8 ms·

Why I'm Boycotting AI

67 points by wyclif 2y ago

WithinReason 2y ago
> It really would have been social suicide to try to make my way in the 2010s professional class with anything other than a MacBook Pro and an iPhone Can someone explain this part? It's not something I can relate to at all. Maybe because I'm not from the US?
- ghaff 2y ago
  MacBooks are common in tech circles but they’re fairly low market share overall. And in my circles iPhones are common but Androids are not rare. That statement is simply false even in the US.
- eru 2y ago
  Probably, I was also objecting to that (and also don't live in the US). But I wouldn't read too much into that sentence: it's just part of the author's self-indulgent style.
- harvey9 2y ago
  It seemed he applied for a job at a place where they judge you on what laptop you carry at the interview. I have seen that attitude in the UK too.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Why would I carry a laptop at an interview?
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      To give a demo? Maybe it’s not fair but I find a Framework running Linux gives a good first impression.
      - eru 2y ago
        I guess it depends on who you are giving a demo to and what kind of demo etc. In tech circles, you would probably make a pretty big impression, if you pulled out an old laptop running MS-DOS (and still did an impressive demo).
  - astura 2y ago
    Who even carries a laptop to a job interview?
- JimDabell 2y ago
  > The upside was a few years feeling like I was part of the future as I sipped my lattés and floated through the dawning post-industrial era with my sleek silver Apple gadgets. This too. The author just has the drama on everything turned up to a thousand percent. It’s incredibly irritating and made me stop reading.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    Thanks for this. These two snippets (yours and GPs) saved me some reading time.
  - quitit 2y ago
    I stopped there too, I said to myself "this is either badly written AI slop, or this person is unhinged."
    - eru 2y ago
      Fortunately, the AI slop is getting better by the week.
- friendzis 2y ago
  Really? Not even being from US, I can attest that simply carrying a silvery laptop or a phone with the half eaten apple logo literally opened doors. Salespeople would have nearly empty iphones besides their personal androids just for the purpose of showing off. The "one of us" mentality has shifted to other things over the years, but some industries still live on the image.
- borgdefenser 2y ago
  In the US, Apple has done an all time great job marketing their products. I don't think there is much more too it. "If I didn't buy Apple it would hurt my career". Obviously, completely absurd but how else can you grow a company to be worth 3.3 trillion selling tech gadgets at a massive premium. It is easy to convince oneself too that this marketing is factual reality after spending so much money too. I mean that new iphone wasn't an expense, it was a career investment!
- quitit 2y ago
  There's quite a bit of hyperbole in the article, but that part reads like a marketer's dream. Imagine that: The idea that all you need to do to solve your social cohesion problems is to buy something. How incredible would such a proposition be! We all know very well that buying something isn't the difference between why our peers will or won't engage with us. However devaluing others into superficial strawman is an accessible coping mechanism for social rejection. When children say something like this, it's because they're not aware they're being bullied and buying the <thing> isn't going to fix it. When an adult says it, it's a bit more concerning - it shows that they perhaps have certain unaddressed social anxieties, or are avoiding dealing with their antisocial behaviours that are leading to their social rejection.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  I'm in the US and I can't relate to it either. I don't doubt that there are subcultures where this is a thing, but it was never a universal issue.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> I still have not downloaded an AI app of any kind to my phone. If he has an iPhone, there’s no need to download it. It’s already there. That said, he has some good points. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we won’t be able to “opt out,” forever. At some point, ML is bound to become endemic. It’s like those stupid scan-guns that supermarkets in my area are starting to ask customers to use. They are scan guns that you pick up, as you go in, and scan each purchase. When you check out, you just scan a barcode on the cashier stand, and Bjorn Stronginthearm’s your uncle. I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers. Sooner or later, however, I am unlikely to be able to avoid them.
- whstl 2y ago
  > I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers. This reminds me of when the bus company of my hometown transitioned to having a driver + cashier to only having a driver that takes cash. Half of the workforce just gone overnight. Of course the writing was on the wall with electronic ticketing, but still. It makes me feel I'm part of a "First They Came" situation. Sure maybe these people found other jobs for themselves (or so I tell myself) but still.
  - protocolture 2y ago
    People get shitty about bullshit jobs and then when they do get cleaned up by ATMs or some other efficiency turn around and pine for them.
    - smackeyacky 2y ago
      That’s not entirely fair. Jobs automated out of existence weren’t bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs are HR and project management. Made up fluff nobody really needs.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        That's a huge blanket statement. Bullshit jobs aren't tied to any specific industries, and all jobs in HR and project management aren't bullshit.
eru 2y ago
[flagged]
mg794613 2y ago
Yeah, there were voices like this with the advent of trains, electricity, light bulbs, ehm, maybe just everything.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  Yeah, if you’re against leaded petrol, thalidomide, CFCs, or asbestos, you’re just a Luddite.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Those automate things that humans find tedious. Modern AI automates things that humans find give their lives meaning. If we automate creative and intellectual work, what else is there?
mathieuh 2y ago
Leaving aside the question of whether AI is/will ever be actually capable of what tech bros claim, I don't think there is anything inherent to AI that will cause these issues. The problem will be with society's mode of production. We have a society now where people could be doing less work but are instead forced to do—as Graeber calls them—Bullshit Jobs. Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes said almost a century ago that as technology advanced people would have to do less work. I think if AI lives up to the hype it could be a tremendous boon for everyone if we can restructure our societies to take advantage.
protocolture 2y ago
> AI is super evil and will destroy us all Ok why is that > AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it. That sounds fine. Its like when you hear a conservative pundit claim that all antifa are weak people who need extra genders, and then in the next breath complain that they are an effective, brutal, brick throwing, pundit punching street militia. Pick a lane. >As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness? So now its issue is that it doesnt give you good feelings?
- Aeolun 2y ago
  > As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness? From my experience trying this. It isn’t quite that easy. The AI has a massive amount of difficulty staying on track and remembering earlier facts when writing a story. There is zero risk of them replacing writers for anything but short stories for now.
  - protocolture 2y ago
    More or less my experience. Sudowrite literally breaks out the story into chapters, and has you arrange all the facts of the story so they can be summarily accessible at all times.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      Even making a massive snowflake for the whole story didn’t quite do it for me. It would forget relatively unimportant things, like the character had said something to someone, then three scenes on misremembers what they actually said.
      - protocolture 2y ago
        I have had both amazing results, and really shit results. Like I had it write a cool opening chapter to a short story based on nothing but my notes. And another time, I had a boxer punch someone 2 floors above him on a balcony.
mentalgear 2y ago
This really felt like on-point : > Unwary, I fell for the techno-optimism of the past two decades and ended up with a diminished attention span and a bunch of mysterious subscription charges to show for it. Well. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on Sam Altman. I know, much better now, the folly of turning over my own mental powers to a bunch of techies promising a brilliant future. > I’m not making that mistake again. Nor should you. Context: > The people pushing AI now are the same sorts who spent the 2010s promoting web 2.0 as a new vision of freedom and global connectivity, all while destroying traditional media and ripping off as much private data as they possibly could and cheerfully selling it to advertisers. > This recent history raises an important question: why in the world should we trust these people ever again? > These are remarkable achievements. But they do infantilise us. I’m pretty sure that, if my phone were taken away from me, I couldn’t find my own way from my home to my place of work.
Trasmatta 2y ago
> Because AI is no good for us — no good for our minds, creativity, or competence — and as it gets jammed down our throats, we are the only ones with the power to refuse. I think there are a lot of risks with AI, but I'm not convinced that it's intrinsically bad for "our minds, creativity, or competence". In many ways it's let me be MORE creative in the ways I want to be, by helping me overcome obstacles that were always blockers in the past.
- protocolture 2y ago
  Ditto. Its crazy how efficient it lets me be with my hobbies
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    "AI" automates the simple things with crazy efficiency. Like I did a bunch of RSS-feeds for sites that don't have them (or they're crap quality). I just gave Cursor (Claude 3.7 I think) the HTML page and told it to write a parser that generates an Atom feed with Go from the page. In most cases it was right on the first go, a few I had to adjust to make them look right in FreshRSS. It even automatically suggested caching entries in a sqlite db to reduce load on the original site. This was for feeds that only have a link with no content, the application opens the link, fetches the relevant content and adds it to the custom feed.
harvey9 2y ago
In Soviet Russia AI boycott you
nottorp 2y ago
Boycott "AI"? Why? See if it's useful, ignoring the religious like hype, and use it for what it's worth. And stop calling it "AI" because it doesn't have anything to do with "intelligence". LLMs will write the code for you is bullshit. LLMs will get you some starter or reference info if it's a widely discussed subject is true. Apple products are crap, software wise. They're just less crap than the competition so I use them.
Tepix 2y ago
> But I’m still paying the price for that: every time I log in to my bank account now, it’s like peeling barnacles off the hull of a ship to get rid of all the new charges that Apple and Google have concocted. That part isn't very convincing. I have no charges on my bank account from Apple or Google. Anyway, i think a potential reason to reject AI is what Kurt Vonnegut has laid out in his 1952 novel "Player Piano": Do we want automation take away jobs we actually like? I highly recommend reading this book, it is once again very relevant today.
- nisegami 2y ago
  I think that the concern that AI will take away creative jobs is missing the forest for the trees. I want to write more about my thoughts on this but the gist of it is those jobs may become rarer, but that doesn't have to mean that creative endeavors will cease. I think we need a broader reimagining of what employment means to individuals and to society.
- DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
  Automation takes away "jobs" but it doesn't make the actual activity forbidden. You can still do things without being paid for them.
  - Tepix 2y ago
    If you identify with your job and it becomes worthless (noone wants to pay for it), it's going to mess with your self-esteem.
    - Lerc 2y ago
      I think this statement concisely embeds the premise that might be the root cause of much of the problem. That premise is "For something to have worth, someone has to be willing to pay for it". That is only true for the narrowest definition of worth. If worth is reduced to a property to facilitate trade and nothing else then it works. Worth can also carry a sense of non-tradable value, It can be meaningful. You can do something because you like doing it and someone else could be glad you were doing it. Requiring a financial transaction to turn that goodwill into self esteem seems to be a fundamental problem with our society.
jasode 2y ago
>AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it. It’s a super-Google that goes into the body of texts and rearranges the words into a very pleasing facsimile of a cogent argument. There’s no “intelligence” behind it, in the sense of a computer actually thinking. >AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphisation People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter. What's important is if it is useful. E.g... create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv. People would embrace AI like that instead of complaining about it. If a pundit tried to advise the consumer who wants to avoid ads, "you know, that ad-skipping technology is _just_ fancy linear algebra and there's no _real_ intelligence behind it! You're dumbing down your brain by letting the AI mute the ads automatically instead of you doing it yourself." ... that's not a compelling argument. The usefulness of blocking ads outweighs any theoretical thresholds for real intelligence. A lot of generative AI is not useful, so people will complain about it by falling back on the "it's not real intelligence" argument.
- eviks 2y ago
  > People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter. > What's important is if it is useful. Except the usefulness expectations almost completely rely on the intelligence (it's right there in the name)! Without this you wouldn't have so much hype&money in this topic. So the complaint is rightfully directed at the core selling point
  - edanm 2y ago
    Why not just... use the product and see if it's useful? What does it matter what it's called, what does it matter if it's hyped or not, what does it matter if investors are or aren't throwing too much money into it. You, individually, can try out the product and see if it's useful for you. Many people have done so and found it extremely useful for themselves (myself included).
NVHacker 2y ago
My personal AI assistant read the article and labelled it #rubbish and #avoid.
cjs_ac 2y ago
I'm boycotting AI because it doesn't solve any problems that I have.
smackeyacky 2y ago
I refused to use ratcheting spanners and air tools and other useful things when working on cars or bikes. I was so very wrong. There is a time and place for an air powered ratchet or big rattle gun. To think “my muscles will atrophy and I’ll stop thinking of clever ways to loosen that thing” is just wrong. It’s confusing the desired outcome with the method. I did resist copilot up until recently and now laugh at myself. Use it to power through the boring template crap and leave yourself the juicy morsels. It’s faster and more satisfying.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Advanced tools are really useful when you get to the intermediate level. Then you can speed up the boring stuff and spend more time on advanced things and learning. There is still value for beginners to do things the hard way for a while. Write the unit tests by hand, see how they all repeat the same pattern 90% of the time. Now you see the pattern and you can use LLM-assisted intellisense to speed it up. And because you know how they're supposed to look like, you can see when the LLM goes off the rails.
- zahlman 2y ago
  > I did resist copilot up until recently and now laugh at myself. Use it to power through the boring template crap and leave yourself the juicy morsels. I don't want a tool to help me power through the boring template crap. I don't want to power through the boring template crap. I don't want the boring template crap to exist. I want to be actively working on things that make the boring template crap cease to exist.
ookblah 2y ago
I guess for every grift for AI hype there's the other side seeking to capture an audience that rejects it and making super hyperbolic statements to get there lol. This doom and gloom is also getting just as tiring. Like imagine rejecting the internet in it's entirety because the "dotcom" era was way overhyped. That's what the author sounds like right now. Whatever rises out of the ashes of this hype will be far more useful than what we had before and we all move forward.
dgfitz 2y ago
I will always struggle with calling an LLM “AI” as if it somehow has any intelligent thought whatsoever. We don’t have AI. We aren’t particularly close to AGI. This effort has about reached the top of the S-curve.
zecg 2y ago
> AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphisation This claim would stand better if it wasn't able to solve math and physics problems I struggle with.
zcar 2y ago
I found one of the comments more interesting. It shows how people can be so terribly wrong in one case and correct in another. >Text predict combined with data mining’…is all 99.9% of [what we have quaintly come to define as] human intelligence is, too. >Learn a trade, Sam. Start a manufacturing company. Go and dig ditches. Perform brain surgery. Fly a chopper. Provide hands-on care for someone who is ill. Be a stay-at-home dad, even. AI can’t do anything,
ddtaylor 2y ago
I have a serious question: is there any good collection or list of people who have rejected technologies when introduced? I'm not talking about entire societies of people like the Amish. I'm talking about people who otherwise use technology, but then do something like this publicly etc. I want to know if time even remembers these people beyond that one tid bit. I am curious if they went on to do anything else or what technologies "caused" them to defect.
- zahlman 2y ago
  >is there any good collection or list of people who have rejected technologies when introduced? Sounds hard to curate. Do you have a specific threshold of notoriety in mind? There could be tons of average people doing this and no good way to find out about it.
- archagon 2y ago
  I mean, Stallman, if you count software commercialization as technology. There are plenty of game developers who reject game engines in lieu of building their own from varying levels of scratch. Jonathan Blow, for example, made a number of successful and artistically meaningful games that heavily leveraged his custom tech stack.
kristiandupont 2y ago
You may be able to boycott it now, but I am pretty sure there will come a time where that's not feasible if you want to participate in society, the same way it's no longer feasible to "boycott the internet".
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Oh I do know a few people who legitimately don't use the internet and still participate in society. Its more possible than it seems when most people are online constantly.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Lots of people never use the internet, just as lots of people don't have a smartphone. Both are minorities, but they happily get along and fully participate in society anyway.
lieks 2y ago
I have different reasons for avoiding AI. I enjoy understanding what my programs do to the deepest level, so making or using AI are both boring; they remove the fun part of programming and leave only the boring parts (mainly debugging). I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason. I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body. A thinking body part is always more annoying to deal with, because you have to reverse-engineer what it's doing to get it to do what you want. I don't think this reasoning applies to everyone. I think it's fine for other people to use ML algorithms. I just don't want them myself.
- omnimus 2y ago
  Also dont forget about deskilling. Right now its fine because you are able to debug. But it would get gradualy lot harder if you are not flexing that muscle.
  - lucb1e 2y ago
    > Also dont forget about deskilling de-skilling (reducing skills), not desk killing, for anyone else as illiterate as me
- ghaff 2y ago
  Since you need to understand your programs at the deepest level I assume you write in assembly and don’t use third party libraries.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    There was an era when car owners were expected to be their own mechanics. When that started going away, I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum". "Deepest level" in GP presumably refers to the deepest level of the existing source code.
    - tailspin2019 2y ago
metalman 2y ago
I agree with boycotting AI, and personaly go as far as refusing to ever speak to a voice recognition system, as one comenter here put's it....I picked my lane and sure it's sometimes difficult, and I feel a bit bad for forcing and blundering my way through to the human who then has to deal with my obstinence.....some of who...are truely outraged at my flat out refusal to just "go along to get along" though to be perfectly honest, I am a pragmatist and so will exploit whatever technology that becomes main stream, for my benifit......but at one remove.....through business only services and identities that I have. And as a hard core refusenick, I can see how sophisticated fingerprinting accross different platforms has become, and how there are various AI's getting better at faking that it is a human presence attempting to interact, which with, what? 5 billion people on line, trying but now failing to connect because of AI out clicking them, there is a very real chance of things going horribly wierd and becoming non functional.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
haunter 2y ago
My only use case of ChatGPT: random CLI app I don't know how to use > explain in plain english what I want to achieve > ChatGPT outputs the command I need Ok, not random but I use it for FFmpeg all the time. Example from yesterday when I needed to convert a TrueHD audio file into stereo FLAC: https://i.imgur.com/5ib99qh.png https://i.imgur.com/5ib99qh.png 100% works and it's perfect
- theshrike79 2y ago
  I'm still waiting for someone to create a SLM (small language model) specifically focused on just being an interactive man-page. "I want to find all mp4 files, convert them to AV1 and move them to this directory" -> SLM generates script and maybe even runs it automatically Claude Code -style. All locally with no internet needed.
  - balnaphone 2y ago
    This exists, just use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat https://github.com/sigoden/aichat with local ollama and a model like qwen2.5-coder:7b or better (e.g. gemma3:12b). Add this to ~/.bashrc : # bind Alt-e on the command line to replace text with command _aichat_bash() { if [[ -n "$READLINE_LINE" ]]; then READLINE_LINE=$(aichat -e "$READLINE_LINE") READLINE_POINT=${#READLINE_LINE} fi } bind -x '"\ee": _aichat_bash' In the example you gave i get: find . -type f -name "*.mp4" -exec ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -c:a copy ~/Videos/{}.mkv \; But if you don't like that you can press Ctrl-Shift-_ (bash has emacs keybindings) to undo and try something else. You can also put a # mark in front and hit enter, then up arrow then Alt-e so you know what created the command.
- zahlman 2y ago
  >random CLI app I don't know how to use > explain in plain english what I want to achieve > ChatGPT outputs the command I need I think there was a recent Show HN with a wrapper for this process.
glimshe 2y ago
Junk writing from someone who doesn't understand AI. I use ChatGPT in many useful ways. For instance, I ask ChatGPT to explain my texts back to me to help prevent misunderstandings due to misleading sentences. How's that a bad thing? This is incredibly useful when there's nobody around to proofread my texts.
josefritzishere 2y ago
100% agree. AI is trash; increasingly invasive, life-destroying trash. There is no worse category of trash. There is nothing it cannot do which people cannot already do. The difference might be measured with various KPIs, but the material difference is that the output of AI is bereft of meaning. By definition, because it is not sentient it lacks intent. So it is all for nothing, means nothing and is nothing. Reject it.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
I used to enjoy learning to understand the small technical details of the design work I did. I spent a lot of time learning HTML, CSS and JS and how to use them properly and effectively. It used to be easy, when my brain was more plastic. Now, not so much (I got old). So, along comes AI, which promises to solve my problems - I won't need to learn the messy details because I just sort of describe what I want and AI handles the details. God, what a disappointment. I don't know what I was thinking that AI was supposed to do for me, but this doesn't seem like what I wanted. I'm missing the details, which is where the interesting bits lie. Probably why I avoid management - sure, managing people and things has details, but those details aren't interesting to me. I probably do need AI to help with that bit … except, hahaha, upper management doesn't need me there, or anywhere, because AI can do that stuff (but probably not the messy details - those were "handled by someone else's code" which was just copied into the system). The future is kind of disappointing right now, in that regard.
rchaud 2y ago
> But we can, for example, click down below Google’s AI offerings to look at actual links. And we can generally go about living our lives in our sad old way without the benefit of AI “personal assistants” I don't think this will be possible for much longer. Google is getting so unusable, I am actually starting to believe that they are intentionally screwing their traditional search product to force users to "onboard" on to their AI results instead.
- sitzkrieg 2y ago
  if you put swears in the query it skips ai overviews
samyar 2y ago
lol
skeledrew 2y ago
So many issues in this article, but I'll only address a couple. The author seems to be saying that AI will somehow deprive people of their creativity, but I can't fathom that at all. It's a crystallization of the AI-making-art conundrum that so many have. But I see no reason why people won't continue to be creative on their own. Not if their creativity is genuinely springing from within. Nobody is being forced to use AI to create works of art, or even assist in it. Just as nobody is being forced to use the spell check or auto-complete features in word processors. They're just there as an option for those who choose to utilize them. I do see how these things can lower the financial value of artistic works though, which I think is the actual issue that many have. It's the fear that AI doing art will lead to less earning potential by artists, which is a different issue. And the author alludes to the creation of further dependency on Big Tech such as OpenAI. This totally ignores the fact that there are quite a few (actually) open models out there. One can do a fully local setup, use a model service such OpenRouter, or even self-host a model on a GPU service such as Runpod. There are all these options available, depending on user preference and skill, so one doesn't have to become dependent on Big Tech's gated offerings. Overall, the only thing I can really say is I hope the author is very close to retirement or already there, as if they keep this stance on AI they'll eventually fall very far behind, unless they're into plumbing or a similar extremely hands-on field.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  I watch synthwave videos on youtube. I focus on low view videos to encourage/validate people that create. My feed is now full of AI synthwave to the point I stopped. So now the hundreds of people I used to encourage no longer have my encouragement. Multiply this by everything. This isn't free trade where it lifts everyone up. People only have so much attention to give out, and AI slop is crowding out actual artists for attention.
xnx 2y ago
> create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv Is someone working on this? I'd love to contribute. I have this idea every time I see someone watching commercial TV. The volume (and volume!) of ads is insane. I was easily able to make a podcast ad remover with LLMs, but real-time ad muting of a video stream is something I haven't tried yet (possibly easier because of closed captioning?).
psadauskas 2y ago
I'm not afraid of AI (LLMs). In fact, I think it has many useful applications that will come to light in the next few years. I'm terrified of AI companies. They have no qualms about destroying economies and societies, burning the planet down with carbon emissions, whatever they think will make it more likely for them become the Google or Amazon of AI. They will fuck the rest of us over without a second thought, if it means they might win.
wyclif 2y ago
65 points, 164 comments...then flagged. I dunno, HN. I think you are losing the plot.

67 points by wyclif 2y ago

> It really would have been social suicide to try to make my way in the 2010s professional class with anything other than a MacBook Pro and an iPhone Can someone explain this part? It's not something I can relate to at all. Maybe because I'm not from the US?

ghaff 2y ago
MacBooks are common in tech circles but they’re fairly low market share overall. And in my circles iPhones are common but Androids are not rare. That statement is simply false even in the US.
eru 2y ago
Probably, I was also objecting to that (and also don't live in the US). But I wouldn't read too much into that sentence: it's just part of the author's self-indulgent style.
harvey9 2y ago
It seemed he applied for a job at a place where they judge you on what laptop you carry at the interview. I have seen that attitude in the UK too.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Why would I carry a laptop at an interview?
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    To give a demo? Maybe it’s not fair but I find a Framework running Linux gives a good first impression.
    - eru 2y ago
      I guess it depends on who you are giving a demo to and what kind of demo etc. In tech circles, you would probably make a pretty big impression, if you pulled out an old laptop running MS-DOS (and still did an impressive demo).
- astura 2y ago
  Who even carries a laptop to a job interview?
JimDabell 2y ago
> The upside was a few years feeling like I was part of the future as I sipped my lattés and floated through the dawning post-industrial era with my sleek silver Apple gadgets. This too. The author just has the drama on everything turned up to a thousand percent. It’s incredibly irritating and made me stop reading.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  Thanks for this. These two snippets (yours and GPs) saved me some reading time.
- quitit 2y ago
  I stopped there too, I said to myself "this is either badly written AI slop, or this person is unhinged."
  - eru 2y ago
    Fortunately, the AI slop is getting better by the week.
friendzis 2y ago
Really? Not even being from US, I can attest that simply carrying a silvery laptop or a phone with the half eaten apple logo literally opened doors. Salespeople would have nearly empty iphones besides their personal androids just for the purpose of showing off. The "one of us" mentality has shifted to other things over the years, but some industries still live on the image.
borgdefenser 2y ago
In the US, Apple has done an all time great job marketing their products. I don't think there is much more too it. "If I didn't buy Apple it would hurt my career". Obviously, completely absurd but how else can you grow a company to be worth 3.3 trillion selling tech gadgets at a massive premium. It is easy to convince oneself too that this marketing is factual reality after spending so much money too. I mean that new iphone wasn't an expense, it was a career investment!
quitit 2y ago
There's quite a bit of hyperbole in the article, but that part reads like a marketer's dream. Imagine that: The idea that all you need to do to solve your social cohesion problems is to buy something. How incredible would such a proposition be! We all know very well that buying something isn't the difference between why our peers will or won't engage with us. However devaluing others into superficial strawman is an accessible coping mechanism for social rejection. When children say something like this, it's because they're not aware they're being bullied and buying the <thing> isn't going to fix it. When an adult says it, it's a bit more concerning - it shows that they perhaps have certain unaddressed social anxieties, or are avoiding dealing with their antisocial behaviours that are leading to their social rejection.
JohnFen 2y ago
I'm in the US and I can't relate to it either. I don't doubt that there are subcultures where this is a thing, but it was never a universal issue.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> I still have not downloaded an AI app of any kind to my phone. If he has an iPhone, there’s no need to download it. It’s already there. That said, he has some good points. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we won’t be able to “opt out,” forever. At some point, ML is bound to become endemic. It’s like those stupid scan-guns that supermarkets in my area are starting to ask customers to use. They are scan guns that you pick up, as you go in, and scan each purchase. When you check out, you just scan a barcode on the cashier stand, and Bjorn Stronginthearm’s your uncle. I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers. Sooner or later, however, I am unlikely to be able to avoid them.

whstl 2y ago
> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers. This reminds me of when the bus company of my hometown transitioned to having a driver + cashier to only having a driver that takes cash. Half of the workforce just gone overnight. Of course the writing was on the wall with electronic ticketing, but still. It makes me feel I'm part of a "First They Came" situation. Sure maybe these people found other jobs for themselves (or so I tell myself) but still.
- protocolture 2y ago
  People get shitty about bullshit jobs and then when they do get cleaned up by ATMs or some other efficiency turn around and pine for them.
  - smackeyacky 2y ago
    That’s not entirely fair. Jobs automated out of existence weren’t bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs are HR and project management. Made up fluff nobody really needs.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      That's a huge blanket statement. Bullshit jobs aren't tied to any specific industries, and all jobs in HR and project management aren't bullshit.

eru 2y ago

[flagged]

mg794613 2y ago

Yeah, there were voices like this with the advent of trains, electricity, light bulbs, ehm, maybe just everything.

YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
Yeah, if you’re against leaded petrol, thalidomide, CFCs, or asbestos, you’re just a Luddite.
School-Cotton 2y ago
Those automate things that humans find tedious. Modern AI automates things that humans find give their lives meaning. If we automate creative and intellectual work, what else is there?

mathieuh 2y ago

Leaving aside the question of whether AI is/will ever be actually capable of what tech bros claim, I don't think there is anything inherent to AI that will cause these issues. The problem will be with society's mode of production. We have a society now where people could be doing less work but are instead forced to do—as Graeber calls them—Bullshit Jobs. Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes said almost a century ago that as technology advanced people would have to do less work. I think if AI lives up to the hype it could be a tremendous boon for everyone if we can restructure our societies to take advantage.

protocolture 2y ago

> AI is super evil and will destroy us all Ok why is that > AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it. That sounds fine. Its like when you hear a conservative pundit claim that all antifa are weak people who need extra genders, and then in the next breath complain that they are an effective, brutal, brick throwing, pundit punching street militia. Pick a lane. >As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness? So now its issue is that it doesnt give you good feelings?

Aeolun 2y ago
> As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness? From my experience trying this. It isn’t quite that easy. The AI has a massive amount of difficulty staying on track and remembering earlier facts when writing a story. There is zero risk of them replacing writers for anything but short stories for now.
- protocolture 2y ago
  More or less my experience. Sudowrite literally breaks out the story into chapters, and has you arrange all the facts of the story so they can be summarily accessible at all times.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    Even making a massive snowflake for the whole story didn’t quite do it for me. It would forget relatively unimportant things, like the character had said something to someone, then three scenes on misremembers what they actually said.
    - protocolture 2y ago
      I have had both amazing results, and really shit results. Like I had it write a cool opening chapter to a short story based on nothing but my notes. And another time, I had a boxer punch someone 2 floors above him on a balcony.

mentalgear 2y ago

This really felt like on-point : > Unwary, I fell for the techno-optimism of the past two decades and ended up with a diminished attention span and a bunch of mysterious subscription charges to show for it. Well. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on Sam Altman. I know, much better now, the folly of turning over my own mental powers to a bunch of techies promising a brilliant future. > I’m not making that mistake again. Nor should you. Context: > The people pushing AI now are the same sorts who spent the 2010s promoting web 2.0 as a new vision of freedom and global connectivity, all while destroying traditional media and ripping off as much private data as they possibly could and cheerfully selling it to advertisers. > This recent history raises an important question: why in the world should we trust these people ever again? > These are remarkable achievements. But they do infantilise us. I’m pretty sure that, if my phone were taken away from me, I couldn’t find my own way from my home to my place of work.

Trasmatta 2y ago

> Because AI is no good for us — no good for our minds, creativity, or competence — and as it gets jammed down our throats, we are the only ones with the power to refuse. I think there are a lot of risks with AI, but I'm not convinced that it's intrinsically bad for "our minds, creativity, or competence". In many ways it's let me be MORE creative in the ways I want to be, by helping me overcome obstacles that were always blockers in the past.

protocolture 2y ago
Ditto. Its crazy how efficient it lets me be with my hobbies
- theshrike79 2y ago
  "AI" automates the simple things with crazy efficiency. Like I did a bunch of RSS-feeds for sites that don't have them (or they're crap quality). I just gave Cursor (Claude 3.7 I think) the HTML page and told it to write a parser that generates an Atom feed with Go from the page. In most cases it was right on the first go, a few I had to adjust to make them look right in FreshRSS. It even automatically suggested caching entries in a sqlite db to reduce load on the original site. This was for feeds that only have a link with no content, the application opens the link, fetches the relevant content and adds it to the custom feed.

harvey9 2y ago

In Soviet Russia AI boycott you

nottorp 2y ago

Boycott "AI"? Why? See if it's useful, ignoring the religious like hype, and use it for what it's worth. And stop calling it "AI" because it doesn't have anything to do with "intelligence". LLMs will write the code for you is bullshit. LLMs will get you some starter or reference info if it's a widely discussed subject is true. Apple products are crap, software wise. They're just less crap than the competition so I use them.

Tepix 2y ago

> But I’m still paying the price for that: every time I log in to my bank account now, it’s like peeling barnacles off the hull of a ship to get rid of all the new charges that Apple and Google have concocted. That part isn't very convincing. I have no charges on my bank account from Apple or Google. Anyway, i think a potential reason to reject AI is what Kurt Vonnegut has laid out in his 1952 novel "Player Piano": Do we want automation take away jobs we actually like? I highly recommend reading this book, it is once again very relevant today.

nisegami 2y ago
I think that the concern that AI will take away creative jobs is missing the forest for the trees. I want to write more about my thoughts on this but the gist of it is those jobs may become rarer, but that doesn't have to mean that creative endeavors will cease. I think we need a broader reimagining of what employment means to individuals and to society.
DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
Automation takes away "jobs" but it doesn't make the actual activity forbidden. You can still do things without being paid for them.
- Tepix 2y ago
  If you identify with your job and it becomes worthless (noone wants to pay for it), it's going to mess with your self-esteem.
  - Lerc 2y ago
    I think this statement concisely embeds the premise that might be the root cause of much of the problem. That premise is "For something to have worth, someone has to be willing to pay for it". That is only true for the narrowest definition of worth. If worth is reduced to a property to facilitate trade and nothing else then it works. Worth can also carry a sense of non-tradable value, It can be meaningful. You can do something because you like doing it and someone else could be glad you were doing it. Requiring a financial transaction to turn that goodwill into self esteem seems to be a fundamental problem with our society.

jasode 2y ago

>AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it. It’s a super-Google that goes into the body of texts and rearranges the words into a very pleasing facsimile of a cogent argument. There’s no “intelligence” behind it, in the sense of a computer actually thinking. >AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphisation People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter. What's important is if it is useful. E.g... create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv. People would embrace AI like that instead of complaining about it. If a pundit tried to advise the consumer who wants to avoid ads, "you know, that ad-skipping technology is _just_ fancy linear algebra and there's no _real_ intelligence behind it! You're dumbing down your brain by letting the AI mute the ads automatically instead of you doing it yourself." ... that's not a compelling argument. The usefulness of blocking ads outweighs any theoretical thresholds for real intelligence. A lot of generative AI is not useful, so people will complain about it by falling back on the "it's not real intelligence" argument.

eviks 2y ago
> People keep bringing up the "fake intelligence" vs "real intelligence" argument but it actually doesn't matter. > What's important is if it is useful. Except the usefulness expectations almost completely rely on the intelligence (it's right there in the name)! Without this you wouldn't have so much hype&money in this topic. So the complaint is rightfully directed at the core selling point
- edanm 2y ago
  Why not just... use the product and see if it's useful? What does it matter what it's called, what does it matter if it's hyped or not, what does it matter if investors are or aren't throwing too much money into it. You, individually, can try out the product and see if it's useful for you. Many people have done so and found it extremely useful for themselves (myself included).

NVHacker 2y ago

My personal AI assistant read the article and labelled it #rubbish and #avoid.

cjs_ac 2y ago

I'm boycotting AI because it doesn't solve any problems that I have.

smackeyacky 2y ago

I refused to use ratcheting spanners and air tools and other useful things when working on cars or bikes. I was so very wrong. There is a time and place for an air powered ratchet or big rattle gun. To think “my muscles will atrophy and I’ll stop thinking of clever ways to loosen that thing” is just wrong. It’s confusing the desired outcome with the method. I did resist copilot up until recently and now laugh at myself. Use it to power through the boring template crap and leave yourself the juicy morsels. It’s faster and more satisfying.

theshrike79 2y ago
Advanced tools are really useful when you get to the intermediate level. Then you can speed up the boring stuff and spend more time on advanced things and learning. There is still value for beginners to do things the hard way for a while. Write the unit tests by hand, see how they all repeat the same pattern 90% of the time. Now you see the pattern and you can use LLM-assisted intellisense to speed it up. And because you know how they're supposed to look like, you can see when the LLM goes off the rails.
zahlman 2y ago
> I did resist copilot up until recently and now laugh at myself. Use it to power through the boring template crap and leave yourself the juicy morsels. I don't want a tool to help me power through the boring template crap. I don't want to power through the boring template crap. I don't want the boring template crap to exist. I want to be actively working on things that make the boring template crap cease to exist.

ookblah 2y ago

I guess for every grift for AI hype there's the other side seeking to capture an audience that rejects it and making super hyperbolic statements to get there lol. This doom and gloom is also getting just as tiring. Like imagine rejecting the internet in it's entirety because the "dotcom" era was way overhyped. That's what the author sounds like right now. Whatever rises out of the ashes of this hype will be far more useful than what we had before and we all move forward.

dgfitz 2y ago

I will always struggle with calling an LLM “AI” as if it somehow has any intelligent thought whatsoever. We don’t have AI. We aren’t particularly close to AGI. This effort has about reached the top of the S-curve.

zecg 2y ago

> AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphisation This claim would stand better if it wasn't able to solve math and physics problems I struggle with.

zcar 2y ago

I found one of the comments more interesting. It shows how people can be so terribly wrong in one case and correct in another. >Text predict combined with data mining’…is all 99.9% of [what we have quaintly come to define as] human intelligence is, too. >Learn a trade, Sam. Start a manufacturing company. Go and dig ditches. Perform brain surgery. Fly a chopper. Provide hands-on care for someone who is ill. Be a stay-at-home dad, even. AI can’t do anything,

ddtaylor 2y ago

I have a serious question: is there any good collection or list of people who have rejected technologies when introduced? I'm not talking about entire societies of people like the Amish. I'm talking about people who otherwise use technology, but then do something like this publicly etc. I want to know if time even remembers these people beyond that one tid bit. I am curious if they went on to do anything else or what technologies "caused" them to defect.

zahlman 2y ago
>is there any good collection or list of people who have rejected technologies when introduced? Sounds hard to curate. Do you have a specific threshold of notoriety in mind? There could be tons of average people doing this and no good way to find out about it.
archagon 2y ago
I mean, Stallman, if you count software commercialization as technology. There are plenty of game developers who reject game engines in lieu of building their own from varying levels of scratch. Jonathan Blow, for example, made a number of successful and artistically meaningful games that heavily leveraged his custom tech stack.

kristiandupont 2y ago

You may be able to boycott it now, but I am pretty sure there will come a time where that's not feasible if you want to participate in society, the same way it's no longer feasible to "boycott the internet".

_heimdall 2y ago
Oh I do know a few people who legitimately don't use the internet and still participate in society. Its more possible than it seems when most people are online constantly.
JohnFen 2y ago
Lots of people never use the internet, just as lots of people don't have a smartphone. Both are minorities, but they happily get along and fully participate in society anyway.

lieks 2y ago

I have different reasons for avoiding AI. I enjoy understanding what my programs do to the deepest level, so making or using AI are both boring; they remove the fun part of programming and leave only the boring parts (mainly debugging). I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason. I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body. A thinking body part is always more annoying to deal with, because you have to reverse-engineer what it's doing to get it to do what you want. I don't think this reasoning applies to everyone. I think it's fine for other people to use ML algorithms. I just don't want them myself.

omnimus 2y ago
Also dont forget about deskilling. Right now its fine because you are able to debug. But it would get gradualy lot harder if you are not flexing that muscle.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  > Also dont forget about deskilling de-skilling (reducing skills), not desk killing, for anyone else as illiterate as me
ghaff 2y ago
Since you need to understand your programs at the deepest level I assume you write in assembly and don’t use third party libraries.
- zahlman 2y ago
  There was an era when car owners were expected to be their own mechanics. When that started going away, I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum". "Deepest level" in GP presumably refers to the deepest level of the existing source code.
  - tailspin2019 2y ago

metalman 2y ago

I agree with boycotting AI, and personaly go as far as refusing to ever speak to a voice recognition system, as one comenter here put's it....I picked my lane and sure it's sometimes difficult, and I feel a bit bad for forcing and blundering my way through to the human who then has to deal with my obstinence.....some of who...are truely outraged at my flat out refusal to just "go along to get along" though to be perfectly honest, I am a pragmatist and so will exploit whatever technology that becomes main stream, for my benifit......but at one remove.....through business only services and identities that I have. And as a hard core refusenick, I can see how sophisticated fingerprinting accross different platforms has become, and how there are various AI's getting better at faking that it is a human presence attempting to interact, which with, what? 5 billion people on line, trying but now failing to connect because of AI out clicking them, there is a very real chance of things going horribly wierd and becoming non functional.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

haunter 2y ago

My only use case of ChatGPT: random CLI app I don't know how to use > explain in plain english what I want to achieve > ChatGPT outputs the command I need Ok, not random but I use it for FFmpeg all the time. Example from yesterday when I needed to convert a TrueHD audio file into stereo FLAC: https://i.imgur.com/5ib99qh.png https://i.imgur.com/5ib99qh.png 100% works and it's perfect

theshrike79 2y ago
I'm still waiting for someone to create a SLM (small language model) specifically focused on just being an interactive man-page. "I want to find all mp4 files, convert them to AV1 and move them to this directory" -> SLM generates script and maybe even runs it automatically Claude Code -style. All locally with no internet needed.
- balnaphone 2y ago
  This exists, just use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat https://github.com/sigoden/aichat with local ollama and a model like qwen2.5-coder:7b or better (e.g. gemma3:12b). Add this to ~/.bashrc : # bind Alt-e on the command line to replace text with command _aichat_bash() { if [[ -n "$READLINE_LINE" ]]; then READLINE_LINE=$(aichat -e "$READLINE_LINE") READLINE_POINT=${#READLINE_LINE} fi } bind -x '"\ee": _aichat_bash' In the example you gave i get: find . -type f -name "*.mp4" -exec ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -c:a copy ~/Videos/{}.mkv \; But if you don't like that you can press Ctrl-Shift-_ (bash has emacs keybindings) to undo and try something else. You can also put a # mark in front and hit enter, then up arrow then Alt-e so you know what created the command.
zahlman 2y ago
>random CLI app I don't know how to use > explain in plain english what I want to achieve > ChatGPT outputs the command I need I think there was a recent Show HN with a wrapper for this process.

glimshe 2y ago

Junk writing from someone who doesn't understand AI. I use ChatGPT in many useful ways. For instance, I ask ChatGPT to explain my texts back to me to help prevent misunderstandings due to misleading sentences. How's that a bad thing? This is incredibly useful when there's nobody around to proofread my texts.

josefritzishere 2y ago

100% agree. AI is trash; increasingly invasive, life-destroying trash. There is no worse category of trash. There is nothing it cannot do which people cannot already do. The difference might be measured with various KPIs, but the material difference is that the output of AI is bereft of meaning. By definition, because it is not sentient it lacks intent. So it is all for nothing, means nothing and is nothing. Reject it.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

I used to enjoy learning to understand the small technical details of the design work I did. I spent a lot of time learning HTML, CSS and JS and how to use them properly and effectively. It used to be easy, when my brain was more plastic. Now, not so much (I got old). So, along comes AI, which promises to solve my problems - I won't need to learn the messy details because I just sort of describe what I want and AI handles the details. God, what a disappointment. I don't know what I was thinking that AI was supposed to do for me, but this doesn't seem like what I wanted. I'm missing the details, which is where the interesting bits lie. Probably why I avoid management - sure, managing people and things has details, but those details aren't interesting to me. I probably do need AI to help with that bit … except, hahaha, upper management doesn't need me there, or anywhere, because AI can do that stuff (but probably not the messy details - those were "handled by someone else's code" which was just copied into the system). The future is kind of disappointing right now, in that regard.

rchaud 2y ago

> But we can, for example, click down below Google’s AI offerings to look at actual links. And we can generally go about living our lives in our sad old way without the benefit of AI “personal assistants” I don't think this will be possible for much longer. Google is getting so unusable, I am actually starting to believe that they are intentionally screwing their traditional search product to force users to "onboard" on to their AI results instead.

sitzkrieg 2y ago
if you put swears in the query it skips ai overviews

samyar 2y ago

lol

skeledrew 2y ago

So many issues in this article, but I'll only address a couple. The author seems to be saying that AI will somehow deprive people of their creativity, but I can't fathom that at all. It's a crystallization of the AI-making-art conundrum that so many have. But I see no reason why people won't continue to be creative on their own. Not if their creativity is genuinely springing from within. Nobody is being forced to use AI to create works of art, or even assist in it. Just as nobody is being forced to use the spell check or auto-complete features in word processors. They're just there as an option for those who choose to utilize them. I do see how these things can lower the financial value of artistic works though, which I think is the actual issue that many have. It's the fear that AI doing art will lead to less earning potential by artists, which is a different issue. And the author alludes to the creation of further dependency on Big Tech such as OpenAI. This totally ignores the fact that there are quite a few (actually) open models out there. One can do a fully local setup, use a model service such OpenRouter, or even self-host a model on a GPU service such as Runpod. There are all these options available, depending on user preference and skill, so one doesn't have to become dependent on Big Tech's gated offerings. Overall, the only thing I can really say is I hope the author is very close to retirement or already there, as if they keep this stance on AI they'll eventually fall very far behind, unless they're into plumbing or a similar extremely hands-on field.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
I watch synthwave videos on youtube. I focus on low view videos to encourage/validate people that create. My feed is now full of AI synthwave to the point I stopped. So now the hundreds of people I used to encourage no longer have my encouragement. Multiply this by everything. This isn't free trade where it lifts everyone up. People only have so much attention to give out, and AI slop is crowding out actual artists for attention.

xnx 2y ago

> create a ad-skipping device that uses so-called "artificial intelligence" to detect commercials during sports broadcasts and automatically mutes the tv Is someone working on this? I'd love to contribute. I have this idea every time I see someone watching commercial TV. The volume (and volume!) of ads is insane. I was easily able to make a podcast ad remover with LLMs, but real-time ad muting of a video stream is something I haven't tried yet (possibly easier because of closed captioning?).

psadauskas 2y ago

I'm not afraid of AI (LLMs). In fact, I think it has many useful applications that will come to light in the next few years. I'm terrified of AI companies. They have no qualms about destroying economies and societies, burning the planet down with carbon emissions, whatever they think will make it more likely for them become the Google or Amazon of AI. They will fuck the rest of us over without a second thought, if it means they might win.

wyclif 2y ago

65 points, 164 comments...then flagged. I dunno, HN. I think you are losing the plot.