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The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Public Patience with Tech Giants Is Running Out

cmiles8 10mo ago
Tech customers are massively AI hype fatigued at this point. The tech isn’t going away, but a hard reset is overdue to bring things back down for a cold hard reality check. Article yesterday about MSFT slashing quotas on AI sales as customers aren’t buying is in line with this broader theme. Morgan Stanley also quietly trying to offload its exposure to data center financing in a move that smells very summer of 2008-ish. CNBC now talks about the AI bubble multiple times a day. OpenAI looks incredibly vulnerable and financially over-extended. I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.
- bluefirebrand 10mo ago
  Yup. The tech giants surely know the correction is coming by now. They are just trying to milk it just a tiny bit longer before it all comes crashing down. Keep your eyes out on the skies, I forecast executives in golden parachutes in the near future
  - cmiles8 10mo ago
    Yes. IPO talks suggests there will be rushed attempts to cash out before this all implodes, but all signs are pointing to that ship having sailed. I don’t see any big AI company having a successful IPO anytime soon which is going to leave some folks stuck holding the financial equivalent of nuclear waste.
    - GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
      hey, at least this time it'll be venture capitalists and not pensioners.
      - nullocator 10mo ago
        Aren't the VCs getting some of their money from pensions?
- Sevii 10mo ago
  The annoying part is that every tech company made an internal mandate for every team to stuff AI into every product. There are some great products that use AI (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Nano-banana, etc). But we simply haven't had time to come up with good ways of integrating AI into every software product. So instead every big tech company spent two years forcing AI into everything with minimal thought. Obviously people are not happy with this.
  - redserk 10mo ago
    Some AI was done tastefully. Apple Photos search comes to mind. I can search for objects across your photos, and it does a reasonable job finding what I want. It's an example of AI that's so well done, the end user doesn't even know it's there. Now Microsoft pushing "Copilot" is the complete opposite. It's so badly integrated with any standard workflow, it's disruptive in the worst of ways.
    - MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
      Google's photo app had the searching for years. It seemed a lot more useful a few years ago when it was using dumber image recognition models. Now it returns fewer matches on the same search. I tend to search the same things a few times a year as a supplement to some story and it's been frustrating to see in real time, a picture that used to come up when searching "car" or "guitar" is missing and instead unrelated pictures returned.
      - redserk 10mo ago
        That's fair, but my point was that AI should be implemented in a way that's out-of-the-way but is still helpful to users. I think LLMs are incredible, I think there's a lot of really good usecases where it can help promote recommendations and actions for a user to take. I don't think every user wants to have every app they touch into a Chatbot though.
  - jamincan 10mo ago
    It's not just that they are adding AI to every single product, it's being pushed on customers in incredibly intrusive and irritating ways that makes it seem as though they're desperate for their AI investments to pan out. If your AI productivity enhancement stuff is so amazing, shouldn't you be turning away customers at the door due to demand instead of brow beating me into finally signing up for it in submission?
- donmcronald 10mo ago
  > I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point. Some days I wonder if we'd be better off or worse off if we had a complete collapse of technology. I think it'd be painful with a massive drop in standard of living, but we could still recover. I wonder if the same will be true in a couple more generations. I think it's dangerous to treat younger generations like replaceable cogs. What happens when there's no one around that knows how the cogs are supposed to fit together?
- mrtksn 10mo ago
  > AI hype fatigue I think your wording is the correct wording, not the "AI fatigue" because I don't want to go to pre-AI era and I can't stand another "OMG It's over" tweet at the same time.
  - donmcronald 10mo ago
    Yeah. Hype fatigue is a good description. Every time I see them talking about having AI book flights and hotels I think about the digital assistants on phones. Didn't they promise us the same thing back then? I won't believe any of the claims until I see them working (flawlessly).
throwaway743 10mo ago
A lot of this AI backlash feels less about the tech itself and more about people feeling economically exposed. When you think your job or livelihood is on thin ice, it is easier to direct that fear at AI than at the fact that our elected reps have not offered any real plan for how workers are supposed to survive the transition. AI becomes a stand-in for a bigger problem. We keep arguing about models and chatbots, but the real issue is that the economic safety net has not been updated in decades. Until that changes, people will keep treating AI as the thing to be angry at instead of the system that leaves them vulnerable.
- the_snooze 10mo ago
  Eh, it's way simpler than that. AI doesn't know when to STFU. When I write an email or document, I don't need modern-day Clippy constantly guessing (and second-guessing) my thoughts. I don't need an AI sparkle button plastered everywhere to summarize articles for me. It's infantilizing and reeks of desperation. If AI is a truly useful tool, then I'll integrate it into my workflow on my own terms and my own timeline.
- jandrewrogers 10mo ago
  A major factor in the backlash is that the AI is obnoxiously intrusive because companies are forcefully injecting it into everything. It pops up everywhere trying to be "helpful" when it is neither needed nor helpful. People often experience AI as an idiot constantly jabbering next to them while they are trying to get work done. AI would be much more pleasant if it only showed up when summoned for a specific task.
- lawlessone 10mo ago
  Part of this the behavior around it too from some users. Like that guy spamming FOSS projects on github with 13k LOC of code nobody asked for and then acting forwarding the criticism from people forced to review it to the Claude and copy pasting the response back to . Triumphant Posts on linkedin from former seo/cryptoscam people telling everyone they'll be left behind if they don't adopt the latest flavor text/image generator. All these resources being spent too on huge data centres for text generators when things like protein folding would be far more useful, billion dollar salaries for "AI Gurus" that are just throwing sh*t at the wall and hoping their particular mix of models and training works, while laying people off.
shevy-java 10mo ago
The recent increase of hardware prices (the example I gave yesterday of the same RAM I purchased about 2 years ago for a cheap computer, suddenly costing 2.5x as much as it did ~2 years ago) changed my opinion completely. I was already skeptical of AI, but I could see a few possible use cases, such as generating images for use in free-to-play browser games, and so forth. But I also saw a lot of crap - fake-videos on youtube that just wastes my time. And now that the prices are going up, I have enough indeed. The big tech bro AI mega-corporations need to pay us - aka mankind - for the damage they cause here. The AI bubble is already subsiding, we see that, despite Trump trying to protect the mafiosi here. They owe us billions now in damage. Microsoft also recently announced it will milk everyone by increasing the prices due to "new AI features in MS office". Granted, I don't use Microsoft products as such (I do have a computer running Win10 though, so my statement is not 100% correct; I just don't use a Microsoft paid-for office suite or any other milk-for-money service), but I think it is time to turn the odds. These corporations should pay us, for the damage they are causing here in general. I no longer accept the AI mafia method, even less so as the prices of hardware went up because of this. This mafia owes us money.
- ronsor 10mo ago
  Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like.
  - palmotea 10mo ago
    > Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like. As a matter of present law, maybe not. Doesn't mean it has to stay that way. And this thing isn't merely "[doing] something you don't like."
    - hunterpayne 10mo ago
      Your insipid post wasted some of all of our time. Does that mean you now owe all of us?
- azemetre 10mo ago
inglor_cz 10mo ago
At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them. It looks like the "car problem" in yet another form. Many people will agree that our cities have become too car-centric and that cars take way too much public space, but few will give up their own personal car.
- agentultra 10mo ago
  That’s largely because the built environment is designed for cars and there are no sufficient alternatives. When you design the built environment for humans people drive less and own fewer personal vehicles.
  - lisper 10mo ago
    It's much worse than "designed for cars." It's more like "not survivable without a car." It's the same with apps on my phone. I don't want to use them, but sometimes there simply is no alternative in today's world. We may end up building a world where AI is similarly necessary. The AI companies would certainly like that. But at the moment we still have a choice. The more people exercise their agency now the more likely we are to retain that agency in the future.
  - inglor_cz 10mo ago
    I lived in Prague, whose center is medieval and the neighbourhoods around it pre-1900, and even though what you say is true (fewer people drove everywhere), the streets were still saturated to their capacity. It seemed to me that regardless of the city, many people will drive until the point where traffic jams and parking become a nightmare, and only then consider the alternatives. This point of pain is much lower in old European cities that weren't built as car-centric and much higher in the US, but the pattern seems to repeat itself.
    - ljlolel 10mo ago
      Helsinki made a major push to reduce cars to get to Vision Zero and succeeded in no car fatalities in 2024. It’s now hard to get a taxi and you’re expected to walk / other transport it’s a little bit annoying but worth it
ceroxylon 10mo ago
> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals. Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice. It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.
- ianferrel 10mo ago
  This kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.
  - 0_____0 10mo ago
    It's ad copy style. Humans have been writing like that for decades but it's not naturalistic construction. Not sure who you talk to, but the 'It's Not Just X, It's Y' format doesn't show up in everyday speech (caveat, in my experience).
    - ratelimitsteve 10mo ago
      this. marketing speak appears much more frequently in online text, which is what AI is trained on, than it does in normal everyday human speech that AI isn't able to capture and train on en masse yet.
    - cess11 10mo ago
      I find it kind of common, used as a riff off of patterns in advertising and post-politics.
      - lumost 10mo ago
        It’s not universal - but it’s a compelling rhetorical device /s It just sounds like slop as it’s everywhere now. The pattern invites questions on the authenticity of the writer, and whether they’ve fallen victim to AI hallucinations and sycophant. I can quickly become offended when someone asks me to read their ChatGPT output without disclosing it was gpt output. Now when AI learns how to use parallelism I will be forced to learn a new style of writing to maintain credibility with the reader /s
zkmon 10mo ago
>> There is a lack of deep value There is nothing called deep value. Stock market rises on speculation of other people's buying patterns, not company fundamentals. Where are deep values? Politics? media? academia? human relations? business? What do you mean by deep values? We can't even look beyond one year ahead. Modern human behavior is highly optimized, to bother only about immediate goals. The other day, I was reviewing a software architecture and asked the architect who the audience/consumer for this document is. She said it is the reviewers. I asked again hoping to identify the downstream process that uses this document, and got the same answer, a bit sternly this time.
- cess11 10mo ago
  Perhaps they mean that it does not satisfy some deep need, perhaps as opposed to a shallow want or desire.
yallneedtoget 10mo ago
[dead]
echelon 10mo ago
We're too early. This is AI's "dialup era" (pre-56k, maybe even the 2400 baud era). We've got a bunch of models, but they don't fit into many products. Companies and leadership were told to "adopt AI" and given crude tools with no instructions. Of course it failed. Chat is an interesting UX, but it's primitive. We need better ways to connect domains, especially multi-dimensional ones. Most products are "bolting on" AI. There are few products that really "get it". Adobe is one of the only companies I've seen with actually compelling AI + interface results, and even their experiments are just early demos [1-4]. (I've built open source versions of most of these.) We're in for another 5 years of figuring this out. And we don't need monolithic AI models via APIs. We need access to the AI building blocks and sub networks so we can adapt and fine tune models to the actual control surfaces. That's when the real take off will happen. [1] Relighting scenes: https://youtu.be/YqAAFX1XXY8?si=DG6ODYZXInb0Ckvc&t=211 https://youtu.be/YqAAFX1XXY8?si=DG6ODYZXInb0Ckvc&t=211 [2] Image -> 3D editing: https://youtu.be/BLxFn_BFB5c?si=GJg12gU5gFU9ZpVc&t=185 https://youtu.be/BLxFn_BFB5c?si=GJg12gU5gFU9ZpVc&t=185 (payoff is at 3:54) [3] Image -> Gaussian -> Gaussian editing: https://youtu.be/z3lHAahgpRk?si=XwSouqEJUFhC44TP&t=285 https://youtu.be/z3lHAahgpRk?si=XwSouqEJUFhC44TP&t=285 [4] 3D -> image with semantic tags: https://youtu.be/z275i_6jDPc?si=2HaatjXOEk3lHeW-&t=443 https://youtu.be/z275i_6jDPc?si=2HaatjXOEk3lHeW-&t=443 edit: curious why I'm getting the flood of downvotes for saying we're too early. Care to offer a counter argument I can consider?
- wavemode 10mo ago
  This is AI's Segway era. Perfectly functional device, but the early-2000s notion that it was going to become the primary mode of transportation was just an investor-fueled pipe dream.
  - ljlolel 10mo ago
    Just add a stick and sharing: the scooters are quite successful
    - wavemode 10mo ago
      I never said they weren't successful.
dreamcompiler 10mo ago
First they extracted oil and water and gold from the ground and sold them back to us. Then they extracted our privacy and sold it to advertisers. Now with AI they're extracting our souls. Who do they expect to sell them to?
- Lord-Jobo 10mo ago
  The current AI is a lot better at extracting my sanity than anything else.
  - soraminazuki 10mo ago
    Haha, you haven't even seen the start of it. You know how bad Google's robot "support agents" are? Well, brace yourself because billionaires want to replace every job out there with those useless robots. All the while robbing the general population of wealth, computer chips, electricity, drinking water, and who knows what else.
    - Uw7yTcf36gTc 10mo ago
      If these agents are good enough to replace a job then they aren’t useless.
      - soraminazuki 10mo ago
        In case you didn't know, Google's robot "support agent" exists to obscure the fact that they have barely any customer support. It's not "replacing" a job as it is abolishing it.
- harvey9 10mo ago
  Joke is on them cos I already mortgaged mine.
- ben_w 10mo ago
  > Now with AI they're extracting our souls. Who do they expect to sell them to? Expect? To work those souls to build the Dyson swarms. Well, some of them, anyway. Zuckerberg clearly uses the word "superintelligence" as a buzzword, he doesn't buy that vison for how "super" it could be given what he says his users will do with it.
tptacek 10mo ago
Periodic reminder that Newsweek no longer exists. What you're reading is essentially an SEO play run by a religious cult that bought Newsweek's branding in a fire sale. A useful thing to do with any Newsweek story is to take a minute to look into the background of whoever the author of the story is. Notably, this story is pitched as a "News Story", but it's not really that at all; it's an opinion piece with a couple of quotes from AI opponents. Frustratingly, not many people understand what "Newsweek" is today, so they're always going to be able to collect some quotes for whatever story they're running.
- bgwalter 10mo ago
  It is from Oct. 3rd, otherwise the author could have integrated OpenAI's "code red" and the absence of successful training runs since 2024 as well. The article accurately reflects opinions in YouTube comments and opinions of the population at large.
- scythe 10mo ago
  Is this still accurate? Wikipedia says that Newsweek was acquired by IBT Media (a front for a religious movement) in 2013 but returned to independent ownership under Dev Pragad and Jonathan Davis in 2018 following a criminal investigation into embezzlement. I was not able to confirm or reject any links still existing between Newsweek and its current owners and IBT Media. It does appear that the new owners are very much leaning into a "new media" business model and the old journalistic staff is probably gone.
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    Dev Pragad was involved with the IBT ownership of Newsweek. The whole thing is a mess. Cards on the table, I'm throwing an elbow with the "religious cult" thing; the cult has not much to do with why you should be careful with Newsweek. Rather, it's that Newsweek as it exists today has nothing to do with Newsweek as people understand it. Whoever owns it, it's basically an actual clickbait farm now.
- waon 10mo ago
  Periodic reminder that there are people seeking to derail discussions critical of AI and divert attention away from the actual substance of these issues.
alienbaby 10mo ago
Ai is a lot more than ai generated media.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jtf23 10mo ago
that the labour theory of value is actually true will come as a shock to many
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- hunterpayne 10mo ago
  If that was the case, a newly discovered but untapped gold mine would be worthless.
AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
It’s not a backlash on the AI it’s a backlash on the society that is utilizing it Go and read all of the anti-AI articles and they will eventually boil down to something to the effect of: “the problems we have are more foundational and fundamental and AI looks like a distraction” However this is a directionless complaint that falls under the “complaining about technology“ trope As a result there is no real coherent conversation about what AI is how do we define it what are people actually complaining about what are we rallying against because people are overwhelmingly utilizing it in every part of life
- Capricorn2481 10mo ago
  Disagree. The people meaningfully controlling the direction of AI are the foundational problem. They are funding the politicians that control the system leaving society vulnerable. And we are well past the point of getting them out of power. Our ability to affect change on them is about numbers. The backlash to how AI is forced on us is an easy rallying point because it's a widely experienced negative. If you own a computer or phone, chances are good AI has annoyed you at some point. People hated Clippy. I don't think it would've been helpful to say "It's not Clippy you're mad at, but the societal foundation that enabled Clippy." That's not a good slogan.
  - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
    So you’re agreeing? You just want the slogan version? You’re doing exactly what I’m saying, which is being mad at the social structure.
1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo ago
GET /x?fnid=80IzSA4TbptZtx0vqRTZsv&fnop=commconfirm HTTP/1.1 Host: news.ycombinator.com connection: close Connection: close
maciejzj 10mo ago
I believe that the root cause for the "fatigue" and tension around AI is much more embedded in the societal context. US (and the rest of the western world) citizens face real life problems in youth employment, social/political instability, unaffordable housing, internet addiction (yes, I believe that it is real problem that people spend 5 hours on their phones daily) and social atomisation. Meanwhile all resources are put in a rush into building technology that does not fundamentally improve people's well being. Advanced societies have had pretty good capabilities of doing writing, design, coding, searching information, etc. Now we are pouring all available resources, at any cost, to automate these processes even more. The costs of this operation are tremendous and it doesn't yield any results that improve everyday lives. In 2020 there was a ton of UI/UX/graphics companies that could produce copious amount of visual content for the society while providing work to many people. Now we are about to automate this process and be able to generate infinite amount of graphics on demand. To what end? Were our capabilities to create graphics any kind of bottleneck before? I don't think so. The stock market and tech leadership are completely decoupled from the problems that the majority of people faces. The real effect of AI at hand is to commoditise intellectual work that previously functioned well dispersed in society. This does not bring benefit to the majority of people.
- gwbas1c 10mo ago
  IMO: We should be using AI for the common good, IE, lower the cost of living, increase our living standards, improve health, improve access to food and shelter, ect. I still have yet to see any LLM that appears to do that. They all seem to allow me to have a conversation with data; IE, a better Google search, or a quick way to make clip art.
  - AlecSchueler 10mo ago
    > We should be using AI for the common good, IE, lower the cost of living, increase our living standards, improve health, improve access to food and shelter, ect. I think the issue is that these aren't really technical problems, they're social problems.
- jimmaswell 10mo ago
glengGlenR 10mo ago
Look who is running corporations and benefiting from the stock market the most: CEO that jacked up EpiPen prices? GenX Insurance CEO that was shot? GenX Musk and Thiel, Satya Nadella, Sundar? GenX Senior leadership and C-suite types are predominantly GenX now. Boomer leadership is tied up in Wall Street. Backlash is just re-iterating the need for Boomers and GenX to cede stewardship of politics and the economy. Biology is self-selecting. People who won't be around to deal with the fallout of their choices have little reason to change course. It's on the next generations to invert the obvious ageism-driven decision making to prefer and over-value the walking dead. Edit: Elon agrees it's best if older generations move on https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-important-for-us-to-die-2021-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-imp...
yyyyuuuuiiiii 10mo ago
> a Pew Research center survey found that nearly one in five Americans saw AI as a benefit rather than a threat. But by 2025, 43 percent of U.S. adults now believe AI is more likely to harm them than help them in the future, according to Pew. Am I stupid or is this a stupid line that proves the antithesis of what they want? It went from 4 in 5 being negative to less than half? What even is journalism now.
- hunterpayne 10mo ago
  There was probably an I don't know category. And that category probably was most of the respondents in the first poll.
josefritzishere 10mo ago
AI slop emulates humans. It's not alive. It can't think. This is what stochastic parrots sound like.
- robocat 10mo ago
  I tried to get a sound effects generator to find out what "stochastic parrots" might sound like...
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

Tech customers are massively AI hype fatigued at this point. The tech isn’t going away, but a hard reset is overdue to bring things back down for a cold hard reality check. Article yesterday about MSFT slashing quotas on AI sales as customers aren’t buying is in line with this broader theme. Morgan Stanley also quietly trying to offload its exposure to data center financing in a move that smells very summer of 2008-ish. CNBC now talks about the AI bubble multiple times a day. OpenAI looks incredibly vulnerable and financially over-extended. I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.

bluefirebrand 10mo ago
Yup. The tech giants surely know the correction is coming by now. They are just trying to milk it just a tiny bit longer before it all comes crashing down. Keep your eyes out on the skies, I forecast executives in golden parachutes in the near future
- cmiles8 10mo ago
  Yes. IPO talks suggests there will be rushed attempts to cash out before this all implodes, but all signs are pointing to that ship having sailed. I don’t see any big AI company having a successful IPO anytime soon which is going to leave some folks stuck holding the financial equivalent of nuclear waste.
  - GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
    hey, at least this time it'll be venture capitalists and not pensioners.
    - nullocator 10mo ago
      Aren't the VCs getting some of their money from pensions?
Sevii 10mo ago
The annoying part is that every tech company made an internal mandate for every team to stuff AI into every product. There are some great products that use AI (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Nano-banana, etc). But we simply haven't had time to come up with good ways of integrating AI into every software product. So instead every big tech company spent two years forcing AI into everything with minimal thought. Obviously people are not happy with this.
- redserk 10mo ago
  Some AI was done tastefully. Apple Photos search comes to mind. I can search for objects across your photos, and it does a reasonable job finding what I want. It's an example of AI that's so well done, the end user doesn't even know it's there. Now Microsoft pushing "Copilot" is the complete opposite. It's so badly integrated with any standard workflow, it's disruptive in the worst of ways.
  - MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
    Google's photo app had the searching for years. It seemed a lot more useful a few years ago when it was using dumber image recognition models. Now it returns fewer matches on the same search. I tend to search the same things a few times a year as a supplement to some story and it's been frustrating to see in real time, a picture that used to come up when searching "car" or "guitar" is missing and instead unrelated pictures returned.
    - redserk 10mo ago
      That's fair, but my point was that AI should be implemented in a way that's out-of-the-way but is still helpful to users. I think LLMs are incredible, I think there's a lot of really good usecases where it can help promote recommendations and actions for a user to take. I don't think every user wants to have every app they touch into a Chatbot though.
- jamincan 10mo ago
  It's not just that they are adding AI to every single product, it's being pushed on customers in incredibly intrusive and irritating ways that makes it seem as though they're desperate for their AI investments to pan out. If your AI productivity enhancement stuff is so amazing, shouldn't you be turning away customers at the door due to demand instead of brow beating me into finally signing up for it in submission?
donmcronald 10mo ago
> I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point. Some days I wonder if we'd be better off or worse off if we had a complete collapse of technology. I think it'd be painful with a massive drop in standard of living, but we could still recover. I wonder if the same will be true in a couple more generations. I think it's dangerous to treat younger generations like replaceable cogs. What happens when there's no one around that knows how the cogs are supposed to fit together?
mrtksn 10mo ago
> AI hype fatigue I think your wording is the correct wording, not the "AI fatigue" because I don't want to go to pre-AI era and I can't stand another "OMG It's over" tweet at the same time.
- donmcronald 10mo ago
  Yeah. Hype fatigue is a good description. Every time I see them talking about having AI book flights and hotels I think about the digital assistants on phones. Didn't they promise us the same thing back then? I won't believe any of the claims until I see them working (flawlessly).

throwaway743 10mo ago

A lot of this AI backlash feels less about the tech itself and more about people feeling economically exposed. When you think your job or livelihood is on thin ice, it is easier to direct that fear at AI than at the fact that our elected reps have not offered any real plan for how workers are supposed to survive the transition. AI becomes a stand-in for a bigger problem. We keep arguing about models and chatbots, but the real issue is that the economic safety net has not been updated in decades. Until that changes, people will keep treating AI as the thing to be angry at instead of the system that leaves them vulnerable.

the_snooze 10mo ago
Eh, it's way simpler than that. AI doesn't know when to STFU. When I write an email or document, I don't need modern-day Clippy constantly guessing (and second-guessing) my thoughts. I don't need an AI sparkle button plastered everywhere to summarize articles for me. It's infantilizing and reeks of desperation. If AI is a truly useful tool, then I'll integrate it into my workflow on my own terms and my own timeline.
jandrewrogers 10mo ago
A major factor in the backlash is that the AI is obnoxiously intrusive because companies are forcefully injecting it into everything. It pops up everywhere trying to be "helpful" when it is neither needed nor helpful. People often experience AI as an idiot constantly jabbering next to them while they are trying to get work done. AI would be much more pleasant if it only showed up when summoned for a specific task.
lawlessone 10mo ago
Part of this the behavior around it too from some users. Like that guy spamming FOSS projects on github with 13k LOC of code nobody asked for and then acting forwarding the criticism from people forced to review it to the Claude and copy pasting the response back to . Triumphant Posts on linkedin from former seo/cryptoscam people telling everyone they'll be left behind if they don't adopt the latest flavor text/image generator. All these resources being spent too on huge data centres for text generators when things like protein folding would be far more useful, billion dollar salaries for "AI Gurus" that are just throwing sh*t at the wall and hoping their particular mix of models and training works, while laying people off.

shevy-java 10mo ago

The recent increase of hardware prices (the example I gave yesterday of the same RAM I purchased about 2 years ago for a cheap computer, suddenly costing 2.5x as much as it did ~2 years ago) changed my opinion completely. I was already skeptical of AI, but I could see a few possible use cases, such as generating images for use in free-to-play browser games, and so forth. But I also saw a lot of crap - fake-videos on youtube that just wastes my time. And now that the prices are going up, I have enough indeed. The big tech bro AI mega-corporations need to pay us - aka mankind - for the damage they cause here. The AI bubble is already subsiding, we see that, despite Trump trying to protect the mafiosi here. They owe us billions now in damage. Microsoft also recently announced it will milk everyone by increasing the prices due to "new AI features in MS office". Granted, I don't use Microsoft products as such (I do have a computer running Win10 though, so my statement is not 100% correct; I just don't use a Microsoft paid-for office suite or any other milk-for-money service), but I think it is time to turn the odds. These corporations should pay us, for the damage they are causing here in general. I no longer accept the AI mafia method, even less so as the prices of hardware went up because of this. This mafia owes us money.

ronsor 10mo ago
Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like.
- palmotea 10mo ago
  > Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like. As a matter of present law, maybe not. Doesn't mean it has to stay that way. And this thing isn't merely "[doing] something you don't like."
  - hunterpayne 10mo ago
    Your insipid post wasted some of all of our time. Does that mean you now owe all of us?
azemetre 10mo ago

inglor_cz 10mo ago

At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them. It looks like the "car problem" in yet another form. Many people will agree that our cities have become too car-centric and that cars take way too much public space, but few will give up their own personal car.

agentultra 10mo ago
That’s largely because the built environment is designed for cars and there are no sufficient alternatives. When you design the built environment for humans people drive less and own fewer personal vehicles.
- lisper 10mo ago
  It's much worse than "designed for cars." It's more like "not survivable without a car." It's the same with apps on my phone. I don't want to use them, but sometimes there simply is no alternative in today's world. We may end up building a world where AI is similarly necessary. The AI companies would certainly like that. But at the moment we still have a choice. The more people exercise their agency now the more likely we are to retain that agency in the future.
- inglor_cz 10mo ago
  I lived in Prague, whose center is medieval and the neighbourhoods around it pre-1900, and even though what you say is true (fewer people drove everywhere), the streets were still saturated to their capacity. It seemed to me that regardless of the city, many people will drive until the point where traffic jams and parking become a nightmare, and only then consider the alternatives. This point of pain is much lower in old European cities that weren't built as car-centric and much higher in the US, but the pattern seems to repeat itself.
  - ljlolel 10mo ago
    Helsinki made a major push to reduce cars to get to Vision Zero and succeeded in no car fatalities in 2024. It’s now hard to get a taxi and you’re expected to walk / other transport it’s a little bit annoying but worth it

ceroxylon 10mo ago

> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals. Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice. It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.

ianferrel 10mo ago
This kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.
- 0_____0 10mo ago
  It's ad copy style. Humans have been writing like that for decades but it's not naturalistic construction. Not sure who you talk to, but the 'It's Not Just X, It's Y' format doesn't show up in everyday speech (caveat, in my experience).
  - ratelimitsteve 10mo ago
    this. marketing speak appears much more frequently in online text, which is what AI is trained on, than it does in normal everyday human speech that AI isn't able to capture and train on en masse yet.
  - cess11 10mo ago
    I find it kind of common, used as a riff off of patterns in advertising and post-politics.
    - lumost 10mo ago
      It’s not universal - but it’s a compelling rhetorical device /s It just sounds like slop as it’s everywhere now. The pattern invites questions on the authenticity of the writer, and whether they’ve fallen victim to AI hallucinations and sycophant. I can quickly become offended when someone asks me to read their ChatGPT output without disclosing it was gpt output. Now when AI learns how to use parallelism I will be forced to learn a new style of writing to maintain credibility with the reader /s

zkmon 10mo ago

>> There is a lack of deep value There is nothing called deep value. Stock market rises on speculation of other people's buying patterns, not company fundamentals. Where are deep values? Politics? media? academia? human relations? business? What do you mean by deep values? We can't even look beyond one year ahead. Modern human behavior is highly optimized, to bother only about immediate goals. The other day, I was reviewing a software architecture and asked the architect who the audience/consumer for this document is. She said it is the reviewers. I asked again hoping to identify the downstream process that uses this document, and got the same answer, a bit sternly this time.

cess11 10mo ago
Perhaps they mean that it does not satisfy some deep need, perhaps as opposed to a shallow want or desire.

yallneedtoget 10mo ago

[dead]

echelon 10mo ago

We're too early. This is AI's "dialup era" (pre-56k, maybe even the 2400 baud era). We've got a bunch of models, but they don't fit into many products. Companies and leadership were told to "adopt AI" and given crude tools with no instructions. Of course it failed. Chat is an interesting UX, but it's primitive. We need better ways to connect domains, especially multi-dimensional ones. Most products are "bolting on" AI. There are few products that really "get it". Adobe is one of the only companies I've seen with actually compelling AI + interface results, and even their experiments are just early demos [1-4]. (I've built open source versions of most of these.) We're in for another 5 years of figuring this out. And we don't need monolithic AI models via APIs. We need access to the AI building blocks and sub networks so we can adapt and fine tune models to the actual control surfaces. That's when the real take off will happen. [1] Relighting scenes: https://youtu.be/YqAAFX1XXY8?si=DG6ODYZXInb0Ckvc&t=211 https://youtu.be/YqAAFX1XXY8?si=DG6ODYZXInb0Ckvc&t=211 [2] Image -> 3D editing: https://youtu.be/BLxFn_BFB5c?si=GJg12gU5gFU9ZpVc&t=185 https://youtu.be/BLxFn_BFB5c?si=GJg12gU5gFU9ZpVc&t=185 (payoff is at 3:54) [3] Image -> Gaussian -> Gaussian editing: https://youtu.be/z3lHAahgpRk?si=XwSouqEJUFhC44TP&t=285 https://youtu.be/z3lHAahgpRk?si=XwSouqEJUFhC44TP&t=285 [4] 3D -> image with semantic tags: https://youtu.be/z275i_6jDPc?si=2HaatjXOEk3lHeW-&t=443 https://youtu.be/z275i_6jDPc?si=2HaatjXOEk3lHeW-&t=443 edit: curious why I'm getting the flood of downvotes for saying we're too early. Care to offer a counter argument I can consider?

wavemode 10mo ago
This is AI's Segway era. Perfectly functional device, but the early-2000s notion that it was going to become the primary mode of transportation was just an investor-fueled pipe dream.
- ljlolel 10mo ago
  Just add a stick and sharing: the scooters are quite successful
  - wavemode 10mo ago
    I never said they weren't successful.

dreamcompiler 10mo ago

First they extracted oil and water and gold from the ground and sold them back to us. Then they extracted our privacy and sold it to advertisers. Now with AI they're extracting our souls. Who do they expect to sell them to?

Lord-Jobo 10mo ago
The current AI is a lot better at extracting my sanity than anything else.
- soraminazuki 10mo ago
  Haha, you haven't even seen the start of it. You know how bad Google's robot "support agents" are? Well, brace yourself because billionaires want to replace every job out there with those useless robots. All the while robbing the general population of wealth, computer chips, electricity, drinking water, and who knows what else.
  - Uw7yTcf36gTc 10mo ago
    If these agents are good enough to replace a job then they aren’t useless.
    - soraminazuki 10mo ago
      In case you didn't know, Google's robot "support agent" exists to obscure the fact that they have barely any customer support. It's not "replacing" a job as it is abolishing it.
harvey9 10mo ago
Joke is on them cos I already mortgaged mine.
ben_w 10mo ago
> Now with AI they're extracting our souls. Who do they expect to sell them to? Expect? To work those souls to build the Dyson swarms. Well, some of them, anyway. Zuckerberg clearly uses the word "superintelligence" as a buzzword, he doesn't buy that vison for how "super" it could be given what he says his users will do with it.

tptacek 10mo ago

Periodic reminder that Newsweek no longer exists. What you're reading is essentially an SEO play run by a religious cult that bought Newsweek's branding in a fire sale. A useful thing to do with any Newsweek story is to take a minute to look into the background of whoever the author of the story is. Notably, this story is pitched as a "News Story", but it's not really that at all; it's an opinion piece with a couple of quotes from AI opponents. Frustratingly, not many people understand what "Newsweek" is today, so they're always going to be able to collect some quotes for whatever story they're running.

bgwalter 10mo ago
It is from Oct. 3rd, otherwise the author could have integrated OpenAI's "code red" and the absence of successful training runs since 2024 as well. The article accurately reflects opinions in YouTube comments and opinions of the population at large.
scythe 10mo ago
Is this still accurate? Wikipedia says that Newsweek was acquired by IBT Media (a front for a religious movement) in 2013 but returned to independent ownership under Dev Pragad and Jonathan Davis in 2018 following a criminal investigation into embezzlement. I was not able to confirm or reject any links still existing between Newsweek and its current owners and IBT Media. It does appear that the new owners are very much leaning into a "new media" business model and the old journalistic staff is probably gone.
- tptacek 10mo ago
  Dev Pragad was involved with the IBT ownership of Newsweek. The whole thing is a mess. Cards on the table, I'm throwing an elbow with the "religious cult" thing; the cult has not much to do with why you should be careful with Newsweek. Rather, it's that Newsweek as it exists today has nothing to do with Newsweek as people understand it. Whoever owns it, it's basically an actual clickbait farm now.
waon 10mo ago
Periodic reminder that there are people seeking to derail discussions critical of AI and divert attention away from the actual substance of these issues.

alienbaby 10mo ago

Ai is a lot more than ai generated media.

deleted 10mo ago

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jtf23 10mo ago

that the labour theory of value is actually true will come as a shock to many

deleted 10mo ago
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hunterpayne 10mo ago
If that was the case, a newly discovered but untapped gold mine would be worthless.

AndrewKemendo 10mo ago

It’s not a backlash on the AI it’s a backlash on the society that is utilizing it Go and read all of the anti-AI articles and they will eventually boil down to something to the effect of: “the problems we have are more foundational and fundamental and AI looks like a distraction” However this is a directionless complaint that falls under the “complaining about technology“ trope As a result there is no real coherent conversation about what AI is how do we define it what are people actually complaining about what are we rallying against because people are overwhelmingly utilizing it in every part of life

Capricorn2481 10mo ago
Disagree. The people meaningfully controlling the direction of AI are the foundational problem. They are funding the politicians that control the system leaving society vulnerable. And we are well past the point of getting them out of power. Our ability to affect change on them is about numbers. The backlash to how AI is forced on us is an easy rallying point because it's a widely experienced negative. If you own a computer or phone, chances are good AI has annoyed you at some point. People hated Clippy. I don't think it would've been helpful to say "It's not Clippy you're mad at, but the societal foundation that enabled Clippy." That's not a good slogan.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
  So you’re agreeing? You just want the slogan version? You’re doing exactly what I’m saying, which is being mad at the social structure.

1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo ago

GET /x?fnid=80IzSA4TbptZtx0vqRTZsv&fnop=commconfirm HTTP/1.1 Host: news.ycombinator.com connection: close Connection: close

maciejzj 10mo ago

I believe that the root cause for the "fatigue" and tension around AI is much more embedded in the societal context. US (and the rest of the western world) citizens face real life problems in youth employment, social/political instability, unaffordable housing, internet addiction (yes, I believe that it is real problem that people spend 5 hours on their phones daily) and social atomisation. Meanwhile all resources are put in a rush into building technology that does not fundamentally improve people's well being. Advanced societies have had pretty good capabilities of doing writing, design, coding, searching information, etc. Now we are pouring all available resources, at any cost, to automate these processes even more. The costs of this operation are tremendous and it doesn't yield any results that improve everyday lives. In 2020 there was a ton of UI/UX/graphics companies that could produce copious amount of visual content for the society while providing work to many people. Now we are about to automate this process and be able to generate infinite amount of graphics on demand. To what end? Were our capabilities to create graphics any kind of bottleneck before? I don't think so. The stock market and tech leadership are completely decoupled from the problems that the majority of people faces. The real effect of AI at hand is to commoditise intellectual work that previously functioned well dispersed in society. This does not bring benefit to the majority of people.

gwbas1c 10mo ago
IMO: We should be using AI for the common good, IE, lower the cost of living, increase our living standards, improve health, improve access to food and shelter, ect. I still have yet to see any LLM that appears to do that. They all seem to allow me to have a conversation with data; IE, a better Google search, or a quick way to make clip art.
- AlecSchueler 10mo ago
  > We should be using AI for the common good, IE, lower the cost of living, increase our living standards, improve health, improve access to food and shelter, ect. I think the issue is that these aren't really technical problems, they're social problems.
jimmaswell 10mo ago

glengGlenR 10mo ago

Look who is running corporations and benefiting from the stock market the most: CEO that jacked up EpiPen prices? GenX Insurance CEO that was shot? GenX Musk and Thiel, Satya Nadella, Sundar? GenX Senior leadership and C-suite types are predominantly GenX now. Boomer leadership is tied up in Wall Street. Backlash is just re-iterating the need for Boomers and GenX to cede stewardship of politics and the economy. Biology is self-selecting. People who won't be around to deal with the fallout of their choices have little reason to change course. It's on the next generations to invert the obvious ageism-driven decision making to prefer and over-value the walking dead. Edit: Elon agrees it's best if older generations move on https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-important-for-us-to-die-2021-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-imp...

yyyyuuuuiiiii 10mo ago

> a Pew Research center survey found that nearly one in five Americans saw AI as a benefit rather than a threat. But by 2025, 43 percent of U.S. adults now believe AI is more likely to harm them than help them in the future, according to Pew. Am I stupid or is this a stupid line that proves the antithesis of what they want? It went from 4 in 5 being negative to less than half? What even is journalism now.

hunterpayne 10mo ago
There was probably an I don't know category. And that category probably was most of the respondents in the first poll.

josefritzishere 10mo ago

AI slop emulates humans. It's not alive. It can't think. This is what stochastic parrots sound like.

robocat 10mo ago
I tried to get a sound effects generator to find out what "stochastic parrots" might sound like...

deleted 10mo ago

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