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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some 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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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'.
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
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.
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".
"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?
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?
> "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?
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 opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been.
I think what you're missing is that AI shows, more 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).
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.
...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.
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. 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'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.
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 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.
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.
At least in America, The 2024 (63%) and 2020 (66%) elections had the highest turnout since 2004. Political violence has been steadily increasing here since 2000. It's gotten to the point there are multiple assassination attempts on the President per year.
Moreover there was a spat of warehouse arsons earlier in the year. So for me, I would not be so confident in saying nobody is going to be burning anything.
These anti AI westerners won't burn down the datacenters in China. These westerns will be subjugated to a lower quality of life as Asia in general rises as they embrace tech and use the advantages for their own. The same with the tech companies the westerners try to neuter, they'll pass the advantages to giant Chinese conglomerates instead
This is the lifecycle of every civilization. Reach dominance and then when life becomes easy, forget about what it takes to stay at the top. This makes room for the next civilization.
If you burned down every data center in the world, AI would still not go away. It's just a computer program. You can run it on your laptop. You can't burn down an idea.
Not too many people have a problem with AI technologies conceptually, and arguing like they do is ignoring the real criticism in favor of semantics. People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used. Burning data centers would radically change the economics of AI.
> People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used.
Those economics are also changing very quickly, with free local AI becoming increasingly dominant for many everyday uses and even starting to become relevant for the enterprise ones.
How many devs would be able to keep working if GitHub disappeared tomorrow?
You can do inference on SOME laptops, but the current shape of GenAI need massive data centers to be used at scale.
Also the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.
The nice thing about local AI is that it really can run anywhere, you just need enough storage space for the weights and the context. It just gets slower if you run it on potato-level hardware.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"?
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
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 use 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.
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.
I don't hate AI, but the marketing around it could use more care: "this model can't be released, no no nooo too dangerous!" yawn. Just put the model in the bag bro.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
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.
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.
The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
"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.
The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create?
That latter seems to have aged quite well.
Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
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.
It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
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.
Huh? In what universe did that happen?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Can you? Maybe if you can afford an AI powered social media bot farm. What a great technology.
Yes there is
It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
They're saying that your contribution is negative. Even if their contribution is zero, zero is still better than negative.
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?
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?
* 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?
Do you expect everyone else to become 'actual iron man'?
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.
I think what you're missing is that AI shows, more than most other technologies, the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people. Not everyone wants to get ahead that way.
What happens to everyone else?
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.
Nobody knows where it works.
> not developers get started putting things together using claudecode
This is where it definitely does not work.
A large percentage of code being written today is AI generated. If none of it worked it wouldn’t be so.
> This is where it definitely does not work.
The person said it’s clearly working for their friends’ purposes. That means it works.
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.
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.
https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
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.
Agreed.
20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products
what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies
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.
Moreover there was a spat of warehouse arsons earlier in the year. So for me, I would not be so confident in saying nobody is going to be burning anything.
I know you're being facetious, but you're going to need a lot of molotov cocktail to burn them down.
Those economics are also changing very quickly, with free local AI becoming increasingly dominant for many everyday uses and even starting to become relevant for the enterprise ones.
Also the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.
Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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."
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.
https://xkcd.com/1170/
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.
1. Have sex
2. Break things
3. Play videogames
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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 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 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.
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...
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.
Join Mastodon if this is what you're looking for. Your people are here!
Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.
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.
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.
Source: https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...
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%
* 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.
really?
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
It is when the foundation of the training set for the technology is predicated on stolen or exploited labor.
This kind of behaviour would need to be name-and-shamed and preferably some sort of industry blacklist for bad behaviour.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955
>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 use as your plastic straw debates.
what is this a reference to?
What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.
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.
No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.
(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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Every time. Shake an AI optimist and you find an AI skeptic.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.