6 ms·

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint,

by japhyr 2mo ago

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better.

CSMastermind 2mo ago
No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)
- c0nducktr 2mo ago
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- krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
  The AI slop that's everywhere is making it worse. Even if someone doesn't care about AI, their feeds (YT, Instagram, LinkedIn) is now filled with AI slop
  - rrr_oh_man 2mo ago
    You forgot HN
  - dlx 2mo ago
    I'm actually thinking that may be a good thing. Maybe people will get off these feeds and...interact with people IRL? ;)
    - cure_42 1mo ago
      There is nothing about using the most popular social media platforms in the world that implies someone doesn't have an active and healthy social life. If you think it does, you may be projecting.
    - aitchnyu 1mo ago
      IME people actually adore the videos of people eating a dripping and crunchy pulav (soft and dry rice dish) and it filling the stomach in 3 swallows, completely unchewed.
  - harvey9 1mo ago
    Previously, in the case of LinkedIn, filled with handcrafted slop.
  - nylonstrung 1mo ago
    Clearly there are people who enjoy the slop though, otherwise it would simply get no engagement and then get hidden by the algo like 99.99% of YT videos
    - krapp 1mo ago
      Much of the engagement for AI slop is generated by AI bots. Remember that actual human traffic on the web has become the minority.
- Octoth0rpe 2mo ago
  > No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system). > Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?
  - simonw 2mo ago
    I enjoy it. I have a small army of weird little golems that mostly do what I tell them to do. What's not fun about that? The other day I asked one of them (running directly on my laptop) to "draw an svg of a circle" and it "thought" for 20 minutes and produced this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F6f9e48293be5c916652d29f0dc0b0657 https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... I'm still chuckling to myself about that two days later.
    - jackling 2mo ago
      > What's not fun about that? Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring. For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV. Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?
      - simonw 2mo ago
        It's that I asked for an SVG of a circle and it created a beautiful gradient filled animated technical diagram. I wanted something closer to <svg><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40"/></svg> Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever. Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2Fb72e910a0a1be5de92844df97ea2a638 https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
- mintplant 2mo ago
  My partner cried the other day because her long-planned PC upgrade is now an order of magnitude more expensive than she budgeted for pre-AI-boom.
  - nylonstrung 1mo ago
    Order of magnitude? It's 10x more expensive now?
    - layer8 1mo ago
      At least base 2.
    - CDSlice 1mo ago
      That’s honestly plausible with RAM and SSDs, the same kits of RAM I spent around $50 on years ago were being scalped for $500+ because there was absolutely no supply.
      - Dylan16807 1mo ago
        A normal RAM kit went up a lot but it's still more like 6x. SSD, more like 2.5-3x. But what percent of your PC price is RAM? When it was cheap it was probably less than 10%. I assume a long-planned upgrade means a mostly new build, and it's a pretty rare setup where that has gone up more than 50-100%. If this long-planned upgrade is just new RAM then the price could skyrocket, but it's still not that much of the overall build.
  - dlubarov 2mo ago
    I don't love this either, but at least it's a short-term economic quirk. At some point fabs will figure out what the long-term demand looks like and scale up production accordingly.
    - john01dav 2mo ago
      This doesn't imply that it will settle at the same or lower price as before though.
- bothers 2mo ago
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- jacobolus 2mo ago
  I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of human-generated comments. I hate that many students are now using LLMs to do all of their homework, resulting in a significant part of the next generation being incompetent at basic scholarly tasks and unprepared for more serious work. I hate that lawyers are using LLMs to write legal briefs, not bothering to check that their cited cases say something exactly the opposite of what their briefs say. I hate that government officials are using LLMs to write public statements that get basic facts wrong. I hate that graphic designers are losing their jobs because their bosses would rather "just use AI, it's cheaper". I hate that Google Search results are now overwhelmed with LLM-generated slop which ranges from dubious to outright wrong, and it's now much more difficult than it used to be to find the information I'm looking for on the open web. I hate that researchers are now publishing LLM slop in journal articles, making it significantly harder to tell the difference between careful scholarship and someone lazily phoning it in. I hate that friends and neighbors now ask ChatGPT as their first source of information about any topic and it frequently tells them something completely misleading or wrong, but they don't bother double checking. Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.
  - worik 2mo ago
    > Am I "ideologically motivated"? I think so. That does not mean you are wrong.
- swatcoder 2mo ago
  So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience. Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop. It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.
  - nylonstrung 1mo ago
    I do think this is true but I think it also reflects negatively on the general populace that this new technology is evaluated in terms of the negative effects on their consumption pattens Transformer models solved the Protein Folding problem in totality but they are categorically "bad" because more of the videos in my feed are low-quality or the advertisement for a cheeseburger looks fake It's predictable but I do think the entire technology is being collectively processed through the lens of media consumption which is sort of tip of the iceberg of what it does and honestly the least important dimension of it
    - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
      Did they? From what I heard, transformer models gave scientists better starting points for computational methods, but we're still far from solving the protein folding problem.
- rtpg 2mo ago
  The "obvious" one: supply chain chaos due to everyone and their dog spending as much as possible for AI boxen Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...) I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis) A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world. There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war. And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
  - rightbyte 1mo ago
    > And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly. Pictures in menus just vaguely resembling the actual dish. Dunno what value the authors think a made up picture provides except for tourist traps. Like, I wont trust your menu twice. I didn't anticipate McDonalds menu pictures becoming in the authentic and informative range of menus.
- solid_fuel 2mo ago
  > No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model. You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say. You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened. You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot. You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder. Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native. You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable. You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing. You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them. On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop. --- Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?" --- This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.
  - jambalaya8 2mo ago
    as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on. the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong (eg, race), read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there (I am anemic), then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)). they may have also had some other diagnoses but i think maybe i am supposed to be bound by the hipaa the ai was ignoring. pretty bad.
- noodletheworld 2mo ago
  Can we just flag obvious flame bait comments like this? Theres clearly no meaningful thought behind a comment like this, and all it does is stir up engagement for laughs. The comment thread clearly shows this isn't a meaningful discussion, it’s people shouting past each other. How can AI be bad? I only see good things! :troll face: it must be a woke left thing! :troll face: Come on.
- ydat 2mo ago
  > No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? I’m not sure I was go quite as far. But there are certainly Makes my life better: LLM chat subscription Makes my life worse: “AI” features that don’t work replacing perfectly good non “AI” features (notably Google Maps and LinkedIn job board). I don’t want fuzzy AI filters, I want concrete filters that let me drill down and browse a result list.
- happytoexplain 2mo ago
  What AI has done to my job as a software developer is make my personal output higher while taking away almost every ounce of enjoyment, interest, and passion I had for the job. Overnight I went from loving my job to hating my job as much as everybody I know outside of tech hates their jobs. I won't even get into what it has done to the already-awful experience of working with low-quality contractors.
  - pseudo0 2mo ago
    Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
    - solid_fuel 2mo ago
      Them: Using AI has made my personal experience with my job much worse, and I dislike using it. You: Have you considered using more AI? Dance monkey, dance! Show them how good at AI you are! Genuinely, learn to read the room - or at the very least read the comments you plan to respond to before you respond to them.
      - Dylan16807 2mo ago
        > at the very least read the comments you plan to respond to before you respond to them Did you see the part where they complained about the experience with low quality contractors becoming extra bad? A suggestion to get rid of those contractors entirely so now they only have the AI problem might actually be an improvement.
        alanwreath 2mo ago
        That probably is exactly what is being referred to: the combination of low quality contractors who have access to AI means even more slop to wade through. If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
  - 2mo ago
- nylonstrung 1mo ago
  Yeah most normies I know who dislike it just generally are not interested in it or think it is dumb and are annoyed by hearing about it so much And the people who actively hate it almost always relate it to a broader pre-existing worldview about the downfall of society, the climate being destroyed, financial markets being a ponzi, oligarchy having too much power etc
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
  I don't understand how you ask such a question without being sarcastic. Look at PC prices. Look at electronics prices. You really think that's healthy right now?
kadushka 2mo ago
Everyone I know loves AI. It is actively making their lives better. All kinds of people, all kind of ages - universally love it and use it every day for all kind of stuff (shopping, health, learning, home improvement, etc, etc).
- beej71 2mo ago
  Poe's Law win?
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  You must live in a bubble; 16% of Americans think AI is making their lives better, the remainder are evenly split between not knowing and disliking it. It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass. It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose. We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away. https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as... https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-americans-think-ai-will-have-a-positive-impact-on-society-a-new-study-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-america...
  - kaashif 2mo ago
    I'm not American, but most people I know who are not in tech just use ChatGPT like they'd use Google but better e.g. what bird is this, what's a good word for X or Y, what's the weather, what was that movie with Z. Edit this meme for me, make this photo not have the guy in the back, how do I grow chillies, etc. Now if you ask them if AI is making their lives better, they might say they don't know. I literally don't know anyone who "hates" AI.
sandeepkd 2mo ago
Its definitely a hype phase and yes a lot of usage is questionable at the moment. To me the scary part is that some of the impacts/decisions would take years if not decades to be measurable and its possible that its a lost battle by then.
singpolyma3 2mo ago
I have yet to meet anyone outside the tech elite who hates AI.
- jambalaya8 2mo ago
  how wide is the variety of people you know? do they understand why they might?
- svachalek 2mo ago
  I've hardly met anyone outside the tech elite who likes it. I can think of one doctor who's a counterexample.
  - singpolyma3 1mo ago
    Absence of like is quite far from hate. I expect most people feel about it the way they do about most tools: mostly they have better things to think about
- ValentineC 2mo ago
  Creatives of any kind, for sure. Artists, illustrators, musicians.
threethirtytwo 2mo ago
I think the thing people can't face is that it makes our lives worse not because it's worse than us. It makes our lives worse because it is better. It is superior. And our lives are worse because it is actively replacing us and we are actively trying to keep up with it.
- centuryfall 2mo ago
  Better at what?
  - threethirtytwo 2mo ago
    many things. Like coding, for example. Try rewriting bun in rust.
  - ultrarunner 2mo ago
    Currently: generating hype at a lower cost without emotion. Is the product itself better? Often no. But salaries have a large weight in the consideration, and hype corroborates the choice.
    - threethirtytwo 2mo ago
      wishful thinking. If the hype wasn't real why have people stopped coding by hand? People like you are delusional. The hype is real. Now, that being said there is something to be said about AI making your life easier. It's not making your life easier. It's upping your output by 10x but it's also upping the demand for output by 10x.
yogthos 2mo ago
What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-optimism-is-so-much-higher-in-china-than-the-us https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-op...
- jltsiren 2mo ago
  The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.
  - yogthos 2mo ago
    It's worth noting that China has seen decades of steady development, and has avoided the boom/bust cycles we see happening in the west. While we've lived through dotCom bubble, the 2008 crash, covid, and now the looming AI bubble, China has just seen steady progress without the working majority getting screwed every decade like clockwork. While future can always bring something unexpected, it is possible to have a resilient system that adapts to the problems as they surface.
    - m4rtink 1mo ago
      Um, I do kinda remember hills made from bikes, empty cities, people laying a siege on failing banks & protests in Honkong being suppressed...
      - yogthos 1mo ago
        A lot of that was just propaganda, like the famous ghost city subway station story which then turned out to just be basic planning https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/china-built-ghost-subway-stations-in-empty-fields-before-residents-arrived-but-years-later-new-homes-roads-and-businesses-began-growing-around-them/articleshow/132456651.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/chin... The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated. China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop... Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone... Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch... The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri... The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231... From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...
justsomeshmuck 2mo ago
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim about most people hating AI because it’s making their life worse? Or are you simply spewing opinion as fact because of your own anecdotal experience? It’s okay to have an opinion on something, but don’t lie and claim it as truth.
- HexPhantom 2mo ago
  [flagged]
pier25 2mo ago
> you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better Absolutely. In fact the data from the past 10-15 years clearly shows the best education technology is still pen and paper, books, and good pedagogy.
- hresvelgr 2mo ago
  I have tried memorisation systems like Anki, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing consolidates my knowledge better than writing the actual concept down with pen and paper.
  - __rito__ 2mo ago
    Creating flashcards is also such a chore! For the recall part of education, the book's exercise, or simply covering up the relevant part with hand and forcing a recall, writing about what you learned, teaching someone else - all work great, and the flow is much more natural.
    - exe34 2mo ago
      Creating the card is half the work though.
      - blitzar 1mo ago
        Creating the card is half the learning
        __rito__ 1mo ago
        Typing out in an app window is not enjoyable. Maintaining physical ones is not practical anymore - with travels and all.
        graemep 1mo ago
        I know people who write with styluses on touchscreens, or take photographs of handwritten notes for just that reason.
jambalaya8 2mo ago
fwiw I enjoy AI. but it is extraordinarily dangerous and does not belong in the hands of most people, and definitely not in the hands of most companies. it is a munition.
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  If considered a munition, it certainly belongs in the hands of citizens to defend themselves against corporations and governments.
  - jambalaya8 2mo ago
    this is why i am an advocate for preventing the forced integration of ai into operating systems.
  - Arkhaine_kupo 1mo ago
    > it certainly belongs in the hands of citizens to defend themselves against corporations and governments. this strategy is only employed by one country in the planet. the goverment used illegal funds to start a paramilitary border police that has murdered multiple legal citizens on camera. No ICE agent has been shot by anyone defending themselves against goverment overreach Companies like Flock have deployed swarms of survaillance with no civillian uprising, companies like Palantir and Meta are openly in bed with the goverment while they pass patents like "facial recognition in all their glasses and its not opt out" That country even saw a bunch of insurrectionists enter its capitol and the traitors werent shot on sight by patriots. Idk man, the whole "we need guns to defend ourselves" doesnt seem to work when morons crave the boot in their neck more than freedom. It mostly seems to just escalate minor disagreements, facilitate self harm, and making schools into increasingly dangerous institutions for children. I guess it also gives insecure men an incredibly dangerous tool to try and hide their feelings of irrelevance. Maybe therapy is cheaper than an AR-15 to hide the fact that 50% of the population cant read at a 6th grade level and feel dumb, scared and unimportant
    - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
BluSyn 2mo ago
It's made my life way better. I love it, it's incredible boost on my ability to learn and produce. Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either. Remember when people said open-sourcing GPT2 would cause world destruction? They keep saying this with every new model release? And it keeps not happening? Hmm. This is all FUD. All evidence suggests more AI is better, and all claims to the contrary keep being proven wrong, and all predictions of doom keep refusing to manifest.
- NewJazz 2mo ago
  If you say so!
- beej71 2mo ago
  > Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either. I do: students who use it to do their thinking for them. And everyone who uses it to do their thinking for them, for that matter.
  - BluSyn 1mo ago
    Like calculators do math for you? It’s a tool like any other. If that’s how they use it, those students weren’t doing much thinking before either.
    - beej71 1mo ago
      Once you grok a process, like addition, then the calculator is not a loss. So once you grok programming, debugging, and software engineering, then using the AI is not a loss. But students aren't doing that for the latter if they just punt to AI.
- crote 2mo ago
  > Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either. Have you tried using a search engine lately, or visiting a social media platform, or buying a computer/smartphone?
HexPhantom 2mo ago
The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss
scotty79 1mo ago
Most people I know that hate AI have faulty versions (1 year behind the frontier) pushed on them at their jobs. People who are free to experiment with frontier models capabilities at their own pace mostly love it or at least are impressed by its capability.
- CagedCoder 1mo ago
  This sounds like some variation of correlation // causation. The people that already like working with (or are addicted to) LLMs would look to try the frontier models on their own time.
  - scotty79 1mo ago
    I wouldn't say so. I recently gifted ZCode with a sub to a non-programmer that didn't have much contact with AI and not really any truly unique positive one (only free tier), and wasn't an enthusiast. In few days she created an already useful app for writing for herself with zero assistance from me. And she's delighted with the process, even seeing its flaws (as mucb as non-programmer can see them). The thing is, she's very intelligent, even though only mildly technical. She's very communicative and thoughtful, so she finds "talking" to AI interesting psychologically (while being fully aware AI doesn't have feelings or consciousness). And she has no history of AI getting pushed on her in any context. Compare to my other friend that's ecologically conscious amateur artist. Initially she was interested in using it in AI generated art, but it wasn't all that good (amd steerable) back then. Then her work started pushing it. With their CEO saying things to the tune of "do or die" and people losing their jobs regardless. And the thing they were pushing was some crappy version of Copilot, that she gave a chance but it was more burden than help at her job most of the times. She pretty much hates AI now and as for the art, she sees it getting better but decides that what's attractive for her in art is the physical process of drawing and tools associated. AI tools don't give her the kind of joy she seeks. Of course this is just a bunch of anecdotes. But I'd be surprised if pushing bad AI on people with additional stressful factors wouldn't cause them to like it less and hate it more.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education. We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer important; some people may still study, but it'll be a hobby, and the people who participate in the intelligence revolution (rather than being crushed by it) will no longer need to think.
- scarecrowbob 1mo ago
  This is the quality of thought that I come to HN to experience because I have a hard time finding it in other places. The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful. The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking... I love it. I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be. This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
- rewgs 1mo ago
  > We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.
  - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
    You can say that, but check how many people are going to the gym regularly, let alone training up to the standard of strength of an average manual laborer from before the industrial revolution. If AI fills its promise, some people will be telling others they should think more, but people will get lazy.

by japhyr 2mo ago

CSMastermind 2mo ago

No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)

c0nducktr 2mo ago
[flagged]
krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
The AI slop that's everywhere is making it worse. Even if someone doesn't care about AI, their feeds (YT, Instagram, LinkedIn) is now filled with AI slop
- rrr_oh_man 2mo ago
  You forgot HN
- dlx 2mo ago
  I'm actually thinking that may be a good thing. Maybe people will get off these feeds and...interact with people IRL? ;)
  - cure_42 1mo ago
    There is nothing about using the most popular social media platforms in the world that implies someone doesn't have an active and healthy social life. If you think it does, you may be projecting.
  - aitchnyu 1mo ago
    IME people actually adore the videos of people eating a dripping and crunchy pulav (soft and dry rice dish) and it filling the stomach in 3 swallows, completely unchewed.
- harvey9 1mo ago
  Previously, in the case of LinkedIn, filled with handcrafted slop.
- nylonstrung 1mo ago
  Clearly there are people who enjoy the slop though, otherwise it would simply get no engagement and then get hidden by the algo like 99.99% of YT videos
  - krapp 1mo ago
    Much of the engagement for AI slop is generated by AI bots. Remember that actual human traffic on the web has become the minority.
Octoth0rpe 2mo ago
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system). > Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?
- simonw 2mo ago
  I enjoy it. I have a small army of weird little golems that mostly do what I tell them to do. What's not fun about that? The other day I asked one of them (running directly on my laptop) to "draw an svg of a circle" and it "thought" for 20 minutes and produced this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F6f9e48293be5c916652d29f0dc0b0657 https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... I'm still chuckling to myself about that two days later.
  - jackling 2mo ago
    > What's not fun about that? Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring. For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV. Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?
    - simonw 2mo ago
      It's that I asked for an SVG of a circle and it created a beautiful gradient filled animated technical diagram. I wanted something closer to <svg><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40"/></svg> Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever. Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2Fb72e910a0a1be5de92844df97ea2a638 https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
mintplant 2mo ago
My partner cried the other day because her long-planned PC upgrade is now an order of magnitude more expensive than she budgeted for pre-AI-boom.
- nylonstrung 1mo ago
  Order of magnitude? It's 10x more expensive now?
  - layer8 1mo ago
    At least base 2.
  - CDSlice 1mo ago
    That’s honestly plausible with RAM and SSDs, the same kits of RAM I spent around $50 on years ago were being scalped for $500+ because there was absolutely no supply.
    - Dylan16807 1mo ago
      A normal RAM kit went up a lot but it's still more like 6x. SSD, more like 2.5-3x. But what percent of your PC price is RAM? When it was cheap it was probably less than 10%. I assume a long-planned upgrade means a mostly new build, and it's a pretty rare setup where that has gone up more than 50-100%. If this long-planned upgrade is just new RAM then the price could skyrocket, but it's still not that much of the overall build.
- dlubarov 2mo ago
  I don't love this either, but at least it's a short-term economic quirk. At some point fabs will figure out what the long-term demand looks like and scale up production accordingly.
  - john01dav 2mo ago
    This doesn't imply that it will settle at the same or lower price as before though.
bothers 2mo ago
[dead]
jacobolus 2mo ago
I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of human-generated comments. I hate that many students are now using LLMs to do all of their homework, resulting in a significant part of the next generation being incompetent at basic scholarly tasks and unprepared for more serious work. I hate that lawyers are using LLMs to write legal briefs, not bothering to check that their cited cases say something exactly the opposite of what their briefs say. I hate that government officials are using LLMs to write public statements that get basic facts wrong. I hate that graphic designers are losing their jobs because their bosses would rather "just use AI, it's cheaper". I hate that Google Search results are now overwhelmed with LLM-generated slop which ranges from dubious to outright wrong, and it's now much more difficult than it used to be to find the information I'm looking for on the open web. I hate that researchers are now publishing LLM slop in journal articles, making it significantly harder to tell the difference between careful scholarship and someone lazily phoning it in. I hate that friends and neighbors now ask ChatGPT as their first source of information about any topic and it frequently tells them something completely misleading or wrong, but they don't bother double checking. Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.
- worik 2mo ago
  > Am I "ideologically motivated"? I think so. That does not mean you are wrong.
swatcoder 2mo ago
So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience. Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop. It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.
- nylonstrung 1mo ago
  I do think this is true but I think it also reflects negatively on the general populace that this new technology is evaluated in terms of the negative effects on their consumption pattens Transformer models solved the Protein Folding problem in totality but they are categorically "bad" because more of the videos in my feed are low-quality or the advertisement for a cheeseburger looks fake It's predictable but I do think the entire technology is being collectively processed through the lens of media consumption which is sort of tip of the iceberg of what it does and honestly the least important dimension of it
  - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
    Did they? From what I heard, transformer models gave scientists better starting points for computational methods, but we're still far from solving the protein folding problem.
rtpg 2mo ago
The "obvious" one: supply chain chaos due to everyone and their dog spending as much as possible for AI boxen Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...) I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis) A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world. There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war. And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
- rightbyte 1mo ago
  > And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly. Pictures in menus just vaguely resembling the actual dish. Dunno what value the authors think a made up picture provides except for tourist traps. Like, I wont trust your menu twice. I didn't anticipate McDonalds menu pictures becoming in the authentic and informative range of menus.
solid_fuel 2mo ago
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model. You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say. You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened. You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot. You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder. Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native. You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable. You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing. You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them. On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop. --- Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?" --- This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.
- jambalaya8 2mo ago
  as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on. the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong (eg, race), read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there (I am anemic), then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)). they may have also had some other diagnoses but i think maybe i am supposed to be bound by the hipaa the ai was ignoring. pretty bad.
noodletheworld 2mo ago
Can we just flag obvious flame bait comments like this? Theres clearly no meaningful thought behind a comment like this, and all it does is stir up engagement for laughs. The comment thread clearly shows this isn't a meaningful discussion, it’s people shouting past each other. How can AI be bad? I only see good things! :troll face: it must be a woke left thing! :troll face: Come on.
ydat 2mo ago
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? I’m not sure I was go quite as far. But there are certainly Makes my life better: LLM chat subscription Makes my life worse: “AI” features that don’t work replacing perfectly good non “AI” features (notably Google Maps and LinkedIn job board). I don’t want fuzzy AI filters, I want concrete filters that let me drill down and browse a result list.
happytoexplain 2mo ago
What AI has done to my job as a software developer is make my personal output higher while taking away almost every ounce of enjoyment, interest, and passion I had for the job. Overnight I went from loving my job to hating my job as much as everybody I know outside of tech hates their jobs. I won't even get into what it has done to the already-awful experience of working with low-quality contractors.
- pseudo0 2mo ago
  Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
  - solid_fuel 2mo ago
    Them: Using AI has made my personal experience with my job much worse, and I dislike using it. You: Have you considered using more AI? Dance monkey, dance! Show them how good at AI you are! Genuinely, learn to read the room - or at the very least read the comments you plan to respond to before you respond to them.
    - Dylan16807 2mo ago
      > at the very least read the comments you plan to respond to before you respond to them Did you see the part where they complained about the experience with low quality contractors becoming extra bad? A suggestion to get rid of those contractors entirely so now they only have the AI problem might actually be an improvement.
      - alanwreath 2mo ago
        That probably is exactly what is being referred to: the combination of low quality contractors who have access to AI means even more slop to wade through. If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
- 2mo ago
nylonstrung 1mo ago
Yeah most normies I know who dislike it just generally are not interested in it or think it is dumb and are annoyed by hearing about it so much And the people who actively hate it almost always relate it to a broader pre-existing worldview about the downfall of society, the climate being destroyed, financial markets being a ponzi, oligarchy having too much power etc
VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
I don't understand how you ask such a question without being sarcastic. Look at PC prices. Look at electronics prices. You really think that's healthy right now?

kadushka 2mo ago

Everyone I know loves AI. It is actively making their lives better. All kinds of people, all kind of ages - universally love it and use it every day for all kind of stuff (shopping, health, learning, home improvement, etc, etc).

beej71 2mo ago
Poe's Law win?
a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
You must live in a bubble; 16% of Americans think AI is making their lives better, the remainder are evenly split between not knowing and disliking it. It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass. It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose. We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away. https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as... https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-americans-think-ai-will-have-a-positive-impact-on-society-a-new-study-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-america...
- kaashif 2mo ago
  I'm not American, but most people I know who are not in tech just use ChatGPT like they'd use Google but better e.g. what bird is this, what's a good word for X or Y, what's the weather, what was that movie with Z. Edit this meme for me, make this photo not have the guy in the back, how do I grow chillies, etc. Now if you ask them if AI is making their lives better, they might say they don't know. I literally don't know anyone who "hates" AI.

sandeepkd 2mo ago

Its definitely a hype phase and yes a lot of usage is questionable at the moment. To me the scary part is that some of the impacts/decisions would take years if not decades to be measurable and its possible that its a lost battle by then.

singpolyma3 2mo ago

I have yet to meet anyone outside the tech elite who hates AI.

jambalaya8 2mo ago
how wide is the variety of people you know? do they understand why they might?
svachalek 2mo ago
I've hardly met anyone outside the tech elite who likes it. I can think of one doctor who's a counterexample.
- singpolyma3 1mo ago
  Absence of like is quite far from hate. I expect most people feel about it the way they do about most tools: mostly they have better things to think about
ValentineC 2mo ago
Creatives of any kind, for sure. Artists, illustrators, musicians.

threethirtytwo 2mo ago

I think the thing people can't face is that it makes our lives worse not because it's worse than us. It makes our lives worse because it is better. It is superior. And our lives are worse because it is actively replacing us and we are actively trying to keep up with it.

centuryfall 2mo ago
Better at what?
- threethirtytwo 2mo ago
  many things. Like coding, for example. Try rewriting bun in rust.
- ultrarunner 2mo ago
  Currently: generating hype at a lower cost without emotion. Is the product itself better? Often no. But salaries have a large weight in the consideration, and hype corroborates the choice.
  - threethirtytwo 2mo ago
    wishful thinking. If the hype wasn't real why have people stopped coding by hand? People like you are delusional. The hype is real. Now, that being said there is something to be said about AI making your life easier. It's not making your life easier. It's upping your output by 10x but it's also upping the demand for output by 10x.

yogthos 2mo ago

What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-optimism-is-so-much-higher-in-china-than-the-us https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-op...

jltsiren 2mo ago
The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.
- yogthos 2mo ago
  It's worth noting that China has seen decades of steady development, and has avoided the boom/bust cycles we see happening in the west. While we've lived through dotCom bubble, the 2008 crash, covid, and now the looming AI bubble, China has just seen steady progress without the working majority getting screwed every decade like clockwork. While future can always bring something unexpected, it is possible to have a resilient system that adapts to the problems as they surface.
  - m4rtink 1mo ago
    Um, I do kinda remember hills made from bikes, empty cities, people laying a siege on failing banks & protests in Honkong being suppressed...
    - yogthos 1mo ago
      A lot of that was just propaganda, like the famous ghost city subway station story which then turned out to just be basic planning https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/china-built-ghost-subway-stations-in-empty-fields-before-residents-arrived-but-years-later-new-homes-roads-and-businesses-began-growing-around-them/articleshow/132456651.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/chin... The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated. China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop... Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone... Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch... The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri... The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231... From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...

justsomeshmuck 2mo ago

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim about most people hating AI because it’s making their life worse? Or are you simply spewing opinion as fact because of your own anecdotal experience? It’s okay to have an opinion on something, but don’t lie and claim it as truth.

HexPhantom 2mo ago
[flagged]

pier25 2mo ago

> you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better Absolutely. In fact the data from the past 10-15 years clearly shows the best education technology is still pen and paper, books, and good pedagogy.

hresvelgr 2mo ago
I have tried memorisation systems like Anki, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing consolidates my knowledge better than writing the actual concept down with pen and paper.
- __rito__ 2mo ago
  Creating flashcards is also such a chore! For the recall part of education, the book's exercise, or simply covering up the relevant part with hand and forcing a recall, writing about what you learned, teaching someone else - all work great, and the flow is much more natural.
  - exe34 2mo ago
    Creating the card is half the work though.
    - blitzar 1mo ago
      Creating the card is half the learning
      - __rito__ 1mo ago
        Typing out in an app window is not enjoyable. Maintaining physical ones is not practical anymore - with travels and all.
        graemep 1mo ago
        I know people who write with styluses on touchscreens, or take photographs of handwritten notes for just that reason.

jambalaya8 2mo ago

fwiw I enjoy AI. but it is extraordinarily dangerous and does not belong in the hands of most people, and definitely not in the hands of most companies. it is a munition.

toomuchtodo 2mo ago
If considered a munition, it certainly belongs in the hands of citizens to defend themselves against corporations and governments.
- jambalaya8 2mo ago
  this is why i am an advocate for preventing the forced integration of ai into operating systems.
- Arkhaine_kupo 1mo ago
  > it certainly belongs in the hands of citizens to defend themselves against corporations and governments. this strategy is only employed by one country in the planet. the goverment used illegal funds to start a paramilitary border police that has murdered multiple legal citizens on camera. No ICE agent has been shot by anyone defending themselves against goverment overreach Companies like Flock have deployed swarms of survaillance with no civillian uprising, companies like Palantir and Meta are openly in bed with the goverment while they pass patents like "facial recognition in all their glasses and its not opt out" That country even saw a bunch of insurrectionists enter its capitol and the traitors werent shot on sight by patriots. Idk man, the whole "we need guns to defend ourselves" doesnt seem to work when morons crave the boot in their neck more than freedom. It mostly seems to just escalate minor disagreements, facilitate self harm, and making schools into increasingly dangerous institutions for children. I guess it also gives insecure men an incredibly dangerous tool to try and hide their feelings of irrelevance. Maybe therapy is cheaper than an AR-15 to hide the fact that 50% of the population cant read at a 6th grade level and feel dumb, scared and unimportant
  - toomuchtodo 1mo ago

BluSyn 2mo ago

It's made my life way better. I love it, it's incredible boost on my ability to learn and produce. Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either. Remember when people said open-sourcing GPT2 would cause world destruction? They keep saying this with every new model release? And it keeps not happening? Hmm. This is all FUD. All evidence suggests more AI is better, and all claims to the contrary keep being proven wrong, and all predictions of doom keep refusing to manifest.

NewJazz 2mo ago
If you say so!
beej71 2mo ago
> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either. I do: students who use it to do their thinking for them. And everyone who uses it to do their thinking for them, for that matter.
- BluSyn 1mo ago
  Like calculators do math for you? It’s a tool like any other. If that’s how they use it, those students weren’t doing much thinking before either.
  - beej71 1mo ago
    Once you grok a process, like addition, then the calculator is not a loss. So once you grok programming, debugging, and software engineering, then using the AI is not a loss. But students aren't doing that for the latter if they just punt to AI.
crote 2mo ago
> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either. Have you tried using a search engine lately, or visiting a social media platform, or buying a computer/smartphone?

HexPhantom 2mo ago

The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss

scotty79 1mo ago

Most people I know that hate AI have faulty versions (1 year behind the frontier) pushed on them at their jobs. People who are free to experiment with frontier models capabilities at their own pace mostly love it or at least are impressed by its capability.

CagedCoder 1mo ago
This sounds like some variation of correlation // causation. The people that already like working with (or are addicted to) LLMs would look to try the frontier models on their own time.
- scotty79 1mo ago
  I wouldn't say so. I recently gifted ZCode with a sub to a non-programmer that didn't have much contact with AI and not really any truly unique positive one (only free tier), and wasn't an enthusiast. In few days she created an already useful app for writing for herself with zero assistance from me. And she's delighted with the process, even seeing its flaws (as mucb as non-programmer can see them). The thing is, she's very intelligent, even though only mildly technical. She's very communicative and thoughtful, so she finds "talking" to AI interesting psychologically (while being fully aware AI doesn't have feelings or consciousness). And she has no history of AI getting pushed on her in any context. Compare to my other friend that's ecologically conscious amateur artist. Initially she was interested in using it in AI generated art, but it wasn't all that good (amd steerable) back then. Then her work started pushing it. With their CEO saying things to the tune of "do or die" and people losing their jobs regardless. And the thing they were pushing was some crappy version of Copilot, that she gave a chance but it was more burden than help at her job most of the times. She pretty much hates AI now and as for the art, she sees it getting better but decides that what's attractive for her in art is the physical process of drawing and tools associated. AI tools don't give her the kind of joy she seeks. Of course this is just a bunch of anecdotes. But I'd be surprised if pushing bad AI on people with additional stressful factors wouldn't cause them to like it less and hate it more.

deleted 1mo ago

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a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago

You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education. We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer important; some people may still study, but it'll be a hobby, and the people who participate in the intelligence revolution (rather than being crushed by it) will no longer need to think.

scarecrowbob 1mo ago
This is the quality of thought that I come to HN to experience because I have a hard time finding it in other places. The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful. The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking... I love it. I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be. This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
rewgs 1mo ago
> We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
  You can say that, but check how many people are going to the gym regularly, let alone training up to the standard of strength of an average manual laborer from before the industrial revolution. If AI fills its promise, some people will be telling others they should think more, but people will get lazy.