The AI Hate Progression

adamddev1

The lack of consent is real. As one of those viral commencement speakers who got booed said: "Find a way to say yes." My greater concern is that we are trading away hard earned truths for drastically inferred best guesses and slop that is just good enough to work. Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time. LLM agents fudge over and cut corners. What people don't understand is the exponential damage that will be done as we keep baking these errors and untruths into everything we build, and build with.

avaer

A sentiment a lot of people can get behind, but at this point if AI is getting a do-over, society is getting a do-over, because the economic entanglements are not really fixable without a revolution of current capitalism. The amount of money that would evaporate if we did AI ethically is unfathomable. Most of big tech would collapse if they had to undo anything they did using stolen IP, as would a large section of the economy that's dependent on it, many people's jobs, and most people's investments. This isn't an argument against doing AI ethically; in fact it shows how bad things have gotten. But what's the fix? When people feel this way are they arguing for revolt? A Butlerian Jihad? Or is there another practical solution?

pesus

Good write up, and I think it accurately sums up many people's feelings about AI. One thing I would disagree with is the idea of AI getting a do over. Even if they somehow managed to do that, the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted for whole generations of people, and its reputation only gets worse every day. There's no coming back from that any time soon.

matchbok3

This is a nonsensical piece. >You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave. This is ... not how consent works. At all.

Drakexor

Just a reminder that only the west hates AI. China has 87% of the populace viewing AI favorably. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/11/19/trust-in-ai-far...

solaire_oa

For a period of time, I was graphing HN AI sentiment on BULL/BEAR LOVE/HATE axes. https://r5d.me/vibeschism/ The mania and lament continues at full speed, I suppose. And related to the brazen contempt for consent: https://r5d.me/robots.txt I like the article's sentiment, but a do-over sounds... unrealistic. Sadly, this is very common with the lamentation links, where the article accurately describes the problems at hand, but is alack of actionable advice.

magic_hamster

There are a few issues here that should be addressed. There's the AI hype and deafening echo chambers, but then there's also the actual value you can find in AI when you just try it a little bit quietly. I totally disagree with the comparison to something like NFT. While AI is being pushed aggressively and it can definitely be annoying, AI is actually useful unlike NFTs. Much like the author, I also enjoy photography, graphic design, and other creative hobbies. It's entirely my choice how much and where to apply AI. We have to accept that yes, it's useful, and yes you can definitely produce good deliverables with it, not just slop. Yes, when looking for assets and not the artistic process, many people will use AI and the cost of creative work will plummet. It's not great but that's the way it is. But it's not like we should just stop creating, especially if it's a hobby. Do it for fun. Or, maybe use AI to try something new. Either way AI is too useful, it's here to stay and it doesn't need a do-over. It's true, we should accept the world is changing, and no amount of moaning or complaining will make this disappear.

skybrian

Maybe we could find common ground in hating the AI gold rush/arms race? If people weren't in such a huge hurry to build it out as fast as possible, maybe there would be more time to figure out how do things right? Seen from that perspective, adding friction (for example, not releasing Mythos widely and suspending Fable for a while) is not so bad. If the bubble collapsed then that would also give us more time.

holistio

A bit off-topic, but ever since the "change currency" swipe down gesture in Revolut was replaced with their nobody actually wants AI in their banking app AI, I've grown to just hate every occasion when I open the damn app.

comrade1234

I have a coworker that irrationally hated ai too. He says something about how his daughter and friends' hobby is jailbreaking ai. We have a product used in call centers. It turns out ai is amazing in triaging (surveying) people. We can ask a question in English and if they respond n another language (any language) the ai will switch to that language, ask its questions, and then give us the answers in English. This was stuff that was impossible 10-years-ago. That ability won him over. The software is written in Java and spring-ai so I have control over the system and user prompts so jailbreaking isn't an issue.

hectdev

I mean, the author is mad something is popular and calls it psychosis. Which, all things being equal, is balanced out by nay sayers time and time again. Is not posting a lengthy rant online and sharing it not a form of "psychosis" when viewed from people that like the new technology? But he lost me at "As it exists right now, I don't give a toss what good it can do, what practical benefits it has once the techbros move on to their next mark. I don't care about any of it at all...". Because he feels hatred, we are supposed to look the other way when it can and does create benefits? Just find a way to use it to your liking (maybe that's zero) and ignore the stuff you can't be bothered with and maybe that means being less connected to technology, which honestly, is pretty great at times.

dvt

> At some point, the entire tech industry saw ChatGPT and fell into a collective psychosis and decided that this, this is the next big thing, and that we must pull out the stops to ensure the prophecy is fulfilled of generative AI/LLMs becoming the next big thing. This is extremely disingenuous, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer product for a reason. Part hype, part usefulness, part novelty. The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes. It's not that hard to criticize the AI hypetrain without a strawman. > I'm sure copyrighted material was already being fed into LLMs at this point (I mean, you also had people willingly feeding it in, like the example I gave above) but once the techbros caught on and wanted to accelerate this, suddenly EVERYTHING public facing was fair game to training their models. This is also just extremely disingenous. For full disclosure, I'm technically a stakeholder here, as I wrote two books which made it into training sets (and part of two class actions), but this cat is way out of the bag. Unless you really want to start splitting hairs about "ingesting" vs "processing" vs "training" vs "transforming," Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer. Folks were bringing this up decades ago, especially record labels that were suing google for copy-pasting lyrics to their main search pages; were you complaining then, too? Because some people were. > All because investors demanded it, and companies didn't want to be caught with their pants down if these inflated claims of it being the next big thing proved to be true. This is where the hate for me really started, because a lot of these companies forced AI upon you, with no means to opt out. FOMO is a hell of a drug on a corporate scale, ho-ly. Corporate FOMO is pretty run of the mill, this shouldn't be surprising in the least. I must've done like half a dozen "blockchain hackathons" or "VR demos" back when those technologies were all the rage. I don't really see how it's that big of a big deal, other than being mildly annoying. > You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave. Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet. It was doubly gone when Facebook sold PII data to advertisers. It was triply gone when Experian got hacked and the SSN of every taxpayer in the USA was leaked (and no one went to jail lol). Let's stop being dramatic. It just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how data collection works. > Good luck avoiding AI if we buy up all the components for you to build your own computers and devices! Submit everything to the cloud, it's now the only affordable option, suckers! Blog author and hobbyist photographer discovers free markets. I don't mean to be dismissive, but this kind of take is boring, uninspired, and (ironically) could've just been written by ChatGPT. Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.

john_strinlai

> Consent needs to be a core concept of it. If people don't want to use it, respect that opinion. this was gone before chatgpt was even a twinkle in someone's eye. "maybe later" replaced "no" on popups. automatically being opted-into mailing lists when ordering pizza or whatever (pizza hut is the worst). B2B emails that have size 3 font with a random word selected that i have to put in the subject line to unsubscribe from the spam. updates that turn on settings i have deliberately turned off. privacy policies changing on a whim that you "automatically accept by using the service" but logging in to delete your account counts as "using the service". etc. there are a million+ examples of tech companies ignoring any concept of consent going back at least 20 years.

tptacek

I mean, the issue with this is: "If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it." That's not going to happen. A lot of these AI-skeptic pieces would be more persuasive or at least more legible if they acknowledged basic facts of the world. A plan that drastically curtails the AI business on a forwardgoing basis is legible to me. A plan where we "start over from zero" sounds utopian, which gives me permission (really, bashes me over the head with it) not to care.

Varelion

I, and everyone in my social circle, go out of our way to not touch anything that was had AI significantly involved in the creation process. Hypocritically, I use AI a lot at work. I see it as using it a lot more than I am paying for, to actively sink OpenAI/Claud's bottom line. I have a coworker that does the same. His logic was sound -- when something is heavily subsidized, abuse it.

isoprophlex

> It was this brazen disregard for any kind of consent from the get go that did most of the work in turning me against anything AI had to offer. It seems the author is in fact hating on disrupt-everything hypercapitalism of the American techbro kind, not generative AI...

fvckaigotohell

I don't care if I am behind times or whatever. I try to regulate myself from AI. I finally just use Brave search without AI and don't go to Google search whatsoever. The more I see AI videos, AI songs, AI writings, AI whatever etc, the more angrier I get. Fucking piece of trash pushed by mediocre bastards who don't want to bother investing skills to do good music, art, in the first place and steal their IPs and "look ma, my dick is making new songs just by prompting Suno with the liquid I ejaculate, screw those starving artists!" The tool is being created and used very irresponsibly by society. It wont' get better, it will get worse. I am going to try to find a way to block all Youtube channels that I find using AI. Next, I will also block all domains that use AI writings, AI images, etc. If this makes my internet usage unusable, so be it. I started from just literally cutting ties with someone who said "my kids make videos and games using AI, and you will be left behind" to my face. Yup, I cut ties with that person not because of political discourse, not because of Trump, but because of AI. The only thing that I can't avoid is using AI in my job because my fucking employer tells me so. I still have to put food on the table or I risk bringing literal swords, guns or ropes and go to literal death march against these "tech leaders". I hope that day will never happen. But who knows, maybe society will be desperate enough to finally have to use violence as the last resort.

sharpshadow

From a nuclear perspective once the AI players are established your training data will be protected again. Far worse than right now with almost unlimited access will be the lobotomized AIs you will be allowed to use while regular online search diminishes slowly. Nevertheless a country can’t simply skip this weapon development it would be counter human evolution.

simianwords

This post is fodder for the neo-conservative (or neo-luddite) left. The neo-conservative left is a political movement by the elite and privileged class of people who are technically literate. Their secret/subconscious ideology is for the status quo to remain. The reason is simple, they never stood for progresss. They actually always wanted to conserve but they liked parroting "progressive" talking points when it helped signal it socially. This author wants consent from companies deploying LLM. What can one say about this lol..

atleastoptimal

It's funny how worked up people get about copyright with respect to to AI training when using copyrighted material for training an AI model is fair use. We have a concept of fair use in copyright because economic growth is essentially tied to the free proliferation of information. I can't really trust any anti-AI argument when it feels more of a tribal grievance than a rational explanation of concern. Especially with the overuse of the "techbro" pejorative, it seems more a lament against a certain type of attidude in the tech world and a hatred that that attitude has translated into massive material wealth.