to replace them.
My intuition would be that the resistance would come from grumpy old guys like me who spent most of their lives perfecting their craft.
You grumpy old guys probably own a house. As labour continues to get devalued, it feels like assets are the only path to prosperity. That's where my anxiety is coming from, anyway.
It should be coming from them too
My guess is a lot of those grumpy old guys, on this site at least, are sitting pretty with large bank accounts. So they don't need to worry about their jobs anymore. They could retire safely tomorrow if they wanted. So they don't care.
Just another instance of the older generation trying to loot the future from the younger.
I understand some of the sentiment, but these folks certainly won't be denying the drug discovered through AI that will save their life or that of their children.
I don't think people truly hate AI. What they hate is how it's used. That's a very different thing and it's a human problem not a technology problem.
Who editorialized the actual title from "Hating AI is good, actually" to "Shunning AI is the human choice"?
This article was submitted under its original title.
Why was this title changed? The original was better, and, well, original.
I'm not really shunning, I've gone from very high on AI to mostly exhausted with it. I wish we could skip ahead ~5 years to it being another tool in the tool belt and lessons learned about where it's good and bad. Right now everything is so same-y. Barely any oxygen for other technologies to get funding and attention, large fraction of what I read on socials is in claude's or chatgpt's voice.
... and maybe I'm wrong and get economically obsoleted. but eschatology is like catnip for every generation and I think there's a big component of that
I think that too many people are conflating their hate for AI, which is a technology, with the sick dynamics pushing it to gain profit. It's consumerism and capitalism to blame, AI is just a technology. As such, we want our leaders to be able to properly use such tech. But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.
I use AI and see value in it but agree the hype train is very annoying. My employer tracks how much we're using AI related tools and has a KPI we need to hit. Thats very annoying too. Reminds of communism: "ideas so great they're mandatory", AI: "A tool so amazing its use is mandatory".
> But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.
What should be done then?
I don't want to sound fatalistic, but in the end, the machine is too powerful to be stopped. With machine I don't mean AI, but rather the financial machine of the US.
Political and economic ramification aside, if we truly create ASI, that severely reduces the value of humanity. We essentially give birth to our enslavers and eventually humanity will be second class on this planet. How is that something to look forward to?
To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place.
I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.
I don't use much AI, but we have an AI agent that reviews all of our PRs at work.
It's pretty good, I actually like it because it's very thorough and catches real things.
On a recent PR though it very confidently pointed out an "error" and suggested a "fix." Now I authored this code by hand and the "error" was it going "this one doesn't look like all the other ones" and I'm a relatively consistent person so it's not the kind of mistake I would make, which means I probably put thought in and the difference was intentional.
I looked at it's suggestion carefully and my original code was correct, the "fix" would have broken the logic. Not a huge deal all things said.
But I'm looking back at it's original report, it's comprehensive, confident, and ends with "Reply 'fix this for me' and I will fix it" and it made me think about more junior engineers.
I double checked it because I had written the code by hand, I understood the context, I also have enough experience to know that if I wrote this one function differently there was probably a good reason. But if I were earlier in my career, with less experience, would I have just clicked the easy button?
Probably. Especially if everyday I'm clicking the easy button.
Highway engineers used to think it was a good idea to make highways as straight as possible, people going in a straight line is easiest right? They realized that if you didn't put some curves in the road that people would just disengage and a perfect straight "easy" highway was much more dangerous than one with curves. I feel like AI is an "easy" highway
It is called 'jagged intelligence'. A lot progress was made in the last 2 years. Most notably reasoning models, tools use, harness progress. It takes time to build the skill to make those models useful, but they do provide a lot of value.
Ah yeah jagged intelligence is the perfect phrase for it. I do also get some value from them, both in coding and in images. I find it the least usable for information primarily because of the hallucination problem. I still do use it for that purpose but it's kind of annoying when it writes something that's wrong, and I find it out from a Google search later.
That is indeed the problem. And when you have to meticulously check everything that the LLM does (because you can't know where the hallucinations will be), it completely destroys any productivity benefits you would gain from having it write the code in the first place. Thus you wind up going no faster (if not slower) than you did in the first place. The only way to go super fast (the way some people claim they are) is to discard quality.
As has been pointed out over and over: the time consuming part of programming was never typing code into the computer, it was understanding the problem and the logic behind the code. Using an LLM only addresses the fast and easy part of programming, not the hard parts.
It's shocking to see such an article title on HN, especially with so many upvotes. It would've been unthinkable in 2025. I always saw this website as very AI-boostery and pro-VC, pretty much as pro-AI as you could find without getting into the singularity cult. Has the audience changed, or is it the opinion of the average user that changed?
> I’m not just skeptical. I'm against it.
I understand the sentiment but I don't think it's useful to take a directly antagonistic stance, especially when it's a losing battle.
For those who feel this way, our best hope is to keep searching for how we can have a world that values human effort and care, even after AI does everything it's proclaimed to do.
We can't declare the world a lost cause and relegate ourselves to only hating. We need to do what we've always done: roll with it.
No need to hate it. Just understand it, know when you're dealing with someone who is viewing it through a rational lens vs. a delusional lens, and just keep doing what you were doing.
Buying into the fear is how you railroad yourself long-term. Using it while maintaining a healthy skepticism around the more radical claims means not being blindsided long-term.
Now as far as hating the turbo-zealots who smugly try to shove it down your throat in an attempt to protect their bags...
Such fantastic writing. I particularly love the last passage - not only it is reminiscent of how great op-eds used to close, but also for it's clear and un-ambigious call to action - you have the agency and no, you don't have to "deal with it", i.e. deal with lazy morons pasting you LLM-generated walls of text for discussion.
I'd find "hating labour replacement is good" a more compelling title.
It’s my opinion that societal rules should be derived from more fundamental virtues and notions of morality. AI is a capability, and it can be used in moral or immoral ways, but it’s more like a knife than an assault rifle. I don’t want AI forced down my throat by SF bro evangelists, but I also don’t want to see it banned as a useful technology. I wish people didn’t feel the need to adopt extreme positions on this topic and were capable of advancing more nuanced perspectives.
That website sucks. My thoughts, https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html.
> I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI.
Join Mastodon if this is what you're looking for. Your people are here!
Lots of people here saying “resistance is futile, so don’t resist.” I don’t care if it’s a losing “fight.” It’s not a single game. Truth is at stake, and we have to constantly fight any source of misinformation. There are times when LLMs are just fine, but they are seductive liars at worst, and we should never forget that.
> These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.”
Schmidt, by all means, is welcome to board the Good Ship Bubble-pop, but I think a lot of these grads are happy to instead watch from the viewing stand and wave goodbye.
I think his notion that AI is fait accompli is one of the (many) things being rejected.
I mean I think hating practices and efforts to exploit people is good. I think hating the adverse consequences of our inventive structures and lack of protections for basic human rights is good. But I think hating AI is pointing at the wrong subject for scorn. If you want positive change you can’t point at something that a lot of people are getting value out of (individuals as well as corporations) and say fuck your experience. It is also wrong for a billionaire to say fuck your future and deal with it, but that should mean hating on that person not the technology.
In the battle of shape rotators vs wordcells, the wordcells have far more to gain with AI. This journo will come around.
The biggest risk I see is the acceleration of homogenization of everything. We are going to be getting the same average (but cheap) slop everywhere even in the space of thought.
Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.
If AI is overblown and permanently flawed, there is nothing to worry about.
If AI becomes as powerful as some fear/hope, productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living. Costs for housing, healthcare, education will collapse, and there is nothing to worry about.
This article somehow tries to straddle both positions, that AI is fundamentally flawed and can never really accomplish useful work yet we should be angry and fearful.
> So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect.
What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.
I kinda get the hate now - all of social media is being awash with AI. I think maybe a better option is to have new social media which is restricted to humans and human produced content. Hard to enforce - but I am sure there are ways out there.
Or, maybe it's beginning of the end of social media. Might not be the worst idea.
It is what it is. Unless it threatens you. Then it's bad And then you prefer a narrative explaining why it's bad. And then you you propagate that narrative. And then that narrative infects the hive.
I don't hate AI. What I hate is while billionaires are promising us a utopian future where work is optional, the price of food, housing, and healthcare in the USA is through the roof. Many people my age (millennials) cannot afford to buy a house for themselves like prior generations were able to. The supposed riches being produced by AI are not being realized for the majority of Americans.
Lol. https://x.com/Marakath/status/2056341063342633336
The low-effort presentation perfectly matches the low-effort argument. Not a single second of human brainpower went into making this an it shows.
The HN crowd is going to hate this article, but I think it's an important discussion to have.
I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions.
This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should be in the bottom left, if the users want it to be in the top right, you put it there.
So consider this QA feedback for the technology. How do you make people not feel this way about it? Go do that.
It's a new disruptive technology that has been around for 3 years, people will just stop caring about this as a topic with time. Right now it's just trendy and zeitgeisty to shit on AI, eventually people will get bored and move on to something else.
No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.
You don't think the concerns have any validity? Sounds kind of hand wavey to me.
Lots of people on this site seem to be of the opinion that "AI is tech, you can't hate tech, only its use". That may be true, but I bet there'd be a whole lot less AI hate in society if:
(1) The proponents would just CHILL THE F OUT. If the technology is so fantastic, and the things you're building with it so amazing, then surely that will speak for itself in due time? Why do you need to sound like a cult leader on cocaine all the time? It reminds me of proponents of cryptocurrencies. My eyes and ears are bleeding – the more you talk, the more I wanna avoid your technology.
(2) The companies involved would respect IP.
(3) Regulators would empower ordinary people to have some redress when their lives are affected by AI-powered decisions. (The flawed EU AI Act is a decent start.)
(4) Regulators would ensure that actors in the AI space pay the cost of the negative externalities they impose on everyone.
(5) See 1. I'm so tired.
I'm somewhere on the pro-AI spectrum (great tool, let's use it *where we've evaluated it and it's the best tool for the job*), but... 100% agree. AI is a tool and outcomes should speak for themselves. I'm not impressed by what tools you used building your thing, and "AI" is not a feature or a benefit on its own.
As an ex-Googler I'll say this: The problem with Eric Schmidt isn't (always) the particulars of the things he says. It's the smug I-know-best "boomer" tone he delivers it with, and the crass obliviousness to his relative position of privilege and power.
Googlers/Xooglers will recall the "my various houses" quip at TGIF some years ago which memegen had a field day with.
Also his multiple events where he brought in Kissinger to have "fireside chats" for Googlers to watch/attend.
In fact his "father knows best" attitude ties directly in with his Kissinger fixation: this realpolitik "practical" vision of a world of inevitable powerful forces that you just have to learn to ride with .. which is just really a skin over "might makes right" under another name. Kissinger was explicitly so, and Schmidt admired him for it. Who cares about million horrifically killed in Cambodia if America is stronger for it?
It's also not honestly all that far from the "Effective Altruism" stuff, too: some powerful person comes up with a system of "pragmatic" and utilitarian justifications for the forces-that-already-are and makes it sound like a programme-for-betterment when it's really just a method for their own further enrichment and ego satisfaction.
Many of us legitimately boo this. Not because we're naive. Or stupid. But because our own sense of agency in the world and democratic ethics means we see agency for collectives of people which work along broad and participatory lines. And because we "naively" believe in justice and maybe a vague Kantian notion of ethics which tries to treat other humans as ends in themselves.
Y'know. So-called basic enlightenment, modernist values.
The "inevitable AI" stuff is just an icing on an overall cake. Standing in front of a bunch of young people who still have energy and spirit and the ability to shape the world and telling them that the best way to shape the future is to accept the form that it's already taking and ride-along and profit is next level douchebaggery, even from Schmidt.
(I also have to muse out loud that the specific vile form Google has taken in the second decade of its existence relates to this same mentality. The Google of the founder's letter at IPO sounds nothing like the ... thing ... that exists now, and this seems to have everything to do with just yielding to what-is instead of making what-can-be)
I understand it’s trendy to like/dislike things, but the widespread disgust we have seen since day one that has refused to abate should be a clear signal that whether it is the technology or the implementation, this rollout or whatever you want to call it is simply not working and people are not buying in in the way they had hoped.
Sorry for the irony, but the article is so long, i asked gpt to extract key points.
I think what'd be a stronger point is talking about centralization of the quality models. Modern AI tools are inherently centralized around huge shared infrastructure that gives enormous leverage (== capacity for abuse) to those owning the infrastructure. This is true even if you have strong competition among several players: each of them would converge on some business model and majority of users would not be bothered with long-term consequences if they receive very tangible short-term value.
The tooling is amazing, amount of productivity we unlock is fantastic and it's getting better by the day. But we need to watch out for collateral damage too. The future is somewhere there, but we can steer it towards being more or less hazardous.
I'm in film and highly exposed to the AI media and arts scene. I was very early to this hate, and I've experienced it personally by the metric boat load.
I'm fine with people not liking the technology, but the number of death threats, rude comments ("your mother didn't use the coat hanger well enough"), and literal stalking and doxxing I've received from some of these rabidly anti-AI people is appalling.
Whatever compels people to throw paint onto fine art or to block traffic for hours (including emergency vehicles and people just trying to get home) is the same bug a lot of these anti-AI griefers have.
I take great joys when luminaries in animation, illustration, game development, etc. announce that they're using AI tools and that they enjoy them. It's one of my sweetest pleasures after enduring the anti-AI outrage day in and day out for years.
It will take a few years for the multigenerational dark age to set in, but eventually you too will realize that they had a point.
Give me one anti-AI point that is ignored and/or not considered by "pro-AI" groups. I'm genuinely curious what it is.
I don’t know or particularly care what “anti-AI” thought leaders think. I don’t get my views from a camp.
The person above believes that in a year, or 3 years, or 10 years that they will remain an “operator” of the AI, and that their creativity will be amplified at the expense of the dumb luddites who will be left in the dust. Very common in tech, more disappointing in the arts. This is incorrect - we will in short order on the current trajectory see cognitive “dark factories” announced by hyperscalers or labs that produce an infinite stream of content, or software, or anything else and rapidly outcompete all human endeavor. To some this is Human Progress, to me it’s a dark age.
> I don't know
You said it.
> or particularly care what "anti-AI" thought leaders think. I don't get my views from a camp.
You said this: "they had a point." So, "I don't know or particularly care what "anti-AI" thought leaders think." is clearly a lie.
> I don't get my views from a camp.
But you speak on it? Gotcha.
> we will in short order on the current trajectory see cognitive "dark factories" announced by hyperscalers or labs that produce an infinite stream of content, or software, or anything else and rapidly outcompete all human endeavor.
To think yourself so pathetic and useless is sad.
Regardless, my request remains unfulfilled.
> To some this is Human Progress, to me it's a dark age.
Why do you welcome it?
I made a specific point, you didn’t like it. I’m not saying this from some sort of inferiority complex, it is literally a product category that is probably going to be announced in an OpenAI blog post in the next 12-24 months or at the next Google IO.
> why do you welcome this?
I… don’t…
I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.
Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.
My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.
The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.
The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.
Funny, growing up in the same world I'm coming to the exact opposite view - instead of unique poops and kids using limited tools in the most creative ways, we'll be getting rehashes of everything, looking mostly the same.
Yes, media production is not fun. And that's what we as humans value in art - the labor. Easy things don't impress us. And by sticking to the default, easy option, with barely any good reason to embrace the suck and learn the difficult tools and processes, I can only see decline.
I recently saw a funny video on TikTok of someone's proposal where the man was lunging weirdly far forward in order to present the ring.
The comment section was full of AI-generated edits to this image which exaggerated it or changed the setting in various creative ways - making his leg even longer, making his leg extend over a giant chasm, adding a bench behind him so he was performing a Bulgarian split squat. I giggled my way through the comments.
This form of humor - of being able to take human in-jokes and run with them - was not possible before artificial intelligence, and it was very funny! Memes are about to get so much more varied and funny as the effort requirement drops. We're nowhere near the effort ceiling in terms of making great memes, most people just simply do not have the time, resources or patience to actualise their mind's eye. It reminded me of exactly the kind of dumb joke and rehashing that made YTPs so special in the first place. I don't know if this is high art, but it is art, and I don't think YTPs were a particularly special form of comedy outside of our rose-tinted memories of childhood.
There's still the capacity for human labor and uniqueness to be embedded in AI-generated media - only the first breaths of low-quality algoslop lacked that. Expression and mimetics will change, and I think children born today will get to enjoy richer and funnier content than we did now that they are unshackled from GMod stop motion.
I don't think people value labor. Failed delayed games serve as examples.
I think it's more of the case that labor is correlated with uniqueness. And I think uniqueness is closer to what people are truly looking for in art.
I was president of a neighborhood association in an entertainment district in Dallas TX some years ago ( Deep Ellum ). The group worked really hard to get Deep Ellum out of nasty downturn and bring new business to the neighborhood. We got a lot of push back from people wanting Deep Ellum to return to the way it was in the late 90s. That was impossible, nothing will ever return to the WayItWas(tm). What I realized was a lot of those voices wanted their lives to be like it was in the late 90s, it had nothing to do with the neighborhood, it was them. I think many people who get the angriest are actually angry with themselves and not the issue du jour.
I think the most challenging part about these people is that it makes it so much harder to address real concerns with AI. I use it, but even I recognize that it needs to be considered carefully. I've been lucky in that most people who use AI that I've encountered have been willing to have great conversations on the pros and cons, the concerns, etc.
However, the moment som anti-AI person comes in, they immediately want to go scorched earth. I just wished they'd use even half this energy for something more impactful.
Being upset about blocked traffic for a protest but not upset that the rich are trying to kill off the labor market is the exact hilariously short sighted issue.
> kill off the labor market
This is such a comical take. There is going to be more demand, not less.
And hypothetically, if they did kill off the labor market, they did it in the wrong country. Everyone here owns guns.
Work will be fine.
> There is going to be more demand, not less.
Every time. Shake an AI optimist and you find an AI skeptic.
Everyone here owns guns? I think you might want to check your stats on that. There is going to be more demand for labor? How? Most of our economy right now is leveraged toward building data centers, that’s infinite growth? When it drops off you think the mass layoffs from the last half-decade wont continue? Do you think everyone is going to shift into painting? Please enlighten us with how the demand for labor will increase miraculously when all the implementers are aligned to decrease it.
Pass. Hate is never good.
There's a massive difference between the hatred of a CEO who is actively wanting to replace workers with what is essentially applied mathematics. AI seems more like easy reasoning for mass-layoffs & cost saving measures - and I rarely see articles that actually attempt to delve into this, instead seeking to just cancel out an entire technology.
This article doesn't hate AI - it hates capitalism - which is a completely different argument, the underlying system was broken already, AI has just excasperated some of the concerns. Things like awful SEO + low effort art were already happening beforehand, they're just become far easier.
And maybe a big problem is that AI = ChatGPT for the vast majority of people, including the person who wrote this artcle.
This article specifically cites things like the Commonwealth Prize - a prize that if you look at historically, wasn't exactly an example of brilliant prose. Surely that's far more of a inditement on the quality of judging for a prize if it can be won by poor writing.
A lot of the issues cited within this article just seem hollow, as they're issues that were pervasive before ChatGPT. AI isn't a panacea, but hating a technology because bad people use it feels reductionist.
I think a far bigger problem is that the majority of the population doesn't have good knowledge of AI or Software in general, including CEOs. I'd love to see journalists that have a good understanding of the actual technology.
You don't need to have a "good knowledge" of a misused technology to hate it when it's used by malevolent people. In the same way I don't need to be a virologist to know that is better to avoid the flu, I don't need to be a ML/AI expert to see its direct detrimental effects on people, communities, and the internet as a whole.
To use your analogy, I would say the "blanket ban" attitude would be more like wishing all viruses would just go away, or have never existed in the first place, which:
1) is an impossible and unproductive attitude, and
2) fails to recognize the important contribution to evolution, genetic diversity, and our immune systems that viruses introduced, not to mention the possible beneficial applications that could exist by understanding it.
Rejecting something without nuance makes you more vulnerable down the road because it prevents you from building an effective immunity. Engaging with it is the only productive way to mitigate its downsides and promote its benefits.
This is a far better explanation of my original point!
I'm absolutley not saying don't critise AI - but a robust criticism built up with understanding is a far sharper critique than a shallow rejection
But if someone creates and releases a new super-flu would you hate the flu or the person releasing it?
But given your example - I don't care much for the opinion of someone who believes flu is spread by sinful thoughts. It's good to have a base understanding of something that you'd like to speak about.
Are local LLM models also within this hate sphere? What about fully open source vision models? That's what makes an article like this feel hollow - it's just someone talking about vibes.
Or to quote the article:
" But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. "
That's why I think this article is a criticism of neoliberal capitalism rather than anything else. If it wasn't AI, it would be robotics, if it wasn't robotics, it would be Quantum. But i'd like to see better substance in articles on this site rather than just a dislike of robots.
Interesting what the disconnect is between what the vocal minority say about AI versus the vast majority who use it every day and do not care, such as coders and even regular people, as ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
I'm not sure what you mean because you didn't actually say it, but AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.
Source: https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...
> AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.
I don't think your source substantiates that.
From your source:
ICE
Somewhat negative: 9%
Very negative: 47%
AI
Somewhat negative: 24%
Very negative: 22%
Pew Research highlights:
* A majority of Americans consider the risk of AI to society high, a minority consider the benefits high
* A majority are more concerned than excited about AI
* Americans feel strongly that it’s important to be able to tell if pictures, videos or text were made by AI, but are not confident in their ability to do so
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
It seems almost universally reviled in creative fields, and the use I mostly see from ordinary people is more along the lines of natural language searches with Gemini.
AI fans are a bubble within the bubble of technology enthusiasts. It's hardly even universally liked among software engineers.
People hate the concept of AI taking their jobs and the top-down implementation of it at many companies. People love chatbots.
> People love chatbots
really?
And how much of this is due to the sloppers/grifters/conmen who hopped on to the AI train (same thing which happened to crypto?)
I feel like that is what the hate needs to be directed towards. Same thing with crypto. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with the technology itself. It’s that we are letting these scammers become the face of it
> There is fundamentally nothing wrong with the technology itself
It is when the foundation of the training set for the technology is predicated on stolen or exploited labor.
I personally know multiple completely clueless people who are ”founders building AI startup” on linkedin despite having zero business skills, zero technical skills, generally low IQ people, just trying to ride the hype wave to scam themselves into fortune. Of course their tactics involve posting total slop on linkedin, scamming freelancers, outsourcing everything to Pakistan, etc
This kind of behaviour would need to be name-and-shamed and preferably some sort of industry blacklist for bad behaviour.
Grifters and scammers gravitate towards certain technologies (and not others) and become the face of them because of something about those technologies. They are not picking random inventions and then adopting them to their scams.
Yeah, that figure of a billion comes from OpenAI directly, I wouldn't put too much stock in its validity or relevance.
It also doesn't qualify how or how often the users use the app. Online games like to do this too - "40M registered users!" when the number of players with an active subscription are a tiny fraction.
it's weekly active users https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
Even just in my family, the attitude has shifted significantly over the last year. Most of my family members are now critical of it and its effects.
Add to this that if ~6B people are using the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage), and ChatGPT only has almost a billion users (and is the largest player in the space), then I’d argue that LLM-users are in fact the minority.
I'm not so sure the silent majority is positive on AI, I think the opposite is more likely. Let's not forget that national poll where it was less popular than ICE -- I think it was 26% positive vs 46% negative.
My view is AI is becoming a poster-child for the increasing wealth disparity. When people are negative on AI it's not just the technology but the entire idea around it. It's simply cool to hate AI and that's going to be a hard hill to overcome, I think.
People are much less binary.
A lot of people can hate the existence and most of the consequences of something yet use it, sparingly or addictively
People can hate impact of the car centric societies and its impact on the climate yet use a car and find it convenient when not overused.
Social medias is another example. A lot of people agree for the most part it didn't make our society better yet they are addicted to doomscroll on instagram or tiktok.
People can use chatgpt to get a picture of them in Myasaki style yet hate that AI can be used to get rid of jobs. Even at developers level, some people might find AI useful in some areas but hate vibecoding and AI slop.
I think the vast majority of people just "don't care" for all possible topics.
One can use it even while hating it.
There’s only a billion people on earth? You’re right that is the vast majority of people.
This is the old "why do protesters against capitalism have iPhones" defense.
it is very amusing to read delusional takes like "everyone hates AI" when everyone I know who uses a computer for work is increasingly reliant on chatbots.
I don't know how many times do these people need to be taught that their little bubble of terminally online folx is not "everyone". twice is not enough, apparently.
"My bubble is more correct then the bubble of those I disagree with". There are objective data to refer to:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955
>5. A majority of teens use AI chatbots. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 (64%) say they ever use an AI chatbot, according to a fall 2025 survey.
>6. A growing share of U.S. workers say at least some of their work is done with AI. That share has risen from 16% in 2024 to 21% in a September 2025 survey.
>8. Younger adults are more likely than older Americans to be aware of and use AI.
so, uh, thanks for proving my point?
also, I don't live in the US (thank G-d!), and we don't have that particular kulturkampf here. it is as foreign to us as your plastic straw debates.
> twice is not enough, apparently.
what is this a reference to?
a certain politician that "everyone" hates.
Opinion polling of the public about AI paints a very unfavorable picture, so it's not delusional. People use it but they fear it's going to take their livelihood. At the very least it has injected a significant amount of uncertainty into people's lives.