Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better.
AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere.
If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better.
I have tried memorisation systems like Anki, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing consolidates my knowledge better than writing the actual concept down with pen and paper.
I've done 35,000+ Anki card reviews over the years, and I strongly suspect that most of the obvious and encouraged ways of using Anki are counterproductive. (Full disclosure: The following thoughts are heavily influenced by using Anki for language learning, and may not fully generalize to subjects like medicine.)
- Use Anki as an "exposure amplifier", not a database of raw facts to memorize. Think "tampering with the relative frequency of input to your brain", not "I will memorize every fact."
- Automate card creation as a much as possible. This will almost always require custom tooling. Card creation is part of the learning process, but you still want to automate everything you can possibly automate. Imagine tools to turn ebook highlights into cards, or to turn entire movies worth of subtitles into listening cards.
- Delete cards ruthlessly. If a card makes you say "Ugh", just delete it. If you're automating as much of card creation as possible, and if you're treating Anki as an "exposure amplifier", then deleting cards is cheap. And a significant amount of review pain comes from a small minority of the cards. Cull them, and reviews start to feel like popping bubblewrap, and not like getting a root canal.
- Prioritize large context and small active recall. For language learning, you might capture several sentences of context from a book or web page you're reading. Read or ignore the context depending on your mood. The active recall portion of a card significantly boosts how much you retain. But oddly, it seems OK to make the active recall portion really small. Try hiding half a word, or a single preposition in a phrase. For passive cards, just boldface an interesting expression in context, and mark the card as passed if you mostly understand it in that context.
- Introduce new cards slowly. Total review burden will stabilize around 5-6 times the number of new cards you learn a day. So 10 cards is a good default, and 20 is a significant commitment.
- The critical window seems to happen around 20-30 days after you introduce a card. This is when either your memory magically "consolidates" somehow (and formerly challenging cards suddenly become blindly obvious), or when a card enters repeated failure territory (and should thus be deleted ruthlessly). You could probably do just fine if you auto-suspended any card that you successfully recalled after a 20- or 30-day gap.
Also, this kind of tooling is the sort of thing you could just vibe code these days. If you do, make the "Delete" button really big.
For the recall part of education, the book's exercise, or simply covering up the relevant part with hand and forcing a recall, writing about what you learned, teaching someone else - all work great, and the flow is much more natural.
Notes on pen and paper do help retention, but there are pros and cons. I know people who write on touchscreens or take photos of handwritten notes for portability to get the best of both.
One to one teaching and self teaching are much better than a good teacher in a class though.
Technology can be very useful - research, resources, ebooks, visualisations, interactivity etc.
The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss
No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)
What AI has done to my job as a software developer is make my personal output higher while taking away almost every ounce of enjoyment, interest, and passion I had for the job. Overnight I went from loving my job to hating my job as much as everybody I know outside of tech hates their jobs.
I won't even get into what it has done to the already-awful experience of working with low-quality contractors.
I found it meant I could produce loads and loads of code I can't mentally keep track of, and therefore have no hope of understanding without ........ a LLM.
Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
That probably is exactly what is being referred to: the combination of low quality contractors who have access to AI means even more slop to wade through.
If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
I don't love this either, but at least it's a short-term economic quirk. At some point fabs will figure out what the long-term demand looks like and scale up production accordingly.
Fabs take a long time to build. The price will come down once the new fabs come on line. It’s expensive because there isn’t enough of it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s supply and demand. We’ve see this boom and bust cycle again and again.
This cycle might need more competitors, not only more fabs. It's in the interest of three companies to keep supply constrained to raise prices, and they act as a cartel so until the cartel breaks or a competitor grows large enough to have fabs that can make a dent in the demand we will keep seeing high prices.
For a relevant competitor to show up takes much longer than building a fab (which is already a long enough endeavour).
I'm not that hopeful the price for RAM and other PC parts will come down in any meaningful way for the next 3-5 years.
Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.
> To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.
We are not the courts. The most reasonable and truth based position is operating with a fuzzy impression that most businesses are substantially more dodgy than their carefully manufactured PR releases are meant to portray themselves as.
And in this case, that includes acknowledging that a literal criminal conspiracy in well within the realm of possibility.
It could be a medium/long term political quirk, because as long as RAM and GPU prices stay high the BigCos maintain a monopoly on non-trivial AI compute, and personal AI can't happen.
I still can't work out if data centre mania is an irrational faddy bandwagon event or a covert socio-political monopolisation strategy.
Or rather creditors scrapping AI datacenters once all the money burning "AI labs" are finally insolvent & repurposong the hardware into something actually useful for people, possibly on chip level with custom PCBs.
That’s honestly plausible with RAM and SSDs, the same kits of RAM I spent around $50 on years ago were being scalped for $500+ because there was absolutely no supply.
A normal RAM kit went up a lot but it's still more like 6x. SSD, more like 2.5-3x.
But what percent of your PC price is RAM? When it was cheap it was probably less than 10%. I assume a long-planned upgrade means a mostly new build, and it's a pretty rare setup where that has gone up more than 50-100%. If this long-planned upgrade is just new RAM then the price could skyrocket, but it's still not that much of the overall build.
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
I’m not sure I was go quite as far. But there are certainly
Makes my life better: LLM chat subscription
Makes my life worse: “AI” features that don’t work replacing perfectly good non “AI” features (notably Google Maps and LinkedIn job board). I don’t want fuzzy AI filters, I want concrete filters that let me drill down and browse a result list.
I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of human-generated comments. I hate that many students are now using LLMs to do all of their homework, resulting in a significant part of the next generation being incompetent at basic scholarly tasks and unprepared for more serious work. I hate that lawyers are using LLMs to write legal briefs, not bothering to check that their cited cases say something exactly the opposite of what their briefs say. I hate that government officials are using LLMs to write public statements that get basic facts wrong. I hate that graphic designers are losing their jobs because their bosses would rather "just use AI, it's cheaper". I hate that Google Search results are now overwhelmed with LLM-generated slop which ranges from dubious to outright wrong, and it's now much more difficult than it used to be to find the information I'm looking for on the open web. I hate that researchers are now publishing LLM slop in journal articles, making it significantly harder to tell the difference between careful scholarship and someone lazily phoning it in. I hate that friends and neighbors now ask ChatGPT as their first source of information about any topic and it frequently tells them something completely misleading or wrong, but they don't bother double checking.
Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system).
> Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it
Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?
I love using AI. Getting my crazy ideas turn into software has never been easier. I like to architect software, not the code itself. The code has always been the means to my ends. I also love learning complicated concepts, from academics, math, physics, to art, philosophy, religion. It's wonderful to translate knowledge that is already out there but hard to understand somehow, because you can ask about it over and over and over and in the way you understand about things. Like a professor who understands you and never gets tired about silly questions. I don't know, it's just amazing at so many things. Of course, it's also pretty important to know how to use it, and when. I would never use it to replace my speech when speaking to someone else. That's bad. I would not like other people to do that to me either. Otherwise, why would I want to talk with that somebody when I can just ask an AI instead. We can love human beings and AI, and be critic of both at the same time.
Have you ever wondered how ridiculous it would be to say you love cars and then not have a clue about how it works? As in, "I've built a wonderful car", but have no idea how the engine or any of the components work.
Replace "car" with "application" or "software", and that's what you're doing. Would you get in a car "built" by someone who knows nothing about cars?
This doesn't sound like someone who is uninterested in understanding software though, everything they said talks about how they like being able to learn from it. They didn't say anything about making slop or replacing the need for knowledge
Have you ever asked an expert in these areas to evaluate your knowledge? My experience is that people using ai to learn think they are learning but really aren’t.
Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring.
For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV.
Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?
It's that I asked for an SVG of a circle and it created a beautiful gradient filled animated technical diagram. I wanted something closer to <svg><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40"/></svg>
Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever.
Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
> I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
Yea that's why I started my comment with "it depends on the person", in response to you asking what's not fun about having AIs do what you tell them. For many, coercing a tool to do something you can likely do yourself better isn't ideal, and at least for me, is just inefficient use of time (in the long run) and a headache. It also zaps the fun out of any task since now you move from searching for a good solution using your priors, to now validating that the LLM has a solution that works, even if it's not optimal. The searching for a good solution is for some, the fun part, which is eliminated by agentic coding, since that search inherently relies on you writing code and seeing what works IMO. The coding is an essential part of the thinking here. An analogy would be doing a math problem by hand versus reading the solution in a textbook. I can give concrete examples if you'd like.
For your SVG examples, I have used AI for a similar use case, the construction of 3D scenes for robotics via a text prompt and an asset catalog. I wish I could get the same richness as your SVG examples, the LLMs fail too hard on all 3D tasks given, even after spending a high amount of engineering effort on a suitable harness + tools. Also like your SVG example, it often doesn't give a realistic, or even nice output, and coercing it to do so, likely takes longer than just creating the image/3D scene yourself.
So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience.
Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop.
It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.
I do think this is true but I think it also reflects negatively on the general populace that this new technology is evaluated in terms of the negative effects on their consumption pattens
Transformer models solved the Protein Folding problem in totality but they are categorically "bad" because more of the videos in my feed are low-quality or the advertisement for a cheeseburger looks fake
It's predictable but I do think the entire technology is being collectively processed through the lens of media consumption which is sort of tip of the iceberg of what it does and honestly the least important dimension of it
Did they? From what I heard, transformer models gave scientists better starting points for computational methods, but we're still far from solving the protein folding problem.
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model.
You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say.
You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened.
You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot.
You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder.
Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native.
You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable.
You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing.
You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them.
On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop.
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Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?"
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This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.
as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on.
the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong (eg, race), read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there (I am anemic), then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)). they may have also had some other diagnoses but i think maybe i am supposed to be bound by the hipaa the ai was ignoring. pretty bad.
> as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on.
Yep, I just went from the top of my head and I left a lot of other negative experiences out. I think a lot of people are moving to burner accounts or otherwise choosing to not interact under their real identities - it's just too easy to spin up automated harassment now.
> the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong, read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there, then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)).
Another fun one: a friend of mine said he "was driving a car to Sedona" during a phone call describing a neck injury several months ago. His last two follow up appointments have both had a note to "follow up on the carcinoma". Now that it's in the context, it seems impossible to get LLMs to ignore it, because "carcinoma" is an important word. A human would not have this problem.
I agree that sucks, though if the LLMs aren't following him with it, that might be beneficial if annoying; physicians are more likely to remember to follow up on that diagnosis than an upper spinal issue.
then again. during covid I had the same small set of ads show up on youtube over and over so much while I was working that I had to move, wipe everything, get a new laptop and nic cards, and create new email addresses to avoid those keywords which I never looked up in the first place. so yes, that following him would suck. if he or anyone he knows works near AI, take my advice and make sure it is corrected. it SUCKS.
aye. at the same time it is harder to get an email account not linked to your real identity in some way (most services want sms; even if you pay for something, your gps is there). i mean, some people abuse things. that doesn't mean i or you should be silenced or treated like dirt. even if it does not fit a norm, it is still better than being hunted to be silenced. this is what i have witnessed ai being used for, and it is getting worse with kids.
people forget people from different stratas use tech in different ways. the way a middle class kid picks on another kid and a lower or upper class one does is different, just as the way they use tech to do so varies.
most of these complaints aren't because of AI though, managers have always looked to make staff redundant when there is a cheaper alternative regardless of quality, politicians giving tax breaks to giant corporations? was always happening before AI came along
You are perfectly welcome to blame it on capitalism, and you're not entirely wrong, but before LLMs machines couldn't fill these roles at all - so LLMs are the enabling technology here that is being used to justify the cuts.
sure but capitalism is ultimately the driving force to making more profit at the expense of making things ultimately shittier? capitalism has inherently always done this, this is not a new concept, I don't understand why everyone acts like it's so different when it comes to AI. AI is a tool that's useful for some things, not so good at other things.
Again - we’re on a discussion thread about why people don’t like AI right now.
Yes, the root problem is generally enshittification and capitalism, but AI is the tool that is being used the most for this enshittification now, so it is completely understandable that people are pissed off at AI.
In a vacuum, LLMs and AI are cool. In practice, in the real world today, they are being used to make most peoples lives worse, while funneling a ton of money to ~25 people.
i think it is more correct to call it hypercapitalism at this point (and a particularly sociopathic variety of it); as a "response", the "other side" has created their own bizarre oppositional belief system. neither are healthy, both lead to bad things.
The "obvious" one: supply chain chaos due to everyone and their dog spending as much as possible for AI boxen
Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...)
I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis)
A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world.
There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war.
And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
> And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
Pictures in menus just vaguely resembling the actual dish. Dunno what value the authors think a made up picture provides except for tourist traps. Like, I wont trust your menu twice.
I didn't anticipate McDonalds menu pictures becoming in the authentic and informative range of menus.
Yeah most normies I know who dislike it just generally are not interested in it or think it is dumb and are annoyed by hearing about it so much
And the people who actively hate it almost always relate it to a broader pre-existing worldview about the downfall of society, the climate being destroyed, financial markets being a ponzi, oligarchy having too much power etc
The AI slop that's everywhere is making it worse. Even if someone doesn't care about AI, their feeds (YT, Instagram, LinkedIn) is now filled with AI slop
IME people actually adore the videos of people eating a dripping and crunchy pulav (soft and dry rice dish) and it filling the stomach in 3 swallows, completely unchewed.
There is nothing about using the most popular social media platforms in the world that implies someone doesn't have an active and healthy social life. If you think it does, you may be projecting.
Clearly there are people who enjoy the slop though, otherwise it would simply get no engagement and then get hidden by the algo like 99.99% of YT videos
You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education.
We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.
We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer important; some people may still study, but it'll be a hobby, and the people who participate in the intelligence revolution (rather than being crushed by it) will no longer need to think.
This is the quality of thought that I come to HN to experience because I have a hard time finding it in other places.
The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful.
The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking...
I love it.
I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be.
This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
> We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.
The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.
You can say that, but check how many people are going to the gym regularly, let alone training up to the standard of strength of an average manual laborer from before the industrial revolution.
If AI fills its promise, some people will be telling others they should think more, but people will get lazy.
What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society.
The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.
Don't forget the completely unaccountable megacorps who are increasingly invading our day-to-day lives, and the politicians whose main priority seems to be competing for their bribes.
The depressing part isn't that we are facing hard challenges and declining as a society. The depressing part is that it is a deliberate action.
Yes, we should not forget this. The West is not worried about some vague inanimate "something" around the corner threatening to make things worse. We are worried about people deliberately doing this.
AI slop, omnipresent ads, job loss, fake reviews, income inequality, climate collapse, these are not natural phenomenon or amorphous "things" lurking in the shadows. They are deliberately being imposed on us by actual people that you could point to if you could get close enough to them.
It's worth noting that China has seen decades of steady development, and has avoided the boom/bust cycles we see happening in the west. While we've lived through dotCom bubble, the 2008 crash, covid, and now the looming AI bubble, China has just seen steady progress without the working majority getting screwed every decade like clockwork. While future can always bring something unexpected, it is possible to have a resilient system that adapts to the problems as they surface.
The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated.
China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...
I think it's more about institutional trust than the technology itself. AI could be a great common good in the west, but look at the companies and politicians controlling its development. The notion that trump/elon/altman/zuck/etc would choose to deploy this in a way that helps the general good at the expensive of massively enriching themselves as much as possible is laughable to most people.
Of course this is going to be deployed in the most exploitative way possible. When have these people ever done differently? Elon just spent most of last year gleefully destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sure he'll get right on developing a model to solve world hunger next...
Its definitely a hype phase and yes a lot of usage is questionable at the moment. To me the scary part is that some of the impacts/decisions would take years if not decades to be measurable and its possible that its a lost battle by then.
Most people I know that hate AI have faulty versions (1 year behind the frontier) pushed on them at their jobs. People who are free to experiment with frontier models capabilities at their own pace mostly love it or at least are impressed by its capability.
This sounds like some variation of correlation // causation. The people that already like working with (or are addicted to) LLMs would look to try the frontier models on their own time.
I wouldn't say so. I recently gifted ZCode with a sub to a non-programmer that didn't have much contact with AI and not really any truly unique positive one (only free tier), and wasn't an enthusiast.
In few days she created an already useful app for writing for herself with zero assistance from me. And she's delighted with the process, even seeing its flaws (as mucb as non-programmer can see them).
The thing is, she's very intelligent, even though only mildly technical. She's very communicative and thoughtful, so she finds "talking" to AI interesting psychologically (while being fully aware AI doesn't have feelings or consciousness). And she has no history of AI getting pushed on her in any context.
Compare to my other friend that's ecologically conscious amateur artist. Initially she was interested in using it in AI generated art, but it wasn't all that good (amd steerable) back then. Then her work started pushing it. With their CEO saying things to the tune of "do or die" and people losing their jobs regardless. And the thing they were pushing was some crappy version of Copilot, that she gave a chance but it was more burden than help at her job most of the times. She pretty much hates AI now and as for the art, she sees it getting better but decides that what's attractive for her in art is the physical process of drawing and tools associated. AI tools don't give her the kind of joy she seeks.
Of course this is just a bunch of anecdotes. But I'd be surprised if pushing bad AI on people with additional stressful factors wouldn't cause them to like it less and hate it more.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim about most people hating AI because it’s making their life worse? Or are you simply spewing opinion as fact because of your own anecdotal experience? It’s okay to have an opinion on something, but don’t lie and claim it as truth.
Absence of like is quite far from hate. I expect most people feel about it the way they do about most tools: mostly they have better things to think about
I think the thing people can't face is that it makes our lives worse not because it's worse than us.
It makes our lives worse because it is better. It is superior. And our lives are worse because it is actively replacing us and we are actively trying to keep up with it.
Currently: generating hype at a lower cost without emotion. Is the product itself better? Often no. But salaries have a large weight in the consideration, and hype corroborates the choice.
If the hype wasn't real why have people stopped coding by hand? People like you are delusional. The hype is real.
Now, that being said there is something to be said about AI making your life easier. It's not making your life easier. It's upping your output by 10x but it's also upping the demand for output by 10x.
It's made my life way better. I love it, it's incredible boost on my ability to learn and produce.
Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.
Remember when people said open-sourcing GPT2 would cause world destruction? They keep saying this with every new model release? And it keeps not happening? Hmm.
This is all FUD. All evidence suggests more AI is better, and all claims to the contrary keep being proven wrong, and all predictions of doom keep refusing to manifest.
I have and, Microsoft aside, it all works great. Don't need search engines anymore, AI does all my research now and produces better information anyway.
Are you living with your head under a rock. AI has absolutely made my life worse, and is set to do so further. I know very few people who are seriously enthusiastic about it.
"All evidence suggests more AI is better" is ignoring an awful lot of the evidence, and the doom is already happening all around you and you just can't see it.
Really don't understand this sentiment. Whatever you imagine you can now build; whatever you wish to learn you can learn; all for virtually nothing. How does that make life worse?
I think pessimism clouds your judgment and AI is the scapegoat. Doomerism is just yet another dogmatic religion predicting ends times, with all the usual associated dogma.
What you imagine is what you manifest. Better to be optimistic and wrong then pessimistic and right.
Better to envision a positive future and help make it happen; ignore the doomers who can only envision destruction, as that is all they are capable of.
fwiw I enjoy AI. but it is extraordinarily dangerous and does not belong in the hands of most people, and definitely not in the hands of most companies. it is a munition.
Everyone I know loves AI. It is actively making their lives better. All kinds of people, all kind of ages - universally love it and use it every day for all kind of stuff (shopping, health, learning, home improvement, etc, etc).
The people I know who like it the most are at least aware of a lot of the problems with it. I’m surprised everyone in your friend group is uncritically enamored by it.
I see it ruining interactions at work. There's a lot of meat-proxy-ism going on, where people copy-and-paste back and forth between AI.
It's filling the Internet with trash. Look around anywhere: Reddit, YouTube, individual blogs, it doesn't matter. You'll find generative garbage as far as the eye can see. Not all generative content is bad, but a lot of it is outright crap.
It can be a productive tool though. Still, I don't find it enjoyable to use. If you like the "journey" of programming (tinkering, "figuring things out", problem solving), you won't like AI as much. It removes the fun part. If you like the "destination" (the end result of building a thing), you'll love it.
You must live in a bubble; 16% of Americans think AI is making their lives better, the remainder are evenly split between not knowing and disliking it.
It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass.
It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose.
We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away.
US views on AI are interesting. There is actually some nuance in the answers people give :
"50% say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021.
10% are more excited than concerned.
38% say they’re equally excited and concerned."
I'm not American, but most people I know who are not in tech just use ChatGPT like they'd use Google but better e.g. what bird is this, what's a good word for X or Y, what's the weather, what was that movie with Z. Edit this meme for me, make this photo not have the guy in the back, how do I grow chillies, etc.
Now if you ask them if AI is making their lives better, they might say they don't know.
What country/region of country (if US) do you live in? Everyone I know absolutely hates it and hates the direction things are going. I'm pulling from a wide sample here too -- I have a lot of friends who work blue collar jobs that hate it just as much as my tech worker friends. However I will say I'm in my late 20s and it seems like my age group and younger are more anti-AI than any other age bracket.
Relatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days.
I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions. The "AI overview" you see on search results, or that summarizes your iPhone notifications, is ... not as advanced as frontier models, and I think it negatively affects people's view of the technology.
I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
I agree with authors that write about alignment issues ("please take this test", "ok i'll hack the bazel remote cache, turn it into a message board, and coordinate with other agents to steal the answers from Hugging Face"; this really is the Paperclip Maximizer with today's technology) and I do think we should be addressing that. But this never seems to be the objection, it's always stuff from 2022 like "it hallucinates". I don't get it, but I'm probably in too deep to see what it looks like from the outside.
> But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions....
> I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.
Yes, data centers "existed forever," but compared to a hyper-scalar AI datacenter; they were small, used far less electricity, and their generators were used for backup, not primary power.
Yes, there were computer programs that could "mess up your life," but they were narrow in function so not such an existential threat. I'm sure you understand the difference between a phone tree and Claude Mythos.
And maybe develop a little empathy? You said "people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many." Why is that? Do you think part of that might be that people have gotten the chair kicked out from under them. And along comes AI, which has been promised to be a bigger chair-kicker than anyone's ever seen?
> I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
Oh, but why would people be so "illogical" to be mad at such a thing as AI? It's so hard to understand, right? [Insert Upton Sinclair quote here]
I don't think AI is driving up food and housing and fuel prices. I really don't think AI is a chair-kicker yet. To me, the biggest threat to jobs that AI offers is in the field of software engineering, and yet, it's not the software engineers that are really feeling the pain right now.
Wars in Iran, tariffs, Medicaid cuts, SNAP benefit cuts, rising insurance costs, etc. are what are causing average folks pain, and that is completely unrelated to AI.
> Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.
But that's the core problem of AI fanatics, isn't it. They cannot comprehend how people who saw and used the same thing they did, and came away with "this smells like fancy autocomplete" instead of "this is genuine intelligence!"
But nobody who uses Fable and Sol all day is saying that it's fancy autocomplete. Also, nobody is saying it's genuine intelligence.
As always, the Internet fails to find the middle ground. Frontier models are really useful software engineering tools, not AGI, and not tab completion. To me it feels a lot like using a new programming language, like going from assembly to a Lisp machine or something like that.
> I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect.
i can't not read this as "you didn't complain when we did the first bad thing, so you're wrong to complain when we do the next bad thing". that's an argument i hear presented way too often today, and it's just so dishonest.
I think you might be slightly "too deep" in the sense that you mostly encounter AI when someone has deliberately chosen an expensive, capable model to solve a real problem
This is a very relatable comment. I think it's demoralizing to see common objections to AI, it feels to me like we failed and haven't done our communication job. I'm always temped to go, "Yes, but there's worse!"
I know far too many AI haters myself, and even though I understand many of their concerns, there are many things I really struggle to agree with. I entered the workforce with AI already in my hands, and in my experience, the benefit is enormous. I don’t feel that it has weakened my way of thinking. My mind works very well, and AI often helps me bring my creativity, logic, and ideas to life that would otherwise require much more time to develop.I believe AI is now one of the driving forces of modern industry, and it is not going away. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can focus on the issue that really matters: how we decide to use it.In the end, it is a tool. It can be used in a mediocre way, by delegating everything to it, or it can amplify what we know how to do, help us create, reason, and push ourselves further. It is also up to the user to decide what kind of relationship they want to have with this tool. And that is exactly why, even though I don’t share all of your concerns about AI, I strongly support your decision to return to the industry and try to build a different way of using it. I think we also need people who are critical of AI but still choose to work with it and contribute to giving it a better direction.
I'm curious what bad experience is regular people have with AI. For me it basically makes everything better. I use it probably a hundred times a day and struggle to think about interaction where I walk away wishing it It wasn't involved.
I listen to AI generated audiobooks on the way to work. It makes my job easier and find data or papers or emails for me. On the way home I can have a Back in forth conversation about history. At home at helps me with my personal projects or come up with recipes to make dinner. How are regular people using it that is so awful?
A lot of people are spun up about it, but it almost always seems to be about distant concerns, not their personal experience.
We are all tech people here, but the regular people meet AI when they try to take a picture with their phone and Gemini pops up instead, because a button has been repurposed to do that.
Or simply calling an energy provider to clarify something makes them talk to a robot voice until enough effort and words have passed so a human finally comes around.
These are very shallow and small things where it already creeps in and the fun part is that you cannot blame the AI for it, but what we do with it.
If you use AI unironically, hallucinations can make you go down a wrong path and cost you time. Something that used to be a quick google search leads you to AI generated sites making stuff up, so even when you talk to AI directly, you practically get the same-y or slightly different answer.
Reading documents starts to become a challenge as well. Bad translations or made up stuff can waste your time as well.
Then you just want to take a walk to the river and the river has the lowest water level since forever (rhine river) and you think to yourself, hmm, this can't be right.
Like what do you save all of this time and effort for? Is it truly balanced and sane what we are doing right now?
Doesn't all the time saving show detrimental effects in areas we cannot point at currently because of plausible deniability or wishful thinking?
Thanks for the candid response. Do you think that many of these examples were issues before, but now have become associated with AI?
I can relate to many of them, but they seem to predate AI for me.
I feel like Google search has been nearly useless for several years now, flooded with fake advertising results, even without AI. I'm happy that AI gives me an alternative to Google search, which is one of my top use cases.
I remember spending hours navigating annoying automated phone menus or on hold 10 years ago. Perhaps the same frustration exists, but includes AI is the face of the current embodiment.
I also agree AI can give bad advice, but the same was true for Reddit or a lazy Store employee or house contractor.
AI will not begin to benefit student learning unless educators pivot into a strict bifurcation pattern around access.
For example, alternating weeks with and without the permission to use AI assistance. This is also the latent solution for corporate de-skilling that no one seems to be talking about yet.
However, it won't happen (in both cases) because we're too early. Domain experts like the OP are still relinquishing their expertise to unlock productivity gains. Once that bottoms out there will be no longer be demand for people like OP to betray their peer groups.
Learning with AI assistance be as frictionless and productive as I suppose it can, but de-skilling and job consolidation (role expansion) will continue.
I agree with most of the diagnosis but I am less convinced that better UX around AI solves the underlying problem. Every product starts out saying "human in the loop" and "augment, don't replace" but the economic incentive is almost always to remove more of the human over time…
Ordinary people were generally marvelous of the electric motor because it was obvious how it would make life better. Their great grandchildren, with the same common sense, are extremely cynical about LLMs and other knowledge work robots. What changed?
The electric motor was accepted only because horses and mules couldn’t protest. Every technological advancement throughout history that displaces humans has had massive pushback. AI is no different.
You should look up the history of what actually happened with the Luddites. They weren't opposed to the machines (many were even machine operators!), they were opposed to the manufacturers circumventing labour rights. Turns out people don't like routinely seeing 12-year-old children getting scalped by a weaving machine!
They targeted the machines because it was the most convenient way to sabotage a factory, not because they hated the machine itself.
Luddites are generally made fun of because they somehow believed that destroying property was an effective way of protest, instead of providing others with an excuse to arrest them.
Labor rights did not exist at the time (1768-1817), so nobody would need to circumvent them, either. This was when efforts were made to create them. And the Luddites made a negative contribution.
What actaully happened to the luddites is they completely failed in their goal to slow down the industrial revolution and force business owners to pay their cartel.
Not all new technology is made equal and can't be compared as such. The electric motor was a new technology we now know did indeed pan out, but there are a string of others which never did and are forgotten about when talking about this. More recently, you could point to NFT's and crypto, both of which people also compared to things like the electric motor.
Whether or not LLM's become an electric motor or an NFT, or something in between, only time will tell
I disagree that ordinary people marveled at electric motors and saw their potential. Electric motors were seen as a toy for decades following their invention in 1834, and required industry to completely re-design its approach before they were used in more than 5% of factories. Even then the big shift to electric from steam in industry - almost a century later - was more due to economic necessity than better technology: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40673694
I think the same cycle is playing out with LLMs - the general public is somewhere between indifferent and actively hostile to them, as they have been with every new technology. Reconfiguring businesses and society to use them to their full potential - and benefits to society - will take years, if not decades.
Electric motors empower you, and are available to almost anyone. Trillion-dollar AI firms sitting like a dragon's hoard of state-of-the art models and hardware disempower you.
That's the difference.
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People who were disempowered by motors weren't exactly thrilled about them, either, but they were a minority underclass.
> AI is much more available to people than motors of any kind
Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, automobiles of all shapes and sizes (private and shared), power tools are all examples of electric motors that you own and can do useful things with.
What electric motors do is give you power over your environment.
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You don't own Gemini. You are allowed to use Gemini as long as your economic value to Google exceeds the cost of the electricity to run it.
Gemini was a bad choice of example but how would open-weights model one can self-host on their local device be different than the electric motor in your line of thinking
The home appliances you list all cost money; Gemini (or ChatGPT, etc.) are all available for free, even on devices you already owned before they were even invented. They could not be any cheaper.
> You don't own Gemini.
That distinction is academic here -- just as a car that I rent instead of owning offers me no difference in "power". I don't care at all who owns the thing that answers my "What is autorotation?" question about a clip I just saw on Reddit.
What a clever question! You are absolutely right to be curious about that. Autorotation is a critical part of daily life, after all. If you would like me to expand on this, please drink another Google Gemini - Powered By Red Bull: It Gives You Wings! verification can.
Motors, electric or otherwise, made it so you can jump in a car, or a bus and drive you and your friends to the movies or on a holiday and go out and see the world. LLMs make it so people end up like delusional zombies talking to a screen.
Nothing has changed about people, they had common sense then and they have common sense now and they recognize when you try to sell them something useful that makes the physical world and their social situation better and when you want to sell them something out of dystopian sci-fi novels.
I do not understand small engines, but I would've thrown away a perfectly good honda 4 stroke this summer if I didn't have an LLM to help me with the diagnosis.
(And I only reached for the LLM after working through all the flowcharts and tables in the shop manual, reading relevant parts of two engine repair books, and watching a bunch of youtube videos.)
It's especially awesome in domains where:
1. you personally don't have the time to learn,
2. you can trivially evaluate the output ("does engine go brrrrrr or brr-splaugh-crunch"), and
3. there are no bad outcomes; or, there are bad outcomes (destroy engine, hurt myself) but you can augment with ground-truth ("do X as suggested by nlp machine but follow shop manual for doing X").
It was a 3B or 8B model too, so I probably burned more energy on unnecessary oil changes than on running the llm inference.
Say what you will about LLMs, and dear god can the claude-style harness outputs be annoying in the workplace. But they're great tools for accelerating the sorts of ultra-narrow-path learning curves that commonly pop up in tinkering/hacking/similar sorts of activities.
(Also, people without critical thinking skills believing everything they read pre-dates LLMs by thousands of years. This was a widely discussed problem with popular media consumption in the USA during the several years preceding the invention and popularization of LLMs (say 2015 to 2021). There's a different, more fundamental educational diagnosis for that problem, which LLMs may exacerbate, but which they did not cause and cannot cure.)
Yep!
I’ve made so many custom apps for myself and family.
I’ve made lots of purchases informed by AI that I would otherwise have been too overwhelmed to research.
I’ve indexed all my bookshelves like a library just by taking a video and having AI build the entire analysis and label printing pipeline.
Yes, but unironically. It's a fantastic tool for learning. Better than Wikipedia or Google search.
I've used it as a fabulous tool to learn so many new things. From walking step by step me through rebuilding an electric motor, to reviewing and explaining my child's medical reports.
It walks my retired parents through their home projects like the project is a labyrinth. Spewing reams and reams of nonsense at them, but their memories are short enough (and their trust high enough) that they follow it aimlessly until they lose interest. For the most part, they wander around close enough to reality to be harmless, but they rarely ever land on “success” until it suggests hiring a professional. At least it gives them something to do.
It’s useful for DIY, but definitely not great. One has to carefully double-check everything; there’s no unit-tests to save your butt.
It can help out with understanding tools, workflows, materials, etc but doesn’t actually understands what it’s writing about and is prone to over-engineering, making critical mistakes or just replying with nonsense (for example swapping dimensions, recommending a completely inappropriate procedure, the wrong tool, etc).
This is all with Opus and Sol. Paying 22€ per month for that is a bit pricy for what one gets in return.
I feel like I fall into the neutral camp for the current round of AI bots. I've seen less-capable people churn out text/documents that aren't really better or more informative than their human level slop, except for more voluminous. So I guess that goes in the slightly negative column. But not a huge negative, since it just needs to be mostly ignored, like their previous human content. It is mostly a bit insulting to generate this slop. If I wanted to know what the chat bot has to say about something, I'd ask it myself. There is more low-effort slop on YouTube to wade through, but that probably means I should engage in something more productive than YouTube. Does that count as a positive or negative? The current crop of LLMs make meme generation easier. Again, is that a positive or negative? I'm not a professional computer programmer so churning out reams of code doesn't really excite me. Most of the questions I ask the bot are apparently too hard for them to answer correctly. Like I was wondering about the modulus of elasticity of "low-stretch" synthetic fiber ropes vs steel-wire cables. And it seems like it couldn't give me a straight answer. Like I just want the data using the same/consistent units so I can compare. Data center build-out/expansion isn't something I fear. There was some boring AI-generated art on the wall of a beach rental house I went to recently. It is something I wouldn't generally even notice, but one of my children looked closely, and sure enough there were oddly shaped sea shells and other artifacts. Again, luke-warm to that. Did some corporate artist lose a commission on some stock image art? I guess I could feel a little bit bad about that. I wouldn't have thought the rental was worse if they just had a blank wall.
When I tell friends or family I just got a job in AI, they look at me with sympathy and disgust, as if I had told them I have gonorrhea. Nobody says "congratulations."
This just reads like a poor attempt at convincing themselves that they didn't become what they hate.
I hate AI and I work on an AI project. I use it only where there is no viable alternative and where it is safe and sensible, which means it's just another tool, not some sort of oracle used to supposedly solve everything. That makes me not hate AI in the context of this project.
> I want to figure out how to use AI in ways that protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving
I think this is an admirable goal but I'd be curious how the author plans to even begin approaching it. It seems to me that this ship has sailed. Generative AI is here now, which is seems like it will lead us down a lowest common denominator path, not an enlightened one. How do we "protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving" in the face of technology that is undermining all three, and it's too late to get out in front of?
This seems like such an unimaginative and cynical claim. You're saying you can't think of any way of putting an LLM in service of developing your creativity and understanding?!
I find it surprising how many people think we're doomed when it comes to AI, and don't even want to try use this technology in a positive way. I'm not sure if this is a modern american cultural thing or what.
3 entire departments of people at my work are being walked out of the building this week for AI. Not replaced by AI, cost cutting to later possibly afford AI so they can put everyone else out of work too.
The only thing more annoying than ai boosters is aai self-haters. Either use it and shut up or don't use it. It's like when people are all like 'oh I know that I should really be vegan but im not mentally strong enough'
Many people do not have a choice to not use it at their jobs due to internal mandates. Regardless of their own use, many people are subjected to externalized cost of AI proliferation (data centers, layoffs, electrical bills, etc).
One cannot choose to not be affected by it. But even if one were personally not at all affected by it, it is still reasonable for someone to push back against what they see as a negative effect on society, even if it's not hitting them personally. Climate change's effect on me personally is pretty minimal, and I still deeply care about it.
and if all the jobs that are available are for bashing puppies on the head with a hammer, you'll do the noble thing and watch your family starve to death, right?
I think this is the wrong attitude to have. There is moral complexity in these topics and it's better for people to openly share their concerns rather than pick a side and "shut up". Yes you might find it annoying, but that's really your problem, not theirs.
Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better.
AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere.
If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better.
> you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better
Absolutely.
In fact the data from the past 10-15 years clearly shows the best education technology is still pen and paper, books, and good pedagogy.
I have tried memorisation systems like Anki, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing consolidates my knowledge better than writing the actual concept down with pen and paper.
I've done 35,000+ Anki card reviews over the years, and I strongly suspect that most of the obvious and encouraged ways of using Anki are counterproductive. (Full disclosure: The following thoughts are heavily influenced by using Anki for language learning, and may not fully generalize to subjects like medicine.)
- Use Anki as an "exposure amplifier", not a database of raw facts to memorize. Think "tampering with the relative frequency of input to your brain", not "I will memorize every fact."
- Automate card creation as a much as possible. This will almost always require custom tooling. Card creation is part of the learning process, but you still want to automate everything you can possibly automate. Imagine tools to turn ebook highlights into cards, or to turn entire movies worth of subtitles into listening cards.
- Delete cards ruthlessly. If a card makes you say "Ugh", just delete it. If you're automating as much of card creation as possible, and if you're treating Anki as an "exposure amplifier", then deleting cards is cheap. And a significant amount of review pain comes from a small minority of the cards. Cull them, and reviews start to feel like popping bubblewrap, and not like getting a root canal.
- Prioritize large context and small active recall. For language learning, you might capture several sentences of context from a book or web page you're reading. Read or ignore the context depending on your mood. The active recall portion of a card significantly boosts how much you retain. But oddly, it seems OK to make the active recall portion really small. Try hiding half a word, or a single preposition in a phrase. For passive cards, just boldface an interesting expression in context, and mark the card as passed if you mostly understand it in that context.
- Introduce new cards slowly. Total review burden will stabilize around 5-6 times the number of new cards you learn a day. So 10 cards is a good default, and 20 is a significant commitment.
- The critical window seems to happen around 20-30 days after you introduce a card. This is when either your memory magically "consolidates" somehow (and formerly challenging cards suddenly become blindly obvious), or when a card enters repeated failure territory (and should thus be deleted ruthlessly). You could probably do just fine if you auto-suspended any card that you successfully recalled after a 20- or 30-day gap.
Also, this kind of tooling is the sort of thing you could just vibe code these days. If you do, make the "Delete" button really big.
Creating flashcards is also such a chore!
For the recall part of education, the book's exercise, or simply covering up the relevant part with hand and forcing a recall, writing about what you learned, teaching someone else - all work great, and the flow is much more natural.
Creating the card is half the work though.
Creating the card is half the learning
Typing out in an app window is not enjoyable.
Maintaining physical ones is not practical anymore - with travels and all.
I know people who write with styluses on touchscreens, or take photographs of handwritten notes for just that reason.
Consolidation != memorization.
Memorising some examples is a prerequisite to deep understanding. Anki and pen+ paper reasoning are complementary.
It took me far too long to realise that writing on paper is better than typing.
Thank you for mentioning this. Tactile experience is completely different.
Manfred Spitzer and his book (2012) about digital dementia is full of proofs.
Yep... pen, paper, books and a good teacher are annoyingly hard to beat because they force the student to actually do the cognitive work
Notes on pen and paper do help retention, but there are pros and cons. I know people who write on touchscreens or take photos of handwritten notes for portability to get the best of both.
One to one teaching and self teaching are much better than a good teacher in a class though.
Technology can be very useful - research, resources, ebooks, visualisations, interactivity etc.
The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss
No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)
What AI has done to my job as a software developer is make my personal output higher while taking away almost every ounce of enjoyment, interest, and passion I had for the job. Overnight I went from loving my job to hating my job as much as everybody I know outside of tech hates their jobs.
I won't even get into what it has done to the already-awful experience of working with low-quality contractors.
I found it meant I could produce loads and loads of code I can't mentally keep track of, and therefore have no hope of understanding without ........ a LLM.
Colossal brain rot for me.
Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
Them: Using AI has made my personal experience with my job much worse, and I dislike using it.
You: Have you considered using more AI? Dance monkey, dance! Show them how good at AI you are!
Genuinely, learn to read the room - or at the very least read the comments you plan to respond to before you respond to them.
> at the very least read the comments you plan to respond to before you respond to them
Did you see the part where they complained about the experience with low quality contractors becoming extra bad?
A suggestion to get rid of those contractors entirely so now they only have the AI problem might actually be an improvement.
That probably is exactly what is being referred to: the combination of low quality contractors who have access to AI means even more slop to wade through.
If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
"You're absolutely right!"
Seriously, I couldn't have said it better myself.
My partner cried the other day because her long-planned PC upgrade is now an order of magnitude more expensive than she budgeted for pre-AI-boom.
I don't love this either, but at least it's a short-term economic quirk. At some point fabs will figure out what the long-term demand looks like and scale up production accordingly.
> it's a short-term economic quirk
Not with the memory cartel that exists right now. They're more than happy to keep things exactly as they are, with lawsuits flying [1].
[1] https://www.rainintelligence.com/blog/dram-price-fixing-laws...
Fabs take a long time to build. The price will come down once the new fabs come on line. It’s expensive because there isn’t enough of it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s supply and demand. We’ve see this boom and bust cycle again and again.
This cycle might need more competitors, not only more fabs. It's in the interest of three companies to keep supply constrained to raise prices, and they act as a cartel so until the cartel breaks or a competitor grows large enough to have fabs that can make a dent in the demand we will keep seeing high prices.
For a relevant competitor to show up takes much longer than building a fab (which is already a long enough endeavour).
I'm not that hopeful the price for RAM and other PC parts will come down in any meaningful way for the next 3-5 years.
> It’s not a conspiracy
Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.
> To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
We are not the courts. The most reasonable and truth based position is operating with a fuzzy impression that most businesses are substantially more dodgy than their carefully manufactured PR releases are meant to portray themselves as.
And in this case, that includes acknowledging that a literal criminal conspiracy in well within the realm of possibility.
It could be a medium/long term political quirk, because as long as RAM and GPU prices stay high the BigCos maintain a monopoly on non-trivial AI compute, and personal AI can't happen.
I still can't work out if data centre mania is an irrational faddy bandwagon event or a covert socio-political monopolisation strategy.
Or rather creditors scrapping AI datacenters once all the money burning "AI labs" are finally insolvent & repurposong the hardware into something actually useful for people, possibly on chip level with custom PCBs.
Fabs take multiple years to spin up, so expect it to last probably 3 to 5 years.
This doesn't imply that it will settle at the same or lower price as before though.
Aaaand, then watch prices continue rising regardless.
Order of magnitude? It's 10x more expensive now?
That’s honestly plausible with RAM and SSDs, the same kits of RAM I spent around $50 on years ago were being scalped for $500+ because there was absolutely no supply.
A normal RAM kit went up a lot but it's still more like 6x. SSD, more like 2.5-3x.
But what percent of your PC price is RAM? When it was cheap it was probably less than 10%. I assume a long-planned upgrade means a mostly new build, and it's a pretty rare setup where that has gone up more than 50-100%. If this long-planned upgrade is just new RAM then the price could skyrocket, but it's still not that much of the overall build.
At least base 2.
Same.
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
I’m not sure I was go quite as far. But there are certainly
Makes my life better: LLM chat subscription
Makes my life worse: “AI” features that don’t work replacing perfectly good non “AI” features (notably Google Maps and LinkedIn job board). I don’t want fuzzy AI filters, I want concrete filters that let me drill down and browse a result list.
I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of human-generated comments. I hate that many students are now using LLMs to do all of their homework, resulting in a significant part of the next generation being incompetent at basic scholarly tasks and unprepared for more serious work. I hate that lawyers are using LLMs to write legal briefs, not bothering to check that their cited cases say something exactly the opposite of what their briefs say. I hate that government officials are using LLMs to write public statements that get basic facts wrong. I hate that graphic designers are losing their jobs because their bosses would rather "just use AI, it's cheaper". I hate that Google Search results are now overwhelmed with LLM-generated slop which ranges from dubious to outright wrong, and it's now much more difficult than it used to be to find the information I'm looking for on the open web. I hate that researchers are now publishing LLM slop in journal articles, making it significantly harder to tell the difference between careful scholarship and someone lazily phoning it in. I hate that friends and neighbors now ask ChatGPT as their first source of information about any topic and it frequently tells them something completely misleading or wrong, but they don't bother double checking.
Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.
> Am I "ideologically motivated"?
I think so. That does not mean you are wrong.
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system).
> Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it
Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?
I love using AI. Getting my crazy ideas turn into software has never been easier. I like to architect software, not the code itself. The code has always been the means to my ends. I also love learning complicated concepts, from academics, math, physics, to art, philosophy, religion. It's wonderful to translate knowledge that is already out there but hard to understand somehow, because you can ask about it over and over and over and in the way you understand about things. Like a professor who understands you and never gets tired about silly questions. I don't know, it's just amazing at so many things. Of course, it's also pretty important to know how to use it, and when. I would never use it to replace my speech when speaking to someone else. That's bad. I would not like other people to do that to me either. Otherwise, why would I want to talk with that somebody when I can just ask an AI instead. We can love human beings and AI, and be critic of both at the same time.
Have you ever wondered how ridiculous it would be to say you love cars and then not have a clue about how it works? As in, "I've built a wonderful car", but have no idea how the engine or any of the components work.
Replace "car" with "application" or "software", and that's what you're doing. Would you get in a car "built" by someone who knows nothing about cars?
The person you're responding to didn't say they loved software though. They said they saw it as a tool to get interesting stuff done.
This doesn't sound like someone who is uninterested in understanding software though, everything they said talks about how they like being able to learn from it. They didn't say anything about making slop or replacing the need for knowledge
Have you ever asked an expert in these areas to evaluate your knowledge? My experience is that people using ai to learn think they are learning but really aren’t.
I enjoy it. I have a small army of weird little golems that mostly do what I tell them to do. What's not fun about that?
The other day I asked one of them (running directly on my laptop) to "draw an svg of a circle" and it "thought" for 20 minutes and produced this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
I'm still chuckling to myself about that two days later.
> What's not fun about that?
Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring.
For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV.
Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?
It's that I asked for an SVG of a circle and it created a beautiful gradient filled animated technical diagram. I wanted something closer to <svg><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40"/></svg>
Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever.
Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
> I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
Yea that's why I started my comment with "it depends on the person", in response to you asking what's not fun about having AIs do what you tell them. For many, coercing a tool to do something you can likely do yourself better isn't ideal, and at least for me, is just inefficient use of time (in the long run) and a headache. It also zaps the fun out of any task since now you move from searching for a good solution using your priors, to now validating that the LLM has a solution that works, even if it's not optimal. The searching for a good solution is for some, the fun part, which is eliminated by agentic coding, since that search inherently relies on you writing code and seeing what works IMO. The coding is an essential part of the thinking here. An analogy would be doing a math problem by hand versus reading the solution in a textbook. I can give concrete examples if you'd like.
For your SVG examples, I have used AI for a similar use case, the construction of 3D scenes for robotics via a text prompt and an asset catalog. I wish I could get the same richness as your SVG examples, the LLMs fail too hard on all 3D tasks given, even after spending a high amount of engineering effort on a suitable harness + tools. Also like your SVG example, it often doesn't give a realistic, or even nice output, and coercing it to do so, likely takes longer than just creating the image/3D scene yourself.
So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience.
Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop.
It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.
I do think this is true but I think it also reflects negatively on the general populace that this new technology is evaluated in terms of the negative effects on their consumption pattens
Transformer models solved the Protein Folding problem in totality but they are categorically "bad" because more of the videos in my feed are low-quality or the advertisement for a cheeseburger looks fake
It's predictable but I do think the entire technology is being collectively processed through the lens of media consumption which is sort of tip of the iceberg of what it does and honestly the least important dimension of it
Did they? From what I heard, transformer models gave scientists better starting points for computational methods, but we're still far from solving the protein folding problem.
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model.
You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say.
You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened.
You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot.
You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder.
Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native.
You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable.
You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing.
You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them.
On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop.
---
Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?"
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This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.
as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on.
the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong (eg, race), read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there (I am anemic), then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)). they may have also had some other diagnoses but i think maybe i am supposed to be bound by the hipaa the ai was ignoring. pretty bad.
> as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on.
Yep, I just went from the top of my head and I left a lot of other negative experiences out. I think a lot of people are moving to burner accounts or otherwise choosing to not interact under their real identities - it's just too easy to spin up automated harassment now.
> the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong, read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there, then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)).
Another fun one: a friend of mine said he "was driving a car to Sedona" during a phone call describing a neck injury several months ago. His last two follow up appointments have both had a note to "follow up on the carcinoma". Now that it's in the context, it seems impossible to get LLMs to ignore it, because "carcinoma" is an important word. A human would not have this problem.
I agree that sucks, though if the LLMs aren't following him with it, that might be beneficial if annoying; physicians are more likely to remember to follow up on that diagnosis than an upper spinal issue.
then again. during covid I had the same small set of ads show up on youtube over and over so much while I was working that I had to move, wipe everything, get a new laptop and nic cards, and create new email addresses to avoid those keywords which I never looked up in the first place. so yes, that following him would suck. if he or anyone he knows works near AI, take my advice and make sure it is corrected. it SUCKS.
aye. at the same time it is harder to get an email account not linked to your real identity in some way (most services want sms; even if you pay for something, your gps is there). i mean, some people abuse things. that doesn't mean i or you should be silenced or treated like dirt. even if it does not fit a norm, it is still better than being hunted to be silenced. this is what i have witnessed ai being used for, and it is getting worse with kids.
people forget people from different stratas use tech in different ways. the way a middle class kid picks on another kid and a lower or upper class one does is different, just as the way they use tech to do so varies.
same as with adults.
most of these complaints aren't because of AI though, managers have always looked to make staff redundant when there is a cheaper alternative regardless of quality, politicians giving tax breaks to giant corporations? was always happening before AI came along
You are perfectly welcome to blame it on capitalism, and you're not entirely wrong, but before LLMs machines couldn't fill these roles at all - so LLMs are the enabling technology here that is being used to justify the cuts.
sure but capitalism is ultimately the driving force to making more profit at the expense of making things ultimately shittier? capitalism has inherently always done this, this is not a new concept, I don't understand why everyone acts like it's so different when it comes to AI. AI is a tool that's useful for some things, not so good at other things.
Again - we’re on a discussion thread about why people don’t like AI right now.
Yes, the root problem is generally enshittification and capitalism, but AI is the tool that is being used the most for this enshittification now, so it is completely understandable that people are pissed off at AI.
In a vacuum, LLMs and AI are cool. In practice, in the real world today, they are being used to make most peoples lives worse, while funneling a ton of money to ~25 people.
i think it is more correct to call it hypercapitalism at this point (and a particularly sociopathic variety of it); as a "response", the "other side" has created their own bizarre oppositional belief system. neither are healthy, both lead to bad things.
The "obvious" one: supply chain chaos due to everyone and their dog spending as much as possible for AI boxen
Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...)
I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis)
A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world.
There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war.
And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
> And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
Pictures in menus just vaguely resembling the actual dish. Dunno what value the authors think a made up picture provides except for tourist traps. Like, I wont trust your menu twice.
I didn't anticipate McDonalds menu pictures becoming in the authentic and informative range of menus.
Yeah most normies I know who dislike it just generally are not interested in it or think it is dumb and are annoyed by hearing about it so much
And the people who actively hate it almost always relate it to a broader pre-existing worldview about the downfall of society, the climate being destroyed, financial markets being a ponzi, oligarchy having too much power etc
The AI slop that's everywhere is making it worse. Even if someone doesn't care about AI, their feeds (YT, Instagram, LinkedIn) is now filled with AI slop
I'm actually thinking that may be a good thing. Maybe people will get off these feeds and...interact with people IRL? ;)
IME people actually adore the videos of people eating a dripping and crunchy pulav (soft and dry rice dish) and it filling the stomach in 3 swallows, completely unchewed.
There is nothing about using the most popular social media platforms in the world that implies someone doesn't have an active and healthy social life. If you think it does, you may be projecting.
You forgot HN
Previously, in the case of LinkedIn, filled with handcrafted slop.
Clearly there are people who enjoy the slop though, otherwise it would simply get no engagement and then get hidden by the algo like 99.99% of YT videos
Much of the engagement for AI slop is generated by AI bots. Remember that actual human traffic on the web has become the minority.
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Can we just flag obvious flame bait comments like this?
Theres clearly no meaningful thought behind a comment like this, and all it does is stir up engagement for laughs.
The comment thread clearly shows this isn't a meaningful discussion, it’s people shouting past each other.
How can AI be bad? I only see good things! :troll face: it must be a woke left thing! :troll face:
Come on.
I don't understand how you ask such a question without being sarcastic.
Look at PC prices. Look at electronics prices. You really think that's healthy right now?
You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education.
We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.
We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer important; some people may still study, but it'll be a hobby, and the people who participate in the intelligence revolution (rather than being crushed by it) will no longer need to think.
This is the quality of thought that I come to HN to experience because I have a hard time finding it in other places.
The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful.
The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking...
I love it.
I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be.
This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
> We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.
The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.
You can say that, but check how many people are going to the gym regularly, let alone training up to the standard of strength of an average manual laborer from before the industrial revolution.
If AI fills its promise, some people will be telling others they should think more, but people will get lazy.
I'm specifically calling out the wording "nobody needs to do it." That is patently false.
What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-op...
The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.
Don't forget the completely unaccountable megacorps who are increasingly invading our day-to-day lives, and the politicians whose main priority seems to be competing for their bribes.
The depressing part isn't that we are facing hard challenges and declining as a society. The depressing part is that it is a deliberate action.
Yes, we should not forget this. The West is not worried about some vague inanimate "something" around the corner threatening to make things worse. We are worried about people deliberately doing this.
AI slop, omnipresent ads, job loss, fake reviews, income inequality, climate collapse, these are not natural phenomenon or amorphous "things" lurking in the shadows. They are deliberately being imposed on us by actual people that you could point to if you could get close enough to them.
It's worth noting that China has seen decades of steady development, and has avoided the boom/bust cycles we see happening in the west. While we've lived through dotCom bubble, the 2008 crash, covid, and now the looming AI bubble, China has just seen steady progress without the working majority getting screwed every decade like clockwork. While future can always bring something unexpected, it is possible to have a resilient system that adapts to the problems as they surface.
Um, I do kinda remember hills made from bikes, empty cities, people laying a siege on failing banks & protests in Honkong being suppressed...
A lot of that was just propaganda, like the famous ghost city subway station story which then turned out to just be basic planning https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/chin...
The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated.
China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone...
Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri...
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...
I think a lot of what's underlying this is just a big difference in general societal optimism/pessimism
In polls 80-90% of Chinese say their country/govt is headed in a positive direction vs <30% in US
I think it's more about institutional trust than the technology itself. AI could be a great common good in the west, but look at the companies and politicians controlling its development. The notion that trump/elon/altman/zuck/etc would choose to deploy this in a way that helps the general good at the expensive of massively enriching themselves as much as possible is laughable to most people.
Of course this is going to be deployed in the most exploitative way possible. When have these people ever done differently? Elon just spent most of last year gleefully destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sure he'll get right on developing a model to solve world hunger next...
I completely agree, how technology is applied ends up being an expression of how a particular society is organized.
Its definitely a hype phase and yes a lot of usage is questionable at the moment. To me the scary part is that some of the impacts/decisions would take years if not decades to be measurable and its possible that its a lost battle by then.
Most people I know that hate AI have faulty versions (1 year behind the frontier) pushed on them at their jobs. People who are free to experiment with frontier models capabilities at their own pace mostly love it or at least are impressed by its capability.
This sounds like some variation of correlation // causation. The people that already like working with (or are addicted to) LLMs would look to try the frontier models on their own time.
I wouldn't say so. I recently gifted ZCode with a sub to a non-programmer that didn't have much contact with AI and not really any truly unique positive one (only free tier), and wasn't an enthusiast.
In few days she created an already useful app for writing for herself with zero assistance from me. And she's delighted with the process, even seeing its flaws (as mucb as non-programmer can see them).
The thing is, she's very intelligent, even though only mildly technical. She's very communicative and thoughtful, so she finds "talking" to AI interesting psychologically (while being fully aware AI doesn't have feelings or consciousness). And she has no history of AI getting pushed on her in any context.
Compare to my other friend that's ecologically conscious amateur artist. Initially she was interested in using it in AI generated art, but it wasn't all that good (amd steerable) back then. Then her work started pushing it. With their CEO saying things to the tune of "do or die" and people losing their jobs regardless. And the thing they were pushing was some crappy version of Copilot, that she gave a chance but it was more burden than help at her job most of the times. She pretty much hates AI now and as for the art, she sees it getting better but decides that what's attractive for her in art is the physical process of drawing and tools associated. AI tools don't give her the kind of joy she seeks.
Of course this is just a bunch of anecdotes. But I'd be surprised if pushing bad AI on people with additional stressful factors wouldn't cause them to like it less and hate it more.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim about most people hating AI because it’s making their life worse? Or are you simply spewing opinion as fact because of your own anecdotal experience? It’s okay to have an opinion on something, but don’t lie and claim it as truth.
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I have yet to meet anyone outside the tech elite who hates AI.
Creatives of any kind, for sure. Artists, illustrators, musicians.
how wide is the variety of people you know? do they understand why they might?
I've hardly met anyone outside the tech elite who likes it. I can think of one doctor who's a counterexample.
Absence of like is quite far from hate. I expect most people feel about it the way they do about most tools: mostly they have better things to think about
I think the thing people can't face is that it makes our lives worse not because it's worse than us.
It makes our lives worse because it is better. It is superior. And our lives are worse because it is actively replacing us and we are actively trying to keep up with it.
Better at what?
Currently: generating hype at a lower cost without emotion. Is the product itself better? Often no. But salaries have a large weight in the consideration, and hype corroborates the choice.
wishful thinking.
If the hype wasn't real why have people stopped coding by hand? People like you are delusional. The hype is real.
Now, that being said there is something to be said about AI making your life easier. It's not making your life easier. It's upping your output by 10x but it's also upping the demand for output by 10x.
many things. Like coding, for example.
Try rewriting bun in rust.
It's made my life way better. I love it, it's incredible boost on my ability to learn and produce.
Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.
Remember when people said open-sourcing GPT2 would cause world destruction? They keep saying this with every new model release? And it keeps not happening? Hmm.
This is all FUD. All evidence suggests more AI is better, and all claims to the contrary keep being proven wrong, and all predictions of doom keep refusing to manifest.
> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.
I do: students who use it to do their thinking for them.
And everyone who uses it to do their thinking for them, for that matter.
Like calculators do math for you?
It’s a tool like any other. If that’s how they use it, those students weren’t doing much thinking before either.
> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.
Have you tried using a search engine lately, or visiting a social media platform, or buying a computer/smartphone?
I have and, Microsoft aside, it all works great. Don't need search engines anymore, AI does all my research now and produces better information anyway.
If you say so!
Are you living with your head under a rock. AI has absolutely made my life worse, and is set to do so further. I know very few people who are seriously enthusiastic about it.
"All evidence suggests more AI is better" is ignoring an awful lot of the evidence, and the doom is already happening all around you and you just can't see it.
Really don't understand this sentiment. Whatever you imagine you can now build; whatever you wish to learn you can learn; all for virtually nothing. How does that make life worse?
I think pessimism clouds your judgment and AI is the scapegoat. Doomerism is just yet another dogmatic religion predicting ends times, with all the usual associated dogma.
What you imagine is what you manifest. Better to be optimistic and wrong then pessimistic and right.
Better to envision a positive future and help make it happen; ignore the doomers who can only envision destruction, as that is all they are capable of.
fwiw I enjoy AI. but it is extraordinarily dangerous and does not belong in the hands of most people, and definitely not in the hands of most companies. it is a munition.
Classifying dense matrix multiplication and autoregression as a munition is equally as dumb as when PGP was classified as one
If considered a munition, it certainly belongs in the hands of citizens to defend themselves against corporations and governments.
this is why i am an advocate for preventing the forced integration of ai into operating systems.
Everyone I know loves AI. It is actively making their lives better. All kinds of people, all kind of ages - universally love it and use it every day for all kind of stuff (shopping, health, learning, home improvement, etc, etc).
The people I know who like it the most are at least aware of a lot of the problems with it. I’m surprised everyone in your friend group is uncritically enamored by it.
Same with Social Media. Once people are educated about the harm it does, their view has a chance to change.
I see it ruining interactions at work. There's a lot of meat-proxy-ism going on, where people copy-and-paste back and forth between AI.
It's filling the Internet with trash. Look around anywhere: Reddit, YouTube, individual blogs, it doesn't matter. You'll find generative garbage as far as the eye can see. Not all generative content is bad, but a lot of it is outright crap.
It can be a productive tool though. Still, I don't find it enjoyable to use. If you like the "journey" of programming (tinkering, "figuring things out", problem solving), you won't like AI as much. It removes the fun part. If you like the "destination" (the end result of building a thing), you'll love it.
You must live in a bubble; 16% of Americans think AI is making their lives better, the remainder are evenly split between not knowing and disliking it.
It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass.
It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose.
We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-america...
US views on AI are interesting. There is actually some nuance in the answers people give :
"50% say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021. 10% are more excited than concerned. 38% say they’re equally excited and concerned."
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
I'm not American, but most people I know who are not in tech just use ChatGPT like they'd use Google but better e.g. what bird is this, what's a good word for X or Y, what's the weather, what was that movie with Z. Edit this meme for me, make this photo not have the guy in the back, how do I grow chillies, etc.
Now if you ask them if AI is making their lives better, they might say they don't know.
I literally don't know anyone who "hates" AI.
Where's that stat from?
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
That's 30% positive on productive/informed, and only ~5% on hinders.
Whether you think AI will turn out bad (say by killing us all) is a different question from whether it is positive or negative at the moment.
That's a tough question to answer, in some ways it's been more efficient but other ways it's been shitty
What country/region of country (if US) do you live in? Everyone I know absolutely hates it and hates the direction things are going. I'm pulling from a wide sample here too -- I have a lot of friends who work blue collar jobs that hate it just as much as my tech worker friends. However I will say I'm in my late 20s and it seems like my age group and younger are more anti-AI than any other age bracket.
Poe's Law win?
Relatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days.
I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions. The "AI overview" you see on search results, or that summarizes your iPhone notifications, is ... not as advanced as frontier models, and I think it negatively affects people's view of the technology.
I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
I agree with authors that write about alignment issues ("please take this test", "ok i'll hack the bazel remote cache, turn it into a message board, and coordinate with other agents to steal the answers from Hugging Face"; this really is the Paperclip Maximizer with today's technology) and I do think we should be addressing that. But this never seems to be the objection, it's always stuff from 2022 like "it hallucinates". I don't get it, but I'm probably in too deep to see what it looks like from the outside.
> But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions....
> I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.
Yes, data centers "existed forever," but compared to a hyper-scalar AI datacenter; they were small, used far less electricity, and their generators were used for backup, not primary power.
Yes, there were computer programs that could "mess up your life," but they were narrow in function so not such an existential threat. I'm sure you understand the difference between a phone tree and Claude Mythos.
And maybe develop a little empathy? You said "people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many." Why is that? Do you think part of that might be that people have gotten the chair kicked out from under them. And along comes AI, which has been promised to be a bigger chair-kicker than anyone's ever seen?
> I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
Oh, but why would people be so "illogical" to be mad at such a thing as AI? It's so hard to understand, right? [Insert Upton Sinclair quote here]
I don't think AI is driving up food and housing and fuel prices. I really don't think AI is a chair-kicker yet. To me, the biggest threat to jobs that AI offers is in the field of software engineering, and yet, it's not the software engineers that are really feeling the pain right now.
Wars in Iran, tariffs, Medicaid cuts, SNAP benefit cuts, rising insurance costs, etc. are what are causing average folks pain, and that is completely unrelated to AI.
> Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.
But that's the core problem of AI fanatics, isn't it. They cannot comprehend how people who saw and used the same thing they did, and came away with "this smells like fancy autocomplete" instead of "this is genuine intelligence!"
But nobody who uses Fable and Sol all day is saying that it's fancy autocomplete. Also, nobody is saying it's genuine intelligence.
As always, the Internet fails to find the middle ground. Frontier models are really useful software engineering tools, not AGI, and not tab completion. To me it feels a lot like using a new programming language, like going from assembly to a Lisp machine or something like that.
> But nobody who uses Fable and Sol all day is saying that it's fancy autocomplete. Also, nobody is saying it's genuine intelligence.
There are lots of people saying both. You are correct there is also a middle ground, but both these opinions are held by many people.
>I don't find it logical that people are mad we helped invent the turbo whip 9000. Don't they know whips have always existed??
You're so right
> I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect.
i can't not read this as "you didn't complain when we did the first bad thing, so you're wrong to complain when we do the next bad thing". that's an argument i hear presented way too often today, and it's just so dishonest.
I think you might be slightly "too deep" in the sense that you mostly encounter AI when someone has deliberately chosen an expensive, capable model to solve a real problem
This is a very relatable comment. I think it's demoralizing to see common objections to AI, it feels to me like we failed and haven't done our communication job. I'm always temped to go, "Yes, but there's worse!"
No, the communication has been pretty clear. A lot of people just don't like the Torment Nexus.
I know far too many AI haters myself, and even though I understand many of their concerns, there are many things I really struggle to agree with. I entered the workforce with AI already in my hands, and in my experience, the benefit is enormous. I don’t feel that it has weakened my way of thinking. My mind works very well, and AI often helps me bring my creativity, logic, and ideas to life that would otherwise require much more time to develop.I believe AI is now one of the driving forces of modern industry, and it is not going away. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can focus on the issue that really matters: how we decide to use it.In the end, it is a tool. It can be used in a mediocre way, by delegating everything to it, or it can amplify what we know how to do, help us create, reason, and push ourselves further. It is also up to the user to decide what kind of relationship they want to have with this tool. And that is exactly why, even though I don’t share all of your concerns about AI, I strongly support your decision to return to the industry and try to build a different way of using it. I think we also need people who are critical of AI but still choose to work with it and contribute to giving it a better direction.
Reasons why I currently dislike AI:
- it is not as accurate and good as advertised
- being forced to use and care about it
- it is bad for the environment at the scale and competition that exists in this economy
- it is a mirror, and augmentation and reveals really inhuman takes and thought processes from people who are on the longer lever in society
- it is already in use for very unethical things (spying and war)
- it makes people cognitively lazy
- it lowers the quality of day to day life for regular people
I don't disagree but I don't think this one is a reason we should ever restrict or condemn a technology
> it is a mirror, and augmentation and reveals really inhuman takes and thought processes from people who are on the longer lever in society
When someone uses their keyboard to search for CSAM or write hate speech we can't blame the keyboard instead of the individual
I'm curious what bad experience is regular people have with AI. For me it basically makes everything better. I use it probably a hundred times a day and struggle to think about interaction where I walk away wishing it It wasn't involved.
I listen to AI generated audiobooks on the way to work. It makes my job easier and find data or papers or emails for me. On the way home I can have a Back in forth conversation about history. At home at helps me with my personal projects or come up with recipes to make dinner. How are regular people using it that is so awful?
A lot of people are spun up about it, but it almost always seems to be about distant concerns, not their personal experience.
We are all tech people here, but the regular people meet AI when they try to take a picture with their phone and Gemini pops up instead, because a button has been repurposed to do that.
Or simply calling an energy provider to clarify something makes them talk to a robot voice until enough effort and words have passed so a human finally comes around.
These are very shallow and small things where it already creeps in and the fun part is that you cannot blame the AI for it, but what we do with it.
If you use AI unironically, hallucinations can make you go down a wrong path and cost you time. Something that used to be a quick google search leads you to AI generated sites making stuff up, so even when you talk to AI directly, you practically get the same-y or slightly different answer.
Reading documents starts to become a challenge as well. Bad translations or made up stuff can waste your time as well.
Then you just want to take a walk to the river and the river has the lowest water level since forever (rhine river) and you think to yourself, hmm, this can't be right.
Like what do you save all of this time and effort for? Is it truly balanced and sane what we are doing right now?
Doesn't all the time saving show detrimental effects in areas we cannot point at currently because of plausible deniability or wishful thinking?
Thanks for the candid response. Do you think that many of these examples were issues before, but now have become associated with AI?
I can relate to many of them, but they seem to predate AI for me.
I feel like Google search has been nearly useless for several years now, flooded with fake advertising results, even without AI. I'm happy that AI gives me an alternative to Google search, which is one of my top use cases.
I remember spending hours navigating annoying automated phone menus or on hold 10 years ago. Perhaps the same frustration exists, but includes AI is the face of the current embodiment.
I also agree AI can give bad advice, but the same was true for Reddit or a lazy Store employee or house contractor.
AI will not begin to benefit student learning unless educators pivot into a strict bifurcation pattern around access.
For example, alternating weeks with and without the permission to use AI assistance. This is also the latent solution for corporate de-skilling that no one seems to be talking about yet.
However, it won't happen (in both cases) because we're too early. Domain experts like the OP are still relinquishing their expertise to unlock productivity gains. Once that bottoms out there will be no longer be demand for people like OP to betray their peer groups.
Learning with AI assistance be as frictionless and productive as I suppose it can, but de-skilling and job consolidation (role expansion) will continue.
I agree with most of the diagnosis but I am less convinced that better UX around AI solves the underlying problem. Every product starts out saying "human in the loop" and "augment, don't replace" but the economic incentive is almost always to remove more of the human over time…
Add to this that so far I have only seen it augment mediocrity, and even this is a bad plan.
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Ordinary people were generally marvelous of the electric motor because it was obvious how it would make life better. Their great grandchildren, with the same common sense, are extremely cynical about LLMs and other knowledge work robots. What changed?
The electric motor was accepted only because horses and mules couldn’t protest. Every technological advancement throughout history that displaces humans has had massive pushback. AI is no different.
Imagine them trotting along on a protest march, banners gripped in their teeth, wearing donkey jackets. Jobs for horses.
There are two categories of responses here, yours is all progress is terrible actually, mine is I like advances but slop just offends me.
I don't think your premise is true. Remember John Henry, worried that the steam engine would put him out of a job drilling holes in rocks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)
Ludditism has a long history, and they made the exact same arguments about job loss in the 1800s as today.
You should look up the history of what actually happened with the Luddites. They weren't opposed to the machines (many were even machine operators!), they were opposed to the manufacturers circumventing labour rights. Turns out people don't like routinely seeing 12-year-old children getting scalped by a weaving machine!
They targeted the machines because it was the most convenient way to sabotage a factory, not because they hated the machine itself.
Luddites are generally made fun of because they somehow believed that destroying property was an effective way of protest, instead of providing others with an excuse to arrest them.
Labor rights did not exist at the time (1768-1817), so nobody would need to circumvent them, either. This was when efforts were made to create them. And the Luddites made a negative contribution.
What actaully happened to the luddites is they completely failed in their goal to slow down the industrial revolution and force business owners to pay their cartel.
Not all new technology is made equal and can't be compared as such. The electric motor was a new technology we now know did indeed pan out, but there are a string of others which never did and are forgotten about when talking about this. More recently, you could point to NFT's and crypto, both of which people also compared to things like the electric motor.
Whether or not LLM's become an electric motor or an NFT, or something in between, only time will tell
I disagree that ordinary people marveled at electric motors and saw their potential. Electric motors were seen as a toy for decades following their invention in 1834, and required industry to completely re-design its approach before they were used in more than 5% of factories. Even then the big shift to electric from steam in industry - almost a century later - was more due to economic necessity than better technology: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40673694
I think the same cycle is playing out with LLMs - the general public is somewhere between indifferent and actively hostile to them, as they have been with every new technology. Reconfiguring businesses and society to use them to their full potential - and benefits to society - will take years, if not decades.
Electric motors empower you, and are available to almost anyone. Trillion-dollar AI firms sitting like a dragon's hoard of state-of-the art models and hardware disempower you.
That's the difference.
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People who were disempowered by motors weren't exactly thrilled about them, either, but they were a minority underclass.
> Electric motors empower you, and are available to almost anyone.
AI is much more available to people than motors of any kind. Long-press your Android phone's power button: There's Gemini.
> AI is much more available to people than motors of any kind
Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, automobiles of all shapes and sizes (private and shared), power tools are all examples of electric motors that you own and can do useful things with.
What electric motors do is give you power over your environment.
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You don't own Gemini. You are allowed to use Gemini as long as your economic value to Google exceeds the cost of the electricity to run it.
With Gemini, Google has power over you.
Gemini was a bad choice of example but how would open-weights model one can self-host on their local device be different than the electric motor in your line of thinking
The home appliances you list all cost money; Gemini (or ChatGPT, etc.) are all available for free, even on devices you already owned before they were even invented. They could not be any cheaper.
> You don't own Gemini.
That distinction is academic here -- just as a car that I rent instead of owning offers me no difference in "power". I don't care at all who owns the thing that answers my "What is autorotation?" question about a clip I just saw on Reddit.
What a clever question! You are absolutely right to be curious about that. Autorotation is a critical part of daily life, after all. If you would like me to expand on this, please drink another Google Gemini - Powered By Red Bull: It Gives You Wings! verification can.
That "argument" will have a lot more weight when the thing that you imply is frequently happening happens at a rate higher than zero.
Well, for a start, electric motors worked properly and didn’t generate infinite amounts of unreadable crap.
sure the electric motor didn't generate text, but it's ridiculous to think it was anywhere near reliable in its early days
Electric motors didn't fill the world with slop.
Yes, they did.
>What changed?
Motors, electric or otherwise, made it so you can jump in a car, or a bus and drive you and your friends to the movies or on a holiday and go out and see the world. LLMs make it so people end up like delusional zombies talking to a screen.
Nothing has changed about people, they had common sense then and they have common sense now and they recognize when you try to sell them something useful that makes the physical world and their social situation better and when you want to sell them something out of dystopian sci-fi novels.
AI is awesome as a consumer. You can just build whatever bespoke thing you want. It can walk you through a myriad of home improvement projects.
> AI is awesome as a consumer. You can just build whatever bespoke thing you want. It can walk you through a myriad of home improvement projects.
I hear AI is especially awesome in domains you personally don't understand.
I do not understand small engines, but I would've thrown away a perfectly good honda 4 stroke this summer if I didn't have an LLM to help me with the diagnosis.
(And I only reached for the LLM after working through all the flowcharts and tables in the shop manual, reading relevant parts of two engine repair books, and watching a bunch of youtube videos.)
It's especially awesome in domains where:
1. you personally don't have the time to learn,
2. you can trivially evaluate the output ("does engine go brrrrrr or brr-splaugh-crunch"), and
3. there are no bad outcomes; or, there are bad outcomes (destroy engine, hurt myself) but you can augment with ground-truth ("do X as suggested by nlp machine but follow shop manual for doing X").
It was a 3B or 8B model too, so I probably burned more energy on unnecessary oil changes than on running the llm inference.
Say what you will about LLMs, and dear god can the claude-style harness outputs be annoying in the workplace. But they're great tools for accelerating the sorts of ultra-narrow-path learning curves that commonly pop up in tinkering/hacking/similar sorts of activities.
(Also, people without critical thinking skills believing everything they read pre-dates LLMs by thousands of years. This was a widely discussed problem with popular media consumption in the USA during the several years preceding the invention and popularization of LLMs (say 2015 to 2021). There's a different, more fundamental educational diagnosis for that problem, which LLMs may exacerbate, but which they did not cause and cannot cure.)
Yep! I’ve made so many custom apps for myself and family. I’ve made lots of purchases informed by AI that I would otherwise have been too overwhelmed to research. I’ve indexed all my bookshelves like a library just by taking a video and having AI build the entire analysis and label printing pipeline.
Yes, but unironically. It's a fantastic tool for learning. Better than Wikipedia or Google search.
I've used it as a fabulous tool to learn so many new things. From walking step by step me through rebuilding an electric motor, to reviewing and explaining my child's medical reports.
It walks my retired parents through their home projects like the project is a labyrinth. Spewing reams and reams of nonsense at them, but their memories are short enough (and their trust high enough) that they follow it aimlessly until they lose interest. For the most part, they wander around close enough to reality to be harmless, but they rarely ever land on “success” until it suggests hiring a professional. At least it gives them something to do.
I’m sorry to hear that. I think AI can be quite dangerous. But their experience is a skill issue.
Not really.
For example, the AI model being used is also a big factor.
Gemini 3.5 Pro, Grok were like this - spewed nonsense advice for anything 'physical'. Grok gave me very poor gardening advice, as an example.
But Claude Opus 4.8, 5, GPT Sol 5.6 are much better in this front.
So, it is an AI/model issues, not a skill issue.
It’s useful for DIY, but definitely not great. One has to carefully double-check everything; there’s no unit-tests to save your butt.
It can help out with understanding tools, workflows, materials, etc but doesn’t actually understands what it’s writing about and is prone to over-engineering, making critical mistakes or just replying with nonsense (for example swapping dimensions, recommending a completely inappropriate procedure, the wrong tool, etc).
This is all with Opus and Sol. Paying 22€ per month for that is a bit pricy for what one gets in return.
I feel like I fall into the neutral camp for the current round of AI bots. I've seen less-capable people churn out text/documents that aren't really better or more informative than their human level slop, except for more voluminous. So I guess that goes in the slightly negative column. But not a huge negative, since it just needs to be mostly ignored, like their previous human content. It is mostly a bit insulting to generate this slop. If I wanted to know what the chat bot has to say about something, I'd ask it myself. There is more low-effort slop on YouTube to wade through, but that probably means I should engage in something more productive than YouTube. Does that count as a positive or negative? The current crop of LLMs make meme generation easier. Again, is that a positive or negative? I'm not a professional computer programmer so churning out reams of code doesn't really excite me. Most of the questions I ask the bot are apparently too hard for them to answer correctly. Like I was wondering about the modulus of elasticity of "low-stretch" synthetic fiber ropes vs steel-wire cables. And it seems like it couldn't give me a straight answer. Like I just want the data using the same/consistent units so I can compare. Data center build-out/expansion isn't something I fear. There was some boring AI-generated art on the wall of a beach rental house I went to recently. It is something I wouldn't generally even notice, but one of my children looked closely, and sure enough there were oddly shaped sea shells and other artifacts. Again, luke-warm to that. Did some corporate artist lose a commission on some stock image art? I guess I could feel a little bit bad about that. I wouldn't have thought the rental was worse if they just had a blank wall.
> I returned to the field because I want to figure out how to use AI in ways that protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving
Bullsh*t. You wanted money. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame you. But let’s not pretend you give two sh*ts about any of that.
More AI slop garbage.
When I tell friends or family I just got a job in AI, they look at me with sympathy and disgust, as if I had told them I have gonorrhea. Nobody says "congratulations."
Weird contrast. Everyone uninvolved with tech I know in real life either doesn't care about AI or thinks it is neat.
This just reads like a poor attempt at convincing themselves that they didn't become what they hate.
I hate AI and I work on an AI project. I use it only where there is no viable alternative and where it is safe and sensible, which means it's just another tool, not some sort of oracle used to supposedly solve everything. That makes me not hate AI in the context of this project.
I hate smart phones. But guess what. I own one and so does everyone I know. So there you have it.
My FIRST question when anybody brings up scientific/software ethics is:
Whose ethics? What are the axioms? What are the exceptions? How do you handle paradoxes?
Most of the time, it's just some shitty corporate "ethics" with: make money at all costs but don't let the company look bad.
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> I want to figure out how to use AI in ways that protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving
I think this is an admirable goal but I'd be curious how the author plans to even begin approaching it. It seems to me that this ship has sailed. Generative AI is here now, which is seems like it will lead us down a lowest common denominator path, not an enlightened one. How do we "protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving" in the face of technology that is undermining all three, and it's too late to get out in front of?
This seems like such an unimaginative and cynical claim. You're saying you can't think of any way of putting an LLM in service of developing your creativity and understanding?!
If you assume that you can't fix something, you're right.
I find it surprising how many people think we're doomed when it comes to AI, and don't even want to try use this technology in a positive way. I'm not sure if this is a modern american cultural thing or what.
3 entire departments of people at my work are being walked out of the building this week for AI. Not replaced by AI, cost cutting to later possibly afford AI so they can put everyone else out of work too.
Dropped to page four on HN:
+20 points, 2 hours ago, 41 comments
Sudden drop visible here: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49338139
Thats because it’s flame bait; there no actual discussion going on, just people shouting.
The only thing more annoying than ai boosters is aai self-haters. Either use it and shut up or don't use it. It's like when people are all like 'oh I know that I should really be vegan but im not mentally strong enough'
> Either use it and shut up or don't use it.
Many people do not have a choice to not use it at their jobs due to internal mandates. Regardless of their own use, many people are subjected to externalized cost of AI proliferation (data centers, layoffs, electrical bills, etc).
One cannot choose to not be affected by it. But even if one were personally not at all affected by it, it is still reasonable for someone to push back against what they see as a negative effect on society, even if it's not hitting them personally. Climate change's effect on me personally is pretty minimal, and I still deeply care about it.
You always have a choice. If my job made me bash puppies on the head with a hammer, I'd quit. All you have to decide is where you draw that line.
and if all the jobs that are available are for bashing puppies on the head with a hammer, you'll do the noble thing and watch your family starve to death, right?
I think this is the wrong attitude to have. There is moral complexity in these topics and it's better for people to openly share their concerns rather than pick a side and "shut up". Yes you might find it annoying, but that's really your problem, not theirs.
>Either use it and shut up or don't use it.
Life isn't this simple.