5 ms·

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

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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
  Previously, in the case of LinkedIn, filled with handcrafted slop.
- nylonstrung 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
  Order of magnitude? It's 10x more expensive now?
  - layer8 2mo ago
    At least base 2.
  - CDSlice 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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?

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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
Previously, in the case of LinkedIn, filled with handcrafted slop.
nylonstrung 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
Order of magnitude? It's 10x more expensive now?
- layer8 2mo ago
  At least base 2.
- CDSlice 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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?