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- Hacker News
- I hate smart phones. But guess what. I own one and so does everyone I know. So there you have it.
- This just reads like a poor attempt at convincing themselves that they didn't become what they hate.
I hate AI and I work on an AI project. I use it only where there is no viable alternative and where it is safe and sensible, which means it's just another tool, not some sort of oracle used to supposedly solve everything. That makes me not hate AI in the context of this project.
by iLoveOncall - When I tell friends or family I just got a job in AI, they look at me with sympathy and disgust, as if I had told them I have gonorrhea. Nobody says "congratulations."by ogou
- Weird contrast. Everyone uninvolved with tech I know in real life either doesn't care about AI or thinks it is neat.by OroPla
- Dropped to page four on HN:
+20 points, 2 hours ago, 41 comments
Sudden drop visible here: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49338139
by Barbing - Thats because it’s flame bait; there no actual discussion going on, just people shouting.
- I feel like I fall into the neutral camp for the current round of AI bots. I've seen less-capable people churn out text/documents that aren't really better or more informative than their human level slop, except for more voluminous. So I guess that goes in the slightly negative column. But not a huge negative, since it just needs to be mostly ignored, like their previous human content. It is mostly a bit insulting to generate this slop. If I wanted to know what the chat bot has to say about something, I'd ask it myself. There is more low-effort slop on YouTube to wade through, but that probably means I should engage in something more productive than YouTube. Does that count as a positive or negative? The current crop of LLMs make meme generation easier. Again, is that a positive or negative? I'm not a professional computer programmer so churning out reams of code doesn't really excite me. Most of the questions I ask the bot are apparently too hard for them to answer correctly. Like I was wondering about the modulus of elasticity of "low-stretch" synthetic fiber ropes vs steel-wire cables. And it seems like it couldn't give me a straight answer. Like I just want the data using the same/consistent units so I can compare. Data center build-out/expansion isn't something I fear. There was some boring AI-generated art on the wall of a beach rental house I went to recently. It is something I wouldn't generally even notice, but one of my children looked closely, and sure enough there were oddly shaped sea shells and other artifacts. Again, luke-warm to that. Did some corporate artist lose a commission on some stock image art? I guess I could feel a little bit bad about that. I wouldn't have thought the rental was worse if they just had a blank wall.by Jblx2
- 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.
- It walks my retired parents through their home projects like the project is a labyrinth. Spewing reams and reams of nonsense at them, but their memories are short enough (and their trust high enough) that they follow it aimlessly until they lose interest. For the most part, they wander around close enough to reality to be harmless, but they rarely ever land on “success” until it suggests hiring a professional. At least it gives them something to do.by ultrarunner
- It’s useful for DIY, but definitely not great. One has to carefully double-check everything; there’s no unit-tests to save your butt.
It can help out with understanding tools, workflows, materials, etc but doesn’t actually understands what it’s writing about and is prone to over-engineering, making critical mistakes or just replying with nonsense (for example swapping dimensions, recommending a completely inappropriate procedure, the wrong tool, etc).
This is all with Opus and Sol. Paying 22€ per month for that is a bit pricy for what one gets in return.
by blub - > 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.
I hear AI is especially awesome in domains you personally don't understand.
by palmotea - 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
- >What changed?
Motors, electric or otherwise, made it so you can jump in a car, or a bus and drive you and your friends to the movies or on a holiday and go out and see the world. LLMs make it so people end up like delusional zombies talking to a screen.
Nothing has changed about people, they had common sense then and they have common sense now and they recognize when you try to sell them something useful that makes the physical world and their social situation better and when you want to sell them something out of dystopian sci-fi novels.
by Barrin92 - Electric motors didn't fill the world with slop.by bronson
- Electric motors empower you, and are available to almost anyone. Trillion-dollar AI firms sitting like a dragon's hoard of state-of-the art models and hardware disempower you.
That's the difference.
---
People who were disempowered by motors weren't exactly thrilled about them, either, but they were a minority underclass.
by vkou - Well, for a start, electric motors worked properly and didn’t generate infinite amounts of unreadable crap.by rsynnott
- I don't think your premise is true. Remember John Henry, worried that the steam engine would put him out of a job drilling holes in rocks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)
Ludditism has a long history, and they made the exact same arguments about job loss in the 1800s as today.
by Legend2440 - The electric motor was accepted only because horses and mules couldn’t protest. Every technological advancement throughout history that displaces humans has had massive pushback. AI is no different.by paxys
- Not all new technology is made equal and can't be compared as such. The electric motor was a new technology we now know did indeed pan out, but there are a string of others which never did and are forgotten about when talking about this. More recently, you could point to NFT's and crypto, both of which people also compared to things like the electric motor.
Whether or not LLM's become an electric motor or an NFT, or something in between, only time will tell
by bodge5000 - I disagree that ordinary people marveled at electric motors and saw their potential. Electric motors were seen as a toy for decades following their invention in 1834, and required industry to completely re-design its approach before they were used in more than 5% of factories. Even then the big shift to electric from steam in industry - almost a century later - was more due to economic necessity than better technology: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40673694
I think the same cycle is playing out with LLMs - the general public is somewhere between indifferent and actively hostile to them, as they have been with every new technology. Reconfiguring businesses and society to use them to their full potential - and benefits to society - will take years, if not decades.
by garethsprice - 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
- 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 - I'm curious what bad experience is regular people have with AI. For me it basically makes everything better. I use it probably a hundred times a day and struggle to think about interaction where I walk away wishing it It wasn't involved.
I listen to AI generated audiobooks on the way to work. It makes my job easier and find data or papers or emails for me. On the way home I can have a Back in forth conversation about history. At home at helps me with my personal projects or come up with recipes to make dinner. How are regular people using it that is so awful?
A lot of people are spun up about it, but it almost always seems to be about distant concerns, not their personal experience.
- I don't disagree but I don't think this one is a reason we should ever restrict or condemn a technology
> it is a mirror, and augmentation and reveals really inhuman takes and thought processes from people who are on the longer lever in society
When someone uses their keyboard to search for CSAM or write hate speech we can't blame the keyboard instead of the individual
by nylonstrung - 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 - This is a very relatable comment. I think it's demoralizing to see common objections to AI, it feels to me like we failed and haven't done our communication job. I'm always temped to go, "Yes, but there's worse!"by manux
- I think you might be slightly "too deep" in the sense that you mostly encounter AI when someone has deliberately chosen an expensive, capable model to solve a real problemby HexPhantom
- >I don't find it logical that people are mad we helped invent the turbo whip 9000. Don't they know whips have always existed??
You're so right
- > But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions....
> 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.
Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.
Yes, data centers "existed forever," but compared to a hyper-scalar AI datacenter; they were small, used far less electricity, and their generators were used for backup, not primary power.
Yes, there were computer programs that could "mess up your life," but they were narrow in function so not such an existential threat. I'm sure you understand the difference between a phone tree and Claude Mythos.
And maybe develop a little empathy? You said "people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many." Why is that? Do you think part of that might be that people have gotten the chair kicked out from under them. And along comes AI, which has been promised to be a bigger chair-kicker than anyone's ever seen?
> 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.
Oh, but why would people be so "illogical" to be mad at such a thing as AI? It's so hard to understand, right? [Insert Upton Sinclair quote here]
by palmotea - 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