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Discussion (228 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.
There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?
In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.
If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria
I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.
This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.
Ok so youâre not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?
Donât sweep them under the rug and say, âworks for me though so thatâs worth it, not a big deal.â
I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesnât mean Iâm happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think itâs unethical⌠and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. Thatâs unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. Theyâre going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they canât run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I donât think thereâs any reason they shouldnât be left to crash and burn like anyone else.
I donât have much sympathy for the position of, âyeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and donât want to talk about it.â
You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.
And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff⌠but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I donât think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? Iâd rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.
And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.
The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to⌠skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.
FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.
The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.
20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.
Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.
The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
> But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year,
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...
This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.
As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.
"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?
They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.
Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:
- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)
- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)
- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)
- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)
- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)
- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)
- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)
I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.
People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!
But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.
-
I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.
I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.
I wish the Dems could have this conversation about their policies and messaging!
derac: "But sir, I think that Von Braun guy is doing some pretty cool stuff with tech. I think we should just let the Nazis keep doing what they're doing; unimpeded."
Truman: "What the hell is wrong with you?"
derac: "Guahh! It'S LiKE yOu aReN'T AllOwED tO hAvE a PosITivE oR NuAncED OpiNiOn oF ThE TeCH!"
I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...
You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by their industry and careers being upended. Don't think that anyone forgot about that now that we're the ones in the crosshairs.
Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed
I'm very curious to hear your take
Itâs just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then youâre probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic âyouâ here, not you specifically).
> People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you canât freeze society in amber. Whether itâs the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes⌠we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
But we wonât. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.
Agreed.
I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.
I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.
It's obvious that tons of people have become better at their jobs because of it, it's obvious that it has already saved companies millions of hours. I understand that many don't like the copyright avoiding antics of these big AI companies, but to say that AI is a net negative on humanity is so completely idiotic that it makes me question their character in anything they do moving forward.
This time the "innovation" is also based on actual theft.
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as âusing economies of scale to exploit the average personâ youâd necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
Which is true, on the long term. But we have no reason to believe that AI will be different in that case. In the short term, technologies have absolutely been used to exploit the average person; the industrial revolution benefited us all over time, but tell that to the kids killed in early industrial manufacturing centers.
Look at how the transition to globalization went in the 80's-10's; entire sections of the US were essentially shut down because of the improvements in communication technology, and unless you're in support of the current state of the US, you'd agree we're still dealing with the consequences of that.
Even in your own case, there's an argument to be made that CFCs meant the overall damage to humanity was greater than the ice trade, just spread out over more people. The exploitation was similar, but it was less visible. Even if we've eventually reached a point where people were better off, you can't argue that the health of the average person was never exploited for the benefit of the few.
To be clear, I'm not separating myself from this; I'm fully aware that work I've done has displaced people. I'm just chafing against the moralizing around it. It feels like the people making these arguments are trying to remove themselves from responsibility while continuing to build on top of companies like Amazon, that are built on top of exploiting people that absolutely cannot advocate for themselves.
If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then⌠well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and itâs exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. Iâm very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.
On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because itâs so easy to. Youâve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.
Itâs not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more wouldâve died from illness, hunger, etc.
It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.
Youâre conflating Metaâs alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you donât have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.
To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like theyâre the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what youâre saying, but to say theyâre largely useless signals that you donât know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.
40-45% of people will get cancer in their lives.
It's estimated that 25-30% of people, globally, enjoy hip-hop.
Cancer is 50% more common than hip-hop.
Is hip-hop normal?
Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.
Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
How else would they feel morally superior to degenerate techies who finally got what they deserve? Didn't you get the memo? It's all Joe the Java developer who's the impetus of injustice in the world.
The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.
Itâs possible that sufficiently advanced âdumbâ compilers and tooling could lower demand. Or that the supply of developers outstripped demand - thatâs happened in other professions. We always joked about how weâre automating our own jobs. We just happened to live in a period of explosive demand growth for our skill set so it never mattered for us. But it was never guaranteed that growth would continue in perpetuity.
When mentoring a freshly minted dev, I always checked whether or not they were open to career and financial advice. And if they were, I would always make this point to them and tell them to think carefully how much of their massive tech salary they should be spending. I make it a point to keep abreast of what median salaries are for other job roles are viable and moderate my spending and saving accordingly, because there was always a possibility that the gravy train would stop.
Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists
And "engineers building things to spec" are not the same as those giving the orders, but they should take a measure of responsibility for the things they build. I think most people generally agree about the culpability of those following orders when people are harmed. I'm not even saying they should necessarily be held accountable; just that moralizing about it is hypocritical.
All technologies have benefits and costs â choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all?
It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article.
For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide.
In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being.
That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out.
The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views:
> I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.
Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt:
> Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe?
On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.
What, we can't use AI even to show it's silly and incomplete? How are people supposed to know the ways it's incomplete if we cannot evaluate it?
I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech".
I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai
In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
> Students using AI to do homework
Either you don't use AI, where you have to spend a lot of time studying or graduate bottom of your class, or you do and get on with your life. You can acknowledge that the studying is the valuable part (most students do in my experience) yet skip it for whatever reason (procrastination / life issues / etc).
> Teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students
We've added an extra step to their already overloaded schedules. If they don't do this they're basically encouraging students to cheat this way.
> Translations
You can now easily get a translation with much better accuracy than before (presumably, I'm a monolingual English speaker), but now you aren't talking to any other human beings for this information. This goes for a lot of other knowledge-value work / hobbies too where asking questions is valuable.
Turns out you can have strong opinions about things without it being an issue of morality.
IME, everyone I meet offline has some low-level caution about AI taking their job, but uses AI and is amazed by their capabilities and is glad for this tool.
Most ppl I meet online are strong anti-AI advocates.
I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior.
If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.
I read the article, and at worst it could be called whinging, but at its lowest point it never came across as trying to push a view point on the reader. What am I missing?
> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.
> I accept these companies donât have a viable business model.
Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?
> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.
> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.
> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.
It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?
As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But itâs a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.
If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel that is right.
Obviously there is a spectrum of moral ills, and not all are created equal, but if you truly believe something is abhorent, you can't be a good person and tolerate it in others
Yes, and thatâs my point. Most vegans truly believe that meat equals murder. Yet the vast majority of them will go out for dinner with people they truly deeply believe are (indirect) murderers. This is indeed very difficult for them.
Locking yourself out of society isnât likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.
On the contrary, i think most moral progress (albeit also many social ills) has been wrought through social pressure.
Itâs just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You donât need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.
Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors.
Sometimes I get an impression that it isnât even a freedom of choice, some must perceive themselves as "good people" as a highest imperative. Whatever that means for current century.
I like to view myself as grey person.
Which is why we have jails.
If everyone defects, the system breaks down. Morality is good and it is actually logical - it solves the prisoners dilemma and pushes cooperation instead of defection. It also reduces harm and has lots of other good properties. I feel that how we affect others matters, but even if you're just a sociopath doing the math, defecting is a strategy that burns things down at scale, not a smart one. Tit for tat with forgiveness is not only morally aligned, but also more prosperous in scenarios that aren't just one-off interactions with strangers.
Would you be friend with Goebbels, knowing he has some different stances than you on some subjects?
And of course, ... making the OP an outcast for his opinions. Just like he said.
Or the person, like many of us here, who come from diverse backgrounds working diverse jobs, simply thinks OP is a twat because the post is logically inconsistent and whiny.
Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.
Numerous problems with it, but fundamentally a lot of their objections could apply to any post-internet tech. It seems like they just don't like AI.
Writer should also entertain the possibility that it turns out they just don't like tech, and AI just makes a lot of the negative aspects of tech more obvious.
Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.
Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).
Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them.
That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control.
So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions.
My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature.
What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment.
Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control.
I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes.
If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse.
The risk isn't AI, it's how we choose to use it.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
You are so consumed, with absolute certainty, of the permanent and eternal correctness of your moral position, that you literally say you would rather throw away personal connections to human beings than be triggered by the presence of ideas or things.
Please reconsider. I'm not even going to try to persuade you that you're wrong about AI because it isn't even relevant. The truth is that if you carry out your plan, you will just end up being an incredibly hurtful person towards a lot of folks who probably have no idea why you are abandoning them and now feel isolated, hurt, and confused.
Also, ask yourself how sure you are, that you're going to be right for all time, about AI, which is a brand-new technology. Maybe you know yourself. Your views seem incredibly rigid and perhaps you really will never change your mind no matter what AI becomes. But if you ever have changed your mind about anything ever, again, please consider whether the harmful course of action you are describing is worth the extraordinary harm you seem eager to effectuate on everyone who disagrees.
Honestly I don't know why I bothered typing out of any of this. I doubt the author cares. I just wish people like this author would consider that their words and actions do actual harm to real people. And, by the way, zero harm to the progress of AI. Just hurtful and dumb.
I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.
I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?
There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.
AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
Anyways, people looking for drama will find one
But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.
Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.
Hmm, okay, then...
Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.
Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...
--
Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]
- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?
- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10â15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?
--
[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!
[^2]: Not a typo.
Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it⌠personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc itâs paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it itâs not all bad.
In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I donât see it being possible. Itâs like saying: I donât like cars (and Iâm better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS⌠thereâs absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
cmiiw to think along these lines though.
- AI datacenters are gold-rush rush jobs with interesting things like their own gas turbine generators etc.
- It's not clear that serving the internet needs us to double the amount of datacenter footprint. If anything, a lot of workloads are getting more power and space efficient.
- Most expensive thing is that we're filling them full of GPUs and with RAM tied up to the GPUs. That's infrastructure that we've paid the resource costs for and it's difficult to repurpose to something else.
I do think AI is going to grow a lot, so I'm not sure how much of the buildout will need repurposing. But I do think doubling our datacenter footprint and doing it in environmentally yucky ways will probably have some lasting effects and consume a lot of resources.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, itâs noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the âeverything was better in the old daysâ stage?
As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. Iâd be curious what the authorsâ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?
I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.
Sure it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side.
I totally welcome our new AI overlords.
> What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
Very subtle.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is?
Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too.
Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).
Itâs the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.
LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
Terence Tao is more credible to me than the views OP expresses in this heart felt, well intentioned but outdated essay.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.
I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.
All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.
That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
From https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...:
> *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
imo we've been living out a decade or more of the Doorman Fallacy ( https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy ) where people are just liquid labour with some minimum constraints to distinguish them from chattel, where the ironic effect is everyone gets treated like they are chattel but for these minimum requirements. Maybe this will move the concerns and opinions class to act to conserve some of our cultural capital base?
mostly i am not sympathetic to the author because we are not of the same tribe, but the essential argument that there's something to conserve that we arent with AI is a worthy concern. we should look less at problems and solutions and more upstream of what we want to preserve and still grow.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
This has played out a million different ways throughout history, nothing special about this case, it just happens to be rooted in anxiety about AI.