Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

mrhottakes

Krugman continues to be late to the party, but at least he's put thought into it this time.

voidUpdate

Given the amount of people on HN happily using LLMs for their everyday work and extolling the virtues of LLMs, "everyone" might be a bit excessive

esperent

An alternative theory: people care deeply about art, and the people who make it: artists, musicians, writers. This is a large part of what gives out society meaning, and even for people who don't think deeply about it, we intuitively understand that these artists (outside of a lucky few) get very little back compared to the effort and passion they put in, and the value they add to society. And suddenly, here come all these huge, horrible companies that literally steal all the artist's work, by pirating it (which we've all been gaslit into thinking is something illegal but it turns out like so much else, it's only illegal if you're poor), and these huge companies have suddenly automated all this artistic creation, this previously human endeavor of creating meaning and joy and sharing passion. This makes people deeply uncomfortable because we recognize how wrong it is for all of these billionaires and trillionares to be getting ever richer while eating the creative genius of humanity and giving as little as possible back. On top of that, they're spying on everything we do and feeding it to the ever hungry AI maw to automate every possible job away, and people (rightfully) think this will steal a lot of meaning from human society, converting it via LLMs into a dollar value, which, again, sits in the billionaire's pocket, not yours. So yes, people are angry about this in a way they weren't angry about e.g. spreadsheets, or cheap international communication. Because it's genuinely different, and people recognize that. AI is out of the bottle, and we cannot put it back. But equally, we cannot live in a world where it creates trillionares, where everyone is made poorer and poorer while the things that give them meaning get automated away (whether that's art, science, philosophy, mathematics, coding, or anything else). The only way I can see forward is of this gets treated like a utility, with strict controls on AI companies - training on public data allowed but then the thing you create gets recognized as a public good, and you earn the money back by serving it via an API, but with strict limits on how much you can charge and no ability to arbitrarily lock people out. I don't see the US achieving this, unfortunately, and it'll probably be looked back on as one of the long list of things that lead to it's downfall.

jdw64

But I do get the sense that it's true that AI is seen as a factor that could worsen the wealth concentration problem we're talking about here

seemaze

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672732 For example..

nancyminusone

Outside software, AI is synonymous with low quality and low effort. As in, "I don't care enough about you to bother with you myself, I'll have the AI do it". Covers news articles, emails, customer service, products, art, jobs, etc. The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.

somewhereoutth

I went to look for a new phone about 6 months ago - everything was AI this, AI that, all the display stands made a big deal about AI (to the extent I considered a 2024 phone because no AI). In the end I didn't buy at that point. Just last week finally I had to buy a new phone, and so I went shopping again - this time no AI was mentioned anywhere . Not online, not on the stands in the shops, nowhere. The silence speaks volumes, as they say.

catigula

>We're going to take your jobs and possibly kill you and also Jeff Bezos might get to live forever, ahahahahahaha! Is this really a mystery?

bariumbitmap

The test of a technology is how it's actually used in society. What it theoretically could do in the abstract is immaterial. For example, BitTorrent is a great peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol. In principle you could use this for legitimate media distribution, and in fact Rainberry Inc. (a.k.a BitTorrent Inc.) tried to do this for decades and succeeded in some one-off partnerships with legit broadcasters: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/02/sharing-d... In practice BitTorrent as a protocol is still mainly used for pirated video files, the same as it was 20 years ago. Meanwhile BitTorrent the company was bought by a cryptocurrency startup in 2018 and laid off most of its employees in 2023. < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainberry,_Inc. > Edit: fix link and clarify

everyone

The monied are all dogpiling money, water, electricity, pc hardware into it in their classic stupid tulipomania way (Just like with NFTs and Crypto before) The management class in corporations are obsessed with it, they are delusional and think they can finally use it achieve their dreams of having no workers. They are forcing their workers to use it somehow. The are also foisting it unasked onto consumers in their products in the most stupid way. just wrecking their products. And the reality of it is that.. The current crop of LLMs are excellent chatbots; they're very good at fooling a human into believing that they are intelligent.. They're good for shitposting and making silly images.. They have a few other quite situational niche uses, but that's about it. I'm just pissed off at the stupidity and waste of it all. Like the Easter Islanders, our elites are driving our society straight into the ground.

feverzsj

Just check the ram and ssd price, I'd say people don't hate AI enough.

orangedog

This feels pedantic but there was a survey posted on HN very recently across the US which showed that 60% dislike it. This means a whopping 40% of people either want it or don't care. I can tell you from observing high schoolers for a week, everybody there was using it, teachers and students alike. Do they like it? I don't know, but they are using it. The numbers against it aren't as big as the most vocal critics would have you believe.

snootypoot

if not bubble, then why bubble shaped

coldtea

Because it's hate worthy. It removes jobs without, at least currently, substituting an equal amount of new jobs (and even if it did, they wouldn't apply to the same people who lost theirs. It serves for spam, public manipulation, and mass surveillance. It constitutes massive copyright fraud. It fills the web with slop. It's added to products despite that users say they don't want it there, and even say they dislike it.

elpakal

I work in AI, both building at a large company and consulting on the side. My manager (of two months) uses claude to reply to everyone in Teams and emails, usually filled with nonsensical slop. I believe in its potential when applied correctly but also am realizing that it's unlocking an entirely new kind of fraudster.

jjulius

>It’s the fear, the enshittification, datacenter hostility, and the tech broligarchy It's also peak "tech hubris". The broader world has largely complained about Silicon Valley's "we know better than you" attitude for a long time, and the push for AI/LLMs is that attitude on steroids.

sys_64738

The bulk output of "AI" is pure slop without constraints. Eventually the volume of slop is so bad that people just stop engaging. It's why AI free zones will thrive but those admitting AI slop are doomed to die painful and horrible deaths in the long run.

aleda145

I think the animosity comes from most people just encountering the "slop". Generated ads, fake content or low quality music.

api

The hard-core heavy-duty hate is all economic. People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into learned helplessness on those things. Nothing can be done. Both parties are bad. The right promotes corrupt oligarchy and regressively transfers wealth upward, the left prevents new home construction (driving real estate costs) and regulates away everything but service industries and white collar jobs that AI is now replacing. The worst AI hate I've seen comes from artists and creatives. I've found the AI hate in those communities to be white hot bordering on people talking about violence. My early take, which I think is still valid, is that actual art is very unlikely to be replaced by AI. AI generated visual stuff looks bland, cliche, or has this weird "plastic" look. AI generated prose is boring. AI generated stories are hilarious barrages of tropes played exactly straight, cliche characters, basically just like paint by numbers bad TV writing or even worse. If real artists find ways to use AI, it won't be this way. It'll be as an assistant or they'll get in and hack it and make it do exactly what they want, much like artistic experimental photography. But I'm only half right, and when I realized this I understood the hate. AI is not replacing "true art," and it won't even if true artists end up finding ways to use it (like artistic photography etc.). But what it is replacing is what a lot of artists make their money doing: commercial art, making "content," ghostwriting, first-pass editing, graphic design, web design, that kind of thing. That's not pour-your-soul-into-it capital-A Art, but it's what pays the bills. AI is absolutely decimating the market for that. So back to my first point: it's all economic.

QuadrupleA

Point not mentioned: it just doesn't work that well! It lies, it reverts to the mean on every topic, it wastes the reader's time. It's toxically positive, sycophantic. It's such a good mimic that it's insidiously hard to distinguish its bullshit or fake work from real work.