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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

• navvyeanand 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • atomicnumber3 6mo ago
    I agree, the hate against vaccines makes me sad.
    • Ekaros 6mo ago
      Nuclear energy. Could have so much less dependency on other sources. And then nuclear weapons. World would be so much safer if every country had sufficient arsenal of them.
    • Legend2440 6mo ago
      GMOs too. Completely unjustified backlash for a technology with incredible potential.
      • operatingthetan 6mo ago
        The main selling pitch for vaccines and GMOs was not "this will take your livelihood!"
      • nobodyandproud 6mo ago
        Don’t even. Unlike vaccines, the patent misbehavior by Monsanto says otherwise about GMO.
        • JoshTriplett 6mo ago
          That's not an issue with GMOs. That's an issue with patents and attempts to restrict replanting.
          • nobodyandproud 6mo ago
            That’s basically the face of GMOs, so it is an issue for GMOs. GMOs for whatever reason have a terrible ambassador and I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary. For vaccines, a good portion of the population remember vaccines being developed and marketed to help people. Then there are immigrants that remember more recently how life changing vaccines are.
      • tanduv 6mo ago
        Fuck Monsanto and their patents on seeds
  • greggoB 6mo ago
    Mobilized by who, and how was that achieved?
    • poly2it 6mo ago
      Have you been on Reddit recently? Anti-AI sentiment isn't limited to technical communities, but engaged with platform-wide. The hate is the content; apart from the rampant anti-intellectualism there is very little engagement with any material discussing the technologies in and of themselves.
      • greggoB 6mo ago
        I don't think you know what "mobilized" means - at least, it implies an actor with ulterior motives is driving this response in people. Usually political actors or the media are accused of this. What you're describing on Reddit sounds like a broad-based antipathy to AI, which is just... how a lot of people are feeling? You can criticise their motivation being based in emotions or vibes instead of facts and thoughts, but unless you have evidence to the contrary, it sounds like this is just where people are at on this topic.
        • poly2it 6mo ago
          Of course I know what mobilised means, but with these social medias, the platforms themselves are at play in shaping the conversations. To clarify, I think this type of anti-AI sentiment should be studied as part of a the baseline social culture of the platforms. I do not have a good answer to why it flourishes on them, other than the generic framing. Perhaps its a new type of technological conservatism?
          • greggoB 6mo ago
            Some ideas for why people might be feeling this way: 1. People are naturally scared of major change. 2. AI has been pretty aggressively thrust on people, whether they like it or not. 3. There is a legitimate concern about widespread job loss, some companies have already claimed AI is the reason for mass layoffs. 4. Deepfakes, scams, cyber security risks, people AI psychosis or using it to commit suicide, etc - no doubt none of this helps with general public opinion. 5. Cannibalisation of the rest of the economy, e.g. RAM and GPU prices making gaming machines unaffordable, non-AI startups unable to get funding in this environment. 6. Hype fatigue - we've recently been through this with crypto. So to me the evidence points to anti-AI sentiment being more of a reactionary response to the current status quo, rather than some proactive effort to negate the technology.
  • anematode 6mo ago
    The mobilizers, in this case, are almost entirely the people leading and deploying AI rather than any anti-AI agitators. When someone hears from these leaders that there will be a white-collar "bloodbath", then sees enshittification in their daily lives from misapplication of the tech, can no longer trust any newly published photo, etc., it's the most rational response.
    • Hamuko 6mo ago
      [dead]
    • fluoridation 6mo ago
      Don't forget other indirect economic effects, like the RAMpocalypse.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  • tokioyoyo 6mo ago
    Can’t blame the people when it’s being sold as a utility to “reduce the workforce”, and no government is willing to prepare/plan for it.
  • operatingthetan 6mo ago
    I'm very into AI but am generally neutral on it. Get real, every other question I ask a frontier model has some random nonsense included that is essentially a lie. These are chaos machines.
• Legend2440 6mo ago
  I am very concerned by the rise of political violence in the US, and I especially don't like how much support it gets on social media. Burning down a warehouse or shooting a politician does not make you a hero.
  • gpt5 6mo ago
    Political polarization create tribalism, where people align their view with their tribe, and justify an increasingly more escalatory means to fight the "other side".
    • contingencies 6mo ago
      Other potential macro-contributing factors may include: breakdown in local community, removal of community forums for discussion, attention economy and tabloid journalism gravitating toward emotional reaction (TikTok) rather than intellectual dialogue (balanced journalism), social media echo chambers, removal of accessible popular education, defunding of public media, unaffordable public access to medicine, credit culture, increasingly unaffordable costs of living and abnormally performative political dioramas. The net result are people, unable to reason about the world around them, drawn in to emotional us-and-them with a dialogue of echo-chamber reinforcement, who decide semi-rationally to "chuck it all in" the second things get out of control financially, psychologically or emotionally. In other words, the modern world has built a perfect breeding ground for recruitment to extremism. <s>Great time to start a cult.</s> ... and in a classic example, apparently the mere mention of concern regarding the rise in US political violence got this thread flagged. Where can you have a discussion anymore?
      • Legend2440 6mo ago
        It got flagged because the people who are pro-violence flag any comments that disagree with them, so they get hidden.
        • contingencies 6mo ago
          Fair theory but how do you know that?
• balamatom 6mo ago
  The AI loves it, though!
• retired 6mo ago
  Downsides of AI: Massive increase in RAM prices, housing crisis worsens as datacenters are build, massive energy usage, children are having trouble learning at school, spreading misinformation is easier than ever. Upsides of AI: I can ask it if my farts are caused by the celery I ate earlier
  • pepperoni_pizza 6mo ago
    You forgot layoffs, layoffs and also layoffs.
  • badc0ffee 6mo ago
    > housing crisis worsens as datacenters are build I take your other points, but I can't see the connection there. I've heard that they increase electricity rates in many cases (poorly managed electric utilities that can't build out grid capacity without raising rates for everyone), but not that they're affecting housing.
    • retired 6mo ago
      For The Netherlands, construction work causes emissions. There are limits to these emissions. Building a data center means you can't simultaneously build a house anywhere nearby the construction site as that would cause the local emissions to go over the set limits. Next to that there is net congestion. The energy grid is currently critical, if you add a data center that means you will not be able to connect 20 to 30 newly build homes to power. There are currently new homes that are waiting for a connection to the grid before people can live there. Space. In the densest country of Europe (non-microstate), a hyper scale data center could have been a neighborhood. Latest point, maybe not the strongest, is construction workers. While construction workers building a data center are different from construction workers building homes, it doesn't really help with the labor shortages in construction if electricians are all busy building data centers.
      • badc0ffee 6mo ago
        Thanks for the perspective. It sounds like you'd run into the same issues (except for the electrical load) building any large industrial project, which does not bode well for your economy.
• mannanj 6mo ago
  Aren't these types of incidents only expected to rise, as inequality and economic challenges are on the rise, what are hungry, bored, lonely and neglected people going to do? This isn't a surprise - we have neglected American health, wellbeing and happiness and then are telling them "AI is going to come trust us its different this time" and yet for most people their lives get worse as AI company shareholders/employees lives' get better. I'm ashamed that we don't care more about human dignity. I care about human dignity and wonder if I'm an outlier? Even a tiny pledge and affirmation "Hey, we see you, we are working to bring relief and guaranteed dignity to your lives by doing xyz" would help. Instead when I ask for peace in war[edit: and basic income, anything that is an essential part of dignity[edit 2: and I hear its not possible right now while that isn't said of AI investments] I hear unaccountable leadership dodging the responsibility [of their constituents] and accelerating conflict while their friends' pockets get thicker.
  • contingencies 6mo ago
    Yes. Other potential macro-contributing factors may include: breakdown in local community, removal of community forums for discussion, attention economy and tabloid journalism gravitating toward emotional reaction (TikTok) rather than intellectual dialogue (balanced journalism), social media echo chambers, removal of accessible popular education, defunding of public media, unaffordable public access to medicine, credit culture, increasingly unaffordable costs of living and abnormally performative political dioramas. The net result are people, unable to reason about the world around them, drawn in to emotional us-and-them with a dialogue of echo-chamber reinforcement, who decide semi-rationally to "chuck it all in" the second things get out of control financially, psychologically or emotionally. In other words, the modern world has built a perfect breeding ground for recruitment to extremism. <s>Great time to start a cult.</s>
• MBCook 6mo ago
  Are they? I heard a presentation from some pro-AI people on Friday to the large company I work at. They said they surveyed people at an AI conference and 93% of people were excited about it. This was said with a straight face like “people love puppies!”. No self awareness at all.
  • sodapopcan 6mo ago
    Oh, I love puppies! There's another data point for them.
  • Ekaros 6mo ago
    I wonder what result you would get if you run survey about do people love dogs at dog show... Also, looking at current market situation how many people would be willing to say to their bosses or even publicly that they think AI is quite a lot of bullshit.
    • pepperoni_pizza 6mo ago
      Exactly. My new favorite game at work is "guess if this person is really into AI or they just have to be because their boss is and if they weren't they would get replaced by someone who is" and it's quite hard to say. And since the "boss" of CEOs are the investors in the stock market, and the stock market is automated to ridiculous degree, is this AI pushing for itself?
  • rtdq 6mo ago
    Ask anyone who is a gamer what they think of AI. I guarantee you'll get a universally negative reaction because of RAMageddon.
    • throwatdem12311 6mo ago
      Not just that, they go absolutely fucking ballistic if they in so much as find a single AI generated texture in a game.
      • 6mo ago
• fnoef 6mo ago
  Gee I wonder why? Could it be because they promised to improve our lives but instead we are losing our jobs? Or maybe because there is insane shortage of electronics for the sake of AI data center? No, I think it should be the fact that this tech consumes more power than an average city. Actually, it must the fact that we have autonomous killing drones now. Or maybe it’s the misinformation slop? Nah, it should be the mass stealing of intellectual property. I’m honestly baffled. What’s there not to like?
• Tyrubias 6mo ago
  This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said layoffs. In addition, the major AI companies have shamelessly stole intellectual property to train their models and shoveled AI down everyone’s throats. Is it any wonder that the general public hates AI? The AI industry isn’t exactly doing its best to appear likable.
  • yoyohello13 6mo ago
    I’m frankly more shocked that people in the industry are surprised the general public hates them. Like it’s been non-stop fear mongering and hype from them for years, AI has basically done nothing to improve the lives of normal people, wtf did they expect?
    • SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
      They didn't expect anything else and aren't surprised. "The X industry is discovering..." is one of those stock phrases that people just kinda deploy willy-nilly; the article contains no argument that anyone in the AI industry didn't know or didn't expect this.
      • emp17344 6mo ago
        Presumably these companies on the verge of an IPO don’t want the public to hate them or their product. It wasn’t exactly a calculated maneuver - they made a decision to leverage fear-based marketing and it backfired.
        • SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
          It wasn't any sort of maneuver! It's what they genuinely believe! Both OpenAI and Anthropic have been telling people about the existential risk of powerful AI since the very day they were founded; OpenAI has been at it since 2015, 8 years before they had any meaningful product to market. Sam Altman still says, after being the victim of anti-AI violence, that "the fear and anxiety about AI is justified" and "it will not all go well". People simply refuse to believe that AI companies are serious about this, and get twisted into knots trying to understand why AI companies would choose this messaging under the premise that they can't be serious.
• cortesoft 6mo ago
  I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income. The other two critiques are trickier. The first is the environmental impact of AI, and the response is difficult. Doing work to make it more efficient, and continuing to develop cleaner energy sources is paramount. Taxing and efficiency requirements might be a start. We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive. It has to be non-negotiable if massive energy usage for AI is to continue. The last is the REAL conversation, and I don’t know the answer. How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI? I guess there is another issue, related to the last one, which is how do we deal with the ability to use AI to mislead and commit fraud at scale. How do we deal with not being able to trust what actually said/done by a human and what is AI pretending to be human? How do we avoid and mitigate the ability for AI to generate a massive amount of custom content that is used to mislead and defraud people? So much of our current mitigation strategy relies on the assumption that it takes a lot of effort and time to do certain things that can now be done instantly thousands of times?
  • Rekindle8090 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • troosevelt 6mo ago
    If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.
• KaiserPro 6mo ago
  I think there is conflation here. Data centres popping up near you probably means higher electricity prices, poor air quality and water problems Sam Altman is a massive penis, with a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The two things that link them are "rich" people imposing their will on everyone else, publicly.
  • joquarky 6mo ago
    > with a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time It's not a gift, it's ignorance. Altman and his peers live in a bubble. They don't interact with former translators, copywriters, or web developers. They don't hear feedback from the people they have put out of a job.
• jmclnx 6mo ago
  All people see is job losses and increased costs based upon articles and tweet type things. If due to AI or not, that is what they are seeing. It is like MAGA news, all they see "AI eliminates jobs and AI increases your electric bill". Nothing at this point will make people believe AI is good for the masses. What will need to happen for people to like AI ? I say they will get real $ month after month to cover more than the inflation, not the dumb tax deductions Trump harps on. In this case, maybe 1,000 USD per month adjusted for inflation yearly from AI will end this trend. Why a payment ? All they see is the wealth of the top 1% increasing almost exponentially where they are struggling to pay their 'fixed' expenses. In reality since 2008, the rich has been cashing in while workers have been footing the bill. That is the big issue.
  • clipsy 6mo ago
    Since the 1970’s, actually.
    • tamimio 6mo ago
      More of 1694, to be honest.
• SJMG 6mo ago
  I think the truth is in fact asymmetric on this front. People, esp. many SWEs, like generating with AI, or more telling, wouldn't want to give it up in their work. On the other hand, people generally hate consuming the product of gen AI. Consumer experience = mostly negative Producer experience = mostly positive
  • happytoexplain 6mo ago
    I disagree. The producer experience is mostly positively impacted in a very visible way: Output. Saying their personal experience has been mostly positive, on average across all of them, is probably wrong.
    • SJMG 6mo ago
      Hmm, what are you disagreeing with here?
  • Unmotivator2677 6mo ago
    As a SWE i absolutely hate gen AI, it produces crappy code and I can't be proud of "my own work". In the past, huge part of the work enjoyment was that I could learn something on the job, or at least be happy to have figured out a hard problem. Now I feel like my skills are slipping overall.
• giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  Its really unwarranted some peoples reactions to someone using AI, and in other cases theres no AI used and people blindly assume something is AI and then proceed to write it off as slop, but it wasnt even AI it was just slightly low quality authentic content that you maybe would not have even commented about, we all have seen low quality videos on youtube we didnt freak out about.
• masijo 6mo ago
  AI has automated my favorite part of the job: coding. Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec. It’s disgusting. And the worst part is that you can’t opt-out. If you give even the slightest hint that you don’t like AI you’re seen as a Luddite and you’ll be put next in line for the upcoming layoff.
  • bwhiting2356 6mo ago
    Just because tractors are here doesn't mean you can't garden as a hobby. I'm also tired of the slop, but this is a culture and management problem. Every software job I've had there was tension between speed and maintainability.
    • happytoexplain 6mo ago
      Many (most?) adults do not have time to write an appreciable amount of software outside their jobs. Further, this doesn't address the enormous impact that losing the option of doing something you find engaging and don't hate for a job has on mental wellbeing, life satisfaction, just being happy at all, etc.
      • bwhiting2356 6mo ago
        We can have 2 out of 3: * artisanal, handmade products * affordable products, not just for the rich * well-paid workers This was true of clothing, agriculture, and will also be true of SaaS. I choose affordable products and well-paid workers, but that requires embracing automation.
        • ori_b 6mo ago
          Are you claiming that software is unaffordable? I get the sense that it was so cheap people were unhappy with how much was shoved into places where it was unwanted.
• amelius 6mo ago
  Them: look how cool we are, stealing your data and making everybody redundant. The people: ?? Investors: Tell us more.
  • layer8 6mo ago
    Plus flooding the world with slop and raising hardware prices. Otherwise accurate.
• rescripting 6mo ago
  The AI CEOs have been screaming for years now about how AI is scary, you should be afraid of it and it’s going to take your job. “Mythos is too dangerous to release.” “OpenAI offers a bounty if you can get ChatGPT to teach you how to do a bioterroism.” “Agentic agents will replace entire categories of jobs. They’ll just be like, gone” This is all signaling to their customers; no not you on their $20/month plan, the governments and corporations of the world who have deep pockets, fat to trim, and borders to defend and expand. It’s no surprise that people don’t like AI. It’s not for people.
• devindotcom 6mo ago
  certainly people are finding everyday uses... but a lot of those uses are necessitated by enshittification of search and other commonplace tools. so although I think many see the usefulness of the technology here and there, their experience of it is one of being forced to adopt a thing they never asked for by companies with few or no sincere or articulable values. billions use windows and gmail but have a poor opinion of microsoft and google both for obvious reasons. I expect the same will be true of AI platforms and the usual suspects behind them.
  • ori_b 6mo ago
    We keep setting houses on fire so that we can roast marshmallows, and wonder why the people living in those houses are unhappy. As we do this, we promise that if we set enough houses on fire, we'll build hell. And imagine how rich we'll be if we sell fuel to keep the hell we built running.
• aifactory5 6mo ago
  [dead]
• keybored 6mo ago
  Weird to have these threads and then fifteen minutes later there will be a 350+ comment, 500+ votes thread about some 200 USD/month AI subscription service which is now the I Have Seen The Light moment and My Beautiful Side Projects Are Finally Materializing. This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending near the cluster of Anthropic/AWS nuclear power plants. And people pay for the pleasure.
  • lpcvoid 6mo ago
    Vibecoders are by now completely dependent on their subscriptions. Their skills are in the process of deterioration, they have no other choice. It's like heroin.
    • lioeters 6mo ago
      Their thinking skills are atrophying in front of our eyes in a matter of months, years. "You better get on the good stuff or you'll left behind!"
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • keybored 6mo ago
      I don’t really think that’s the case. I think that any deterioration is temporary. They can get back on that horse with some starting issues.
• Devasta 6mo ago
  It has destroyed art, it has destroyed public trust with fabricated videos, it has caused skyrocketing prices in components so stuff like Valves console cannot get made, and its enriched freaks like Sam Altman. The fact that AI acolytes are positively giddy about the above is just icing on the cake.
  • joquarky 6mo ago
    I agree on all but the first. The signal:noise is now much lower for discovery of high quality art, but that art is still being made by people.
    • Devasta 6mo ago
      I agree that it is mostly that the discovery mechanism is shot to bits, but its also the case that before I could find a new artist and marvel, now I have to treat with suspicion to be sure there is no AI before I do anything else.
• nayroclade 6mo ago
  Bear in mind, in the same survey this article is talking about, nothing and nobody had an overall positive rating amongst those polled. So yeah, AI is unpopular, but it's just one more thing that people hate amongst a broader cultural movement of generalised hate.
  • Tyrubias 6mo ago
    What you term “a broader cultural movement of generalised hate” is just a reflection of people’s dissatisfaction and fear regarding the state of the world. They’re seeing wages stagnate and prices go up. They hear news about how well the stock market is doing, but they don’t see any of those benefits. They see their politicians spend money on war and destruction but refuse to spend money on social programs. At the same time, the rise of the Internet paradoxically makes it both easier and harder for people to question the narratives they’ve been taught. Amidst all this confusion and worry, is there any wonder people are dissatisfied and looking for someone or something to blame?
    • alexjplant 6mo ago
      Did people act like this in the 70s too when we had stagflation, mass unemployment, gas rationing, Vietnam, Nixon, etc. to contend with? I ask that sincerely because I wasn't around then. The US got a ton of cool music and cinema during that decade (disco and soft rock excepted) but the rest of it sounds even worse than things are now.
      • SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
        People acted like this constantly, the 70s are incredibly sanitized in the popular imagination. A government strike force murdered 4 student protesters at Kent State in 1970; Boston had 40 race riots between 1974 and 1976.
• DocTomoe 6mo ago
  Some perspective ... I really do not see 'the public hating AI' outside of a very specific demographic (17-30 year old artsy types, generally left-leaning). Average everyday people in my area either don't care about AI at all, or like it, using it as a better search engine. The situation might be different in the States, but I'd wager Joe Sixpack, brass fisher in Montana, couldn't care less about GPT-5.5 or whatever Musk is up to these days.
  • mcphage 6mo ago
    > I'd wager Joe Sixpack, brass fisher in Montana I don’t think Montana fishermen have a broad impact on society, or its decision making. There’s just not that many of them.
    • jazzyjackson 6mo ago
      On the contrary I would bet people who enjoy fly-fishing in Montana are over represented in Congress.
  • bwhiting2356 6mo ago
    Joe Sixpack from Montana is thinking about whether he wants a data center in his town, and increasingly they are saying no https://www.wsj.com/us-news/maine-governor-vetoes-bill-to-temporarily-ban-data-centers-9a9af743 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/maine-governor-vetoes-bill-to-te...
• teej 6mo ago
  ChatGPT has a billion users so surely not all of the public hates it
  • oldmanhorton 6mo ago
    I feel like this can be explained in part by “I like using it for myself, but I hate when others use it.” When you use ChatGPT for yourself, you may have a sense that what you see is made up; when someone else that you trust uses it and pronounces the output in a way that suggests it is their own, you are left doing much more complex social math to figure out if your trust in this person or entity can hold. It gets exhausting, personally.
  • tamimio 6mo ago
    That’s not really an accurate measure, assuming it’s true, but I for one have an openAI account but I never used it, like not once, and you can imagine a lot of people too are the same, rest maybe casually, others only on free tier.
  • bjacobel 6mo ago
    > ChatGPT has a billion users And their company's leadership is famous for compulsively lying. Pardon me if I suspect they might be arriving at that number using creative math.
  • happytoexplain 6mo ago
    Usage != positive feelings.
    • simianwords 6mo ago
      why? I think both generally track. And I won't appreciate category errors such as calling it similar to smoking
      • insane_dreamer 6mo ago
        That's your experience, perhaps. I use it extensively in my work, and some in my personal life. I also think it's a net negative for society, will likely be highly destructive, and I would be happy to give up my use of it in exchange for its elimination.
• AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
  Welcome to the end of another AI hype cycle Anyone who was in AI before 2022 can tell you about the last cycle that went from 2012-2018 or so when the metaverse failed, but we got tensorflow, pytorch, gpgpus The cool thing is that every hype cycle generates a lot of really good new AI tech and integrations that persist. This time we got GPTs and diffusion sand splatting I think this previous cycle will be seen as the penultimate with the next one permanently improving with no scale back. We’ll be fine. We have survived every winter
  • bwhiting2356 6mo ago
    This is the first time the general public has cared about any AI industry cycle.
    • AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
      Totally agree
• forgetfreeman 6mo ago
  "Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic." Abhorrent under normal circumstances certainly but declaring the primary drivers of both the workers rights and civil rights movements ineffective is laughable. Power cedes nothing without violence.
• porcoda 6mo ago
  Not really surprising. I would guess this goes beyond just the AI and jobs issue. Your average person sees AI all over the place in contexts they didn’t ask for it but can’t escape. Social media is covered with AI garbage (e.g., AI generated videos). Podcasts are being flooded with AI garbage that are pretty overt grabs for ad impressions where quality is … not important. Appliances and consumer devices are getting AI that nobody asked for. And of course, our world of tech stuff where the selling point is more or less leaning hard into FOMO (“Everybody’s doing it - don’t you want to be an 100x developer and not get left behind?”). It’s easy to fixate on the OpenAI and Anthropic-level companies, but the real inescapable flood of AI garbage is coming from the downstream companies building on the core AI providers. Communities like HN have some role to play here. Maybe some peer pressure on AI founders to, maybe, not make the world a worse place?
  • james_marks 6mo ago
    Yes. If my only AI experiences were the ones you list, along with Google’s search summary, and the modern Clippy, I’d hate it too. My wife was shocked to learn how much she liked Claude after these forced experiences with AI.
• autaut 6mo ago
  I don’t think the public hates ai. I think AI needs a lot of money so it loudly only pursued the light-bendingly rich by leveraging the only two emotions they have: 1) greed: you will be able to fire all your employees 2) fear: if you don’t buy it someone else will and that is too dangerous for you Of course normal people found this incredibly off putting.
• jhack 6mo ago
  To a lot of people AI is just image and text generation. And yes, these uses alone aren't worth the time, money, and energy. But there are a lot of areas where AI is helping that people don't see, like in medicine. Drug development, cancer research and early detection, CT and MRI analysis, just to name a few. These uses cases are vastly more important but rarely get discussed. It's important to know that AI isn't this one singular thing or else we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  • fnoef 6mo ago
    You know, perspective matters. When you sell a knife with the promise of a tool that helps you cut onions, is a completely different story from when you market it as a weapon to kill your neighbor. AI is massively marketed by AI people as a tool to replace your job. So either the AI people are bad at marketing or the gains in other industry are insignificant/ do not generate shareholder value.
    • joquarky 6mo ago
      > AI is massively marketed by AI people as a tool to replace your job Keep in mind who pays the AI companies. It's not you, it's the C-levels. The marketing is aimed at them.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • oldmanhorton 6mo ago
    “Think of the children!” When AI produces those meaningful advances in those fields, great, we can start having meaningful discussions about them. The greatest medical advancement of the 21st century is likely mRNA, or maybe GLP-1 for some. Neither were LLM assisted in any meaningful way as far as I know (they predate ChatGPT, perhaps more primitive models were involved in ways I’m not familiar with). Until those advances come, this argument is fanfic. Plus, in the most morbid way possible: who gives a shit about living longer if they are stripped of their career, are inundated with slop at every angle, and can’t trust any information. These are real problems that AI has already created, unlike the fanfic of ridding cancer.
• oulipo2 6mo ago
  For a good reason
• very_good_man 6mo ago
  The Journalism Industry Is Discovering That The Public Hates It
• bwhiting2356 6mo ago
  This is a problem of misaligned incentives that echoes other waves of new technology. The arrival of the washing machine was not resisted, because it directly benefited people who could now move up to higher value and less difficult work. AI doesn't seem to be playing out that way.
  • zozbot234 6mo ago
    > AI doesn't seem to be playing out that way. Because it's even less useful than a washing machine. Unless you trust a frickin' humanoid robot doing your house chores, which is batshit insane as things stand.
• luisgvv 6mo ago
  Tbh I don't care if vibe coding or generated art is produced as I think general public will eventually accept them or decide when it's worth to use/consume those kind of products. What I really hate is agentic customer support, sales etc. - when you have to use them you realize how stupid the workflows, tool call, MCP, and all that garbage that is glued is just to reduce costs instead of churn. PS: Ironically I'm working on coding an "agentic platform" for the product suite and their backend services. I simply don't feel confident about the product I'm building but I guess it is paying my bills for the moment
• Kiro 6mo ago
  > Even within tech and coding, one of the areas where AI is reported to have the most promise, there’s the question of whether the productivity gains reported can be trusted. I wish articles like this would at least acknowledge the massive adoption AI has among programmers. It's not comparable to stuff like helping you write the occasional email, which I presume is the baseline for most people outside tech. Making it sound like a minor tool that some people are still just experimenting with completely misses the impact it has already had on software development.
  • fnoef 6mo ago
    Many of these developers adopted the tools against their will, as means to bring home salary while they still can. In the mean time, the AI folks are working hard to just eliminate their job.
  • happytoexplain 6mo ago
    The impact in software has been very hard to measure. There are so many ups and downs and variables. Adoption in particular is a useless metric. They are forced to adopt even if it's not really helping in their case, or if it does help but using it makes them miserable, like being forced to switch jobs from something you enjoy to something you find boring and tedious. And then there's the "expertise debt" that will have who knows what impact in the coming decades.
    • WorldMaker 6mo ago
      Also, this "Legacy Code as a Service" tech debt boom may eventually find creditors that need paying. These models are trained on other people's Legacy Code. No company is letting OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta have access to their best code and smartest experts. It's all just other people's Legacy Code. LLMs are going to force companies towards a lot of mediocre software regression to the mean. How long before companies are scrambling for expertise they laid off or didn't invest in because all their software sucks and no one around knows what it is doing or why? The tech debt bank account is going to get weird in the coming decades.
• fidotron 6mo ago
  The group that really hate AI are the media and journalists, which makes perfect sense given what generative AI is doing to those industries. As it stands though the whole "the public hates AI" is about as credible as that phase from a decade ago where random tweets were used to justify any position they wanted to.
  • mplanchard 6mo ago
    I work remotely, so most of my social sphere is non-tech people. I live in a pretty liberal area, where the average level of education is high. I don’t know a single non-tech person who has positive feelings about AI in that sphere.
• garganzol 6mo ago
  AI is precise. People are not. AI calculates things. People manipulate them to their benefit. AI precision demands people's accountability. Some people feel threatened by that, fearing that their shady games will no longer be working. Deceivers cannot stand seeing their own reflection in the mirror, so they project their own pathological traits onto it. The whole thing turns into aggression. Psychology 101, inspired by the works of Carl Jung.
• deepsquirrelnet 6mo ago
  > In a provocative GitHub post, machine-learning engineer Han-Chung Lee argued that even rosy internal numbers that do show AI-assisted productivity gains are suspect, as they’re produced to hit adoption targets no one can effectively audit. Isn't this fundamentally what MBAs do with their time? Keep going with this analysis, because it goes much deeper... In my experience, BI is often a house of cards. A lot of times it's just narrative crafting, just like we're all encouraged to do when we write our resumes. Can you embellish a story? Can you invent a convincing political narrative? As far as I can tell, that's the fundamental unit of US corporation.
• nickvec 6mo ago
  "Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic." I am not condoning violence, but claiming it is not a politically effective tactic is disingenuous. I get that columnists are trying to cover their asses, but still.
  • ares623 6mo ago
    Violence is only allowed in one direction.
    • krapp 6mo ago
      It's only allowed in one direction, but it's effective in many. Violence is the reason slavery ended in the US. Violence brought us civil rights laws. Gay rights. Women's rights. Labor laws. Environmental protection laws. Every right granted by default to white Christian gentlemen at the founding of this great nation had to be taken in blood by everyone else. That's just how America is. It cannot be trusted to live up to its own standards except at gunpoint. When, where and how violence is justifiable is a different question, of course. But the premise that "Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic" is simply false. If violence were politically ineffective, authoritarian states wouldn't use so much of it.
      • badc0ffee 6mo ago
        Half of those things were not brought about by violence. Labor laws? Absolutely. Gay rights, maybe? Gay marriage was famously won non-violently by showing the wider public that gay is normal. What violence brought about women's rights or environmental protection laws? I suppose protestors destroyed the fur market.
• CoherenceDaddy 6mo ago
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• mschuster91 6mo ago
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• lmaoguy 6mo ago
  “Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic. But you also cannot ignore how the tone-deaf public messaging of the AI industry has helped to contribute to this reaction.” And yet, as the will of the people is ignored to the benefit of but few, violence will become the answer.
  • ares623 6mo ago
    Never mind the fact that this article exists _because_ of the violence.
• dominotw 6mo ago
  1. constant scare mongering of job "bloodbath" . amedio is the worst culprit by far. 2. flooding social media with obviously fake ai content 3. only billionaires benefiting from it and gloating about it .
• ares623 6mo ago
  All this, so people like us can do our jobs just a little bit easier, which wasn't that hard to begin with, and in fact was quite comfortable all things considered, for employers who are promising to lay us off, for productivity gains that aren't even measurable. Think back on a time where you and a teammate (or teammates) spent hours or days debating back and forth on different technological or architectural options for trade-offs. How much nuance and detail went into those discussion. We used to take pride in our ability to make careful and measured tradeoffs. And yet with this tech all that is thrown out the window.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• franktankbank 6mo ago
  I mean come on. The public hates whatever face the vc puts on.
• tamimio 6mo ago
  I did mention that few days ago in here and it seems HN was in denial, but the reality is, most people don’t like it. Sure, they might use it, but that’s just because they are after some shortcuts, but they all have a negative sentiment towards it, and used as a term to discredit something, as opposed to making it better, “oh look, that’s AI, yeah whatever”, “yeah AI, fake and g..” I heard it many times online or offline. The only people who still look positively at AI, are either the ones working on it/building something with it, or the ones who are profiting from it, kinda like crypto few years ago, and just like how crypto is mostly immediately associated with scams now, I imagine something similar will be associated with AI soon. Even other tech people that are not directly in the AI industry hate AI, due to all the shortages in chips and prices increasing across the hardware board, from gamers to sysadmins to hobbyists, I mean, the rpi are almost like a fully fledged NUC few years ago. Edit: to add, did AI improved the average person life? Nope, if not increasing the costs, or tracking and violating their privacy, it did flood the internet with slop, or a frustrating useless AI chat support.. from an average person perspective, it added none to their quality of life, it didn’t make things cheaper, it didn’t improve their travels, it didn’t magically made them teleport, and so on, instead, AI was used for all hostile purposes against average person. Even from technical perspective, have we seen any breakthrough in tech given AI is a “superior” assistant? Nope, software is more shitty and buggy now, and SaaS are even increasing the prices (probably to pay for AI tokens), software developers are saying coding isn’t fun anymore, hardware designs didn’t improve, governments processes still have the beuqacratic system plus AI. Unlike when automation was introduced decades ago, where people did notice an improvement in their quality of life.
• yogthos 6mo ago
  I find it interesting how public opinion on AI is diametrically opposed in China to that in the west https://www.semafor.com/article/02/11/2026/trust-in-tech-companies-dropped-globally-in-2026-report https://www.semafor.com/article/02/11/2026/trust-in-tech-com...
  • happytoexplain 6mo ago
    Westerners tend to get fulfillment from "doing things" and the feeling of individualism, self-control, and self-determination. Sometimes we use the term "control freak". Some other societies tend to be much happier with automation, without worrying so much about the less fine-grained control, how trustworthy it is, the quality of results, etc. This is hugely generalized and a little offensive, but there is definitely a core difference that could be more thoroughly described.
• marstall 6mo ago
  TNR - DNR
• mark_l_watson 6mo ago
  So much of the public hates AI, at least the non-tech people I talk with. Good to see so much common sense among the general public. While I find a Gemini Ultra subscription worthwhile for myself, most of the value is in the fun and entertainment of interacting with a strong API in AntiGravity (usually use Claude models), Gemini App, NotebookLM, etc. It is intellectually interesting and fun. Can I justify the cost to society for data centers, possibility of US government bailing out the AI tech giants, etc.? No I can't. I think the Chinese are skunking us. Building cheaper AI is the winning strategy. GLM-5.1 and Deepseek v4 are amazingly effective for much lower inference costs.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
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• nunez 6mo ago
  It's unbelievable and frustrating that _we basically built our own demise._ We built the most meritocratic and accessible career path possible. If you knew how to code, and you invested in your craft (or didn't!), you were more-or-less guaranteed multiple amazing, well-paying career paths anywhere in the world. Yet, a cohort of us decided "what if we built this thing that literally does our job? what could possibly go wrong?" Yeah, this is gatekeeping, but the medical and legal industries have perfected that, and our industry doesn't even require advanced degrees to climb the ladder! (John Ternus only has a B.Eng in MEng!) Why did we Eric-Andre-meme ourselves?
  • Unmotivator2677 6mo ago
    It wasn't us, this was the plan it Tech oligarchs for a long time now, and they are continuing to do this, no longer even hiding it. Do you know what people on H1B visas and Meta forcing their workers to be spied on have in common? That people on visa have to agree to anything and can't refuse. This is how this tech came about, by forcing people who literally have no other choice.
• BrenBarn 6mo ago
  > If Altman, Amodei, and their Big Tech peers want to rebuild public trust and create a genuine technology that benefits the public, then the path forward isn’t another white paper or postulating about the existential risks of their technology. It’s sustained, verifiable action: genuine transparency about what their products can do, a willingness to accept meaningful regulation and responsibility even at financial cost, and real democratic input from communities on the growth of data centers. They need to accept far more than that. They need to accept that they may not be able to "create a genuine technology that benefits the public" at all, and that they therefore may be required to stop completely and totally dissolve all their operations if it turns out that is what is best.
• raffael_de 6mo ago
  most readers seem to conclude that the ai industry should have done better marketing when the truth is that they believed they wouldn't even have to consider the public opinion because of how powerful their technology is.
• pibaker 6mo ago
  It should not take more than one brain cell to realize that in an era when employment is already perceived as precarious, you are not going to earn any public favors by telling people you are taking their jobs and making them obsolete. Doubly not so when you offer no alternative path towards building personal wealth. Triply not so when you address none of the economic problems people face like housing or healthcare costs but make others, like social cohesion and energy prices worse. If the industry continue to gleefully ignore public discontent over AI impact on society, I imagine what might happen is a public backlash that would make the post Chernobyl anti nuclear sentiment look tame.
• morkalork 6mo ago
  Post scarcity or death. We're about to face off with the great filter in the next few decades. Buckle up!
• periodjet 6mo ago
  It really isn’t, and we by and large don’t. The New Republic seems to be falsely equating “active Mastodon posters” with “the public”; it’s just not true outside of some very specific and insular bubbles.
• hintymad 6mo ago
  I think the top three people who deserve the hate are Amodei, Hinton, and Joshua. They are the pioneers of the field, and they could have been more objective and laid out exactly where AI does well, where AI falls short, and how we can build a bright future. But oh, no! Instead, they keep telling people that AI will get us the doomsday. AI will displace half of jobs yesterday. AI will be so dangerous that only government can control it. AI will be so malicious that we should make sure AI say the right words in the right tone and give the "right" information. So, a fear monger, a commie, and a woke. It's not hard to imagine why that the public would turn against AI.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• insane_dreamer 6mo ago
  If the promise of AI is true, it will turn out to be the most socially and economically destructive force in the history of mankind. And yet, we're all being rushed headlong downstream without a clue of what's going to happen next, pushed by companies and investors driven by FOMO of not capturing the gains.
• IAmGraydon 6mo ago
  AI is a useful tool and would likely be far more accepted if it wasn’t pushed and hyped to the point of becoming what amounts to a global mass delusion.
• Quarrelsome 6mo ago
  I think specifically those opinionated within current generations mostly hate it. Fruit celebrity love island shows that plenty of younger generations are entirely content to consume its content. Its possible that most current generations would as well. Trash TV is extremely popular and LLMs are well suited to produce that type of content. Nicki Minaj has factor 10 listens over a band like Tool. The money will pick the close to zero production cost for 9/10ths of the viewers every time and the platforms will prioritise the many. I very much doubt boycott has enough weight in the long run to hold back generated content from taking over most of the bigger spaces. We've already seen this happen in recent years with staged content mopping up a lot of the most viewed content by manipulating potential viewers. Cheap influencer content has similarly squeezed cultivated content ad revenue through volume and consistency on YouTube. If you want change then the route would have to be a legal one, not a social movement. Especially since we've mostly forgotten how to do the groundwork for social movements, leaving us all hand wringing and shouting into the void.