Shunning AI is the human choice

splittydev

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

satvikpendem

Interesting what the disconnect is between what the vocal minority say about AI versus the vast majority who use it every day and do not care, such as coders and even regular people, as ChatGPT has almost a billion users.

echelon

I'm in film and highly exposed to the AI media and arts scene. I was very early to this hate, and I've experienced it personally by the metric boat load. I'm fine with people not liking the technology, but the number of death threats, rude comments ("your mother didn't use the coat hanger well enough"), and literal stalking and doxxing I've received from some of these rabidly anti-AI people is appalling. Whatever compels people to throw paint onto fine art or to block traffic for hours (including emergency vehicles and people just trying to get home) is the same bug a lot of these anti-AI griefers have. I take great joys when luminaries in animation, illustration, game development, etc. announce that they're using AI tools and that they enjoy them. It's one of my sweetest pleasures after enduring the anti-AI outrage day in and day out for years.

randypewick

I think that too many people are conflating their hate for AI, which is a technology, with the sick dynamics pushing it to gain profit. It's consumerism and capitalism to blame, AI is just a technology. As such, we want our leaders to be able to properly use such tech. But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.

delabay

In the battle of shape rotators vs wordcells, the wordcells have far more to gain with AI. This journo will come around.

endymion-light

There's a massive difference between the hatred of a CEO who is actively wanting to replace workers with what is essentially applied mathematics. AI seems more like easy reasoning for mass-layoffs & cost saving measures - and I rarely see articles that actually attempt to delve into this, instead seeking to just cancel out an entire technology. This article doesn't hate AI - it hates capitalism - which is a completely different argument, the underlying system was broken already, AI has just excasperated some of the concerns. Things like awful SEO + low effort art were already happening beforehand, they're just become far easier. And maybe a big problem is that AI = ChatGPT for the vast majority of people, including the person who wrote this artcle. This article specifically cites things like the Commonwealth Prize - a prize that if you look at historically, wasn't exactly an example of brilliant prose. Surely that's far more of a inditement on the quality of judging for a prize if it can be won by poor writing. A lot of the issues cited within this article just seem hollow, as they're issues that were pervasive before ChatGPT. AI isn't a panacea, but hating a technology because bad people use it feels reductionist. I think a far bigger problem is that the majority of the population doesn't have good knowledge of AI or Software in general, including CEOs. I'd love to see journalists that have a good understanding of the actual technology.

oleganza

Sorry for the irony, but the article is so long, i asked gpt to extract key points. I think what'd be a stronger point is talking about centralization of the quality models. Modern AI tools are inherently centralized around huge shared infrastructure that gives enormous leverage (== capacity for abuse) to those owning the infrastructure. This is true even if you have strong competition among several players: each of them would converge on some business model and majority of users would not be bothered with long-term consequences if they receive very tangible short-term value. The tooling is amazing, amount of productivity we unlock is fantastic and it's getting better by the day. But we need to watch out for collateral damage too. The future is somewhere there, but we can steer it towards being more or less hazardous.

rokob

I mean I think hating practices and efforts to exploit people is good. I think hating the adverse consequences of our inventive structures and lack of protections for basic human rights is good. But I think hating AI is pointing at the wrong subject for scorn. If you want positive change you can’t point at something that a lot of people are getting value out of (individuals as well as corporations) and say fuck your experience. It is also wrong for a billionaire to say fuck your future and deal with it, but that should mean hating on that person not the technology.

rd42

I kinda get the hate now - all of social media is being awash with AI. I think maybe a better option is to have new social media which is restricted to humans and human produced content. Hard to enforce - but I am sure there are ways out there.

morelandjs

It’s my opinion that societal rules should be derived from more fundamental virtues and notions of morality. AI is a capability, and it can be used in moral or immoral ways, but it’s more like a knife than an assault rifle. I don’t want AI forced down my throat by SF bro evangelists, but I also don’t want to see it banned as a useful technology. I wish people didn’t feel the need to adopt extreme positions on this topic and were capable of advancing more nuanced perspectives.

philipallstar

> So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect. What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.

velcrovan

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

aswegs8

I don't want to sound fatalistic, but in the end, the machine is too powerful to be stopped. With machine I don't mean AI, but rather the financial machine of the US.

thrw045

To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place. I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.

Ecys

Lol. https://x.com/Marakath/status/2056341063342633336

throwpoaster

Pass. Hate is never good.

cmrdporcupine

As an ex-Googler I'll say this: The problem with Eric Schmidt isn't (always) the particulars of the things he says. It's the smug I-know-best "boomer" tone he delivers it with, and the crass obliviousness to his relative position of privilege and power. Googlers/Xooglers will recall the "my various houses" quip at TGIF some years ago which memegen had a field day with. Also his multiple events where he brought in Kissinger to have "fireside chats" for Googlers to watch/attend. In fact his "father knows best" attitude ties directly in with his Kissinger fixation: this realpolitik "practical" vision of a world of inevitable powerful forces that you just have to learn to ride with .. which is just really a skin over "might makes right" under another name. Kissinger was explicitly so, and Schmidt admired him for it. Who cares about million horrifically killed in Cambodia if America is stronger for it? It's also not honestly all that far from the "Effective Altruism" stuff, too: some powerful person comes up with a system of "pragmatic" and utilitarian justifications for the forces-that-already-are and makes it sound like a programme-for-betterment when it's really just a method for their own further enrichment and ego satisfaction. Many of us legitimately boo this. Not because we're naive. Or stupid. But because our own sense of agency in the world and democratic ethics means we see agency for collectives of people which work along broad and participatory lines. And because we "naively" believe in justice and maybe a vague Kantian notion of ethics which tries to treat other humans as ends in themselves. Y'know. So-called basic enlightenment, modernist values. The "inevitable AI" stuff is just an icing on an overall cake. Standing in front of a bunch of young people who still have energy and spirit and the ability to shape the world and telling them that the best way to shape the future is to accept the form that it's already taking and ride-along and profit is next level douchebaggery, even from Schmidt. (I also have to muse out loud that the specific vile form Google has taken in the second decade of its existence relates to this same mentality. The Google of the founder's letter at IPO sounds nothing like the ... thing ... that exists now, and this seems to have everything to do with just yielding to what-is instead of making what-can-be)

dwa3592

I think this highlights the dichotomy of AI use and how it's shaping everyone's opinion based on their own experience. It's your AI versus mine. You could be OpenAI with unlimited compute and disprove a conjecture or you could be the people referred in the article who are asking claude if a story is written by a human. Opus 4.7 can generate working code faster than I ever could but I still see it as a dumb word calculator bc of the mistakes it makes.

NietTim

Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.

nibblecid

I believe that the technology is not the problem! It is the people who use AI in bad/unhealthy/unethical ways. I bet that in 10 years, we'll have a movie like The Big Short style talking about all the crazy things people did with AI, and the audience will say, "Yeah! We saw it coming!" No, you didn't!