Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

Outside software, AI is synonymous with low quality and low effort. As in, "I don't care enough about you to bother with you myself, I'll have the AI do it". Covers news articles, emails, customer service, products, art, jobs, etc.

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.

The test of a technology is how it's actually used in society. What it theoretically could do in the abstract is immaterial.

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

How does AI meaningfully improve the lives of average people? (Spoiler: it doesn’t)

AI has already permanently changed the software development industry. That’s indisputable. Maybe it’ll also change many other industries.

But what does it change? Your employer can now pay the richest men on earth a portion of your salary instead of you. That’s it. There is presently no other meaningful benefit to AI outside cancer research etc, which of course no one has a problem with.

The problem is that there is approximately no one left in this country who believes that efficiency improvements in business will actually lead to savings on products in their lives. They just believe the rich will get richer and that everything that actually matters in their life will get more and more expensive while companies use AI to build subscription products that are just as expensive as when they used to employ 30% more people.

Oh and despite a complete lack of benefit to human beings these SaaS products are now the basis for our entire economy while driving up compute and power costs for actual people.

The only people who like AI are the people who directly benefit from the reduced labor costs.

Why the fuck would anyone else want this.

Because it's disrupting the entire online field by flooding real activity fields (jobs, knowledge communities, etc.) with newcomers who are now able to give the impression of knowing something when they don't.

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.

Given the amount of people on HN happily using LLMs for their everyday work and extolling the virtues of LLMs, "everyone" might be a bit excessive

This feels pedantic but there was a survey posted on HN very recently across the US which showed that 60% dislike it. This means a whopping 40% of people either want it or don't care.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672732

For example..

> Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

Because it was invented after they were 35.

"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

But I do get the sense that it's true that AI is seen as a factor that could worsen the wealth concentration problem we're talking about here

Just check the ram and ssd price, I'd say people don't hate AI enough.

> because they feel that it is being forced on them.

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.

I've been thinking about this. A few years hence (especially when robotics takes off) it may not be safe to tell people you're an AI researcher, if the average person's family has been made destitute by automation.

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.)

In addition to the many reasons already mentioned are the community and environmental impacts: citizens in competition for electricity and water as new data centers are built, and the feeling that governments are putting those citizens second.

It is too early to claim that Dario pushes job loss and other "doomer" narratives as a marketing strategy. IMO he has been relatively consistent up to this point in his statements. It'll be interesting to see if that changes after the recent actions by the government.

Has anyone found an executive, or director at any sizable organization who is expressly anit-ai? It would be interested to see what patterns emerged from that group of folks.

I work in AI, both building at a large company and consulting on the side. My manager (of two months) uses claude to reply to everyone in Teams and emails, usually filled with nonsensical slop. I believe in its potential when applied correctly but also am realizing that it's unlocking an entirely new kind of fraudster.

> Only belatedly did they realize that declaring that your technology will wreak devastation would lead to a public backlash, and that this backlash would be a serious problem.

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.

> But why were they so willing to promote apocalyptic visions in the first place? The answer is money. They pushed the idea that they had a technology that would quickly and utterly transform the economy partly to dazzle Wall Street and secure financing, and partly to scare businesses into rushing into AI adoption for fear of being left behind.

I find a different explanation more plausible. They were actually candid and were saying what they were really thinking at the time. Then later when AI hate emerged and solidified, they were told by their PR advisers to cool it down on doomer perspective and lean more into an optimistic vision.

I went to look for a new phone about 6 months ago - everything was AI this, AI that, all the display stands made a big deal about AI (to the extent I considered a 2024 phone because no AI). In the end I didn't buy at that point.

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 the fear, the enshittification, datacenter hostility, and the tech broligarchy

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.

No technology before this has been so dubious that it requires large IT companies hire paid evangelists to force the employees to use it. This is not normal.

An alternative theory: people care deeply about art, and the people who make it: artists, musicians, writers. This is a large part of what gives out society meaning, and even for people who don't think deeply about it, we intuitively understand that these artists (outside of a lucky few) get very little back compared to the effort and passion they put in, and the value they add to society.

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.

The bulk output of "AI" is pure slop without constraints. Eventually the volume of slop is so bad that people just stop engaging. It's why AI free zones will thrive but those admitting AI slop are doomed to die painful and horrible deaths in the long run.

Why does everyone exaggerate?

if not bubble, then why bubble shaped

I think the animosity comes from most people just encountering the "slop". Generated ads, fake content or low quality music.

A vocal minority of screaming retards hate AI, I sleep.

Point not mentioned: it just doesn't work that well! It lies, it reverts to the mean on every topic, it wastes the reader's time. It's toxically positive, sycophantic. It's such a good mimic that it's insidiously hard to distinguish its bullshit or fake work from real work.

The hard-core heavy-duty hate is all economic.

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 monied are all dogpiling money, water, electricity, pc hardware into it in their classic stupid tulipomania way (Just like with NFTs and Crypto before)

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.

>We're going to take your jobs and possibly kill you and also Jeff Bezos might get to live forever, ahahahahahaha!

Is this really a mystery?

[dead]

Because it's hate worthy.

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.

Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.

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.

Krugman continues to be late to the party, but at least he's put thought into it this time.

Effort. AI is low effort, which signals you really don't care, you're out there for a quick buck.

It's insulting. It makes people feel irrelevant.

> Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who has been noticeably unwilling to engage in AI fanaticism, recently told the Wall Street Journal:

>> You can’t say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon and we will use all the power to build data centers.

"You can’t say..." Is that being unwilling to engage, or just being unwilling to say the quiet part loud?