Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.

  - Everyone says it's going to take my job. Are they correct? I don't know, but I'm not excited to roll the dice.

  - It's pricing out consumer computing.

  - It's the final nail in the coffin for the free internet in multiple ways:

    - Websites are blocking anyone with a non-standard browser to attempt to clamp down on bot scraping.
    
    - The web is moving towards denonymization, in part to combat bot traffic.
    
    - Websites and forums themselves are being assaulted by bot traffic, much of it divisive propaganda.

  - It represents an aggressive centralization of power and resources in the hands of people with money and power.

For example, BitTorrent is a great peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol. In principle you could use this for legitimate media distribution, and in fact Rainberry Inc. (a.k.a BitTorrent Inc.) tried to do this for decades and succeeded in some one-off partnerships with legit broadcasters:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/02/sharing-d...

In practice BitTorrent as a protocol is still mainly used for pirated video files, the same as it was 20 years ago. Meanwhile BitTorrent the company was bought by a cryptocurrency startup in 2018 and laid off most of its employees in 2023.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainberry,_Inc.>

Edit: fix link and clarify

For example..

It's exhausting to find a job, it's annoying to have to parse through a plethora of AI generated content for real knowledge, it's becoming increasingly frustrating to build something when people assume you've made it using AI tools, and it's very annoying to see the only things that popup to be stuff like: AI tools listing directories, agentic this and that, AI detectors, AI creators, AI tools created to handle other AI tools, and so on.

I can tell you from observing high schoolers for a week, everybody there was using it, teachers and students alike. Do they like it? I don't know, but they are using it.

The numbers against it aren't as big as the most vocal critics would have you believe.

I think that's what a lot of people are expecting. Several people told me unironically they're becoming plumbers to try and delay the worst. (I think blue collar has a decade or so after white collar.)

They'll probably roll out UBI or a fake jobs program before things get really ugly, but I think the social and psychological adjustment will be more difficult than the economic one. (We already figured out how to send everyone free money.)

Which of course it is for a lot of us.

Definitely, the tech industry has earned this skepticism, it didn't come out of nowhere. Decades of dark patterns, ads crammed down our throats, and now everyone has to use AI for everything? Features nobody asked for or wanted, which their bosses are tracking their usage of?

Aside from the obvious reasons, I am also convinced there's a state-sponsored astroturfing campaign against AI and datacenters on social media. I see dozens of accounts (some of individuals inactive for years before they starting going crazy with anti-AI/datacenter posts) posting the same things with similar or identical wording - not resharing, but creating new images with similar or identical wording.

Many people think this is how things have played out, but I find it hard to believe. I know half these tech execs are hopped up on Ketamine or something, but even that can't make them this disconnected from reality. I mean, fine, "AI will take all the jobs" might appeal to some Capitalists (the smarter ones know how that will work out long term)... but also "AI could destroy the world"?! That is appealing to nobody!

The usual explanation for this is "angling for regulatory capture" but (a) this only hinders US companies, which helps China, which is the real competition, and (b) the more realistic outcome, as Anthropic is finding out, is complete lockdown.

The datacenter backlash was not just a logical outcome a caveman could have predicted, it has actually been happening and growing since 2024... but they still kept saying those things.

It was always terrible marketing and they knew it, but to them it isn't marketing. They feel compelled to say it again and again because they actually believe it.

It's insulting. It makes people feel irrelevant.

And suddenly, here come all these huge, horrible companies that literally steal all the artist's work, by pirating it (which we've all been gaslit into thinking is something illegal but it turns out like so much else, it's only illegal if you're poor), and these huge companies have suddenly automated all this artistic creation, this previously human endeavor of creating meaning and joy and sharing passion. This makes people deeply uncomfortable because we recognize how wrong it is for all of these billionaires and trillionares to be getting ever richer while eating the creative genius of humanity and giving as little as possible back.

On top of that, they're spying on everything we do and feeding it to the ever hungry AI maw to automate every possible job away, and people (rightfully) think this will steal a lot of meaning from human society, converting it via LLMs into a dollar value, which, again, sits in the billionaire's pocket, not yours.

So yes, people are angry about this in a way they weren't angry about e.g. spreadsheets, or cheap international communication. Because it's genuinely different, and people recognize that.

AI is out of the bottle, and we cannot put it back. But equally, we cannot live in a world where it creates trillionares, where everyone is made poorer and poorer while the things that give them meaning get automated away (whether that's art, science, philosophy, mathematics, coding, or anything else).

The only way I can see forward is of this gets treated like a utility, with strict controls on AI companies - training on public data allowed but then the thing you create gets recognized as a public good, and you earn the money back by serving it via an API, but with strict limits on how much you can charge and no ability to arbitrarily lock people out.

I don't see the US achieving this, unfortunately, and it'll probably be looked back on as one of the long list of things that lead to it's downfall.

Just last week finally I had to buy a new phone, and so I went shopping again - this time no AI was mentioned anywhere. Not online, not on the stands in the shops, nowhere. The silence speaks volumes, as they say.

It's also peak "tech hubris". The broader world has largely complained about Silicon Valley's "we know better than you" attitude for a long time, and the push for AI/LLMs is that attitude on steroids.

It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.

The whole leadership of the AI industry, with almost no exceptions, sounds like a bunch of psychopaths who have no qualms about lying and get off on the idea of a populace being oppressed and demoralized by their companies.

It removes jobs without, at least currently, substituting an equal amount of new jobs (and even if it did, they wouldn't apply to the same people who lost theirs.

It serves for spam, public manipulation, and mass surveillance.

It constitutes massive copyright fraud.

It fills the web with slop.

It's added to products despite that users say they don't want it there, and even say they dislike it.

People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into learned helplessness on those things. Nothing can be done. Both parties are bad. The right promotes corrupt oligarchy and regressively transfers wealth upward, the left prevents new home construction (driving real estate costs) and regulates away everything but service industries and white collar jobs that AI is now replacing.

The worst AI hate I've seen comes from artists and creatives. I've found the AI hate in those communities to be white hot bordering on people talking about violence.

My early take, which I think is still valid, is that actual art is very unlikely to be replaced by AI. AI generated visual stuff looks bland, cliche, or has this weird "plastic" look. AI generated prose is boring. AI generated stories are hilarious barrages of tropes played exactly straight, cliche characters, basically just like paint by numbers bad TV writing or even worse. If real artists find ways to use AI, it won't be this way. It'll be as an assistant or they'll get in and hack it and make it do exactly what they want, much like artistic experimental photography.

But I'm only half right, and when I realized this I understood the hate.

AI is not replacing "true art," and it won't even if true artists end up finding ways to use it (like artistic photography etc.). But what it is replacing is what a lot of artists make their money doing: commercial art, making "content," ghostwriting, first-pass editing, graphic design, web design, that kind of thing.

That's not pour-your-soul-into-it capital-A Art, but it's what pays the bills. AI is absolutely decimating the market for that.

So back to my first point: it's all economic.

The management class in corporations are obsessed with it, they are delusional and think they can finally use it achieve their dreams of having no workers. They are forcing their workers to use it somehow. The are also foisting it unasked onto consumers in their products in the most stupid way. just wrecking their products.

And the reality of it is that.. The current crop of LLMs are excellent chatbots; they're very good at fooling a human into believing that they are intelligent.. They're good for shitposting and making silly images.. They have a few other quite situational niche uses, but that's about it.

I'm just pissed off at the stupidity and waste of it all. Like the Easter Islanders, our elites are driving our society straight into the ground.

Is this really a mystery?