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Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in
- jaybyrd 9mo agoguys were just trying to take jobs away from you.... please stop being mean to us - richest people on earth 2026
- GolfPopper 9mo agoYou forgot... "by stealing from artists and writers at scale".
- malfist 9mo agoTechbros trying to replace wage theft as the largest $ crime in the US
- jacquesm 9mo agoYou forgot about 'open source contributors' and 'musicians'.
- soulofmischief 9mo agoAs an open source contributor and musician who is not rich, I am pretty stoked about the engineering, scientific and mathematical advancements being made in my lifetime. I have only become more creatively enabled when adopting these tools, and while I share the existential dread of becoming unemployable, I also am wearing machine-fabricated clothing and enjoying a host of other products of automation. I do not have selective guilt over modern generative tools because I understand that one day this era will be history and society will be as integrated with AI as we are with other transformative technologies.
- nozzlegear 9mo agoAs an open source maintainer, I'm not stoked and I feel pretty much the opposite way. I've only become more annoyed when trying to adopt these tools, and felt more creative and more enabled by reducing their usage and going back to writing code by hand the old fashioned way. AI's only been useful to me as a commit message writer and a rubber duck. > I do not have selective guilt over modern generative tools because I understand that one day this era will be history and society will be as integrated with AI as we are with other transformative technologies. This seems overly optimistic, but also quite dystopian. I hope that society doesn't become as integrated with these shitty AIs as we are with other technologies.
- soulofmischief 9mo agoThere is a way for us to both get what we want out of software development without ideologically crusading against each other's ideals. We can each have these valid opinions about how generative technology personally integrates into our lives. Of course, that might be less and less true about our work as time goes on. At some point in the future, hiring an engineer who refuses to use generative coding tools will be the equivalent of hiring someone today who refuses to use an IDE or even a tricked out emacs/vim and just programs everything in Notepad. That's cool if they enjoy it, but it's unproductive in an increasingly competitive industry.
- nozzlegear 9mo agoPerhaps so, but again I find your vision of the future overly optimistic. Luckily I'm self employed and don't have to worry about AI usage quotas and "being unproductive" in an increasingly unproductive and non-deterministic industry.
- callc 9mo agoYou can say the same thing as we invented the atomic bomb. Cool science and engineering, no doubt. Not paying any attention to societal effects is not cool. Plus, presenting things as inevitabilities is just plain confidently trying to predict the future. Anyone can san “I understand one day this era will be history and X will have happened”. Nobody knows how the future will play out. Anyone who says they do is a liar. If they actually knew then go ahead and bet all your savings on it.
- dylan604 9mo agothese two groups are used to having their stuff stolen way more than the groups GP listed, so in a way kind of appropriate to have been omitted.
- TheDong 9mo agoYou're saying "musicians" aren't "artists", and "open source contributors" aren't artists _or_ writers? Artists covers both of the groups you said.
- jacquesm 9mo agoYes, we're all artists. Good now?
- myhf 9mo agoand don't forget "subtle backdoors disguised as regular example code"
- jaybyrd 9mo agowell if all the talent is stolen and put into our water destruction machine we can make significantly worse and more expensive versions of just giving the job to a wagey
- logicprog 9mo agoThe AI water issue is bunk. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
- goalieca 9mo agoThat article was clearly AI generated. I read pages of it and still didn’t see any actual data. Just different phrasing’s of that claim.
- logicprog 9mo agoWhat are you talking about? He goes into plenty of data, domain relevant definitions, specific cases, etc? Links to reliable sources for every numbers claim, of which there's several per paragraph, shows graphs, pictures, and does a lot of math (all of which I manually checked myself on paper as I went through). Also, the writing style is very much not ChatGPT-like, especially with all of the very honest corrections and edits he's added over time, which an AI slop purveyor wouldn't do. The deep analysis starts at this section: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?open=false#%C2%A7national https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake... You can't just dismiss anything you don't like as AI.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tsunamifury 9mo agoSomething something… great artist steal.
- Mars008 9mo agoThe picture will be incomplete if we don't mention that those 'artists and writers' are using the results at scale.
- pesus 9mo agoOn one hand, we're actively destroying society, but on the other, billionaires are getting richer! Why are you mad at us!?
- Sharlin 9mo agoSonething something for a brief moment we created a lot of value for the shareholders
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoWith -$4.50 revenue per new customer, these gamblers are demonstrably creating an externalized debt for society when it inevitably implodes the market. Some are projecting >35% drop in the entire index when reality hits the "magnificent" 7. Look at the price of Gold, corporate cash flows, and the US Bonds laggard performance. That isn't normal by any definition. =3
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- donkey_brains 9mo agoToday a manager at my work asked all his teams including mine “please write up a report on how many engineers from your teams we could replace with AI”. Surprisingly, the answer he got was “none, because that’s not how AI works”. Guess we’ll see if that registers…
- sublinear 9mo agoAll of them because cost cutting is a red flag in business regardless of what year it is.
- MobiusHorizons 9mo agoI would love to have responded something like “only one: yours” But in all seriousness, ai does a pretty good job at impersonating VPs. It’s confidently wrong and full of hope for the future.
- mayhemducks 9mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- consumer451 9mo agoI use various agentic dev tools all day long, mostly with Opus. The tools are very capable now, but when planning mid-complexity features, I find the time estimates hilarious. Phase 1: 1-2 weeks Phase 2: 1 week Phase 3: 2 weeks 8 to 12 hours later, all the work is done and tested. The funny part to me was that if I had an AI true believer boss, I would report those time estimates directly, and have a lot of time to do other stuff.
- whattheheckheck 9mo agoWhen youre the boss telling kids how to work what time esti.ates will you believe? Tis the cycle
- ziml77 9mo agoHuman time estimates are bad, but the ones that AI gives are just absurd. I've seen them used from small things like planning interviews and short presentations, all the way up to large scale projects. In no case do they make any sense to me. But I think people end up trusting them because they look so confident and well planned due to how the AIs break things down.
- khana 9mo ago[dead]
- seizethecheese 9mo ago> There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society The article is certainly interesting as yet another indicator of the backlash against AI, but I must say, “exists to scam the elderly” is totally absurd. I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth. I say this as someone whose father was scammed out of a lot of money, so I’m certainly not numb to potential consequences there. The scams were enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not.
- gllmariuty 9mo agoarticle forgot to mention the usual "think about the water usage"
- seizethecheese 9mo agoIt mentions ecological destruction, which I must say is way better than water usage, AI is a power hog after all.
- rootnod3 9mo agoIf it's the "usual reply", maybe it's because....I dunno...water is kinda important?
- queenkjuul 9mo agoI'm also not convinced the HN refrain of "it's actually not that much water" is entirely true. I've seen conflicting reports from sources i generally trust, and it's no secret an all-GPU AI data center is more resource intensive than a general purpose data center.
- Retric 9mo agoWhat’s the point of attacking a straw man while ignoring the actual points being brought up? The water usage by data centers is fairly trivial in most places. The water use manufacturing the physical infrastructure + electricity generation is surprisingly large but again mostly irrelevant. Yet modern ‘AI’ has all sorts of actual problems.
- porkloin 9mo agoI hate LLMs as much as the next guy, but this was honestly just not very funny. Humor can be a great vehicle for criticism when it's done right, but this feels like clickbait-level lazy writing. I wouldn't criticize it anywhere else, but I have enjoyed reading a bunch of actually good writing from mcsweeney's over the years in the actual literary journal and on their website.
- jaybyrd 9mo agoi think its a little on the nose but overall def worth reading and funny enough for a chuckle in my opinion
- madeofpalk 9mo agoI think you just don’t like McSweeney’s style.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago[flagged]
- heliumtera 9mo agoAgreed, it's almost non satire given how cynical it is. I loved it.
- Froztnova 9mo agoIt's that brand of humor that isn't really humor anymore because the person writing it is clearly positively seething behind the keyboard and considers the whole affair to be deadly serious. I've never really been able to get into it either because it's sort of a paradox. If I agree, I feel bad enough about the actual issue that I'm not really in the mood to laugh, and if I disagree then I obviously won't like the joke anyways.
- porkloin 9mo agoFor me I guess I don't really see what it's adding. You can watch an actual video clip of Jensen begging people not to "bully" or say "hurtful" things about AI while wearing a stupid leather jacket. It's a million times funnier to watch him squirm in real life. I find it unfunny for the same reason I don't find modern SNL intro bits about Trump funny. The source material is already insane to the point that it makes surface-level satire like this feel pointless.
- theLegionWithin 9mo agonice satire
- random_duck 9mo agoIs this a sign that us of the plebs are starting to grow discontent?
- heliumtera 9mo agoStarting? Society minus those who struggled with css is fully fatigued of AI.
- blibble 9mo agoit's certainly a change from the "inevitability" vomit the boosters were emitting this time last year
- techblueberry 9mo agoOh, I mean they’re still doing that too: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...
- blibble 9mo agooh dear the whole thing reads as "it's going to be so powerful! give money now!"
- Lerc 9mo agoPerhaps things would work out better if people didn't say mean things regardless of who it's about. You can still criticise without being mean.
- thinkingtoilet 9mo agoExplain how to nicely criticize computer software that allows for the generation of sexually explicit images of children.
- Lerc 9mo agoI'm not sure what you are wanting here, are you actually requiring me to be a bully to affect change? I can certainly criticize specific things respectfully. If I prioritised demonstrating my moral superiority I could loudly make all sorts of disingenuous claims that won't make the world a better place. I certainly do not think people should be making exploitative images in Photoshop or indeed any other software. I do not think that I should be able choose which software those rules apply to based upon my own prejudice. I also do not think that being able to do bad things with something is sufficient to negate every good thing that can be done with it. Countless people have been harmed by the influence of religious texts, I do not advocate for those to be banned, and I do not demand the vilification of people who follow those texts. Even though I think some books can be harmful, I do not propose attacking people who make printing presses. What exactly are you requiring here. Pitchforks and torches? Why AI and not the other software that can be used for the same purposes? If you want robust regulation that can provide a means to protect people from how models are used then I am totally prepared (and have made submissions to that effect) to work towards that goal. Being antagonistic works against making things better. Crude generalisations convince no-one. I want the world to be better, I will work towards that. I just don't understand how anyone could believe vitriolic behaviour will result in anything good.
- chasd00 9mo agoPhotoshop has been around for a long time.
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- trhway 9mo ago[flagged]
- zahlman 9mo agoMcSweeney's is a well known Internet satire site that has been in operation for decades; while there are multiple contributors, the style here seems fairly standard for the site, the author has a submission history going back to at least 2020 and I see no LLM cliches. Suspecting AI here makes about as much sense to me as suspecting it on an arbitrarily selected LWN article.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- irishcoffee 9mo agoIt is highly amusing to me that the same ~2,000 people who have the most to gain from LLM success also largely control the media narratives and the vast majority of the global economy. Someone coined a term for those of the general population who trust this small group of billionaires and defend their technology. “Dumb fucks”
- daft_pink 9mo agoMaybe he shouldn’t have claimed if we could get in a moving vehicle with his ai driving no problem
- rednafi 9mo ago"Oh, it's another tool in your repertoire like Bash" doesn't garner billions of dollars in investment. So they have to address it as the next electricity or the internet, when in its current form, it's much closer to a crypto grift than it is to electricity.
- gip 9mo ago> "immoral technofascist life" Many people would rather argue about morality and conscience (of our time, of our society) instead of confronting facts and reality. What we see here is a textbook case of that.
- tdb7893 9mo agoIs there a reason you seem to view conscience and confronting facts as seemingly opposed things? Also it seems to me like morality and conscience seem important to argue about, with facts just being part of that argument.
- SpicyLemonZest 9mo agoI think that someone interested in discussing facts would not write the phrase "immoral technofascist life". If I took the discussion at face value, I might respond asking for examples of how e.g. Dario Amodei is a "technofascist", but I think we can agree that would be really obtuse of me.
- technofastest 9mo ago[flagged]
- datsci_est_2015 9mo agoNo see “facts” are what I use to support my worldview, and what you’ve supplied are arguments, and I can discard your arguments through debate, especially because I believe that they’re founded on your feelings (like a silly “conscience”).
- datsci_est_2015 9mo ago/s if it wasn’t obvious. When I see the word “facts” used like this, I feel there’s a parallel to the way the word “respect” is used abusively, as outlined in this Tumblr post that has stuck with me for years: https://soycrates.tumblr.com/post/115633137923/stimmyabby-sometimes-people-use-respect-to-mean https://soycrates.tumblr.com/post/115633137923/stimmyabby-so... > Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority” > and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person” > and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay. The word “facts” can be used abusively, as in “My facts prove my worldview, your “facts” are arguments based on emotion.”
- kshri24 9mo ago> just use my evil technology Ridiculous to say the technology, by itself, is evil somehow. It is not. It is just math at the end of the day. Yes you can question the moral/societal implications of said technology (if used in a negative way) but that does not make the technology itself evil. For example, I hate vibe coding with a passion because it enables wrong usage (IMHO) of AI. I hate how easy it has become to scam people using AI. How easy it is to create disinformation with AI. Hate how violence/corruption etc could be enabled by using AI tools. Does not mean I hate the tech itself. The tech is really cool. You can use the tech for doing good as much as you can use it for destroying society (or at the very minimum enabling and spreading brainrot). You choose the path you want to tread. Just do enough good that it dwarfs the evil uses of this awesome technology.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>Nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so - Shakespeare That said, their thinking is that this can remove labor from their production, all while stealing works under the very copyright they setup. So I'd call that "evil" in every conventional sense. >Just do enough good that it dwarfs the evil uses of this awesome technology. The evil is in the root of the training, though. And sadly money is not coming from "good". I don't see any models focusing on ensuring it trains only on CC0/FOSS works, so it's hard to argue of any good uses with evil roots. If they could do that at the bare minimum, maybe they can make the argument over "horses vs cars". As it is now, this is a car powered by stolen horses. (also I work in games, and generative AI is simply trash in quality right now).
- pixl97 9mo agoEven this has little to do with AI and points right at the capitalist society that already exists. HN really doesn't like to talk about their golden child that let's money flow, but the concentration of wealth and IP by the super wealthy occurred before GenAI was a thing. This also ignores the broken fucking copyright system that ensures once you create something you get many lifetimes of fucking off without having to work, so if genAI kills that I won't shed a tear.
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- quantum_state 9mo agoViewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.
- justarandomname 9mo agoyeah, but zero chance of that happening unfortunately.
- pear01 9mo agowell practiced cynicism is boring. imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like. hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.
- smallmancontrov 9mo agoIt's interesting that the prosperity maximum of both the United States and China happened at "market economy kept in line with a firm hand" even though we approached it from different directions (left and right respectively) and in the US case reversed course. We could use another Roosevelt.
- stemlord 9mo agopeople have been pretty clear about a positive path forward - big tech should pay for the data they extract and sell back to us - startups should stop forcing ai features that no one wants down our throats - the vanguard of ai should be open and accessible to all not locked in the cloud behind paywalls
- greesil 9mo agoWell practiced criticism of cynicism is boring
- FridayoLeary 9mo ago
- Gene5ive 9mo agoUp Next: A McSweeney's article where McSweeney's takes the debates about it on Hacker News as seriously as Hacker News takes McSweeney's: way too much
- selimthegrim 9mo agoThis has the potential to be another /g/ ITT we HN now
- lovich 9mo agoThe Luddites weren’t anti technological progress, they were anti losing their job and entire way of life with an impolite “get fucked you fucking peasant” message to boot. I wonder what name the tech bros will come up to call us for the same feeling nowadays.
- yoyohello13 9mo agoThey don’t need a new name. They just keep using Luddite.
- snowwrestler 9mo ago> As someone who desperately needs this technology to work out, I can honestly say it is the most essential tool ever created in all of human history. For those having trouble finding the humor, it lies in the vast gulf between grand assertions that LLMs will fundamentally transform every aspect of human life, and plaintive requests to stop saying mean things about it. As a contrast: truly successful products obviate complaints. Success speaks for itself. In TV, software, e-commerce, statins, ED pills, modern smartphones, social media, etc… winning products went into the black quickly and made their companies shitloads of money (profits). No need to adjust vibes, they could just flip everyone the bird from atop their mountains of cash. (Which can also be pretty funny.) There are mountains of cash in LLMs today too, but so far they’re mostly on the investment side of the ledger. And industry-wide nervousness about that is pretty easy to discern. Like the loud guy with a nervous smile and a drop of sweat on his brow. https://youtu.be/wni4_n-Cmj4 https://youtu.be/wni4_n-Cmj4 So much of the current discourse around AI is the tech-builders begging the rest of the world to find a commercially valuable application. Like the AgentForce commercials that have to stoop to showing Matthew McConaughey suffering the stupidest problems imaginable. Or the OpenAI CFO saying maybe they’ll make money by taking a cut of valuable things their customers come up with. “Maybe someone else will change the world with this, if you’ll all just chill out” is a funny thing to say repeatedly while also asking for $billions and regulatory forbearance.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- datsci_est_2015 9mo ago> As a contrast: truly successful products obviate complaints. Success speaks for itself. Makes me consider: Dotcom domains, Bitcoin, Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, generative AI… Varying degrees of utility. But the common thread is people absolutely begging you to buy in, preying on FOMO.
- twoodfin 9mo agoOr maybe McSweeney’s hasn’t been consistently funny for years and years?
- gradus_ad 9mo agoJensen needs to keep escalating the hype to keep the hoarding dynamics in play. Because that's what's selling GPU's. You can't look at voracious GPU demand as a real signal of AI app profitability or general demand. It's a function of global tech oligarchs with gargantuan cash hoards not wanting to be left behind. But hoarding dynamics are nonlinear through self reinforcment and the moment any hint of limitations of current gen AI crop up spend will collapse.
- ares623 9mo agoNone of them can stop. None of them can blink. They must keep going. If Jensen even as much as _plans_ for something other than AI, it will cause everyone else to doubt.
- akomtu 9mo agoAI is alien intelligence, really. If biotech created an unusual mold that responds to electric impulses the way LLMs do, we would rightfully declare that this mold has some sort of intelligence and for this reason it is, technically speaking, an alien lifeform. AI is just that intelligent mold, but based on transistors instead of organic cells. Needless to say, it's a bad idea to create a competing lifeform that's smarter than us, regardless of whatever flimsy benefits it might have.
- 20260126032624 9mo agoHey, I just wanted to say, big fan of your work on vixra.org
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoLLM is not real AI, would take 75% of our galaxy energy to reach human level error rates, and is economically a fiction.... but it doesn't have to be "AGI" to cause real harm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl... The damage is already clear =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYNHYIX11Pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYNHYIX11Pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
- stego-tech 9mo agoExcellent satire, absolutely something I could see in The Onion or Hard Drive as an Op-Ed.
- mattgreenrocks 9mo agoIt’s wild to me that we both see people like Jensen as great while also tolerating public whining of the sort in the linked article. Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are far worse! But why do we put up with a billionaire whining that people are critical of what they make? At that scale it is guaranteed to have haters. It’s just statistics, man.
- twochillin 9mo agofully expected this to be about nadella
- willturman 9mo agoIt is.
- lifetimerubyist 9mo ago[flagged]
- olivierestsage 9mo agoPowerful catharsis in this
- i_love_retros 9mo agoToday I asked copilot agent a question about a selector in a cypress test and it requested to run a python command in my terminal.
- Brajeshwar 9mo agoWe, humans, will read this and laugh, chuckle, but the AI Overloads will not understand that. This will be added to the training data and become a truth. But what if that is?
- kindawinda 9mo ago[flagged]
- hedayet 9mo agoThe same people selling you AI today (AGI tomorrow) were the ones selling remote work yesterday. Then "mandated" everyone back to the office. Oh, and most of them had a crypto bag too. <sigh>
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoMost cons can't create actual value, and inevitably must continue to con to survive. It would be called recidivism if they went to prison. =3
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- vivzkestrel 9mo ago- can we please get an article like this dedicated to windows 11?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- notepad0x90 9mo ago> . Yes, it’s expanding the surveillance state, and yes, it’s destroying the education system, and yes, it’s being trained on copyrighted work without permission, and yes, it’s being used to create lethal autonomous weapons systems that can identify, target, and kill without human input, but… I forget my point, but ultimately, I think you should embrace it. What's your answer to this? How did it turn out for nuclear energy? If it wasn't for this sort of thinking we'd have nuclear power all over the world and climate issues would not have been as bad. You should embrace it, because other countries will and yours will be left behind if you don't. That doesn't mean put up with "slop", but that also doesn't mean be hostile to anything labeled "AI" either. The tech is real, it is extremely valuable (I applaud your mental gymnastics if you think otherwise), but not as valuable as these CEOs want it to be or in the way they want to be. On one hand you have clueless executives and randos trying to slap "AI" on everything and creating a mess. On the other extreme you have people who reject things just because it has auto-complete (LLMs :) ) as one of it's features. You're both wrong. What Jensen Huang and other CEOs like Satya Nadella are saying about this mindless bandwagonning of "oh no, AI slop!!!" b.s. is true, but I think even they are too caught up in tech circles? Regular people don't to the most part feel this way, they only care about what the tool can do, not how it's doing it to the most part. But..people in tech largely influence how regular people are educated, informed,etc... Look at the internet, how many "slop" sites were there early on? how much did it get dismissed because "all the internet is good for is <slop>"? Forget everything else, just having an actual program.. that I can use for free/cheap.. on my computer.. that can do natural language processing well!!! that's insane!! Even in some of the sci-fi I've been rewatching in recent years, the "AI/Computer" in spaceships or whatever is nowhere near as good as chatgpt is today in terms of understanding what humans are saying. I'm just calling for a bit of a perspective on things? Some are too close to things and looking under the hood too much, others are too far and looking at it from a distance. The AI stock valuation is of course ridiculous, as is the overhyped investments in this area, and the datacenter buildout madness. And like I said, there are tons of terrible attempts at using this tech (including windows copilot), but the extremes of hostility against AI I'm seeing is also concerning, and not because I care about this awesome tech (which I do), but you know.. the job market is rough and everything is already crappy.. I don't want to go through an AI market crash or whatever on top of other things, so I would really appreciate it on a personal level if the cause of any AI crash is meritocratic instead of hype and bandwagonning, that's all.
- casey2 9mo agoInvesting and scalping are two different things. When you invest the pie grows larger, scalping you take more than you can eat from the existing pie. Very few companies are investing into AI, most are engaged in scalping, hoping they are big enough to weather the storm.
- LittleBox 9mo agoSomeone remind me why this tech called AI deserves attention of this magnitude again.