7 ms·

Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?

83 points by spzb 1y ago

gjsman-1000 1y ago
Quite the opposite: It would appear, especially with the rise of the ChatGPT, that the vocal "I don't want it" people are the extreme minority. ChatGPT alone has over 100 million active users per month. Not necessarily paying users; and not necessarily a number that's going to double overnight again requiring another server blitzscale; but it's comfortably cemented. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/chatgpt-doubled-its-weekly-active-users-in-under-6-months-thanks-to-new-releases/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/chatgpt-doubled-its-weekly...
- nancyminusone 1y ago
  Going to ChatGPT to ask for a quick python script isn't quite the same as "AI Overview" being inserted into every search result page, a fake generated image at the top of every post, entire fake websites taking up SEO with whole articles devoid of information, people "writing" and "illustrating" generated books and trying to sell them for no effort put in...
thdxr 1y ago
i think the idea that no one wants it is off even if the models do not get better there is so much demand even just b2b we have all these problems we can fix but we are totally limited by availability cloud providers are overwhelmed by the demand - you can see this in how stingy they are with rate limits and how they don't even talk to you unless you've already spent a lot with them
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  If what you're saying is true, how come both Microsoft and Amazon are slowing down capital expenditure?
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  Yet the AI companies are still spending far more money than they earn. Something doesn't add up here.
  - oytis 1y ago
    Growth phase aka market capture via price dumping. People wouldn't be using AI that much if it costed like what it takes to build and run one.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  > there is so much demand even just b2b Yes... there are a lot of expensive efforts of dubious actual value under way. Basically every company is trying to see if they can replace workers with AI, driving this demand. I've had insight into several of these, and from what I've seen, not a lot of people need to worry about their jobs in the next few years.
- nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
  > we have all these problems we can fix but we are totally limited by availability Outside of generating React codebases, what are problems that, thus far, as of today, have been fixed by LLMs?
oytis 1y ago
A lot of people seem to want it. At least they want it more than dealing with a human to cover their needs.
tcbawo 1y ago
I think people want to use it for their own benefit. Years of invasive advertisements has many people convinced that AI integrated into consumer products are more for corporate benefit, not the user's benefit.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  I agree. I use AI stuff, but on my own terms. I don't want it integrated into anything which I'm not buying specifically for the AI.
  - tcbawo 1y ago
    I find the downvotes on my comment somewhat curious and amusing. But an example of what I am talking about is a reduction of buttons on TV remotes. Often manufacturers are reducing buttons and promoting the microphone/audio prompt button. This is probably cheaper for them, but more inconvenient for me.
azan_ 1y ago
In articles like this I’m always surprised that author did not take 5 minutes to think that well, maybe I’m living in a bubble and there’s lots of people that are actually excited about AI.
- tayo42 1y ago
  What are people excited about right now?
  - johnfn 1y ago
    I'm pretty excited about Cursor.
  - vntok 1y ago
    Having a smart-but-no-smartass intern by my side, that is always eager to help, that is at the very least superficially knowledgeable about most things, that autonomously gets better at absolutely everything non-physical (yet), that is loyal yet immediately replaceable should I get bored with it or should a better intern pop up overnight (literally happened yesterday with qwen3), that never tires or gets annoyed at me.... well that's pretty exciting.
    - SrslyJosh 1y ago
      In other words, a slave. =)
      - vntok 1y ago
        What a weird and deshumanizing thing to say. Slaves are definitely people, a machine definitely isn't. Moreover, slaves aren't productive over the medium/long term. You don't get useful and lengthy performance from raw coercion, the same way you don't get truthful and actionable intelligence from torturing prisoners. So no, an LLM has very little in common with a slave.
  - saidinesh5 1y ago
    Google Gemini for what used to be Amazon Alexa tasks, chatgpt image filters (that Studio Ghibli one?), YouTube AI channels putting out content like If Danny Devito was the little mermaid, if Linkin park sang song X... Etc..
ttul 1y ago
Lots of hyperbolic language in this post, but little substance.
- crowcroft 1y ago
  Endless tautology with very little argument.
sb8244 1y ago
Maybe my position on this is obvious, I honestly don't know a lot of how others see it. Preface: I'm generally an AI skeptic. There are a LOT of people who are doing "business work" for a living, which is significantly different than hands-on coding. AI gives these people a way to just automate all of the (maybe necessary) work that they don't want to do. The final product being 80% good enough is fine. It is done and doesn't require them to spend time on something they don't want to do. More often than not, it is at 80% today.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  I think it's interesting how many people (and artists) are yelling about how AI can't do a service as good as a human. That's true, but quality was never the problem. Business leaders typically don't bat an eye about outsourcing to the second world or third world, even if the quality might be subpar. Being a business leader is not letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough;" and there's apparently a mountain of fields where AI is "good enough." Or, at least, good enough to replace where the third world would have been doing the work.
  - nothercastle 1y ago
    Yeah there are a lot of Tasks where it’s just cost and no value do quality does not matter. Take customer service at comcast, it’s already terrible nobody would protest if they made it worse
  - eru 1y ago
    That's an interesting perspective. Btw, it's not even that workers in developing countries are intrinsically worse---it depends on the task and the people. But no matter how good they are, communicating half a world away and across cultures definitely makes turning your business requirements into good work harder.
Jtsummers 1y ago
> But everything is getting labelled as AI Welcome to ~15 years ago when everything was labelled data science. Rebranding statistics as data science was hot because it got investor dollars, and it could get you hired if you went to a bootcamp. Companies everywhere were hiring data "scientists" that barely knew how to program because that's what someone on their board or their investors wanted to see (or they thought they wanted to see it). Today it's AI (machine learning) which is an extension of that earlier data science phase, which itself was an extension of applied statistics branded with a trendier name. And LLMs (generative AI) fall under the same trend as crypto systems a decade or so ago. If you toss it into your product (actually or just claimed) you get investor money. Because it's a fad. There may be some value from it, but the majority is not valuable it's just trend following.
oldjim69 1y ago
Because no one wants to pay anyone for work
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Before AI, it was called "outsourced to Philippines, India, or China." AI (as Indian companies are currently panicking about) is good enough to mostly replace their role as the lower-tier budget option.
kstrauser 1y ago
This is called "begging the question". Obviously lots of people like it, especially when they don't specifically think of it as AI. "Do you want an AI to filter all your information?" "No way!" "Do you want Google to summarize your search results?" "Yes please!"
- CobrastanJorji 1y ago
  I doubt many people besides Google executives really want Google to summarize your search results.
  - jankeymeulen 1y ago
    I was thinking the same, who on earth would want that, so did my technical colleagues, but since the AI summaries rolled out over here, non-technical folks I've asked about it actually seem to like it.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      I'm also a big fan of perplexity, using it for about a quarter of my searches.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Seriously? I think that's what most people want from a search engine, even if they wouldn't phrase it that way. Today I heard my wife ask our HomePod which US state was most similar in size to Germany. First, I was absolutely shocked that it gave a useful and correct answer. Well done, little dingus, and sorry to have doubted you. But more relevant, her goal wasn't to do a search. Her goal was to get an answer. For the most part, people want an answer from Google, not a list of pages that might potentially answer them if they're lucky. Sometimes I do want to see a long list of results I can skim through for the most likely answer, especially if I'm looking for technical details on something. But if I ask "how long do I bake a frozen 20 lb turkey?", I really just want a correct answer. So maybe people wouldn't actually say they want Google to summarize their search results if you phrased it exactly like that. But I bet most people, most of the time, would say that they wish the thing would just look at the 437 pages of results and tell them the answer.
jzellis 1y ago
Me: sees headline Golly, I wonder if anyone in the HN comments is going to be angrily pro-AI
throwanem 1y ago
Because that hero image is exactly the graphite sketch (touched with white and gold paint markers) of a PCB the writer wanted, and it took five seconds and five cents to produce, and it is worth more than that to no one including the human artist who did not draw it, because it is only here so people don't assume this stock website layout is broken for its absence. That the human artist still deserves and requires paying I enthusiastically agree. I would rather that happen in a way which will demean their skills less than having to subsist on makework like this garbage would.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  Throughout history, that's what artists DID. The great works only exist because of the Church or because some rich patron paid for it. And everyone else just ended up copying those for middle-class people's houses and such, because that was the Renaissance version of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art. Art classes go gaga today over the Clothed and Nude Majas, when the whole reason they existed was so some rich noble could have a "respectable" decoration that he could then hoist away when the party got raunchy enough and go "heh, look, she's nekkid now."
  - throwanem 1y ago
    Yes. The loudly embittered ones now will be making sandwiches or something in a decade, around when today's quietly thoughtful ones really begin making themselves known to history as the precursor generation of the first great - diffusion artists? Collageurs d'inference? Oh, I'm sure it won't be anything I would come up with, anyway. But what does life look like when keeping the deep-pocketed philistines satisfied takes only two hours a week, plus the usual coffee dates or "coffee" dates or "coffee dates?"
zitterbewegung 1y ago
I think that incrementally adding features (how OpenAI and their competitors) is a much better release strategy than a monolithic one by windows 11 and macOS and that’s a big part of negative feedback. Also Microsoft and Google never should have kept renaming their products multiple times such as ditching Cortana which has the largest brand recognition of any AI system. (Saying it was Cortana plus like Alexa is now is best ). I’ve used many features of Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini and they have made me more productive after I have learned how to use them. Generally you get more complainers on a new product then people who use it. Being in the HN bubble doesn’t help either IMHO.
rvz 1y ago
Only ChatGPT and Deepseek are seen as new "AI" in the mainstream. The rest? 95% of people have not heard about.
nancyminusone 1y ago
> extra large high res image of generated useless fake unrealistic circuit board > "Why don't people like AI?" > many such cases It's a damn cliche at this point, why does everyone still do it?
beloch 1y ago
> "Secondly, there is an insane amount of money tied up in AI." Money attracts attention, both passively and actively. People see OpenAI, etc. spending billions on training and figure there must be something to it. OpenAI and others also probably spend quite a bit on marketing and social media bombing too, and a lot of that will likely be done by humans. If you can spend billions on training, what's a few million more on social media? It doesn't matter what AI can actually do now. If companies like OpenAI can attract enough investment and customers to stay afloat long enough, then they may yet become indispensable in the future. The line between bubble and self-fulfilling prophecy is thin.
happy_dog1 1y ago
This April 3rd Pew research study is some fairly interesting reading: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p... They find that the general public is overall much more skeptical that AI will benefit anyone, much more likely to view it as harmful and much less excited about its potential than "AI experts". A majority of Americans are more concerned than excited. There is interestingly a large gender gap between men and women -- women are much less likely to view AI favorably, to use it frequently or to be excited about its potential than men. There is some research to suggest that consumers are less likely to buy a product and less likely to trust it (less "emotional trust") when AI is used prominently to market it: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2... So I think the data suggests that while there is excitement around AI, overall consumers are much less excited about AI than people in the industry think and that it may actually impact their buying decisions negatively. Will this gap go away over time? I don't know. For any of you working in tech at the time, was there a similar gap in perceptions around the Internet back in the days of the dot com bubble? The other problem as pointed out is that MANY things are labeled as AI, ranging from logistic regression to chatbots, and probably there is more enthusiasm around some of these things than others.
- kranke155 1y ago
  Incredible. Thanks for sharing.
- more-nitor 1y ago
  idk have you ever been stuck on some AI chatbot? some credit card companies have botched chatbot process: "lost/forged credit card report" / "talk-to-person" are essential support process, but they require you to enter your PIN to get thru that process (if the request for a new credit-card is faked, you're out of luck)
- swatcoder 1y ago
  Prior to the dot-com bubble itself, hype for the growing potential of the internet was modest and mostly in line with organic adoption and exploration. People at large weren't anticipating a revolution. They were just enjoying the growing areay of new products and opportunities that were appearing. During the dot-com bubble, inasmuch as it represented a turning tide, this trickle had reached a tipping point and we witnessed a tsunami of innovative products that consumers were genuinely fascinated by. There were just too many of them for the market to sustain them all, and a correction followed, as you would expect. This AI story is basically the opposite, much like the blockchain story. Many investors and some consumers who have living or borrowed memory of dot-com bubble or the smartphone explosion really really want another opportunity to cash in on a exponentially expanding market and/or live through a new technological revolution and are basically trying to will the next one into existence as soon as possible, independent of any organicity or practicality. In contrast to blockchain hype, maybe it'll work here. Maybe it won't. But it's fundamentally a different scenario from the dot-com bubble either way.
coretx 1y ago
Shareholders are not nobodies.
dustingetz 1y ago
it’s a tech culture war, devs are gaslighting the business sucking down incredible salaries while reporting that the jira ticket is delayed by tech debt, the business is gaslighting the devs with the inept technology leadership, stupid HR games (my wife’s workplace dragged everybody in for fucking friendship bracelet day), secret DEI policies while paying high performers the same as negative performers because they can’t tell the difference. These two groups hate each other and AI promises holy grail to both parties - devs can more easily learn the 1000th tech stack in between yoga classes while pretending to work, the business dreams of finally firing all the devs and keeping all that money for themselves. And neither group has a clue how this dream will be fulfilled, but they want to believe because computers can now talk, so enter the entrepreneurs and VCs to gaslight everyone involved with fake stories of how 35% of LOC at Google was coded by AI (erm, accepted IDE autocomplete), laughing all the way to the bank while they vacuum up all that dumb money, poor befuddled executives that roleplayed their way into an 8 figure budget responsibility by being tall white men with blue eyes
- deleted 1y ago
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tompark 1y ago
"Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?" This sounds like that Yogi Berra-ism, "No one comes here anymore, it's too crowded." I suppose well over half of the people who read HN are too young to remember the dotcom craze. Everyone had every scrap of money tied up in tech stocks. IMO, the hype over AI is relatively small compared to other hype cycles. The goofiest part was the endless predictions about the singularity, and "you don't know what exponential growth looks like, man!". I mean, it can still happen, but for a while that's what AI was all about.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > IMO, the hype over AI is relatively small compared to other hype cycles I think this is a really interesting observation actually The dotcom boom describes a period of time where money was flying around like crazy, the economy went wild During this "AI boom", investment and the economy is cratering. It's not even remotely comparable
androng 1y ago
out of touch article. ChatGPT doubles in searches on weekdays and more people search for ChatGPT than the Warriors basketball team https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&geo=US&q=chatgpt,warriors&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge... Google Gemini has 350m monthly users
BuckRogers 1y ago
I'm excited about AI after using Grok. It quickly replaced Google for me. I'm not sure I'd actually pay for it, I'd just go use another free AI, but it's very, very good. I definitely think a locally hosted AI running on my GPU that can use the internet, something like Nvidia ChatRTX will be everywhere soon. I know it'll replace most knowledge and arts jobs within 1, maybe 5, maybe 10 years. But nothing is going to stop that. It definitely helps me get through some real drudgery as a developer as well. I definitely focus on the bigger picture now more, and less on digging into mundane drudgery like a syntax issue. I think anyone that doesn't fear losing their job as an artist or as a doctor or developer wants it. It's going to do a better job in many things. Improving lives, quality of life, and lifespans. No doubt in my mind.
AIPedant 1y ago
Beyond codegen, it seems to me that the resolution to this paradox is that ChatGPT is a very popular toy in peoples' home life, but a lot of those very same people are wise enough to not use it for enterprise applications. Or, if they foolishly trusted Satya Nadella, LLM-assisted work eventually blew up in their face and they stopped using it. So gen AI is quite popular, but badly falls short of tech's aspirations. I hate generative AI and refuse to use it, but I hear of people using it all the time in low-stakes contexts: 1) recipes (the cookies might suck but they won't be poisonous) 2) low-quality infotainment (NotebookLM) 3) OpenAI proudly celebrating that horrible Studio Ghibli crap - unlike dishonest math benchmark scores, garish slop on demand actually brings in customers! 4) ChatGPT boyfriend scams :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976 And I've also heard of people using it at work and being severely criticized: 1) ChatGPT-drafted license agreements that the executives would never agree to 2) summarizing documents you were too lazy to read and missing crucial context 3) coworkers being personally offended (or superiors being angry) about a ChatGPT email Programmers and bottom-barrel creatives have the only reliable success with LLMs if there's real money at stake. Then there are notably but low-margin use cases like dyslexia assistance, Be My Eyes, etc. For everyone else, it's just a nifty doo-dad.
Ekaros 1y ago
I think it is in: "Oh well that is neat" "Anyways..." Category. So generating some text, some image, something else occasionally is pretty cool. Maybe asking some questions and getting something explained. Or search when needed. And ofc, chatting when bored. But for general person. I do not really think there is that frequent use. And then I really doubt that this can be sold a service for vast majority of population. Like say search can not.
fionic 1y ago
I know I’ll get downvoted hard for this but I can’t tell if these posts are supposed to be satire. Literally every person I talk to in every single industry uses AI daily: Community managers for sending different email content, sales managers for emailing marketing content and researching prospects and are actively researching agents to help communicate with people automatically, govt workers for generating RFPs, defense industry, coders, band members researching audio engineering, real estate marketing house descriptions, just to name a few. Everyone also says they love it and makes their job so much easier. Not a single person has ever said what these articles headline or try to claim: “man this is awful seriously AI is such a dumb concept and it’s making life worse, no one asked for all this AI to get in my way all the time.” Obviously my experience is anecdotal but makes it very hard for me to understand this kind of negative content who it’s for and who it’s serving. I think people are aware of auto generated content and the words here ring so empty to me and I feel like it has to be the case for others as well. Pessimists will get left in the dusts of these machines whose shoulders the optimists ride on.
- deleted 1y ago
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tim333 1y ago
>So why is AI getting so much attention when it seems that there is limited actual demand for it? He skips the main reason which is it will get better in the future. Today chatbots, tomorrow I, Robot/Terminator/Her/AI/The Matrix etc. Or better as the movies tend to be biased towards disaster. Incidentally there aren't really movies about future crypto/NFT/dotcom bubbles. AI and robots are different.
incomingpain 1y ago
How do you know 'nobody wants it?' If it's tremendously popular, obviously people want it. >yougov surveys. Long ago it was revealed how easy it is to manipulate polls/surveys. I discount 100% of polls since. The big pollsters have good reputation because they attempt to eliminate the manipulation; but its not really possible to do. The questions in of themselves are doing it. Here's an extreme example to illustrate. Do you think illegal immigrants should get social net benefits? Pretty much everyone says no. Do you think an innocent child with a broken arm from playing at a park with friends, whose parents may be guilty of a crime, should get their arm set by the ER for free? Pretty much everyone says yes. News article: 99% of people support free benefits to illegal immigrants.

83 points by spzb 1y ago

Quite the opposite: It would appear, especially with the rise of the ChatGPT, that the vocal "I don't want it" people are the extreme minority. ChatGPT alone has over 100 million active users per month. Not necessarily paying users; and not necessarily a number that's going to double overnight again requiring another server blitzscale; but it's comfortably cemented. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/chatgpt-doubled-its-weekly-active-users-in-under-6-months-thanks-to-new-releases/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/chatgpt-doubled-its-weekly...

nancyminusone 1y ago
Going to ChatGPT to ask for a quick python script isn't quite the same as "AI Overview" being inserted into every search result page, a fake generated image at the top of every post, entire fake websites taking up SEO with whole articles devoid of information, people "writing" and "illustrating" generated books and trying to sell them for no effort put in...

thdxr 1y ago

i think the idea that no one wants it is off even if the models do not get better there is so much demand even just b2b we have all these problems we can fix but we are totally limited by availability cloud providers are overwhelmed by the demand - you can see this in how stingy they are with rate limits and how they don't even talk to you unless you've already spent a lot with them

disgruntledphd2 1y ago
If what you're saying is true, how come both Microsoft and Amazon are slowing down capital expenditure?
tonyedgecombe 1y ago
Yet the AI companies are still spending far more money than they earn. Something doesn't add up here.
- oytis 1y ago
  Growth phase aka market capture via price dumping. People wouldn't be using AI that much if it costed like what it takes to build and run one.
alabastervlog 1y ago
> there is so much demand even just b2b Yes... there are a lot of expensive efforts of dubious actual value under way. Basically every company is trying to see if they can replace workers with AI, driving this demand. I've had insight into several of these, and from what I've seen, not a lot of people need to worry about their jobs in the next few years.
nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
> we have all these problems we can fix but we are totally limited by availability Outside of generating React codebases, what are problems that, thus far, as of today, have been fixed by LLMs?

oytis 1y ago

A lot of people seem to want it. At least they want it more than dealing with a human to cover their needs.

tcbawo 1y ago

I think people want to use it for their own benefit. Years of invasive advertisements has many people convinced that AI integrated into consumer products are more for corporate benefit, not the user's benefit.

lupusreal 1y ago
I agree. I use AI stuff, but on my own terms. I don't want it integrated into anything which I'm not buying specifically for the AI.
- tcbawo 1y ago
  I find the downvotes on my comment somewhat curious and amusing. But an example of what I am talking about is a reduction of buttons on TV remotes. Often manufacturers are reducing buttons and promoting the microphone/audio prompt button. This is probably cheaper for them, but more inconvenient for me.

azan_ 1y ago

In articles like this I’m always surprised that author did not take 5 minutes to think that well, maybe I’m living in a bubble and there’s lots of people that are actually excited about AI.

tayo42 1y ago
What are people excited about right now?
- johnfn 1y ago
  I'm pretty excited about Cursor.
- vntok 1y ago
  Having a smart-but-no-smartass intern by my side, that is always eager to help, that is at the very least superficially knowledgeable about most things, that autonomously gets better at absolutely everything non-physical (yet), that is loyal yet immediately replaceable should I get bored with it or should a better intern pop up overnight (literally happened yesterday with qwen3), that never tires or gets annoyed at me.... well that's pretty exciting.
  - SrslyJosh 1y ago
    In other words, a slave. =)
    - vntok 1y ago
      What a weird and deshumanizing thing to say. Slaves are definitely people, a machine definitely isn't. Moreover, slaves aren't productive over the medium/long term. You don't get useful and lengthy performance from raw coercion, the same way you don't get truthful and actionable intelligence from torturing prisoners. So no, an LLM has very little in common with a slave.
- saidinesh5 1y ago
  Google Gemini for what used to be Amazon Alexa tasks, chatgpt image filters (that Studio Ghibli one?), YouTube AI channels putting out content like If Danny Devito was the little mermaid, if Linkin park sang song X... Etc..

ttul 1y ago

Lots of hyperbolic language in this post, but little substance.

crowcroft 1y ago
Endless tautology with very little argument.

sb8244 1y ago

Maybe my position on this is obvious, I honestly don't know a lot of how others see it. Preface: I'm generally an AI skeptic. There are a LOT of people who are doing "business work" for a living, which is significantly different than hands-on coding. AI gives these people a way to just automate all of the (maybe necessary) work that they don't want to do. The final product being 80% good enough is fine. It is done and doesn't require them to spend time on something they don't want to do. More often than not, it is at 80% today.

gjsman-1000 1y ago
I think it's interesting how many people (and artists) are yelling about how AI can't do a service as good as a human. That's true, but quality was never the problem. Business leaders typically don't bat an eye about outsourcing to the second world or third world, even if the quality might be subpar. Being a business leader is not letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough;" and there's apparently a mountain of fields where AI is "good enough." Or, at least, good enough to replace where the third world would have been doing the work.
- nothercastle 1y ago
  Yeah there are a lot of Tasks where it’s just cost and no value do quality does not matter. Take customer service at comcast, it’s already terrible nobody would protest if they made it worse
- eru 1y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. Btw, it's not even that workers in developing countries are intrinsically worse---it depends on the task and the people. But no matter how good they are, communicating half a world away and across cultures definitely makes turning your business requirements into good work harder.

Jtsummers 1y ago

> But everything is getting labelled as AI Welcome to ~15 years ago when everything was labelled data science. Rebranding statistics as data science was hot because it got investor dollars, and it could get you hired if you went to a bootcamp. Companies everywhere were hiring data "scientists" that barely knew how to program because that's what someone on their board or their investors wanted to see (or they thought they wanted to see it). Today it's AI (machine learning) which is an extension of that earlier data science phase, which itself was an extension of applied statistics branded with a trendier name. And LLMs (generative AI) fall under the same trend as crypto systems a decade or so ago. If you toss it into your product (actually or just claimed) you get investor money. Because it's a fad. There may be some value from it, but the majority is not valuable it's just trend following.

oldjim69 1y ago

Because no one wants to pay anyone for work

gjsman-1000 1y ago
Before AI, it was called "outsourced to Philippines, India, or China." AI (as Indian companies are currently panicking about) is good enough to mostly replace their role as the lower-tier budget option.

kstrauser 1y ago

This is called "begging the question". Obviously lots of people like it, especially when they don't specifically think of it as AI. "Do you want an AI to filter all your information?" "No way!" "Do you want Google to summarize your search results?" "Yes please!"

CobrastanJorji 1y ago
I doubt many people besides Google executives really want Google to summarize your search results.
- jankeymeulen 1y ago
  I was thinking the same, who on earth would want that, so did my technical colleagues, but since the AI summaries rolled out over here, non-technical folks I've asked about it actually seem to like it.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    I'm also a big fan of perplexity, using it for about a quarter of my searches.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Seriously? I think that's what most people want from a search engine, even if they wouldn't phrase it that way. Today I heard my wife ask our HomePod which US state was most similar in size to Germany. First, I was absolutely shocked that it gave a useful and correct answer. Well done, little dingus, and sorry to have doubted you. But more relevant, her goal wasn't to do a search. Her goal was to get an answer. For the most part, people want an answer from Google, not a list of pages that might potentially answer them if they're lucky. Sometimes I do want to see a long list of results I can skim through for the most likely answer, especially if I'm looking for technical details on something. But if I ask "how long do I bake a frozen 20 lb turkey?", I really just want a correct answer. So maybe people wouldn't actually say they want Google to summarize their search results if you phrased it exactly like that. But I bet most people, most of the time, would say that they wish the thing would just look at the 437 pages of results and tell them the answer.

jzellis 1y ago

Me: sees headline Golly, I wonder if anyone in the HN comments is going to be angrily pro-AI

throwanem 1y ago

Because that hero image is exactly the graphite sketch (touched with white and gold paint markers) of a PCB the writer wanted, and it took five seconds and five cents to produce, and it is worth more than that to no one including the human artist who did not draw it, because it is only here so people don't assume this stock website layout is broken for its absence. That the human artist still deserves and requires paying I enthusiastically agree. I would rather that happen in a way which will demean their skills less than having to subsist on makework like this garbage would.

psunavy03 1y ago
Throughout history, that's what artists DID. The great works only exist because of the Church or because some rich patron paid for it. And everyone else just ended up copying those for middle-class people's houses and such, because that was the Renaissance version of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art. Art classes go gaga today over the Clothed and Nude Majas, when the whole reason they existed was so some rich noble could have a "respectable" decoration that he could then hoist away when the party got raunchy enough and go "heh, look, she's nekkid now."
- throwanem 1y ago
  Yes. The loudly embittered ones now will be making sandwiches or something in a decade, around when today's quietly thoughtful ones really begin making themselves known to history as the precursor generation of the first great - diffusion artists? Collageurs d'inference? Oh, I'm sure it won't be anything I would come up with, anyway. But what does life look like when keeping the deep-pocketed philistines satisfied takes only two hours a week, plus the usual coffee dates or "coffee" dates or "coffee dates?"

zitterbewegung 1y ago

I think that incrementally adding features (how OpenAI and their competitors) is a much better release strategy than a monolithic one by windows 11 and macOS and that’s a big part of negative feedback. Also Microsoft and Google never should have kept renaming their products multiple times such as ditching Cortana which has the largest brand recognition of any AI system. (Saying it was Cortana plus like Alexa is now is best ). I’ve used many features of Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini and they have made me more productive after I have learned how to use them. Generally you get more complainers on a new product then people who use it. Being in the HN bubble doesn’t help either IMHO.

rvz 1y ago

Only ChatGPT and Deepseek are seen as new "AI" in the mainstream. The rest? 95% of people have not heard about.

nancyminusone 1y ago

> extra large high res image of generated useless fake unrealistic circuit board > "Why don't people like AI?" > many such cases It's a damn cliche at this point, why does everyone still do it?

beloch 1y ago

> "Secondly, there is an insane amount of money tied up in AI." Money attracts attention, both passively and actively. People see OpenAI, etc. spending billions on training and figure there must be something to it. OpenAI and others also probably spend quite a bit on marketing and social media bombing too, and a lot of that will likely be done by humans. If you can spend billions on training, what's a few million more on social media? It doesn't matter what AI can actually do now. If companies like OpenAI can attract enough investment and customers to stay afloat long enough, then they may yet become indispensable in the future. The line between bubble and self-fulfilling prophecy is thin.

happy_dog1 1y ago

This April 3rd Pew research study is some fairly interesting reading: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p... They find that the general public is overall much more skeptical that AI will benefit anyone, much more likely to view it as harmful and much less excited about its potential than "AI experts". A majority of Americans are more concerned than excited. There is interestingly a large gender gap between men and women -- women are much less likely to view AI favorably, to use it frequently or to be excited about its potential than men. There is some research to suggest that consumers are less likely to buy a product and less likely to trust it (less "emotional trust") when AI is used prominently to market it: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2... So I think the data suggests that while there is excitement around AI, overall consumers are much less excited about AI than people in the industry think and that it may actually impact their buying decisions negatively. Will this gap go away over time? I don't know. For any of you working in tech at the time, was there a similar gap in perceptions around the Internet back in the days of the dot com bubble? The other problem as pointed out is that MANY things are labeled as AI, ranging from logistic regression to chatbots, and probably there is more enthusiasm around some of these things than others.

kranke155 1y ago
Incredible. Thanks for sharing.
more-nitor 1y ago
idk have you ever been stuck on some AI chatbot? some credit card companies have botched chatbot process: "lost/forged credit card report" / "talk-to-person" are essential support process, but they require you to enter your PIN to get thru that process (if the request for a new credit-card is faked, you're out of luck)
swatcoder 1y ago
Prior to the dot-com bubble itself, hype for the growing potential of the internet was modest and mostly in line with organic adoption and exploration. People at large weren't anticipating a revolution. They were just enjoying the growing areay of new products and opportunities that were appearing. During the dot-com bubble, inasmuch as it represented a turning tide, this trickle had reached a tipping point and we witnessed a tsunami of innovative products that consumers were genuinely fascinated by. There were just too many of them for the market to sustain them all, and a correction followed, as you would expect. This AI story is basically the opposite, much like the blockchain story. Many investors and some consumers who have living or borrowed memory of dot-com bubble or the smartphone explosion really really want another opportunity to cash in on a exponentially expanding market and/or live through a new technological revolution and are basically trying to will the next one into existence as soon as possible, independent of any organicity or practicality. In contrast to blockchain hype, maybe it'll work here. Maybe it won't. But it's fundamentally a different scenario from the dot-com bubble either way.

coretx 1y ago

Shareholders are not nobodies.

dustingetz 1y ago

it’s a tech culture war, devs are gaslighting the business sucking down incredible salaries while reporting that the jira ticket is delayed by tech debt, the business is gaslighting the devs with the inept technology leadership, stupid HR games (my wife’s workplace dragged everybody in for fucking friendship bracelet day), secret DEI policies while paying high performers the same as negative performers because they can’t tell the difference. These two groups hate each other and AI promises holy grail to both parties - devs can more easily learn the 1000th tech stack in between yoga classes while pretending to work, the business dreams of finally firing all the devs and keeping all that money for themselves. And neither group has a clue how this dream will be fulfilled, but they want to believe because computers can now talk, so enter the entrepreneurs and VCs to gaslight everyone involved with fake stories of how 35% of LOC at Google was coded by AI (erm, accepted IDE autocomplete), laughing all the way to the bank while they vacuum up all that dumb money, poor befuddled executives that roleplayed their way into an 8 figure budget responsibility by being tall white men with blue eyes

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tompark 1y ago

"Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?" This sounds like that Yogi Berra-ism, "No one comes here anymore, it's too crowded." I suppose well over half of the people who read HN are too young to remember the dotcom craze. Everyone had every scrap of money tied up in tech stocks. IMO, the hype over AI is relatively small compared to other hype cycles. The goofiest part was the endless predictions about the singularity, and "you don't know what exponential growth looks like, man!". I mean, it can still happen, but for a while that's what AI was all about.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
> IMO, the hype over AI is relatively small compared to other hype cycles I think this is a really interesting observation actually The dotcom boom describes a period of time where money was flying around like crazy, the economy went wild During this "AI boom", investment and the economy is cratering. It's not even remotely comparable

androng 1y ago

out of touch article. ChatGPT doubles in searches on weekdays and more people search for ChatGPT than the Warriors basketball team https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&geo=US&q=chatgpt,warriors&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge... Google Gemini has 350m monthly users

BuckRogers 1y ago

I'm excited about AI after using Grok. It quickly replaced Google for me. I'm not sure I'd actually pay for it, I'd just go use another free AI, but it's very, very good. I definitely think a locally hosted AI running on my GPU that can use the internet, something like Nvidia ChatRTX will be everywhere soon. I know it'll replace most knowledge and arts jobs within 1, maybe 5, maybe 10 years. But nothing is going to stop that. It definitely helps me get through some real drudgery as a developer as well. I definitely focus on the bigger picture now more, and less on digging into mundane drudgery like a syntax issue. I think anyone that doesn't fear losing their job as an artist or as a doctor or developer wants it. It's going to do a better job in many things. Improving lives, quality of life, and lifespans. No doubt in my mind.

AIPedant 1y ago

Beyond codegen, it seems to me that the resolution to this paradox is that ChatGPT is a very popular toy in peoples' home life, but a lot of those very same people are wise enough to not use it for enterprise applications. Or, if they foolishly trusted Satya Nadella, LLM-assisted work eventually blew up in their face and they stopped using it. So gen AI is quite popular, but badly falls short of tech's aspirations. I hate generative AI and refuse to use it, but I hear of people using it all the time in low-stakes contexts: 1) recipes (the cookies might suck but they won't be poisonous) 2) low-quality infotainment (NotebookLM) 3) OpenAI proudly celebrating that horrible Studio Ghibli crap - unlike dishonest math benchmark scores, garish slop on demand actually brings in customers! 4) ChatGPT boyfriend scams :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976 And I've also heard of people using it at work and being severely criticized: 1) ChatGPT-drafted license agreements that the executives would never agree to 2) summarizing documents you were too lazy to read and missing crucial context 3) coworkers being personally offended (or superiors being angry) about a ChatGPT email Programmers and bottom-barrel creatives have the only reliable success with LLMs if there's real money at stake. Then there are notably but low-margin use cases like dyslexia assistance, Be My Eyes, etc. For everyone else, it's just a nifty doo-dad.

Ekaros 1y ago

I think it is in: "Oh well that is neat" "Anyways..." Category. So generating some text, some image, something else occasionally is pretty cool. Maybe asking some questions and getting something explained. Or search when needed. And ofc, chatting when bored. But for general person. I do not really think there is that frequent use. And then I really doubt that this can be sold a service for vast majority of population. Like say search can not.

fionic 1y ago

I know I’ll get downvoted hard for this but I can’t tell if these posts are supposed to be satire. Literally every person I talk to in every single industry uses AI daily: Community managers for sending different email content, sales managers for emailing marketing content and researching prospects and are actively researching agents to help communicate with people automatically, govt workers for generating RFPs, defense industry, coders, band members researching audio engineering, real estate marketing house descriptions, just to name a few. Everyone also says they love it and makes their job so much easier. Not a single person has ever said what these articles headline or try to claim: “man this is awful seriously AI is such a dumb concept and it’s making life worse, no one asked for all this AI to get in my way all the time.” Obviously my experience is anecdotal but makes it very hard for me to understand this kind of negative content who it’s for and who it’s serving. I think people are aware of auto generated content and the words here ring so empty to me and I feel like it has to be the case for others as well. Pessimists will get left in the dusts of these machines whose shoulders the optimists ride on.

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tim333 1y ago

>So why is AI getting so much attention when it seems that there is limited actual demand for it? He skips the main reason which is it will get better in the future. Today chatbots, tomorrow I, Robot/Terminator/Her/AI/The Matrix etc. Or better as the movies tend to be biased towards disaster. Incidentally there aren't really movies about future crypto/NFT/dotcom bubbles. AI and robots are different.

incomingpain 1y ago

How do you know 'nobody wants it?' If it's tremendously popular, obviously people want it. >yougov surveys. Long ago it was revealed how easy it is to manipulate polls/surveys. I discount 100% of polls since. The big pollsters have good reputation because they attempt to eliminate the manipulation; but its not really possible to do. The questions in of themselves are doing it. Here's an extreme example to illustrate. Do you think illegal immigrants should get social net benefits? Pretty much everyone says no. Do you think an innocent child with a broken arm from playing at a park with friends, whose parents may be guilty of a crime, should get their arm set by the ER for free? Pretty much everyone says yes. News article: 99% of people support free benefits to illegal immigrants.