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Two thoughts:
A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow.
B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?
This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.
At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.
We could do without them.
This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activities like streaming music and video, and general social media.
Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.
I also hate it because:
1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it.
2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.
Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.
It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the typical ways in which they would normally act like assholes.
Company goes under and they just start something else.
There's no real consequences. This is a club, not a market.
It's a cute thought that big tech wants our help to shape artificial intelligence.
I think it was partly also PR. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for mindshare and Dalle-E, Sora, Nano banana, etc generated a lot of media buzz for Google and OpenAI at various points in time.
To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create?
That latter seems to have aged quite well.
AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily.
Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
Huh? In what universe did that happen?
You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass.
There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
Can you? Maybe if you can afford an AI powered social media bot farm. What a great technology.
Yes there is
It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.
Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.
I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.
Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.
I feel the same way about AI. Does it make me more productive? Sure. Does it make me suddenly hate the career I used to love? Definitely. Every day I'm told to move faster and to love this cool thing that takes away the math and low-level problem solving that I used to get so much enjoyment from and instead makes me a manager of a chatbot. Any attempt at moderation in the presence of upper management is met with clear threats to my job. Even better, my company (and so many others) are finding unlimited budgets for AI while putting off any sort of raises for the humans involved.
No. Or rather, I wish it happened very differently, and much slower. The rush to make every new city and development "car-friendly" had negative consequences that will last centuries. That's why my city isn't walkable and has awful public transportation, and biking is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the insidious environmental and health effects!
Of course cars have their place in efficient modern transportation, but we would live in a much better world if their development and integration had been slower, more carefully considered, and more criticized.
I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot.
I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same.
/I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice
So, it would be entirely correct for someone back then to hate the changes and say it will destroy most of journalism. Because it did.
This is completely false; compare reporting on the initiation of the Iraq war vs the recent Iran war. Before the internet the flow of information was more centralized and heavily controlled.
Horse carriage drivers -> Cars
Print media -> Internet
Drafting -> CAD
Music -> Electronic music, DAWs
Film photography -> Digital
Traditional film special effects -> CGI
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars)
In each of these cases, there was a subset of people that did the previous thing that hated on the people doing the new thing. They had every opportunity to adapt, but chose not to. They thumb their nose at it as everyone else jumps on board.
This time around, it isn't just practitioners hating on it. The internet has enabled a bunch of cling-on performative folks that aren't even artists, engineers, etc. that love to dog pile onto the hate.
It's really funny because I've shot lots of films over the last few decades. When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made. Not only will a lot of them proudly tell you they've never made anything, they'll then double down. They'll say that if they were to hypothetically make something (which they won't), it would be using the old tools and that I should be ashamed of myself for using AI. Despite the fact that I have years of experience using the tools they're describing to me.
I don't even get it. Not even putting in the effort to try, yet telling me that my enormous wealth of experience is wrong and that I'm unethical and my creative output is "worthless".
It's some kind of sick comedy.
They're saying that your contribution is negative. Even if their contribution is zero, zero is still better than negative.
Certainly seems like an apt comparison! Personally I think we should just ban AI if it’s going to primarily facilitate the production of slop-shit like TikTok.
And despite the touts insisting on how useful and amazing these tools are, I have yet to see anything of true value be produced. Slop-shit vomit factories indeed.
I think you're badly missing the point.
It is true that car drivers replaced horse carriage drivers and car mechanics replaced the people who took care of horses and what not.
But in the horse carriage vs car metaphor with AI, people are not the drivers and blacksmiths, people are the horses.
How many horses do you see around lately?
If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)
Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…
We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)
We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired.
This is what we keep being told.
So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.
https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.
How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.
At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.
Agreed.
20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products
what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies
Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.
The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind".
But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it.
The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.
You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.
I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.
Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.
If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.
Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.
Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement.
When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.
I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.
If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."
This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you.
And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.
If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.
How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools?
Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming.
I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.
Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".
If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution.
The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.
Code generation is a very silly way of using LLMs. They're not even good at it.
Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.
https://xkcd.com/1170/
What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest.
- Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship"
- Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities
- The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general
- Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match
Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.
I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?
I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.
Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.
People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.
Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity.
I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away.
Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either.
We will pay people.
Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.
Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.
People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.
1. Have sex
2. Break things
3. Play videogames
Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.
Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.
It's Jared Diamond. That's who says agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.
I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.
I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.
All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.
Nothing new here.
What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.
I am not sure why or if this is a new pattern.
It's repeatedly stated that while it's still improving, AI is coming for the entry level positions and the juniors first. How many times have you seen AI described as "like an eager junior"?
Why would that surprise you? They aren't stupid. They can see that people are trying to position AI as a way to replace them.
My guess is a lot of those grumpy old guys, on this site at least, are sitting pretty with large bank accounts. So they don't need to worry about their jobs anymore. They could retire safely tomorrow if they wanted. So they don't care.
Just another instance of the older generation trying to loot the future from the younger.
It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable.
I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the same passion, but won't tell because the time isn't ripe yet.
I don't think people truly hate AI. What they hate is how it's used. That's a very different thing and it's a human problem not a technology problem.
I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.
As has been pointed out over and over: the time consuming part of programming was never typing code into the computer, it was understanding the problem and the logic behind the code. Using an LLM only addresses the fast and easy part of programming, not the hard parts.
Join Mastodon if this is what you're looking for. Your people are here!
Buying into the fear is how you railroad yourself long-term. Using it while maintaining a healthy skepticism around the more radical claims means not being blindsided long-term.
Now as far as hating the turbo-zealots who smugly try to shove it down your throat in an attempt to protect their bags...
Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.
If AI becomes as powerful as some fear/hope, productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living. Costs for housing, healthcare, education will collapse, and there is nothing to worry about.
This article somehow tries to straddle both positions, that AI is fundamentally flawed and can never really accomplish useful work yet we should be angry and fearful.
Schmidt, by all means, is welcome to board the Good Ship Bubble-pop, but I think a lot of these grads are happy to instead watch from the viewing stand and wave goodbye.
I think his notion that AI is fait accompli is one of the (many) things being rejected.
What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.
I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions.
This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should be in the bottom left, if the users want it to be in the top right, you put it there.
So consider this QA feedback for the technology. How do you make people not feel this way about it? Go do that.
No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.
Googlers/Xooglers will recall the "my various houses" quip at TGIF some years ago which memegen had a field day with.
Also his multiple events where he brought in Kissinger to have "fireside chats" for Googlers to watch/attend.
In fact his "father knows best" attitude ties directly in with his Kissinger fixation: this realpolitik "practical" vision of a world of inevitable powerful forces that you just have to learn to ride with .. which is just really a skin over "might makes right" under another name. Kissinger was explicitly so, and Schmidt admired him for it. Who cares about million horrifically killed in Cambodia if America is stronger for it?
It's also not honestly all that far from the "Effective Altruism" stuff, too: some powerful person comes up with a system of "pragmatic" and utilitarian justifications for the forces-that-already-are and makes it sound like a programme-for-betterment when it's really just a method for their own further enrichment and ego satisfaction.
Many of us legitimately boo this. Not because we're naive. Or stupid. But because our own sense of agency in the world and democratic ethics means we see agency for collectives of people which work along broad and participatory lines. And because we "naively" believe in justice and maybe a vague Kantian notion of ethics which tries to treat other humans as ends in themselves.
Y'know. So-called basic enlightenment, modernist values.
The "inevitable AI" stuff is just an icing on an overall cake. Standing in front of a bunch of young people who still have energy and spirit and the ability to shape the world and telling them that the best way to shape the future is to accept the form that it's already taking and ride-along and profit is next level douchebaggery, even from Schmidt.
(I also have to muse out loud that the specific vile form Google has taken in the second decade of its existence relates to this same mentality. The Google of the founder's letter at IPO sounds nothing like the ... thing ... that exists now, and this seems to have everything to do with just yielding to what-is instead of making what-can-be)
(1) The proponents would just CHILL THE F OUT. If the technology is so fantastic, and the things you're building with it so amazing, then surely that will speak for itself in due time? Why do you need to sound like a cult leader on cocaine all the time? It reminds me of proponents of cryptocurrencies. My eyes and ears are bleeding – the more you talk, the more I wanna avoid your technology.
(2) The companies involved would respect IP.
(3) Regulators would empower ordinary people to have some redress when their lives are affected by AI-powered decisions. (The flawed EU AI Act is a decent start.)
(4) Regulators would ensure that actors in the AI space pay the cost of the negative externalities they impose on everyone.
(5) See 1. I'm so tired.
I think what'd be a stronger point is talking about centralization of the quality models. Modern AI tools are inherently centralized around huge shared infrastructure that gives enormous leverage (== capacity for abuse) to those owning the infrastructure. This is true even if you have strong competition among several players: each of them would converge on some business model and majority of users would not be bothered with long-term consequences if they receive very tangible short-term value.
The tooling is amazing, amount of productivity we unlock is fantastic and it's getting better by the day. But we need to watch out for collateral damage too. The future is somewhere there, but we can steer it towards being more or less hazardous.
I'm fine with people not liking the technology, but the number of death threats, rude comments ("your mother didn't use the coat hanger well enough"), and literal stalking and doxxing I've received from some of these rabidly anti-AI people is appalling.
Whatever compels people to throw paint onto fine art or to block traffic for hours (including emergency vehicles and people just trying to get home) is the same bug a lot of these anti-AI griefers have.
I take great joys when luminaries in animation, illustration, game development, etc. announce that they're using AI tools and that they enjoy them. It's one of my sweetest pleasures after enduring the anti-AI outrage day in and day out for years.
The person above believes that in a year, or 3 years, or 10 years that they will remain an “operator” of the AI, and that their creativity will be amplified at the expense of the dumb luddites who will be left in the dust. Very common in tech, more disappointing in the arts. This is incorrect - we will in short order on the current trajectory see cognitive “dark factories” announced by hyperscalers or labs that produce an infinite stream of content, or software, or anything else and rapidly outcompete all human endeavor. To some this is Human Progress, to me it’s a dark age.
Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.
My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.
The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.
The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.
Yes, media production is not fun. And that's what we as humans value in art - the labor. Easy things don't impress us. And by sticking to the default, easy option, with barely any good reason to embrace the suck and learn the difficult tools and processes, I can only see decline.
The comment section was full of AI-generated edits to this image which exaggerated it or changed the setting in various creative ways - making his leg even longer, making his leg extend over a giant chasm, adding a bench behind him so he was performing a Bulgarian split squat. I giggled my way through the comments.
This form of humor - of being able to take human in-jokes and run with them - was not possible before artificial intelligence, and it was very funny! Memes are about to get so much more varied and funny as the effort requirement drops. We're nowhere near the effort ceiling in terms of making great memes, most people just simply do not have the time, resources or patience to actualise their mind's eye. It reminded me of exactly the kind of dumb joke and rehashing that made YTPs so special in the first place. I don't know if this is high art, but it is art, and I don't think YTPs were a particularly special form of comedy outside of our rose-tinted memories of childhood.
There's still the capacity for human labor and uniqueness to be embedded in AI-generated media - only the first breaths of low-quality algoslop lacked that. Expression and mimetics will change, and I think children born today will get to enjoy richer and funnier content than we did now that they are unshackled from GMod stop motion.
I think it's more of the case that labor is correlated with uniqueness. And I think uniqueness is closer to what people are truly looking for in art.
However, the moment som anti-AI person comes in, they immediately want to go scorched earth. I just wished they'd use even half this energy for something more impactful.
This is such a comical take. There is going to be more demand, not less.
And hypothetically, if they did kill off the labor market, they did it in the wrong country. Everyone here owns guns.
Work will be fine.
Every time. Shake an AI optimist and you find an AI skeptic.
This article doesn't hate AI - it hates capitalism - which is a completely different argument, the underlying system was broken already, AI has just excasperated some of the concerns. Things like awful SEO + low effort art were already happening beforehand, they're just become far easier.
And maybe a big problem is that AI = ChatGPT for the vast majority of people, including the person who wrote this artcle.
This article specifically cites things like the Commonwealth Prize - a prize that if you look at historically, wasn't exactly an example of brilliant prose. Surely that's far more of a inditement on the quality of judging for a prize if it can be won by poor writing.
A lot of the issues cited within this article just seem hollow, as they're issues that were pervasive before ChatGPT. AI isn't a panacea, but hating a technology because bad people use it feels reductionist.
I think a far bigger problem is that the majority of the population doesn't have good knowledge of AI or Software in general, including CEOs. I'd love to see journalists that have a good understanding of the actual technology.
1) is an impossible and unproductive attitude, and
2) fails to recognize the important contribution to evolution, genetic diversity, and our immune systems that viruses introduced, not to mention the possible beneficial applications that could exist by understanding it.
Rejecting something without nuance makes you more vulnerable down the road because it prevents you from building an effective immunity. Engaging with it is the only productive way to mitigate its downsides and promote its benefits.
I'm absolutley not saying don't critise AI - but a robust criticism built up with understanding is a far sharper critique than a shallow rejection
Are local LLM models also within this hate sphere? What about fully open source vision models? That's what makes an article like this feel hollow - it's just someone talking about vibes.
Or to quote the article:
" But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. "
That's why I think this article is a criticism of neoliberal capitalism rather than anything else. If it wasn't AI, it would be robotics, if it wasn't robotics, it would be Quantum. But i'd like to see better substance in articles on this site rather than just a dislike of robots.
Source: https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...
I don't think your source substantiates that.
From your source:
ICE
Somewhat negative: 9%
Very negative: 47%
AI
Somewhat negative: 24%
Very negative: 22%
* A majority of Americans consider the risk of AI to society high, a minority consider the benefits high
* A majority are more concerned than excited about AI
* Americans feel strongly that it’s important to be able to tell if pictures, videos or text were made by AI, but are not confident in their ability to do so
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
It seems almost universally reviled in creative fields, and the use I mostly see from ordinary people is more along the lines of natural language searches with Gemini.
AI fans are a bubble within the bubble of technology enthusiasts. It's hardly even universally liked among software engineers.
really?
I feel like that is what the hate needs to be directed towards. Same thing with crypto. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with the technology itself. It’s that we are letting these scammers become the face of it
It is when the foundation of the training set for the technology is predicated on stolen or exploited labor.
This kind of behaviour would need to be name-and-shamed and preferably some sort of industry blacklist for bad behaviour.
Add to this that if ~6B people are using the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage), and ChatGPT only has almost a billion users (and is the largest player in the space), then I’d argue that LLM-users are in fact the minority.
My view is AI is becoming a poster-child for the increasing wealth disparity. When people are negative on AI it's not just the technology but the entire idea around it. It's simply cool to hate AI and that's going to be a hard hill to overcome, I think.
A lot of people can hate the existence and most of the consequences of something yet use it, sparingly or addictively
People can hate impact of the car centric societies and its impact on the climate yet use a car and find it convenient when not overused.
Social medias is another example. A lot of people agree for the most part it didn't make our society better yet they are addicted to doomscroll on instagram or tiktok.
People can use chatgpt to get a picture of them in Myasaki style yet hate that AI can be used to get rid of jobs. Even at developers level, some people might find AI useful in some areas but hate vibecoding and AI slop.
I don't know how many times do these people need to be taught that their little bubble of terminally online folx is not "everyone". twice is not enough, apparently.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955
>6. A growing share of U.S. workers say at least some of their work is done with AI. That share has risen from 16% in 2024 to 21% in a September 2025 survey.
>8. Younger adults are more likely than older Americans to be aware of and use AI.
so, uh, thanks for proving my point?
also, I don't live in the US (thank G-d!), and we don't have that particular kulturkampf here. it is as foreign to use as your plastic straw debates.
what is this a reference to?
I understand the sentiment but I don't think it's useful to take a directly antagonistic stance, especially when it's a losing battle.
For those who feel this way, our best hope is to keep searching for how we can have a world that values human effort and care, even after AI does everything it's proclaimed to do.
We can't declare the world a lost cause and relegate ourselves to only hating. We need to do what we've always done: roll with it.