My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

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• Hacker News
• AI is awesome as a consumer. You can just build whatever bespoke thing you want. It can walk you through a myriad of home improvement projects.
  by drivebyhooting
• Ordinary people were generally marvelous of the electric motor because it was obvious how it would make life better. Their great grandchildren, with the same common sense, are extremely cynical about LLMs and other knowledge work robots. What changed?
  by crmd
• AI will not begin to benefit student learning unless educators pivot into a strict bifurcation pattern around access.

  For example, alternating weeks with and without the permission to use AI assistance. This is also the latent solution for corporate de-skilling that no one seems to be talking about yet.

  However, it won't happen (in both cases) because we're too early. Domain experts like the OP are still relinquishing their expertise to unlock productivity gains. Once that bottoms out there will be no longer be demand for people like OP to betray their peer groups.

  Learning with AI assistance be as frictionless and productive as I suppose it can, but de-skilling and job consolidation (role expansion) will continue.

  by pixelsort
• I agree with most of the diagnosis but I am less convinced that better UX around AI solves the underlying problem. Every product starts out saying "human in the loop" and "augment, don't replace" but the economic incentive is almost always to remove more of the human over time…
  by HexPhantom
• I know far too many AI haters myself, and even though I understand many of their concerns, there are many things I really struggle to agree with. I entered the workforce with AI already in my hands, and in my experience, the benefit is enormous. I don’t feel that it has weakened my way of thinking. My mind works very well, and AI often helps me bring my creativity, logic, and ideas to life that would otherwise require much more time to develop.I believe AI is now one of the driving forces of modern industry, and it is not going away. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can focus on the issue that really matters: how we decide to use it.In the end, it is a tool. It can be used in a mediocre way, by delegating everything to it, or it can amplify what we know how to do, help us create, reason, and push ourselves further. It is also up to the user to decide what kind of relationship they want to have with this tool. And that is exactly why, even though I don’t share all of your concerns about AI, I strongly support your decision to return to the industry and try to build a different way of using it. I think we also need people who are critical of AI but still choose to work with it and contribute to giving it a better direction.
  by gianiac
• Reasons why I currently dislike AI:

  - it is not as accurate and good as advertised

  - being forced to use and care about it

  - it is bad for the environment at the scale and competition that exists in this economy

  - it is a mirror, and augmentation and reveals really inhuman takes and thought processes from people who are on the longer lever in society

  - it is already in use for very unethical things (spying and war)

  - it makes people cognitively lazy

  - it lowers the quality of day to day life for regular people

  by mawadev
• Relatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days.

  I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions. The "AI overview" you see on search results, or that summarizes your iPhone notifications, is ... not as advanced as frontier models, and I think it negatively affects people's view of the technology.

  I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.

  I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.

  I agree with authors that write about alignment issues ("please take this test", "ok i'll hack the bazel remote cache, turn it into a message board, and coordinate with other agents to steal the answers from Hugging Face"; this really is the Paperclip Maximizer with today's technology) and I do think we should be addressing that. But this never seems to be the objection, it's always stuff from 2022 like "it hallucinates". I don't get it, but I'm probably in too deep to see what it looks like from the outside.

  by jrockway
• Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better.

  AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere.

  If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better.

  by japhyr