12 ms·

Shunning AI is the human choice

• splittydev 5mo ago
  These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
  • new_account_100 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • mrbungie 5mo ago
    AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
    • tptacek 5mo ago
      There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).
      • dredmorbius 5mo ago
        Upset with what aspect(s) of databases? The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create? That latter seems to have aged quite well.
        • kalleboo 5mo ago
          Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information). Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
      • knuckleheads 5mo ago
        The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.
      • lacewing 5mo ago
        There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one. Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
        • brandon272 5mo ago
          I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption. Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
          • andrekandre 5mo ago
            > Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI. its because "ai" means whatever the marketing dept decides it is... we've had all kinds of 'ai' in the past its just they enabled features based on some intelligent logic not just llms. right now llms are being shoved into everything whether its a good fit or not; so it makes for additional noise...
      • hansmayer 5mo ago
        > People were upset about databases in the 1980s Huh? In what universe did that happen?
      • keybored 5mo ago
        Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be. So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily. Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
        • TrnsltLife 5mo ago
          Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants. The Amish don't use tractors or whatever. I guess we could have AI free countries. The last bastions of true humanity or something.
      • anonzzzies 5mo ago
        People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
        • andrekandre 5mo ago
          > But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience people are doing this inside companies as well; stupid animations generated by ai posted in slack, powerpoint slides with super detailed drawings and images of ai generated "user experiences" where a couple of text boxes would have been fine, etc etc
      • the_gastropod 5mo ago
        Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
      • d0liver 5mo ago
        What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
        • dmantis 5mo ago
          Why would it? It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it. Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.
          • the_gastropod 5mo ago
            In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it? The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
            • KptMarchewa 5mo ago
              Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
              • AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
                No. You're not thinking it through well enough. The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business. Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.) The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech? You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
                • satvikpendem 5mo ago
      • bdangubic 5mo ago
        > It really isn't going anywhere It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
      • barnabee 5mo ago
        TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it. AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
      • customguy 5mo ago
        The widespread criticism isn't based on "the tech not going away eventually". All of that is a red herring, a response to something nobody (mainstream) is talking about.
    • empath75 5mo ago
      I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train. You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass. There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
      • bluefirebrand 5mo ago
        > There is no possible universe where AI is banned Yes there is It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
        • nba456_ 5mo ago
          No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI. And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
          • csande17 5mo ago
            You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.
            • empath75 5mo ago
              Why do you imagine this would change _anything_? There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models. If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.
    • b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
      none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.
    • elpocko 5mo ago
      > To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in. Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
      • swiftcoder 5mo ago
        > Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
      • miltonlost 5mo ago
        AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?
      • goda90 5mo ago
        Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
      • miyoji 5mo ago
        > It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues. No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
        • logicchains 5mo ago
          [flagged]
        • elpocko 5mo ago
          > dismiss people's legitimate concerns Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.
    • logicchains 5mo ago
      >people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
      • hack1312 5mo ago
        [dead]
      • satvikpendem 5mo ago
        Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.
    • potsandpans 5mo ago
      I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children." There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair. This is the world now.
  • justonepost2 5mo ago
    The eschaton will devour the people who “join them” just as fast as the people who fight it.
    • Procrastes 5mo ago
      As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess? Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_be_eaten_first/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...
  • fontain 5mo ago
    That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.
  • chasd00 5mo ago
    My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating. I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot. I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same. /I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice
    • tiahura 5mo ago
      50, lawyer, and it has completely revolutionized my workflow. Just shake my head at the denialism.
      • justonepost2 5mo ago
        How about when you’re 53 and unemployed on subsistence UBI?
        • pepperoni_pizza 5mo ago
          There will be no UBI.
          • justonepost2 5mo ago
            Probably correct :)
        • marris 5mo ago
          I will do the pro-social thing of wishing that resources were more scarce so that the resources I hold were worth more.
  • dfxm12 5mo ago
    If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
    • dale_glass 5mo ago
      I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would. https://xkcd.com/1170/ https://xkcd.com/1170/
      • bigstrat2003 5mo ago
        If your friends all start to jump off a bridge, the rational thing to do is question their sanity, not to just jump. That xkcd is dead wrong.
        • gitaarik 5mo ago
          Or you should wonder why they might jump instead of directly questioning their sanity. Then if you see the bridge is on fire and it's safe to jump into the water, then it makes sense, right?
    • Filligree 5mo ago
      I mean. Yes? Probably?
    • enoint 5mo ago
      If all my friends drove 75 mph, would I risk driving 15 mph in front of them?
  • lccerina 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • dist-epoch 5mo ago
      You forget about the robot armies that will soon defend the data centers.
    • empath75 5mo ago
      If you burned down every data center in the world, AI would still not go away. It's just a computer program. You can run it on your laptop. You can't burn down an idea.
      • lccerina 5mo ago
        How many devs would be able to keep working if GitHub disappeared tomorrow? You can do inference on SOME laptops, but the current shape of GenAI need massive data centers to be used at scale. Also the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.
        • zozbot234 5mo ago
          The nice thing about local AI is that it really can run anywhere, you just need enough storage space for the weights and the context. It just gets slower if you run it on potato-level hardware.
          • DrewADesign 5mo ago
            For bang-on user cases like coding, sure. For concept art and other still-image diffusion tasks, sure. For damn near anything else, calling hardware that doesn’t approach the inference breadth and performance of data-center-hosted remote services ‘potato-level’ is pretty disingenuous… never mind any significant training. Not only that, hardware is less accessible than it’s been in years— nvidia is re-releasing the 3060 so gamers can buy something. For anything you’d stake your business on? Good luck.
  • dist-epoch 5mo ago
    Everybody will. You will not be spared. If you think you are a senior prompt whisperer and that will save you, that is going away in a year too.
    • mrspuratic 5mo ago
      Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.
  • add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
    Not everyone is empty enough to be okay with participating in the expansion of something they strongly believe will be a net negative for the world.
  • probably_wrong 5mo ago
    > If you can't fight them, join them. This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you. And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.
  • crazyfingers 5mo ago
    > join them Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.
    • XorNot 5mo ago
      This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result. The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind". But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it. The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.
      • zozbot234 5mo ago
        > There's nothing to learn with AI You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.
        • debazel 5mo ago
          The amount of steering necessary is rapidly decreasing. You're looking at a way too small timeline if you think this will be sustainable, or you're hoping that LLMs will hit their peak very soon.
      • 5mo ago
  • the_snooze 5mo ago
    That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.
  • DiabloD3 5mo ago
    These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  • pelasaco 5mo ago
    You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?
    • virgildotcodes 5mo ago
      Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually. If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
      • pelasaco 5mo ago
        I was more thinking, Taxi drivers that hate cars, or people who hate their work but still do it, the whole life.. but yeah your answer is good too lol :)
  • KerrAvon 5mo ago
    What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.
  • velcrovan 5mo ago
    I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-future/ https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
    • 7tflutter7 5mo ago
      The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.
      • velcrovan 5mo ago
        I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them
        • 7tflutter7 5mo ago
          Ok i actually agree with that. Imo the gov is going to have to print a lot of money to deal with the impacts of ai (covid was $5T), if we do it now that same dollar would go 10x further and the people would effectively be the largest owner of AI labs like Anthropic. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure idea.
  • asklq 5mo ago
    It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency. Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone". If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution. The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.
    • 7tflutter7 5mo ago
      So your master plan is to purposely work ten times slower than everyone else to prove a point to a CEO who doesn't know your name?
    • otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
      > It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone". Code generation is a very silly way of using LLMs. They're not even good at it.
    • Paradigma11 5mo ago
      Of course these graduates have agency. So do the companies not employing them. Telling them to deal with it is well meant advice, not an attempt to coerce them into compliance. To be honest most likely nobody cares deeply if they take that advice or not.
  • malfist 5mo ago
    These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
    • chasd00 5mo ago
      only time will tell, make your bets. carefully.
  • mpalmer 5mo ago
    I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on. What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest. - Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship" - Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities - The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general - Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match
  • dburkland 5mo ago
    Bingo
  • afavour 5mo ago
    I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it". You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • splittydev 5mo ago
      The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.
      • dml2135 5mo ago
        Plenty of people don't like cars to this day.
        • splittydev 5mo ago
          Yes. And I'm sure they're having a hard time. ^
          • mrbungie 5mo ago
            It really depends on their environment. Not every city is a car-first city.
          • throw4847285 5mo ago
            It's so funny when technological progress guys encounter YIMBYs. They can't even perceive that somebody would have a criticism of the impact of a technology on one's lived environment. "But, history is one big game of Civilization, and we replaced the little horses with tanks? What do you mean you don't like it?" Whigs gonna whig I guess.
  • QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago
    You don’t get to choose whether they allow you to join them.
  • jayd16 5mo ago
    It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.
  • SubmarineClub 5mo ago
    Doubt. How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools? Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming. I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.
    • bigstrat2003 5mo ago
      They aren't even good at programming, despite the repeated claims to the contrary by AI bros.
    • duchef 5mo ago
      I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in. I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice). I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • JeremyNT 5mo ago
    > These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it. If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."
    • 7tflutter7 5mo ago
      ^ doomscrolling john connor
  • bsza 5mo ago
    > AI is here to stay I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op. How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
    • 7tflutter7 5mo ago
      Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.
      • bsza 5mo ago
        Not counting tests, we haven't seen one in action in over 80 years. If we could practice this level of caution with AI, that would be a great start.
        • joquarky 5mo ago
          That's because we built very fast computers to simulate them.
        • saulpw 5mo ago
          We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation. Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.
      • nmeagent 5mo ago
        In the mid-80s the world was estimated to have some 60000+, so 12000 is somewhat of an improvement. Ideally through arms control we could reduce this further, but that's no trivial undertaking.
    • chasd00 5mo ago
  • keybored 5mo ago
    Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here. Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.
  • righthand 5mo ago
    This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?
  • beej71 5mo ago
    Meth is here to stay, too, and--damn--is it great for productivity.
  • tootie 5mo ago
    Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.
  • kalleboo 5mo ago
    AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight. We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent) We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired. This is what we keep being told. So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.
    • jolt42 5mo ago
      When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.
      • duchef 5mo ago
        I think his point was that we are bombarded with cataclysmic language from AI leaders about our sooncoming intellectual demise.
    • mpalmer 5mo ago
      We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent) FWIW the people saying this tend to be remarkably ignorant.
  • geremiiah 5mo ago
    If you can't fight them, join them. That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.
  • iceflinger 5mo ago
    Cool, fighting it is then.
  • bob1029 5mo ago
    I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next. At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.
    • ModernMech 5mo ago
      > A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next. Agreed. 20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies
  • giancarlostoro 5mo ago
    I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.
    • tavavex 5mo ago
      The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.
      • giancarlostoro 5mo ago
        > It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. Correct it is not, but there was also some better tooling and frameworks before. We used to have RAD native tooling, now we have... Electron.
        • tavavex 5mo ago
          Yes, and there is still good tooling now, you don't have to use Electron. The reason why many companies use bad tooling or bad practices was provided in the sentence immediately after the one that you've quoted. When tech was new, companies needed to gain customers and engineers were on longer leashes, so making reliable and high-quality software was paramount. Now that everyone has to use computers, they refocused on extracting more money from what they already had by taking shortcuts, cutting dev teams and letting profit motives always take the driver's seat. But you can still write good software. Arguably, it's the easiest it has ever been.
  • 827a 5mo ago
    Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.
  • ai-x 5mo ago
    Imagine making "AI Hater" as your personality
    • AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
      I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations. I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.
  • lbrito 5mo ago
    This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes. AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement. When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.
  • dspillett 5mo ago
    To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping. If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :) Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…
    • orangecoffee 5mo ago
      One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?
    • mancerayder 5mo ago
      Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone. Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.
      • dspillett 5mo ago
  • Aurornis 5mo ago
    Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay. Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly. It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage. What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.
    • skydhash 5mo ago
      > Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there. I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.
  • jgbuddy 5mo ago
    True
  • vitality6637 5mo ago
    "These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • soloto 5mo ago
    Assumed future facts are not facts, they are just your opinion.
• new_account_100 5mo ago
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• satvikpendem 5mo ago
  Interesting what the disconnect is between what the vocal minority say about AI versus the vast majority who use it every day and do not care, such as coders and even regular people, as ChatGPT has almost a billion users.
  • dist-epoch 5mo ago
    This is the old "why do protesters against capitalism have iPhones" defense.
  • hatsuseno 5mo ago
    Yeah, that figure of a billion comes from OpenAI directly, I wouldn't put too much stock in its validity or relevance.
    • SketchySeaBeast 5mo ago
      It also doesn't qualify how or how often the users use the app. Online games like to do this too - "40M registered users!" when the number of players with an active subscription are a tiny fraction.
      • milkshakes 5mo ago
        it's weekly active users https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
  • rglullis 5mo ago
    One can use it even while hating it.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
    it is very amusing to read delusional takes like "everyone hates AI" when everyone I know who uses a computer for work is increasingly reliant on chatbots. I don't know how many times do these people need to be taught that their little bubble of terminally online folx is not "everyone". twice is not enough, apparently.
• shanius 5mo ago
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• echelon 5mo ago
  I'm in film and highly exposed to the AI media and arts scene. I was very early to this hate, and I've experienced it personally by the metric boat load. I'm fine with people not liking the technology, but the number of death threats, rude comments ("your mother didn't use the coat hanger well enough"), and literal stalking and doxxing I've received from some of these rabidly anti-AI people is appalling. Whatever compels people to throw paint onto fine art or to block traffic for hours (including emergency vehicles and people just trying to get home) is the same bug a lot of these anti-AI griefers have. I take great joys when luminaries in animation, illustration, game development, etc. announce that they're using AI tools and that they enjoy them. It's one of my sweetest pleasures after enduring the anti-AI outrage day in and day out for years.
  • justonepost2 5mo ago
    It will take a few years for the multigenerational dark age to set in, but eventually you too will realize that they had a point.
    • jasonlotito 5mo ago
      Give me one anti-AI point that is ignored and/or not considered by "pro-AI" groups. I'm genuinely curious what it is.
      • justonepost2 5mo ago
        I don’t know or particularly care what “anti-AI” thought leaders think. I don’t get my views from a camp. The person above believes that in a year, or 3 years, or 10 years that they will remain an “operator” of the AI, and that their creativity will be amplified at the expense of the dumb luddites who will be left in the dust. Very common in tech, more disappointing in the arts. This is incorrect - we will in short order on the current trajectory see cognitive “dark factories” announced by hyperscalers or labs that produce an infinite stream of content, or software, or anything else and rapidly outcompete all human endeavor. To some this is Human Progress, to me it’s a dark age.
• randypewick 5mo ago
  I think that too many people are conflating their hate for AI, which is a technology, with the sick dynamics pushing it to gain profit. It's consumerism and capitalism to blame, AI is just a technology. As such, we want our leaders to be able to properly use such tech. But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.
  • vaylian 5mo ago
    > But our leaders are clearly unable to do so. What should be done then?
  • chasd00 5mo ago
    I use AI and see value in it but agree the hype train is very annoying. My employer tracks how much we're using AI related tools and has a KPI we need to hit. Thats very annoying too. Reminds of communism: "ideas so great they're mandatory", AI: "A tool so amazing its use is mandatory".
• delabay 5mo ago
  In the battle of shape rotators vs wordcells, the wordcells have far more to gain with AI. This journo will come around.
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• Arthur391 5mo ago
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• endymion-light 5mo ago
  There's a massive difference between the hatred of a CEO who is actively wanting to replace workers with what is essentially applied mathematics. AI seems more like easy reasoning for mass-layoffs & cost saving measures - and I rarely see articles that actually attempt to delve into this, instead seeking to just cancel out an entire technology. This article doesn't hate AI - it hates capitalism - which is a completely different argument, the underlying system was broken already, AI has just excasperated some of the concerns. Things like awful SEO + low effort art were already happening beforehand, they're just become far easier. And maybe a big problem is that AI = ChatGPT for the vast majority of people, including the person who wrote this artcle. This article specifically cites things like the Commonwealth Prize - a prize that if you look at historically, wasn't exactly an example of brilliant prose. Surely that's far more of a inditement on the quality of judging for a prize if it can be won by poor writing. A lot of the issues cited within this article just seem hollow, as they're issues that were pervasive before ChatGPT. AI isn't a panacea, but hating a technology because bad people use it feels reductionist. I think a far bigger problem is that the majority of the population doesn't have good knowledge of AI or Software in general, including CEOs. I'd love to see journalists that have a good understanding of the actual technology.
  • lccerina 5mo ago
    You don't need to have a "good knowledge" of a misused technology to hate it when it's used by malevolent people. In the same way I don't need to be a virologist to know that is better to avoid the flu, I don't need to be a ML/AI expert to see its direct detrimental effects on people, communities, and the internet as a whole.
    • endymion-light 5mo ago
      But given your example - I don't care much for the opinion of someone who believes flu is spread by sinful thoughts. It's good to have a base understanding of something that you'd like to speak about. Are local LLM models also within this hate sphere? What about fully open source vision models? That's what makes an article like this feel hollow - it's just someone talking about vibes. Or to quote the article: " But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. " That's why I think this article is a criticism of neoliberal capitalism rather than anything else. If it wasn't AI, it would be robotics, if it wasn't robotics, it would be Quantum. But i'd like to see better substance in articles on this site rather than just a dislike of robots.
• oleganza 5mo ago
  Sorry for the irony, but the article is so long, i asked gpt to extract key points. I think what'd be a stronger point is talking about centralization of the quality models. Modern AI tools are inherently centralized around huge shared infrastructure that gives enormous leverage (== capacity for abuse) to those owning the infrastructure. This is true even if you have strong competition among several players: each of them would converge on some business model and majority of users would not be bothered with long-term consequences if they receive very tangible short-term value. The tooling is amazing, amount of productivity we unlock is fantastic and it's getting better by the day. But we need to watch out for collateral damage too. The future is somewhere there, but we can steer it towards being more or less hazardous.
• rokob 5mo ago
  I mean I think hating practices and efforts to exploit people is good. I think hating the adverse consequences of our inventive structures and lack of protections for basic human rights is good. But I think hating AI is pointing at the wrong subject for scorn. If you want positive change you can’t point at something that a lot of people are getting value out of (individuals as well as corporations) and say fuck your experience. It is also wrong for a billionaire to say fuck your future and deal with it, but that should mean hating on that person not the technology.
• rd42 5mo ago
  I kinda get the hate now - all of social media is being awash with AI. I think maybe a better option is to have new social media which is restricted to humans and human produced content. Hard to enforce - but I am sure there are ways out there.
  • davrosthedalek 5mo ago
    Or, maybe it's beginning of the end of social media. Might not be the worst idea.
• morelandjs 5mo ago
  It’s my opinion that societal rules should be derived from more fundamental virtues and notions of morality. AI is a capability, and it can be used in moral or immoral ways, but it’s more like a knife than an assault rifle. I don’t want AI forced down my throat by SF bro evangelists, but I also don’t want to see it banned as a useful technology. I wish people didn’t feel the need to adopt extreme positions on this topic and were capable of advancing more nuanced perspectives.
• philipallstar 5mo ago
  > So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect. What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• velcrovan 5mo ago
  Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-future/ https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
  • sesm 5mo ago
    "AI" is a marketing term, LLMs and Difusion Models are math.
  • egui 5mo ago
    The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
    • velcrovan 5mo ago
      To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project? I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.
      • tavavex 5mo ago
        > If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project? No. Obviously, what you do on your PC is inconsequential to the rest of society. But despite this, AI and its consequences in big tech have become so thoroughly linked because the entities that develop and profit off of AI use are so big and influential over the rest of us. The hobbyist space isn't what people even think about.
        • 5mo ago
• aswegs8 5mo ago
  I don't want to sound fatalistic, but in the end, the machine is too powerful to be stopped. With machine I don't mean AI, but rather the financial machine of the US.
• Ecys 5mo ago
  Lol. https://x.com/Marakath/status/2056341063342633336 https://x.com/Marakath/status/2056341063342633336
  • q3k 5mo ago
    The low-effort presentation perfectly matches the low-effort argument. Not a single second of human brainpower went into making this an it shows.
• thrw045 5mo ago
  To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place. I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.
  • dandaka 5mo ago
    It is called 'jagged intelligence'. A lot progress was made in the last 2 years. Most notably reasoning models, tools use, harness progress. It takes time to build the skill to make those models useful, but they do provide a lot of value.
    • thrw045 5mo ago
      Ah yeah jagged intelligence is the perfect phrase for it. I do also get some value from them, both in coding and in images. I find it the least usable for information primarily because of the hallucination problem. I still do use it for that purpose but it's kind of annoying when it writes something that's wrong, and I find it out from a Google search later.
      • dandaka 5mo ago
        You are cooking them wrong. You absolutely must ask the model to do grounding work — search online, search in your files, cross-check with different agents. They are universal reasoning engines, not a fact recalling tool. Check my 'deep research' skill, you will get the idea https://github.com/dandaka/skills/blob/main/deep-research/SKILL.md https://github.com/dandaka/skills/blob/main/deep-research/SK...
  • bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    That is indeed the problem. And when you have to meticulously check everything that the LLM does (because you can't know where the hallucinations will be), it completely destroys any productivity benefits you would gain from having it write the code in the first place. Thus you wind up going no faster (if not slower) than you did in the first place. The only way to go super fast (the way some people claim they are) is to discard quality. As has been pointed out over and over: the time consuming part of programming was never typing code into the computer, it was understanding the problem and the logic behind the code. Using an LLM only addresses the fast and easy part of programming, not the hard parts.
• throwpoaster 5mo ago
  Pass. Hate is never good.
• cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
  As an ex-Googler I'll say this: The problem with Eric Schmidt isn't (always) the particulars of the things he says. It's the smug I-know-best "boomer" tone he delivers it with, and the crass obliviousness to his relative position of privilege and power. Googlers/Xooglers will recall the "my various houses" quip at TGIF some years ago which memegen had a field day with. Also his multiple events where he brought in Kissinger to have "fireside chats" for Googlers to watch/attend. In fact his "father knows best" attitude ties directly in with his Kissinger fixation: this realpolitik "practical" vision of a world of inevitable powerful forces that you just have to learn to ride with .. which is just really a skin over "might makes right" under another name. Kissinger was explicitly so, and Schmidt admired him for it. Who cares about million horrifically killed in Cambodia if America is stronger for it? It's also not honestly all that far from the "Effective Altruism" stuff, too: some powerful person comes up with a system of "pragmatic" and utilitarian justifications for the forces-that-already-are and makes it sound like a programme-for-betterment when it's really just a method for their own further enrichment and ego satisfaction. Many of us legitimately boo this. Not because we're naive. Or stupid. But because our own sense of agency in the world and democratic ethics means we see agency for collectives of people which work along broad and participatory lines. And because we "naively" believe in justice and maybe a vague Kantian notion of ethics which tries to treat other humans as ends in themselves. Y'know. So-called basic enlightenment, modernist values. The "inevitable AI" stuff is just an icing on an overall cake. Standing in front of a bunch of young people who still have energy and spirit and the ability to shape the world and telling them that the best way to shape the future is to accept the form that it's already taking and ride-along and profit is next level douchebaggery, even from Schmidt. (I also have to muse out loud that the specific vile form Google has taken in the second decade of its existence relates to this same mentality. The Google of the founder's letter at IPO sounds nothing like the ... thing ... that exists now, and this seems to have everything to do with just yielding to what-is instead of making what-can-be)
• dwa3592 5mo ago
  I think this highlights the dichotomy of AI use and how it's shaping everyone's opinion based on their own experience. It's your AI versus mine. You could be OpenAI with unlimited compute and disprove a conjecture or you could be the people referred in the article who are asking claude if a story is written by a human. Opus 4.7 can generate working code faster than I ever could but I still see it as a dumb word calculator bc of the mistakes it makes.
• NietTim 5mo ago
  Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.
  • inglor_cz 5mo ago
    I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly. It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable. I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the same passion, but won't tell because the time isn't ripe yet.
    • NoGravitas 5mo ago
      I'll tell. It's you. You personally, and no one else. Not a category of people that includes you. Just you.
      • inglor_cz 5mo ago
        I don't particularly care if you hate me, I am more wary about people being hateful in general. It is a dangerous emotion to nurture and channels people towards acting in an evil way. And the rationalizations tend to be questionable. 100 years ago, plenty of people would tell you that Jews are bloodsuckers who dominate the economy with their greed and enslave regular workers. It isn't exactly the same, but surely it rhymes. At least today the hated enemy is a bit abstract and not a human. Though the hate can easily extend towards actual people who work on it.
      • NietTim 5mo ago
        Such a weird, non HN worthy, type of comment. Just pure personal attack while they said nothing weird. Why are you here?
    • satvikpendem 5mo ago
• nibblecid 5mo ago
  I believe that the technology is not the problem! It is the people who use AI in bad/unhealthy/unethical ways. I bet that in 10 years, we'll have a movie like The Big Short style talking about all the crazy things people did with AI, and the audience will say, "Yeah! We saw it coming!" No, you didn't!
• nilirl 5mo ago
  > I’m not just skeptical. I'm against it. I understand the sentiment but I don't think it's useful to take a directly antagonistic stance, especially when it's a losing battle. For those who feel this way, our best hope is to keep searching for how we can have a world that values human effort and care, even after AI does everything it's proclaimed to do. We can't declare the world a lost cause and relegate ourselves to only hating. We need to do what we've always done: roll with it.
• AntronX 5mo ago
  I wish tech companies would stop shoving AI in my face everywhere. F off google i don't want to "ask ai" in maps. Get that ugly ai button off from messenger, meta. At least microslop winblows lets me remove crapilot buttons from apps.
• BosunoB 5mo ago
  Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.
  • afavour 5mo ago
    > Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.
    • joquarky 5mo ago
      UBI is not a solution either, as it will inevitably fall into the same traps and favoritism as tax laws.
      • iAMkenough 5mo ago
        Agreed. Sam Altman’s vision for UBI is basically “bring back company towns.”
  • frotaur 5mo ago
    I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital. People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
    • BosunoB 5mo ago
      Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation. I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
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• theturtle 5mo ago
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• jdw64 5mo ago
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• gspr 5mo ago
  Lots of people on this site seem to be of the opinion that "AI is tech, you can't hate tech, only its use". That may be true, but I bet there'd be a whole lot less AI hate in society if: (1) The proponents would just CHILL THE F OUT. If the technology is so fantastic, and the things you're building with it so amazing, then surely that will speak for itself in due time? Why do you need to sound like a cult leader on cocaine all the time? It reminds me of proponents of cryptocurrencies. My eyes and ears are bleeding – the more you talk, the more I wanna avoid your technology. (2) The companies involved would respect IP. (3) Regulators would empower ordinary people to have some redress when their lives are affected by AI-powered decisions. (The flawed EU AI Act is a decent start.) (4) Regulators would ensure that actors in the AI space pay the cost of the negative externalities they impose on everyone. (5) See 1. I'm so tired.
  • EdgeExplorer 5mo ago
    I'm somewhere on the pro-AI spectrum (great tool, let's use it *where we've evaluated it and it's the best tool for the job*), but... 100% agree. AI is a tool and outcomes should speak for themselves. I'm not impressed by what tools you used building your thing, and "AI" is not a feature or a benefit on its own.
• stephc_int13 5mo ago
  Every waves of automation are naturally creating resistance, as they tend to make the lives of a large number of people miserable during the transition. Nothing new here. What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation. I am not sure why or if this is a new pattern.
  • spogbiper 5mo ago
    I think social media is a big factor. Anti-AI posts and comments are very popular on mainstream Reddit subs at least. Not sure if its a cause or an effect or even external manipulation
  • bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    > What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation. Why would that surprise you? They aren't stupid. They can see that people are trying to position AI as a way to replace them.
    • stephc_int13 5mo ago
      My intuition would be that the resistance would come from grumpy old guys like me who spent most of their lives perfecting their craft.
      • bluefirebrand 5mo ago
        It should be coming from them too My guess is a lot of those grumpy old guys, on this site at least, are sitting pretty with large bank accounts. So they don't need to worry about their jobs anymore. They could retire safely tomorrow if they wanted. So they don't care. Just another instance of the older generation trying to loot the future from the younger.
      • JambalayaJim 5mo ago
        You grumpy old guys probably own a house. As labour continues to get devalued, it feels like assets are the only path to prosperity. That's where my anxiety is coming from, anyway.
• TRiG_Ireland 5mo ago
  I think this is the first article I've seen here which captures my practical concerns with AI, my moral concerns, my economic concerns, and also the emotional "true, profound, and guttural loathing". I hate it so much, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it. It just feels so icky. And the times when I've been fooled into reading AI-generated texts I feel cheated. It's all so cheap and nasty.
  • thrw045 5mo ago
    I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way. I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there. I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about. All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.
    • satvikpendem 5mo ago
      That is a specific implementation of image models, not true for all image models. For example Civitai has a lot of realistic models that look like people took them, at least on first glance, as I'm sure with enough pixel peeping you can find discrepancies, point is the "flatness" look is with that specific ChatGPT model. For example: https://civitai.com/models/2149369/iphone-realism https://civitai.com/models/2149369/iphone-realism
    • ihumanable 5mo ago
      Magical editing of pictures is so wild to me. Most photos people take have a longterm have an audience of basically 1. That's why there's jokes about how awful it is when a coworker corners you to show you their vacation photos, the vast majority of photos taken by the average person are only ever going to be viewed again by the person taking it (and maybe their immediate family). Memory is already this squishy thing and then when you go back to reminisce about {meaningful event} and go pull up your edited photos, what are you even looking at? Google used to play these ads constantly of editing stuff out, changing how the sky looks, etc. It's present day you effectively gaslighting future you. What's the point of memorializing something and then immediately destroying the truth of what happened with a bunch of edits.
• jklinger410 5mo ago
  The HN crowd is going to hate this article, but I think it's an important discussion to have. I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions. This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should be in the bottom left, if the users want it to be in the top right, you put it there. So consider this QA feedback for the technology. How do you make people not feel this way about it? Go do that.
  • Jtarii 5mo ago
    It's a new disruptive technology that has been around for 3 years, people will just stop caring about this as a topic with time. Right now it's just trendy and zeitgeisty to shit on AI, eventually people will get bored and move on to something else. No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.
    • jklinger410 5mo ago
      You don't think the concerns have any validity? Sounds kind of hand wavey to me.
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• leecommamichael 5mo ago
  Lots of people here saying “resistance is futile, so don’t resist.” I don’t care if it’s a losing “fight.” It’s not a single game. Truth is at stake, and we have to constantly fight any source of misinformation. There are times when LLMs are just fine, but they are seductive liars at worst, and we should never forget that.
• jesse_dot_id 5mo ago
  The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very expensive bills that will be coming due in the coming months and years. They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.
  • frizlab 5mo ago
    I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.
    • MisterTea 5mo ago
      It's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine. Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.
      • jesse_dot_id 5mo ago
        They're not firing employees to replace them with AI. We're mostly engineers here I think. Does anyone actually believe they're replacing humans with the same AI that we're using in our day-to-days? I don't know about you, but my harnesses absolutely suck without a human driving them and the more knowledgeable the human, the less they suck. It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the typical ways in which they would normally act like assholes.
• alansaber 5mo ago
  I'd find "hating labour replacement is good" a more compelling title.
• JKCalhoun 5mo ago
  > These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.” Schmidt, by all means, is welcome to board the Good Ship Bubble-pop, but I think a lot of these grads are happy to instead watch from the viewing stand and wave goodbye. I think his notion that AI is fait accompli is one of the (many) things being rejected.
• d_burfoot 5mo ago
  Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.
  • UtopiaPunk 5mo ago
    Ishmael is a good read.
    • jackbravo 5mo ago
      What is it about?
      • UtopiaPunk 5mo ago
        It's a fictional dialog that gives an account of history from a different viewpoint, from a society that was destroyed by modern civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(Quinn_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(Quinn_novel)
  • voidmain 5mo ago
    Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.
    • NoGravitas 5mo ago
      Yep, it's all driven by Moloch, and nothing but.
  • bena 5mo ago
    Historians. Well, one. Well, he's not a historian. He's a biochemist and physiologist who has studied some anthropology. It's Jared Diamond. That's who says agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.
• _-_-__-_-_- 5mo ago
  That website sucks. My thoughts, https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html.
• goosejuice 5mo ago
  I understand some of the sentiment, but these folks certainly won't be denying the drug discovered through AI that will save their life or that of their children. I don't think people truly hate AI. What they hate is how it's used. That's a very different thing and it's a human problem not a technology problem.
• cphoover 5mo ago
  I don't hate AI. What I hate is while billionaires are promising us a utopian future where work is optional, the price of food, housing, and healthcare in the USA is through the roof. Many people my age (millennials) cannot afford to buy a house for themselves like prior generations were able to. The supposed riches being produced by AI are not being realized for the majority of Americans.
• analog8374 5mo ago
  It is what it is. Unless it threatens you. Then it's bad And then you prefer a narrative explaining why it's bad. And then you you propagate that narrative. And then that narrative infects the hive.
• hansmayer 5mo ago
  Such fantastic writing. I particularly love the last passage - not only it is reminiscent of how great op-eds used to close, but also for it's clear and un-ambigious call to action - you have the agency and no, you don't have to "deal with it", i.e. deal with lazy morons pasting you LLM-generated walls of text for discussion.
• geremiiah 5mo ago
  Political and economic ramification aside, if we truly create ASI, that severely reduces the value of humanity. We essentially give birth to our enslavers and eventually humanity will be second class on this planet. How is that something to look forward to?
• StilesCrisis 5mo ago
  > I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. Join Mastodon if this is what you're looking for. Your people are here!
• whatever1 5mo ago
  The biggest risk I see is the acceleration of homogenization of everything. We are going to be getting the same average (but cheap) slop everywhere even in the space of thought. Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.
• rglover 5mo ago
  No need to hate it. Just understand it, know when you're dealing with someone who is viewing it through a rational lens vs. a delusional lens, and just keep doing what you were doing. Buying into the fear is how you railroad yourself long-term. Using it while maintaining a healthy skepticism around the more radical claims means not being blindsided long-term. Now as far as hating the turbo-zealots who smugly try to shove it down your throat in an attempt to protect their bags...
• paulsutter 5mo ago
  If AI is overblown and permanently flawed, there is nothing to worry about. If AI becomes as powerful as some fear/hope, productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living. Costs for housing, healthcare, education will collapse, and there is nothing to worry about. This article somehow tries to straddle both positions, that AI is fundamentally flawed and can never really accomplish useful work yet we should be angry and fearful.
  • saulpw 5mo ago
    There's this other case, which I think many people believe, that AI becomes as powerful as we fear/hope, and productivity is so high that only a few people need to work, but the superior standard of living is enjoyed by only those few people. We don't make the transition to post-capitalism and our economic dystopia is exacerbated and further entrenched. The future may be even less evenly distributed.
  • joquarky 5mo ago
    > productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living Who is "we" in this statement? How will these gains go to those who need housing, healthcare, and education? The current trajectory indicates the gains will go to the wealthy and the rest of us will get to fight for scraps.
• Forgeties79 5mo ago
  I understand it’s trendy to like/dislike things, but the widespread disgust we have seen since day one that has refused to abate should be a clear signal that whether it is the technology or the implementation, this rollout or whatever you want to call it is simply not working and people are not buying in in the way they had hoped.
• GaryBluto 5mo ago
  Can I ask what the deal is with people saying anti-intellectual things and then finishing it with ", actually"? Where did this originate from from? Is it a shibboleth?
  • blanched 5mo ago
    “anti-intellectual” judgment aside, I believe it’s just a meme (in the original definition of the word).
  • rozap 5mo ago
    Saying that shunning the machine that is usurping human creativity and intelligence is "anti intellectual" is pretty funny I'm not an AI hater but the implication of your comment is that being on the AI train is the intellectual position, which is wild, given the AI hype is almost entirely from CEOs, who are the furthest thing from.
• lbrito 5mo ago
  Why was this title changed? The original was better, and, well, original.
• jgbuddy 5mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
• tavavex 5mo ago
  It's shocking to see such an article title on HN, especially with so many upvotes. It would've been unthinkable in 2025. I always saw this website as very AI-boostery and pro-VC, pretty much as pro-AI as you could find without getting into the singularity cult. Has the audience changed, or is it the opinion of the average user that changed?
• kimetime 5mo ago
  I'm not really shunning, I've gone from very high on AI to mostly exhausted with it. I wish we could skip ahead ~5 years to it being another tool in the tool belt and lessons learned about where it's good and bad. Right now everything is so same-y. Barely any oxygen for other technologies to get funding and attention, large fraction of what I read on socials is in claude's or chatgpt's voice. ... and maybe I'm wrong and get economically obsoleted. but eschatology is like catnip for every generation and I think there's a big component of that
  • saulpw 5mo ago
    I feel you, I kind of want to skip ahead some years too. But it feels like 1998 internet hype--skip ahead 5 years and Facebook hasn't even been created yet. The internet certainly didn't become just another tool in the tool belt, and the worst of the internet's effects were still yet to come.
• inglor_cz 5mo ago
  Who editorialized the actual title from "Hating AI is good, actually" to "Shunning AI is the human choice"? This article was submitted under its original title.
• karmakaze 5mo ago
  > And can anything truly novel be created by a technology that feeds on what already exists? When I was very young, I used to make up jokes that didn't really make sense, but they seemed novel and I cracked myself up. Late in life I wondered what truly original idea(s) I've had that wasn't an extension or mashup of existing ones or I'd learned from somewhere even subconsciously. It was very hard to come up with any. So this fault like many others that can be ascribed to machines can equally apply to ourselves. I did finally think of a few, the clearest being the idea of 2*Pi being more fundamental than Pi back when I was in grade 7 math (I can visualize the room and lesson when the thought occurred to me) back in '77 long before I learned of Tau.
• Codemoarguyface 5mo ago
  It's the same as hating a calculator, luddites. No.
• Codemoarguyface 5mo ago
  It's the same as hating computers and calculators, luddites. Go back into the forest then
• shantnutiwari 5mo ago
  I almost didnt read the article due to all the negative comments here. Interesting how many people havent even read the article and are just vomitting generic "But AI is just math, and also the future" type of arguments.
• cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
  hating AI is a waste of time. hating capitalism isn’t