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> Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good but doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value for money. And you can get a lot of value
by wartywhoa23 11mo ago
> Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good but doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value for money. And you can get a lot of value from AI these days; especially if you are doing marketing, frontend design, etc. and all the other stuff a studio like this would be doing.
So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones.
- senordevnyc 11mo ago[flagged]
- nothrabannosir 11mo ago[flagged]
- senordevnyc 11mo agoAre you going to hire him? If not, for the purpose of paying his bills, your giving a shit is irrelevant. That’s what I mean.
- nothrabannosir 11mo agoYou mean, when evaluating suppliers, do I push for those who don't use AI? Yes. I'm not going to be childish and dunk on you for having to update your priors now, but this is exactly the problem with this speaking in aphorisms and glib dismissals. You don't know anyone here, you speak in authoritative tone for others, and redefine what "matters" and what is worthy of conversation as if this is up to you. > Don’t write a blog post whining about your morals, why on earth not? I wrote a blog post about a toilet brush. Can the man write a blog post about his struggle with morality and a changing market?
- clickety_clack 11mo agoThis is a YC forum. That guy is giving pretty honest feedback about a business decision in the context of what the market is looking for. The most unkind thing you can do to a founder is tell them they’re right when you see something they might be wrong about.
- brazukadev 11mo agoWhich founder is wrong? Not only the brainwashed here are entrepreneurs
- simianwords 11mo agoWhat you (and others in this thread) are also doing is a sort of maximalist dismissal of AI itself as if it is everything that is evil and to be on the right side of things, one must fight against AI. This might sound a bit ridiculous but this is what I think a lot of people's real positions on AI are.
- techpression 11mo agoYet to see anything good come from it, and I’m not talking about machine learning for specific use cases. And if we look at the players who are the winners in the AI race, do you see anyone particularly good participating?
- simianwords 11mo ago800 million weekly active users for ChatGPT. My position on things like this is that if enough people use a service, I must defer to their judgement that they benefit from it. To do the contrary would be highly egoistic and suggest that I am somehow more intelligent than all those people and I know more about what they want for themselves. I could obviously give you examples where LLMs have concrete usecases but that's besides the larger point.
- techpression 11mo agoI don’t do zero sum games, you can normalize every bad thing that ever happened with that rhetoric. Also, someone benefiting from something doesn’t make it good. Weapons smuggling is also extremely beneficial to the people involved.
- simianwords 11mo agoYes but if I go with your priors then all of these are similarly to be suspect - gaming - netflix - television - social media - hacker news - music in general - carnivals A priori, all of these are equally suspicious as to whether they provide value or not. My point is that unless you have reason to suspect, people engaging in consumption through their own agency is in general preferable. You can of course bring counter examples but they are more of caveats against my larger truer point.
- easyThrowaway 11mo ago> when the market is telling you loud and clear they want X Does it tho? Articles like [1] or [2] seem to be at odd with this interpretation. If it were any different we wouldn't be talking about the "AI bubble" after all. [1]https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-exec-asks-why-arent-more-people-impressed-with-ai https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-exec-asks-why-arent-mor... [2]https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...
- classified 11mo agoExactly. Microsoft for instance got a noticeable backlash for cramming AI everywhere, and their future plans in that direction.
- simianwords 11mo ago1) it was failure of specific implementation 2) if you had read the paper you wouldn’t use it as an example here. Good faith discussion on what the market feels about LLMs would include Gemini, ChatGPT numbers. Overall market cap of these companies. And not cherry picked misunderstood articles.
- easyThrowaway 11mo agoNo, I picked those specifically. When Pets.com[1] went down in early 2000 it wasn't neither the idea, nor the tech stack that brought the company down, it was the speculative business dynamics that caused its collapse. The fact we've swapped technology underneath doesn't mean we're not basically falling into ".com Bubble - Remastered HD Edition". I bet a few Pets.com exec were also wondering why people weren't impressed with their website. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com
- simianwords 11mo agoDo you actually want to get into the details on how frequently do markers get things right vs get things wrong? It would make the priors a bit more lucid so we can be on the same page.
- DonHopkins 11mo agoSome people maintain that JavaScript is evil too, and make a big deal out of telling everyone they avoid it on moral grounds as often as they can work it into the conversation, as if they were vegans who wanted everyone to know that and respect them for it. So is it rational for a web design company to take a moral stance that they won't use JavaScript? Is there a market for that, with enough clients who want their JavaScript-free work? Are there really enough companies that morally hate JavaScript enough to hire them, at the expense of their web site's usability and functionality, and their own users who aren't as laser focused on performatively not using JavaScript and letting everyone know about it as they are?
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo agoThe age old question: do people get what they want, or do they want what they (can) get? Put differently, is "the market" shaped by the desires of consumers, or by the machinations of producers?
- simianwords 11mo ago>So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones. You are misconstruing the original point. They are simply suggesting that the moral qualms of using AI are simply not that high - neither to vast majority of consumers, neither to the government. There are a few people who might exaggerate these moral issues for self service but they wouldn't matter in the long term. That is not to suggest there are absolutely no legitimate moral problems with AI but they will pale in comparison to what the market needs. If AI can make things 1000x more efficient, humanity will collectively agree in one way or the other to ignore or work around the "moral hazards" for the greater good. You can start by explaining what your specific moral value is that goes against AI use? It might bring to clarity whether these values are that important at all to begin with.
- vkou 11mo ago> If AI can make things 1000x more efficient, Is that the promise of the faustian bargain we're signing? Once the ink is dry, should I expect to be living in a 900,000 sq ft apartment, or be spending $20/year on healthcare? Or be working only an hour a week?
- ovi256 11mo agoWhile humans have historically mildly reduced their working time to today's 40h workweek, their consumption has gone up enormously, and whole new categories of consumption were opened. So my prediction is while you'll never live in a 900,000sqft apartment (unless we get O'Neill cylinders from our budding space industry) you'll probably consume a lot more, while still working a full week
- ako 11mo agoAI is just a tool, like most other technologies, it can be used for good and bad. Where are you going to draw the line? Only if it effects you, or maybe we should go back to using coal for everything, so the mineworkers have their old life back? Or maybe follow the Amish guidelines to ban all technology that threatens sense of community? If you are going to draw a line, you'll probably have to start living in small communities, as AI as a technology is almost impossible to stop. There will be people and companies using it to it's fullest, even if you have laws to ban it, other countries will allow it.
- georgemcbay 11mo ago> AI is just a tool, like most other technologies, it can be used for good and bad. The same could be said of social media for which I think the aggregate bad has been far greater than the aggregate good (though there has certainly been some good sprinkled in there). I think the same is likely to be true of "AI" in terms of the negative impact it will have on the humanistic side of people and society over the next decade or so. However like social media before it I don't know how useful it will be to try to avoid it. We'll all be drastically impacted by it through network effects whether we individually choose to participate or not and practically speaking those of us who still need to participate in society and commerce are going to have to deal with it, though that doesn't mean we have to be happy about it.
- marcosdumay 11mo ago> The same could be said of social media Yes, absolutely. Just because it's monopolized by evil people doesn't mean it's inherently bad. In fact, mots people here have seen examples of it done in a good way.
- satvikpendem 11mo ago> In fact, mots people here have seen examples of it done in a good way. Like this very website we're on, proving the parent's point in fact.
- idiotsecant 11mo agoThat's how it works. You can be morally righteous all you want, but this isn't a movie. Morality is a luxury for the rich. Conspicuous consumption. The morally righteous poor people just generally end up righteously starving.
- dripdry45 11mo agoThis seems rather black and white. Defining the morals probably makes sense, then evaluating whether they can be lived or whether we can compromise in the face other priorities?
- tjwebbnorfolk 11mo agoWhat parent is saying is that what works is what will matter in the end. That which works better than something else will become the method that survives in competition. You not liking something on purportedly "moral" grounds doesn't matter if it works better than something else.
- malfist 11mo agoOxycontin certainly worked, and the markets demanded more and more of it. Who are we to take a moral stand and limit everyone's access to opiates? We should just focus on making a profit since we're filling a "need"
- satvikpendem 11mo agoUsing LLMs doesn't kill people, I'm sure there are some exceptions like OpenAI's suicide that was in the news, but not to the degree of oxycontin.
- tinfoilhatter 11mo agoNot yet maybe... Once we factor in the environmental damage that generative AI, and all the data centers being built to power it, will inevitably cause - I think it will become increasingly difficult to make the assertion you just did.
- joquarky 11mo agoYou're using data centers to read and post comments here.
- wartywhoa23 11mo agoYou're entering a bridge and there's a road sign before it with a pictogram of a truck and a plaque below that reads "10t max". According to the logic of your argument, it's perfectly okay to drive a 360t BelAZ 75710 loaded to its full 450t capacity over that bridge just because it's a truck too.