The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

jdw64

The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well. But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks. The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use is felt by the lower classes, while the upper classes still have the freedom not to use it. AI may be able to make decisions based on more data than executives do, and perhaps even make better decisions than management. Yet the people being replaced are the lower-level workers. This is the problem. The upper classes, who claim that AI is an essential tool, still have the freedom not to use it. But the lower classes cannot survive unless they use it. It becomes a tool required for survival, while at the same time being treated as something wrong, inferior, or low-status if you use it. To get a job, AI becomes an essential survival tool. But culturally, it is also treated as a tool that damages creativity. I see this in open-source communities as well, in the class discourse around open source. The same culture appears on Hacker News. Among the upper layer of open-source communities, there is often hostility toward AI-generated code, based on ideas of human purity: AI code is said to have no meaning, no responsibility, no real authorship. So even within open source, this takes on a class character. But as a freelance developer, I have to trade against my own code-writing ability in order to survive and deliver. Because of AI, the floor price of software delivery has collapsed. If I do not use AI, I cannot meet the new requirements. In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000. Without AI, that volume of work is impossible to handle. This kind of discourse always makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it, but I have to use it. AI lowers the barrier to creation and learning, but the way it lowers that barrier can also bypass the training of thought itself. It turns young people into both beneficiaries and damaged subjects at the same time. And we live under this loop of coercion. Sometimes I think I do not want to use AI. But if I want to survive, I have to use it. I feel the abilities I once took pride in beginning to decay, and I feel myself becoming increasingly bound to AI companies. At the same time, I also feel another kind of ability beginning to emerge. Perhaps growing older means learning how to live inside irony.

fluidfortune

The irony here is this: AI actually has the potential to absolutely level the playing field. Right now corporations are building the infrastructure out wildly and incorporating it into everything. They’re concerned about a race to the top while creating absolute inefficiency and ignoring responsible, sustainable growth. The task of GenZ should not be to avoid AI, in my opinion. Rather, embrace it. Own it. WEAPONIZE IT. When Google mainstreamed the Search Engine and added tool after tool, it made things that were previously legacy (Word Processing? Pay a big licensing fee to Microsoft, only save to your local machine or hard media! Along comes Google Drive and Docs and now you can edit your document everywhere and a computer crash doesn’t take it out!) well, digitized. AI is that integration at warp speed. We now have the tools to work harder and faster. We have near-instant access to research. If we are discerning, AI is actually not a weapon against us. It is a tool we can use to change the narrative. Big companies are actually banking on fear of the masses. They want you to believe that AI is too big. That it is all-knowing. They don’t want you to recognize you can download ollama and a localized agent and tune it to your needs. Or to get into Gemini and ask it how you can disconnect from Google’s cloud if that’s really what you want it to do. AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?

skeeter2020

>> AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s? 2 comments that smack of AI authorship, or if the above is human-created, god I wish they'd used AI.

kald145

Gen-Z is pretty cool. The problem is a small subset of Gen-X and Millenials who have too much money and power and treat AI as if it is the Dianetics bible from SciFi author Ron L. Hubbard (who according to James Randi knew exactly what he was doing). There are truly mentally unwell people in charge who would like get out the E-meter and audit everyone who does not follow their new Scientology knockoff. Yes, the advertising methods and suppression of opposition are the same.

cat_plus_plus

It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy enough to not have to.

umanwizard

I don’t understand why people act like we just have to submit to the AI revolution. We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?

Insanity

Paywalled so I can't read the article. However, is this exclusive to young people? I'm a millenial (early 90s) and I share their sentiment. I might not share it for the same reason though. Personally, I'm concerned about what AI usage would do to my cognitive ability, and as such I try to limit my use. I can't avoid using it at work (we're being tracked on "AI Adoption") and it does genuinely speed up some of my tasks. And I do play around with AI coding tools, mostly because I think I _should_ know them in this day and age. But apart from that, I'm not using it. I'm using DDG searches rather than asking ChatGPT for solutions, I still go around reading websites and papers instead of AI summaries, and I don't outsource my writing to it. (i.e, I write my own emails, my own blogs, my own poorly worded HN comments, etc).

anianz

> Freystaetter and Gottlieb both say that instead of their own generation, they are more worried about Gen Alpha and other young people that come after them, who lose their chance to develop healthy relationships with technologies when they become mandatory and ubiquitous. I remember similar concerns from Millennials about Gen-Z with the Internet and social media. In the end the Internet and Social Media Gen-Z grew up with was quite different from the one Gen-Y was worried about and the reaction of the new generation to it of course not uniform. Similar developments might happen with Gen Alpha and AI, which seems even more polarizing to me.

fourspacetabs

https://archive.ph/F3T8k

tarr11

The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this. paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis. Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.

Lyngbakr

> They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind. I'm currently reading a fascinating book called Blood In The Machine° about the Luddites who opposed certain technologies in 19th century England and the parallels with the current state of affairs. It's important to remember that while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes. ° https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...

ChrisArchitect

Previously on the Gallup study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443

cedws

We know that AI will ultimately just end up enriching a very small group of people with no change in prosperity for working and middle classes. CEOs are openly saying as much. For the past number of decades the rise in productivity has been completely detached from wages, it'll be no different this time. We're also no strangers to enshittification, we have first hand experience of technology causing negative societal effects when in the hands of for-profit entities.

wduquette

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

a15971

In tech, young people can complain. Us, the older folks, are not allowed to complain, lest we get branded as old fashioned, unable to adapt, etc.

fny

> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way. I don't see how these and other sentiments are unique to Gen Z at all. The difference I've seen is that many zoomers have given up on learning in the first place. "What's the point?"

sailfast

I don't understand all the negativity in the education space. Ever since I read Diamond Age, the ability to interact with and interrogate works of literature, or science, or the world at large is EXTREMELY powerful for understanding. AI can be used for good especially when you're digging into the details / nitty gritty and asking good questions. Anything can be used in a saccharine way to take the easy way out. Why not ban Cliff Notes as well? Sure, it won't write the essay, but also you didn't read the book. You don't have to use these tools in a lazy way. You don't have to use these tools in a way that cheats / compromises your intelligence. Building up the awareness to use them in a way that multiplies instead of subtracts is going to be the key issue for my kids, and for anybody in the workforce today.

pllbnk

I think a lot of people have already experienced that LLMs are useless by themselves. Ultimately what can make them useful are humans who are directing them, who understand their work and have concrete goals, who know how to verify LLM outputs which always contain at least a few hallucinations that can steer entire session off the cliff. And the hatred comes from the fact that their bosses whose AI usage is for the most part is limited to writing and summarizing emails are rubbing their hands together when they can lay off everyone and have their businesses run by AI.

dabinat

I think that AI can have value if used correctly, but there is a long list of negative externalities that we are not prepared for as a society. We need to pass laws or establish norms to mitigate as many of those as possible, but I doubt that will happen until things are already bad. On the plus side, I believe AI will finally kill social media, which can only be a good thing.

karakoram

https://archive.md/cThY7