6 ms·

The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

129 points by karakoram 6mo ago

jdw64 6mo ago
The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well. But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks. The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use is felt by the lower classes, while the upper classes still have the freedom not to use it. AI may be able to make decisions based on more data than executives do, and perhaps even make better decisions than management. Yet the people being replaced are the lower-level workers. This is the problem. The upper classes, who claim that AI is an essential tool, still have the freedom not to use it. But the lower classes cannot survive unless they use it. It becomes a tool required for survival, while at the same time being treated as something wrong, inferior, or low-status if you use it. To get a job, AI becomes an essential survival tool. But culturally, it is also treated as a tool that damages creativity. I see this in open-source communities as well, in the class discourse around open source. The same culture appears on Hacker News. Among the upper layer of open-source communities, there is often hostility toward AI-generated code, based on ideas of human purity: AI code is said to have no meaning, no responsibility, no real authorship. So even within open source, this takes on a class character. But as a freelance developer, I have to trade against my own code-writing ability in order to survive and deliver. Because of AI, the floor price of software delivery has collapsed. If I do not use AI, I cannot meet the new requirements. In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000. Without AI, that volume of work is impossible to handle. This kind of discourse always makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it, but I have to use it. AI lowers the barrier to creation and learning, but the way it lowers that barrier can also bypass the training of thought itself. It turns young people into both beneficiaries and damaged subjects at the same time. And we live under this loop of coercion. Sometimes I think I do not want to use AI. But if I want to survive, I have to use it. I feel the abilities I once took pride in beginning to decay, and I feel myself becoming increasingly bound to AI companies. At the same time, I also feel another kind of ability beginning to emerge. Perhaps growing older means learning how to live inside irony.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- alephnerd 6mo ago
  > The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes This is why the harshest critics of AI tend to be white collar workers of this social class. The same kinds that told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code" and called them deplorables for voting nativist in 2016. Any chance to build mutual trust was squandered. The jobs worst impacted by AI are jobs where most of the workers are Democrats and live in blue states that don't swing. Meanwhile, those manufacturing, construction, and healthcare jobs that are becoming a bigger part of the economy tend to be in the purple part of the country so their needs are heard.
  - techno303 6mo ago
    gonna push back on this i don't see a relationship betwern criticism and the chance of automation/replacement the harshest critics that i see tend to be, almost ubiquitously, creatives perhaps just my walk of life
    - alephnerd 6mo ago
      There's a reason the "creatives" are called the "chattering class"
  - Eric_WVGG 6mo ago
    and why the people most prone to praising it are ones who mostly write emails all day. “Wow, this is very, very good at my job, which must be a difficult job because it pays well and I'm a smart guy. Imagine how well it will work for the dum-dums.”
  - ModernMech 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Izkata 6mo ago
fluidfortune 6mo ago
The irony here is this: AI actually has the potential to absolutely level the playing field. Right now corporations are building the infrastructure out wildly and incorporating it into everything. They’re concerned about a race to the top while creating absolute inefficiency and ignoring responsible, sustainable growth. The task of GenZ should not be to avoid AI, in my opinion. Rather, embrace it. Own it. WEAPONIZE IT. When Google mainstreamed the Search Engine and added tool after tool, it made things that were previously legacy (Word Processing? Pay a big licensing fee to Microsoft, only save to your local machine or hard media! Along comes Google Drive and Docs and now you can edit your document everywhere and a computer crash doesn’t take it out!) well, digitized. AI is that integration at warp speed. We now have the tools to work harder and faster. We have near-instant access to research. If we are discerning, AI is actually not a weapon against us. It is a tool we can use to change the narrative. Big companies are actually banking on fear of the masses. They want you to believe that AI is too big. That it is all-knowing. They don’t want you to recognize you can download ollama and a localized agent and tune it to your needs. Or to get into Gemini and ask it how you can disconnect from Google’s cloud if that’s really what you want it to do. AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?
- tobr 6mo ago
  In the end, unfortunately, whoever sits on the most compute will have the power. It’s not going to be you and me.
  - ericst 6mo ago
    Honestly it is not even that clear. Local models are quite efficient as well.
    - hilariously 6mo ago
      Yes, it is clear - for every compute unit you have that's more efficient and effective I have 10,000,000,000 compute units. I can use the same models that you do. How would you win?
skeeter2020 6mo ago
>> AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s? 2 comments that smack of AI authorship, or if the above is human-created, god I wish they'd used AI.
kald145 6mo ago
Gen-Z is pretty cool. The problem is a small subset of Gen-X and Millenials who have too much money and power and treat AI as if it is the Dianetics bible from SciFi author Ron L. Hubbard (who according to James Randi knew exactly what he was doing). There are truly mentally unwell people in charge who would like get out the E-meter and audit everyone who does not follow their new Scientology knockoff. Yes, the advertising methods and suppression of opposition are the same.
- make3 6mo ago
  You're delusional if you're implying that thinking AI is a threat to the existence of the middle class is coocoo. The actual progressive thing to do is to accept that it is, and think of how to build the world in a way that protects people.
cat_plus_plus 6mo ago
It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy enough to not have to.
- mrbungie 6mo ago
  Is it though? I thought elite engineers needed to consume billions of tokens monthly and/or pay >100 USD subscriptions to AI tools to realize their potential.
- bell-cot 6mo ago
  > Disdain for AI is a luxury belief ... Or a belief of those scared that an imploding "AI" bubble will ruin their financial futures. Or just that most of the humans in their own white collar professions will be replaced by AI's.
  - cat_plus_plus 6mo ago
    What should people who can't afford to hire a white collar professional do?
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
  This place sure lost interest in meritocracy fast once mediocrity became available to everyone.
- aydenp 6mo ago
  We're calling skills a 'luxury' now? Doing actual work to learn things?
School-Cotton 6mo ago
I don’t understand why people act like we just have to submit to the AI revolution. We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?
- Steve16384 6mo ago
  Because lots of people, businesses and governments don't want to.
  - School-Cotton 6mo ago
    My impression is that The majority of people do want to.
    - esyir 6mo ago
      My impression is that, seeing the rising AI use rates everywhere, that you are in a bubble. Could be me too, but seeing China's general societal infatuation with AI outpace the US by orders of magnitude, I think that's a bit less likely.
    - bluecheese452 6mo ago
      When has that ever mattered?
- SkyeCA 6mo ago
  You can make AI/LLMs illegal, but other countries won't. There's a real risk as a country you fall behind economically if you ban what turns out to be the next big tech revolution.
  - School-Cotton 6mo ago
    Okay. Let China become more technologically advanced than us. I don’t care. Chinese tech companies being able to write software 20% faster than us is a less bitter pill to swallow than having to live in our current LLM world.
- 6mo ago
Insanity 6mo ago
Paywalled so I can't read the article. However, is this exclusive to young people? I'm a millenial (early 90s) and I share their sentiment. I might not share it for the same reason though. Personally, I'm concerned about what AI usage would do to my cognitive ability, and as such I try to limit my use. I can't avoid using it at work (we're being tracked on "AI Adoption") and it does genuinely speed up some of my tasks. And I do play around with AI coding tools, mostly because I think I _should_ know them in this day and age. But apart from that, I'm not using it. I'm using DDG searches rather than asking ChatGPT for solutions, I still go around reading websites and papers instead of AI summaries, and I don't outsource my writing to it. (i.e, I write my own emails, my own blogs, my own poorly worded HN comments, etc).
- vlod 6mo ago
  https://archive.is/F3T8k https://archive.is/F3T8k
- coldpie 6mo ago
  I don't think it's exclusive to young people, no. I'm a couple years older than you. All of my friends also hate it and make fun of it. Like some of the people in the article, I'm also looking to get out of the tech industry and find something else to do other than be forced to talk to shitty robots. If they want to fire me for not using their crappy tech enough, fine. I don't care anymore.
- spacechild1 6mo ago
  Fellow millenial here. I rarely use AI, for similar reasons. Not only am I worried about cognitive decline, I also have plenty of ethical concerns and I don't want to become even more dependent on US megacorps. Fortunately, I'm writing my own software and nobody can tell me which tools to use :)
- karakoram 6mo ago
  https://archive.md/cThY7 https://archive.md/cThY7
anianz 6mo ago
> Freystaetter and Gottlieb both say that instead of their own generation, they are more worried about Gen Alpha and other young people that come after them, who lose their chance to develop healthy relationships with technologies when they become mandatory and ubiquitous. I remember similar concerns from Millennials about Gen-Z with the Internet and social media. In the end the Internet and Social Media Gen-Z grew up with was quite different from the one Gen-Y was worried about and the reaction of the new generation to it of course not uniform. Similar developments might happen with Gen Alpha and AI, which seems even more polarizing to me.
- isoprophlex 6mo ago
  I have three (gen A) kids, of which two are of the age to have opinions on this. They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right). If I try to spin them a bullshit story, they tell me how can that be true and maybe I got brainwashed by AI. Also they hate ads with a passion. If anything, I'm incredibly hopeful for newer generations. They'll probably mostly be fine, like most of us were. --- Edit: many responses, and I'll add that in isolation "x is not real work" coming from a kid is maybe equally endearing as it is divisive. I'll add that of course my kids are a product of their upbringing, and I make no secret of my existential confusion about what it is to program a computer when most of the time i'm just steering the clanker away from obviously dumb mistakes. My wife is a psychologist working with underprivileged kids, so we always joke that she has the real job and I'm just doing a hobby that pays well. Much of this is them simply parroting that, maybe. We do try to teach them to think beyond dogma and the cultural bias they grow up in, but who can tell. Everyone is in the end to a great extent a product of their environments, and parents. Finally. They (their generation) will probably be fine, but they might equally well not be. Vapes, tiktok, souped up ebikes, sexting, designer drugs, climate change, refugees, extremism. So many challenges, but you could argue every generation had that. So i choose not to have too much of an opinion and try to stick with gleeful, desperate optimism.
  - burnte 6mo ago
    > They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right). For most of computing history this has been the case, too!
fourspacetabs 6mo ago
https://archive.ph/F3T8k https://archive.ph/F3T8k
- karakoram 6mo ago
  https://archive.md/cThY7 https://archive.md/cThY7
tarr11 6mo ago
The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this. paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis. Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.
- ericjmorey 6mo ago
  Would this show bias of Gallup or of Verge or of the Ai training data? How would you determine which?
- sonofhans 6mo ago
  The cool thing about critical reasoning is how easy it is to uncover bias or agenda in an article like this. I suspect that as you rely more on a robot for this your own skills will atrophy.
  - tarr11 6mo ago
    This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts. Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts. There are also too many things to read. My default before llms would have been to ignore this article. At least now I learned some things (mostly about the Gallup poll which had source data) I do think some people will outsource critical thinking to llms - but it also helps amplify critical thinking by doing a lot of the filtering and organizing and let me focus on the things i think are important.
    - nozzlegear 6mo ago
      > This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts. > Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts. This argument reminds me of one of Ted Chiang's short stories about "lookism," which (iirc) was a natural preference for people to prefer people who are attractive. In the story, a new technology was developed that could interact with a person's brain to "turn off" their lookism and instead just consider what a person brings to the table without your brain factoring in your own attraction to them. I won't spoil the story, but a little arms race develops in the technology to "turn off" natural human reactions to things like attraction, emotion in speech, etc., so that users won't be swayed by them in advertising, political campaigns, anything that could possibly have an agenda. By the end, people using the technology are described as highly autistic – unable to perceive any human emotional context, triggers or attraction – so that they're able to interpret just a person's intent and not be manipulated by the underlying motivations. It's an interesting story, your use of LLMs to cut out the "emotional triggers" from an article and get just the "objective facts" reminds me of that. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58050245 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58050245
Lyngbakr 6mo ago
> They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind. I'm currently reading a fascinating book called Blood In The Machine° about the Luddites who opposed certain technologies in 19th century England and the parallels with the current state of affairs. It's important to remember that while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes. ° https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-machine https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...
- pocksuppet 6mo ago
  Because history is written by the victors, the Luddites were painted as idiots who just hated machines for no reason or dumb reasons. This couldn't be further from the truth.
  - elmomle 6mo ago
    The sad thing that I haven't been able to resolve in my mind is that this is a cultural multi-party prisoners' dilemma among sovereign entities. From a power-centric point of view, if my neighbors intentionally cast off modern technology, they are ripe for domination, economic exploitation, etc. The history of human civilization from the age of city-states onward is about navigating the need for protection from hostile, arrogating outside forces (and/or being one of those hostile forces).
    - aj_hackman 6mo ago
      This doesn't account for the potential instability of modern technology. If you have an efficient electric range and your neighbors are still burning wood when the power goes out, you're in dutch. This is relevant to the AI discussion, as there is still a class of people doing things "the old way", and their skills might come in clutch for a society that's let itself atrophy in convenience.
      - make3 6mo ago
ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
Previously on the Gallup study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443
cedws 6mo ago
We know that AI will ultimately just end up enriching a very small group of people with no change in prosperity for working and middle classes. CEOs are openly saying as much. For the past number of decades the rise in productivity has been completely detached from wages, it'll be no different this time. We're also no strangers to enshittification, we have first hand experience of technology causing negative societal effects when in the hands of for-profit entities.
wduquette 6mo ago
My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.
- Gagarin1917 6mo ago
  Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.
  - gdulli 6mo ago
    Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it. The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.
  - minikomi 6mo ago
    Or that they hate the project more than using AI
  - goalieca 6mo ago
    It might seem they are lazy and not willing to put in the hard work to learn for themselves. The follow up questions confirmed this.
  - wduquette 6mo ago
    Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.
  - array_key_first 6mo ago
    You can use something and simultaneously hate it. For example, smoking. That's not to say AI is addictive. It's probably not. But, if all your classmates are using AI then maybe the workload increases to compensate. Then, you have no choice but to use AI. We see this pattern with companies all the time. They often don't want to advertise aggressively or employ dark patterns. But their competitors do, and then eventually the only way to stay competitive is to join them.
a15971 6mo ago
In tech, young people can complain. Us, the older folks, are not allowed to complain, lest we get branded as old fashioned, unable to adapt, etc.
fny 6mo ago
> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way. I don't see how these and other sentiments are unique to Gen Z at all. The difference I've seen is that many zoomers have given up on learning in the first place. "What's the point?"
sailfast 6mo ago
I don't understand all the negativity in the education space. Ever since I read Diamond Age, the ability to interact with and interrogate works of literature, or science, or the world at large is EXTREMELY powerful for understanding. AI can be used for good especially when you're digging into the details / nitty gritty and asking good questions. Anything can be used in a saccharine way to take the easy way out. Why not ban Cliff Notes as well? Sure, it won't write the essay, but also you didn't read the book. You don't have to use these tools in a lazy way. You don't have to use these tools in a way that cheats / compromises your intelligence. Building up the awareness to use them in a way that multiplies instead of subtracts is going to be the key issue for my kids, and for anybody in the workforce today.
pllbnk 6mo ago
I think a lot of people have already experienced that LLMs are useless by themselves. Ultimately what can make them useful are humans who are directing them, who understand their work and have concrete goals, who know how to verify LLM outputs which always contain at least a few hallucinations that can steer entire session off the cliff. And the hatred comes from the fact that their bosses whose AI usage is for the most part is limited to writing and summarizing emails are rubbing their hands together when they can lay off everyone and have their businesses run by AI.
- make3 6mo ago
  I think that comments like this are not helpful for humanism. Us pogressives should stop trying to argue that AI actually sucks, it obviously doesn't and will continue to improve. We would start organizing and thinking about ways to build a society where the average human can still have a solid, interesting quality of life even when solid AI is everywhere.
  - pllbnk 6mo ago
    AI still sucks where it truly matters. Ask any SOTA LLM about medications for your child for example. Now that you got the answer, ask again - it might be subtly or not so subtly different. Push back slightly, you will get "I am sorry I was wrong...". Now which version to believe? Neither. You need a competent human being to either figure it out from trusted sources or just know the answer. Maybe LLM actually gets it right, but you will never know unless you are an expert in that particular field and just use it as assistant. For all other cases, its value is negative, which it expertly spins as positive. From the software engineer's standpoint, I do a fair amount of vibe coding for personal projects. If the result meets my narrow goal, I am happy. At work I can't let a single line of generated code be left unread and unverified because that's where it matters.
    - make3 6mo ago
      If you use a state of the art search tool and give it enough information, which you should, it should be very competent at that honestly, because it can read hundreds of papers and articles. I don't think your exemple is true. You would need statistics and benchmarks, not a made up strawman.
saidAkh 6mo ago
[flagged]
dabinat 6mo ago
I think that AI can have value if used correctly, but there is a long list of negative externalities that we are not prepared for as a society. We need to pass laws or establish norms to mitigate as many of those as possible, but I doubt that will happen until things are already bad. On the plus side, I believe AI will finally kill social media, which can only be a good thing.
karakoram 6mo ago
https://archive.md/cThY7 https://archive.md/cThY7

129 points by karakoram 6mo ago

jdw64 6mo ago

The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well. But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks. The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use is felt by the lower classes, while the upper classes still have the freedom not to use it. AI may be able to make decisions based on more data than executives do, and perhaps even make better decisions than management. Yet the people being replaced are the lower-level workers. This is the problem. The upper classes, who claim that AI is an essential tool, still have the freedom not to use it. But the lower classes cannot survive unless they use it. It becomes a tool required for survival, while at the same time being treated as something wrong, inferior, or low-status if you use it. To get a job, AI becomes an essential survival tool. But culturally, it is also treated as a tool that damages creativity. I see this in open-source communities as well, in the class discourse around open source. The same culture appears on Hacker News. Among the upper layer of open-source communities, there is often hostility toward AI-generated code, based on ideas of human purity: AI code is said to have no meaning, no responsibility, no real authorship. So even within open source, this takes on a class character. But as a freelance developer, I have to trade against my own code-writing ability in order to survive and deliver. Because of AI, the floor price of software delivery has collapsed. If I do not use AI, I cannot meet the new requirements. In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000. Without AI, that volume of work is impossible to handle. This kind of discourse always makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it, but I have to use it. AI lowers the barrier to creation and learning, but the way it lowers that barrier can also bypass the training of thought itself. It turns young people into both beneficiaries and damaged subjects at the same time. And we live under this loop of coercion. Sometimes I think I do not want to use AI. But if I want to survive, I have to use it. I feel the abilities I once took pride in beginning to decay, and I feel myself becoming increasingly bound to AI companies. At the same time, I also feel another kind of ability beginning to emerge. Perhaps growing older means learning how to live inside irony.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
alephnerd 6mo ago
> The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes This is why the harshest critics of AI tend to be white collar workers of this social class. The same kinds that told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code" and called them deplorables for voting nativist in 2016. Any chance to build mutual trust was squandered. The jobs worst impacted by AI are jobs where most of the workers are Democrats and live in blue states that don't swing. Meanwhile, those manufacturing, construction, and healthcare jobs that are becoming a bigger part of the economy tend to be in the purple part of the country so their needs are heard.
- techno303 6mo ago
  gonna push back on this i don't see a relationship betwern criticism and the chance of automation/replacement the harshest critics that i see tend to be, almost ubiquitously, creatives perhaps just my walk of life
  - alephnerd 6mo ago
    There's a reason the "creatives" are called the "chattering class"
- Eric_WVGG 6mo ago
  and why the people most prone to praising it are ones who mostly write emails all day. “Wow, this is very, very good at my job, which must be a difficult job because it pays well and I'm a smart guy. Imagine how well it will work for the dum-dums.”
- ModernMech 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Izkata 6mo ago

fluidfortune 6mo ago

The irony here is this: AI actually has the potential to absolutely level the playing field. Right now corporations are building the infrastructure out wildly and incorporating it into everything. They’re concerned about a race to the top while creating absolute inefficiency and ignoring responsible, sustainable growth. The task of GenZ should not be to avoid AI, in my opinion. Rather, embrace it. Own it. WEAPONIZE IT. When Google mainstreamed the Search Engine and added tool after tool, it made things that were previously legacy (Word Processing? Pay a big licensing fee to Microsoft, only save to your local machine or hard media! Along comes Google Drive and Docs and now you can edit your document everywhere and a computer crash doesn’t take it out!) well, digitized. AI is that integration at warp speed. We now have the tools to work harder and faster. We have near-instant access to research. If we are discerning, AI is actually not a weapon against us. It is a tool we can use to change the narrative. Big companies are actually banking on fear of the masses. They want you to believe that AI is too big. That it is all-knowing. They don’t want you to recognize you can download ollama and a localized agent and tune it to your needs. Or to get into Gemini and ask it how you can disconnect from Google’s cloud if that’s really what you want it to do. AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?

tobr 6mo ago
In the end, unfortunately, whoever sits on the most compute will have the power. It’s not going to be you and me.
- ericst 6mo ago
  Honestly it is not even that clear. Local models are quite efficient as well.
  - hilariously 6mo ago
    Yes, it is clear - for every compute unit you have that's more efficient and effective I have 10,000,000,000 compute units. I can use the same models that you do. How would you win?

skeeter2020 6mo ago

>> AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s? 2 comments that smack of AI authorship, or if the above is human-created, god I wish they'd used AI.

kald145 6mo ago

Gen-Z is pretty cool. The problem is a small subset of Gen-X and Millenials who have too much money and power and treat AI as if it is the Dianetics bible from SciFi author Ron L. Hubbard (who according to James Randi knew exactly what he was doing). There are truly mentally unwell people in charge who would like get out the E-meter and audit everyone who does not follow their new Scientology knockoff. Yes, the advertising methods and suppression of opposition are the same.

make3 6mo ago
You're delusional if you're implying that thinking AI is a threat to the existence of the middle class is coocoo. The actual progressive thing to do is to accept that it is, and think of how to build the world in a way that protects people.

cat_plus_plus 6mo ago

It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy enough to not have to.

mrbungie 6mo ago
Is it though? I thought elite engineers needed to consume billions of tokens monthly and/or pay >100 USD subscriptions to AI tools to realize their potential.
bell-cot 6mo ago
> Disdain for AI is a luxury belief ... Or a belief of those scared that an imploding "AI" bubble will ruin their financial futures. Or just that most of the humans in their own white collar professions will be replaced by AI's.
- cat_plus_plus 6mo ago
  What should people who can't afford to hire a white collar professional do?
add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
This place sure lost interest in meritocracy fast once mediocrity became available to everyone.
aydenp 6mo ago
We're calling skills a 'luxury' now? Doing actual work to learn things?

School-Cotton 6mo ago

I don’t understand why people act like we just have to submit to the AI revolution. We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?

Steve16384 6mo ago
Because lots of people, businesses and governments don't want to.
- School-Cotton 6mo ago
  My impression is that The majority of people do want to.
  - esyir 6mo ago
    My impression is that, seeing the rising AI use rates everywhere, that you are in a bubble. Could be me too, but seeing China's general societal infatuation with AI outpace the US by orders of magnitude, I think that's a bit less likely.
  - bluecheese452 6mo ago
    When has that ever mattered?
SkyeCA 6mo ago
You can make AI/LLMs illegal, but other countries won't. There's a real risk as a country you fall behind economically if you ban what turns out to be the next big tech revolution.
- School-Cotton 6mo ago
  Okay. Let China become more technologically advanced than us. I don’t care. Chinese tech companies being able to write software 20% faster than us is a less bitter pill to swallow than having to live in our current LLM world.
6mo ago

Insanity 6mo ago

Paywalled so I can't read the article. However, is this exclusive to young people? I'm a millenial (early 90s) and I share their sentiment. I might not share it for the same reason though. Personally, I'm concerned about what AI usage would do to my cognitive ability, and as such I try to limit my use. I can't avoid using it at work (we're being tracked on "AI Adoption") and it does genuinely speed up some of my tasks. And I do play around with AI coding tools, mostly because I think I _should_ know them in this day and age. But apart from that, I'm not using it. I'm using DDG searches rather than asking ChatGPT for solutions, I still go around reading websites and papers instead of AI summaries, and I don't outsource my writing to it. (i.e, I write my own emails, my own blogs, my own poorly worded HN comments, etc).

vlod 6mo ago
https://archive.is/F3T8k https://archive.is/F3T8k
coldpie 6mo ago
I don't think it's exclusive to young people, no. I'm a couple years older than you. All of my friends also hate it and make fun of it. Like some of the people in the article, I'm also looking to get out of the tech industry and find something else to do other than be forced to talk to shitty robots. If they want to fire me for not using their crappy tech enough, fine. I don't care anymore.
spacechild1 6mo ago
Fellow millenial here. I rarely use AI, for similar reasons. Not only am I worried about cognitive decline, I also have plenty of ethical concerns and I don't want to become even more dependent on US megacorps. Fortunately, I'm writing my own software and nobody can tell me which tools to use :)
karakoram 6mo ago
https://archive.md/cThY7 https://archive.md/cThY7

anianz 6mo ago

> Freystaetter and Gottlieb both say that instead of their own generation, they are more worried about Gen Alpha and other young people that come after them, who lose their chance to develop healthy relationships with technologies when they become mandatory and ubiquitous. I remember similar concerns from Millennials about Gen-Z with the Internet and social media. In the end the Internet and Social Media Gen-Z grew up with was quite different from the one Gen-Y was worried about and the reaction of the new generation to it of course not uniform. Similar developments might happen with Gen Alpha and AI, which seems even more polarizing to me.

isoprophlex 6mo ago
I have three (gen A) kids, of which two are of the age to have opinions on this. They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right). If I try to spin them a bullshit story, they tell me how can that be true and maybe I got brainwashed by AI. Also they hate ads with a passion. If anything, I'm incredibly hopeful for newer generations. They'll probably mostly be fine, like most of us were. --- Edit: many responses, and I'll add that in isolation "x is not real work" coming from a kid is maybe equally endearing as it is divisive. I'll add that of course my kids are a product of their upbringing, and I make no secret of my existential confusion about what it is to program a computer when most of the time i'm just steering the clanker away from obviously dumb mistakes. My wife is a psychologist working with underprivileged kids, so we always joke that she has the real job and I'm just doing a hobby that pays well. Much of this is them simply parroting that, maybe. We do try to teach them to think beyond dogma and the cultural bias they grow up in, but who can tell. Everyone is in the end to a great extent a product of their environments, and parents. Finally. They (their generation) will probably be fine, but they might equally well not be. Vapes, tiktok, souped up ebikes, sexting, designer drugs, climate change, refugees, extremism. So many challenges, but you could argue every generation had that. So i choose not to have too much of an opinion and try to stick with gleeful, desperate optimism.
- burnte 6mo ago
  > They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right). For most of computing history this has been the case, too!

fourspacetabs 6mo ago

https://archive.ph/F3T8k https://archive.ph/F3T8k

karakoram 6mo ago
https://archive.md/cThY7 https://archive.md/cThY7

tarr11 6mo ago

The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this. paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis. Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.

ericjmorey 6mo ago
Would this show bias of Gallup or of Verge or of the Ai training data? How would you determine which?
sonofhans 6mo ago
The cool thing about critical reasoning is how easy it is to uncover bias or agenda in an article like this. I suspect that as you rely more on a robot for this your own skills will atrophy.
- tarr11 6mo ago
  This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts. Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts. There are also too many things to read. My default before llms would have been to ignore this article. At least now I learned some things (mostly about the Gallup poll which had source data) I do think some people will outsource critical thinking to llms - but it also helps amplify critical thinking by doing a lot of the filtering and organizing and let me focus on the things i think are important.
  - nozzlegear 6mo ago
    > This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts. > Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts. This argument reminds me of one of Ted Chiang's short stories about "lookism," which (iirc) was a natural preference for people to prefer people who are attractive. In the story, a new technology was developed that could interact with a person's brain to "turn off" their lookism and instead just consider what a person brings to the table without your brain factoring in your own attraction to them. I won't spoil the story, but a little arms race develops in the technology to "turn off" natural human reactions to things like attraction, emotion in speech, etc., so that users won't be swayed by them in advertising, political campaigns, anything that could possibly have an agenda. By the end, people using the technology are described as highly autistic – unable to perceive any human emotional context, triggers or attraction – so that they're able to interpret just a person's intent and not be manipulated by the underlying motivations. It's an interesting story, your use of LLMs to cut out the "emotional triggers" from an article and get just the "objective facts" reminds me of that. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58050245 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58050245

Lyngbakr 6mo ago

> They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind. I'm currently reading a fascinating book called Blood In The Machine° about the Luddites who opposed certain technologies in 19th century England and the parallels with the current state of affairs. It's important to remember that while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes. ° https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-machine https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...

pocksuppet 6mo ago
Because history is written by the victors, the Luddites were painted as idiots who just hated machines for no reason or dumb reasons. This couldn't be further from the truth.
- elmomle 6mo ago
  The sad thing that I haven't been able to resolve in my mind is that this is a cultural multi-party prisoners' dilemma among sovereign entities. From a power-centric point of view, if my neighbors intentionally cast off modern technology, they are ripe for domination, economic exploitation, etc. The history of human civilization from the age of city-states onward is about navigating the need for protection from hostile, arrogating outside forces (and/or being one of those hostile forces).
  - aj_hackman 6mo ago
    This doesn't account for the potential instability of modern technology. If you have an efficient electric range and your neighbors are still burning wood when the power goes out, you're in dutch. This is relevant to the AI discussion, as there is still a class of people doing things "the old way", and their skills might come in clutch for a society that's let itself atrophy in convenience.
    - make3 6mo ago

ChrisArchitect 6mo ago

Previously on the Gallup study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443

cedws 6mo ago

We know that AI will ultimately just end up enriching a very small group of people with no change in prosperity for working and middle classes. CEOs are openly saying as much. For the past number of decades the rise in productivity has been completely detached from wages, it'll be no different this time. We're also no strangers to enshittification, we have first hand experience of technology causing negative societal effects when in the hands of for-profit entities.

wduquette 6mo ago

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

Gagarin1917 6mo ago
Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.
- gdulli 6mo ago
  Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it. The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.
- minikomi 6mo ago
  Or that they hate the project more than using AI
- goalieca 6mo ago
  It might seem they are lazy and not willing to put in the hard work to learn for themselves. The follow up questions confirmed this.
- wduquette 6mo ago
  Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.
- array_key_first 6mo ago
  You can use something and simultaneously hate it. For example, smoking. That's not to say AI is addictive. It's probably not. But, if all your classmates are using AI then maybe the workload increases to compensate. Then, you have no choice but to use AI. We see this pattern with companies all the time. They often don't want to advertise aggressively or employ dark patterns. But their competitors do, and then eventually the only way to stay competitive is to join them.

a15971 6mo ago

In tech, young people can complain. Us, the older folks, are not allowed to complain, lest we get branded as old fashioned, unable to adapt, etc.

fny 6mo ago

> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way. I don't see how these and other sentiments are unique to Gen Z at all. The difference I've seen is that many zoomers have given up on learning in the first place. "What's the point?"

sailfast 6mo ago

I don't understand all the negativity in the education space. Ever since I read Diamond Age, the ability to interact with and interrogate works of literature, or science, or the world at large is EXTREMELY powerful for understanding. AI can be used for good especially when you're digging into the details / nitty gritty and asking good questions. Anything can be used in a saccharine way to take the easy way out. Why not ban Cliff Notes as well? Sure, it won't write the essay, but also you didn't read the book. You don't have to use these tools in a lazy way. You don't have to use these tools in a way that cheats / compromises your intelligence. Building up the awareness to use them in a way that multiplies instead of subtracts is going to be the key issue for my kids, and for anybody in the workforce today.

pllbnk 6mo ago

I think a lot of people have already experienced that LLMs are useless by themselves. Ultimately what can make them useful are humans who are directing them, who understand their work and have concrete goals, who know how to verify LLM outputs which always contain at least a few hallucinations that can steer entire session off the cliff. And the hatred comes from the fact that their bosses whose AI usage is for the most part is limited to writing and summarizing emails are rubbing their hands together when they can lay off everyone and have their businesses run by AI.

make3 6mo ago
I think that comments like this are not helpful for humanism. Us pogressives should stop trying to argue that AI actually sucks, it obviously doesn't and will continue to improve. We would start organizing and thinking about ways to build a society where the average human can still have a solid, interesting quality of life even when solid AI is everywhere.
- pllbnk 6mo ago
  AI still sucks where it truly matters. Ask any SOTA LLM about medications for your child for example. Now that you got the answer, ask again - it might be subtly or not so subtly different. Push back slightly, you will get "I am sorry I was wrong...". Now which version to believe? Neither. You need a competent human being to either figure it out from trusted sources or just know the answer. Maybe LLM actually gets it right, but you will never know unless you are an expert in that particular field and just use it as assistant. For all other cases, its value is negative, which it expertly spins as positive. From the software engineer's standpoint, I do a fair amount of vibe coding for personal projects. If the result meets my narrow goal, I am happy. At work I can't let a single line of generated code be left unread and unverified because that's where it matters.
  - make3 6mo ago
    If you use a state of the art search tool and give it enough information, which you should, it should be very competent at that honestly, because it can read hundreds of papers and articles. I don't think your exemple is true. You would need statistics and benchmarks, not a made up strawman.

saidAkh 6mo ago

[flagged]

dabinat 6mo ago

I think that AI can have value if used correctly, but there is a long list of negative externalities that we are not prepared for as a society. We need to pass laws or establish norms to mitigate as many of those as possible, but I doubt that will happen until things are already bad. On the plus side, I believe AI will finally kill social media, which can only be a good thing.

karakoram 6mo ago

https://archive.md/cThY7 https://archive.md/cThY7