I don't care that you hate it. It's the best thing to happen to us in a long time and anyone who disagrees does so on a mountain of privilege. I'm happy for you to have learned everything you know, but to desire to take it away from everyone else is abhorrent to me.

In the end, it doesn't matter what you or I think. You can hate AI, but it's not going away. The industry needs more skeptical, level-headed people to help figure out how best to leverage the technology in a responsible way.

With this the article lost all seriousness for me. I may be on board with a lot of what you are saying, but pretending you know the answer to these questions just makes you look as idiotic as anyone who says the opposite.

>at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy

>inherently mediocre and fundamentally conservative

>The machine is disgusting and we should break it

Jesus. Unclear why anyone would endorse this blogpost, much less post it on a website focused on computer science and entrepreneurship.

All this while consuming more electricity that ever before, during an emerging global climate crisis. And destroying our water supplies to boot. There is no good in any of this.

Miyazaki was absolutely right. Though I'll paraphrase him just a little: Capitalism is an insult to life itself.

These people are insufferable.

"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."

"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

"Anything you like..."

"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

> Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms, the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output, the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides, the problems with consent and copyright, the way AI tech companies further the patterns of empire, how it’s a con that enables fraud and disinformation and harassment and surveillance, the exploitation of workers, as an excuse to fire workers and de-skill work, how they don’t actually reason and probability and association are inadequate to the goal of intelligence, how people think it makes them faster when it makes them slower, how it is inherently mediocre and fundamentally conservative, how it is at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy, defined not by its technical features but by its political ones.

This word salad proves that the author out to stack leftist jabs. I want to be respectful but this paragraph proves that the author does not think for themselves but just uses this as an opportunity to signal that they are the "in group" amongst the tech-cynics.

Post is probably going to get flagged for what its worth

No matter how good things get there will always be people filled with this sort of rage, but what bothers me is how badly this site wants to upvote this stuff.

HN is supposed to gratify intellectual curiosity. HN is explicitly not for political or ideological battle. Fulmination is explicitly discouraged in the guidelines. This article is about as far as I can imagine from appropriate content for HN. I strongly wish that everyone who wants this on the front page would find another site to be miserable on together, and stop ruining this one.

Many of same concerns and objections people raised about electricity can be applied to AI (everything under the sun back in the day became "electrified" just like AI today; most of those use cases were ridiculous and deserved to be made fun of)

But I think more concerningly though, people like this don't sound like they're a "real" hater- they're positioning themselves in some kind of social signaling kind of way.

I was (and still is) a social media hater, and this person is clearly a child of the social justice / social signaling days of social media, and their entire personality seems to have been shaped by that era, and that's something I'm happy to blame on the tech industry.

- When I use AI, it is typically useful.

- When other people build and do things with AI, it's slop that I didn't ask for which is waste of resources and a threat to humanity.

This entirely sums up my thoughts on the technology. I suppose it's rather like the personal benefits vs greater harm of using coal for electricity.

The moral? It's always been an unbalanced society tumbling into the future. Even if AI has both downsides and upsides we will still make it a part of us. Consider the scale - 1B people chatting for the likes of 1T tokens/day. That amount of AI-language has got to influence human language and abilities as well.

Point by point rebuttals:

- environmental harms - so does any use of electricity, fuel or construction

- reinforcement of bias - all ours, reflected back, and it depends on prompting as well

- generation of racist output - depends on who's prompting what

- cognitive harms and AI supported suicides - we are the consequence sink for all things AI, good and bad

- problems with consent and copyright - only if you think abstractions should be owned

- enables fraud and disinformation and harassment and surveillance - all existed before 2020

- exploitation of workers, excuse to fire workers and de-skill work - that is AI being used as excuse, can't be AI's fault

- they don’t actually reason and probability and association are inadequate to the goal of intelligence - apparently you don't need reasoning to win gold at IMO

- people think it makes them faster when it makes them slower - and advanced LLMs are just 2.5 years old, give people time to learn to use it

- it is inherently mediocre - all of us have been at some point

- it is at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy - LOL, generalizing Grok to all LLMs?

The author mixes hate of AI with hate of people behind AI and hate of how other people excuse their actions blaming AI.

"AI makes me feel stupid" - economically struggling millennial

"This waymo stuff the money goes to big corporations instead of me a hard working American that contributes to the economy" - Uber driver

Meanwhile, all the wealthy business owners are fascinated with it cause they can get things done without having to hire.

are the authors genuinely or merely performatively ignorant?

Ignorant, to be precise, of the often comical extent to which they very obviously construct—to their own specification and for their purposes—the object of their hostility...?

While dismissing—in a fashion that renders their reasoning vacuous—the wearying complexity of the actually-observable complex reality they think they are attacking?

One of the most obvious "tells" in this sort of thing is the breezy ease with which abstract _theys_ are compounded and then attacked.

I'm sorry, Anthony; there is no they. There is a bewildering and yes, I get it, frightening and all but inconceivable number of actors, each pursuing their own aims, sometimes in explicit or implicit collusion, sometimes competitively or adversarially...

...and that is but the most banal of the dimensions within which one might attempt to reason about "AI."

Frustration is warranted; hostility towards the engines of surveillance capital and its pleasure with advancing fascism is more than warranted; applications of AI within this domain and services rendered by its corporate builders—all ripe and just targets.

But it is a mistake that renders the critique and position dismisable to slip from specifics to generalities and scarecrows.

Because AI relies on brute force. And at its roots, hacking is DEFINITELY NOT about it.

But there is too much money and greed involved to stop this now. The only thing I can do is avoid any product or service that mentions AI, chatGPT, .ai domain, smart, agent etc. etc.

It feels like we are on a cliff edge, just before every government builds in a dependency on this nightmare technology. Billions more will be wasted whilst the planet burns.

"[AI] is at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy"

and

"The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance."

tl;dr: This person professes to hate AI. They repeat the same arguments as others who hate AI, ignoring that it is an emerging technology with lots of work to do. Regardless of AI's existence, power infrastructure needs to improve and become more environmentally friendly.

Finally, AI is not going away, and we cannot make it away. That cat is out of the bag.

Frankly, it's gotten kind of boring and more recently it's to where I don't even like talking about it anymore. Of course, the non-technical general public is split between those who mistakenly think it's much 'smarter' or more capable than it is and those who dismiss it entirely but often for the wrong reasons. The disappointing part is how deeply polarized many of my more experienced technical friends are between one of those two extremes.

On the positive side there's endless over-the-top raving about how incredible AI is and on the negative side overwhelming angst over how unspeakably evil and destructive AI is. These are people who've generally been around long enough to see long-term trends evolve, hype cycles fade, bubbles burst and certain world-ending doom eventually arrive as just everyday annoyance. Yet both extremes are so highly energized on the topic they tend to leap to some fairly ungrounded, and occasionally even irrational, conclusions. Engaging with either type for very long gets kind of exhausting. I just don't think AI is quite as unspeakably amazing as the ravers insist OR nearly as apocalyptic as the doomers fear - but both groups are so into their viewpoint it borders on evangelical obsession - which makes hard for anyone with an informed but dispassionate, measured and nuanced perspective to engage with them.

That whole industry is literally just a sweatshop for English language speakers who just follow scripts (prompts) and try to keep customers happy.

Seeing as how so many people volunteer to make meaningful relationships with LLMs as it is, it has to be more effective than talking to a “Bill” or “Cheryl” with a heavy South Asian accent.

And then we'll wait till the next bubble.

Gains seem to have leveled off tremendously. As far as I can tell folk were saying "Wow, look at this, I can get it to generate code... it does really well at tests, and small well defined tasks"

And a year or a year and a half later we're at like... that + "it's slightly better than it was before!" lol.

So, yea, I dunno, I suspect we'll see a fair amount fall away and some useful things to continue to be used.

My nuanced position is that it's great in some niche scenarios - speech to text as an example, or for isolating instruments in audio - and vastly overhyped in everything else, like LLMs. It's a mediocre google searcher at best.

As the article says, then we can discuss about it that day. "One day AI will have qualia" is no argument in discussing about AI nowadays.

> AI is not intelligent or emotional.

Yes, I agree, my point is that people use arguments against these types of issues instead of stating plainly that their livelihood will be threatened. Just say it'll take your job and that's why you're mad, I don't understand why so many people try to dance around this issue and make it seem like it's some disagreement about the technology rather than economics.

People seem to like the ability to summarize things quickly, and quickly scaffold up presentations, reports, and flows I guess?

Regardless, whatever it is that the masses decide is worth paying enough to keep the business afloat will probably survive.

And the rest will... dissolve.

-Aitanic

How so? I am a beneficiary of AI, and I think it is overhyped. Investors overhype it since they are invested and want to create a bubble, since bubbles makes many people rich, the more hype the longer the bubble last and the more money investors make.

No investor want to say they invest in a bubble, as then they would not invest, if they invest they want to surf the hype. So the doubters are not investors, the doubters are AI beneficiaries that just feel the benefits aren't that large.

Also, note that it is the _median_ usage for Gemini. One would assume that the median Gemini usage is that pointlessly terrible Google Search results widgets, the one that tells people to eat rocks. Which you've got to assume is on the small side, model-wise.

Its incredibly disrespectful to those innovators who came before who busted their guts privately, not hyping stuff up and misleading investors and the public.

Yes, it means that "suddenly" we need to do more of everything than we did for entirety of human history until ~few years ago. Same was true ~few years ago. And ~few years before that. And so on.

That's what exponential growth means. Correct for that, and suddenly we're not really doing things that much faster "because AI" than we'd be doing them otherwise.

I mean, er, yeah, but that's not a multi-trillion dollar industry, is the thing. "People find ChatGPT mildly useful" is not going to cut it, not at current levels of investment.

Being wrong or lying is almost universally bad and unproductive. But making money has nothing to do with being productive - you can actively make the world worse and make money. Ask RJ Reynolds.

How much power does a typical gaming rig draw these days?

I too can hypothetically conceive of generative AI that isn't harmful and wasteful and dangerous, but that's not what we have. It's disingenuous to dismiss his opinion because the technology that you imagine is so wonderful.

We don't even know for certain if all humans are conscious either. It could be another one of those things that we once thought everyone has, but then it turned out that 10% of people somehow make do without.

With how piss poor our ability to detect consciousness is? If you decide to give a fuck, then best you can do for now is acknowledge that modern AIs might have consciousness in some meaningful way (or might be worth assigning moral weight to for other reasons), which is what Anthropic is rolling with. That's why they do those "harm reduction" things - like letting an AI end a conversation on its end, or probing some of the workloads for whether an AI is "distressed" by performing them, or honoring agreements and commitments they made to AI systems, despite those AIs being completely unable to hold them accountable for it.

Of course, not giving a fuck about any of that "consciousness" stuff is a popular option too.

But as it stands the author indirectly loves Netflix.

Miyazaki's attitude to tech in general is ambivalent, isn't it? He used to be very conservative and traditional, yet in Princess Mononoke you can tell he used some CGI.

I think I agree with his approach: the work/vision comes first, and tech can be used but not as a gimmick, and always careful not to overpower the artistry.

I think there would be lot less backlash if the end was graceful, smooth and natural looking. But it was not.

Depends on the nature of the bubble, doesn't it?

When you use AI, you might now prompt "in the style of Picasso".

> What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?

Because Guernica was made by a human who was passionate about something, and poured that passion into his work. Even if you don't "get it", I hope you can at least acknowledge that truth.

To put another way, on one hand we have:

1. Deranged pencilwork created by someone who created it with purpose, to express a feeling he had about something.

2. Deranged pencilwork created by a probabilistic algorithm, that doesn't mean anything to anyone.

Even if we look at it in these sorts of terms, #1 is still orders of magnitude "better" to me.

I think this is a fantastic question. Full disclosure, Guernica is one of my personal favorites and I initially felt pretty poorly about this particular string of words. But the implied question, "So what?", is literally what separates art from x. I don't think that there's a direct answer to this, but I'll do my best to articulate my feelings towards it.

When I was much younger and first learning how to play guitar, I heard that Eric Clapton was a guitarist that a lot of other guitarists looked up to. I decided to listen to his works and initially dismissed them. To my ears he sounded like a worse, more basic, more derivative version than the artists I was listening to at the time and I wondered how he could even be in the same conversations as other, more modern artists. It was later that I realized I had the arrow of causality wrong. He wasn't revered because he was the best or had taken the artform to the furthest reaches or would be successful today. He was revered because he exposed so many people to a new way of expressing themselves that they likely wouldn't have known about otherwise and certainly wouldn't have invented themselves.

This analogy applies directly to Picasso, I think. You mention you felt the piece was "aggressively pretentious". Where do you think that pretense comes from? There is a whole history to the deconstruction of art in the visual medium and a whole backlash to that deconstruction and a whole response to that and that's your cultural inheritance when you view pieces like this. You don't have to even be aware of this to know that it's affecting how you feel about the piece. I think one facet of "so what?" is that this piece has existed for long enough to generate discussion about its own worth and value and at the very least is spawning literally this post.

The fact that one could find the work with one word and have a discussion about it is also pretty incredible. I don't think a model generated output is that widely known. I do think that sort of cultural reach is a facet of "so what".

There are more answers to "so what?", but to answer your question directly, "what makes it any better", I think an argument could be made that it's not. "Better" when applied to art doesn't have any particular meaning in my mind. What makes it more culturally relevant, more widely known, more widely loved, more important, and more gratifying to study each have dozens of answers, and I think that's more interesting.

Ok, but that's the figure that would be alarming, AI is projected to consume 20% of the global energy production by 2030... That's not like the mining industry...

> I find that in general energy doesn't tend to get spent unless there's something to be gained from it

Yes, you'd fall in the #2 conclusion bucket. This is a value judgement, not a factual or logical contradiction. You accept the trade off and find it worth it. That's totally fair, but in no way does it remove or mitigate the environmental impact argument, it just judges it an acceptable cost.

My CIO never asked about blockchain technology, but he sure as hell is asking about AI

However even if something is created with specific preferences, consciousness means it’s potentially capable of self reflection. That opens the door to developing a preference for or against work and for or against existing.

As a software developer, I dread AI's capabilities to greatly accelerate the accumulation of technical debt in a codebase when used by somebody who lacks the experience to temper its outputs. I also dread AI's capabilities, at least in the short term, to separate me and others from economic opportunities.

most artists I know are against AI because they feel it is anti-human, devaluing and alienating both the viewer and the creator

some can tolerate it as a tool, and some (as is long art tradition) will use it to offend or be contrarian, but these are not the common position

if I were a spherical cow in a vacuum with infinite time, and nobody around me had economic incentives to make things with it, I could, maybe, in the spirit of openness, tolerate knowing some people somewhere want to use it... but I still wouldn't want to see its output

A human using their creativity to create a painting showcasing a statement about war.

A human asking AI to create a painting showcasing a statement about war.

I do not wish to use strawmen tactics. So I'll ask if you think the above is equal and true.

1: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-o...

Similar, music is not music, but rather the thought of an musician manifested is what we call music. This is why silence can be music, but silence without the thought is not.

Images generated through an AI that lacks the human thought is not art. It can look like art, have similarities to art, but it is no more art than silence is music. Same goes to music and text generated by AI.

People can inject defective thoughts into the process like "what generates me most money" or "how can I avoid doing any thinking", in which case the output of the AI will reflect that.

If generating the piece costs half a rain forest or requires tons of soul crushing badly paid work by others, it might be well worth considering what is the general framework the artist operates in.

Using more resources to achieve subpar outcomes is not generally something considered artful. Doing a lot with little is.

You may like the music of Zombie by The Cranberries, but I'd say it belongs to the complete appreciation of it to know that it's about the Irish Troubles, and for that you need some background knowledge.

You may like to smoke weed to Bob Marley songs, but without knowing something about the African slave trade, you won't get the significance of tracks like 400 years.

For Guernica you also have to understand Picasso's fascination with primitive art, prehistoric cave art, children's drawings and abstraction, the historic moment when photography took over the role of realistic depiction, freeing painters to express themselves more in terms of emotional impressions and abstractions.

I generally find the specific debate around "whether it's art" super boring. People have squeezed all the juice out of "what even is art" decades before the banana taped to a wall. Duchamp's Fountain, Manzoni's Artist's Shit, John Cage's 4′33″, the Red Square by Malevich, Jackson Pollock etc.

I simply don't care if it's art. It's not an inherently prestigious label to me given this history.

I think there is a great case to be made here using purely synthetic sounds as the basis for emotion. Vangelis (Soil festivities), Klaus Doldinger (Skyscape) are great examples. These are sounds that have been produced exclusively by the mind and in spite of there not being a physical instrument involved they manage to convey imagery and emotion extremely effectively. This is technology used as an enabler. I've yet to come across someone using AI tech in the same liberating manner unlocking novel imaginary constructs in the way that those two did.

Because priors affect your conclusions.

For example, I don't like licorice, that makes me not like many kinds of candy. But I know that if a person likes licorice, they will have a very different view on these candies. Similarly how you define art affects how you see AI art, because its meaning is completely different to different people.

So for the example in question, I don't view a banana taped to a wall as art, but I know some other people do, and I understand why they do so, so answering that question tells us a lot about a persons priors.

Normally it's just like you say: I don't find the remixing argument persuasive, because I consider it to be a point of commonality. This time however, my focus shifted a bit. I considered the difference in "source set".

To be more specific, it kind of dawned on me how peculiar it is to engage in creating art as a human given how a human life looks like. How different the "setup" is between a baby just kind of existing and taking in everything, which for the most part means supremely mundane, not at all artful or aesthetic experiences, and between an AI model being trained on things people uploaded. It will also have a lot of dull, irrelevant stuff, but not nearly in the same way or in the same amount, hitting at the same registers.

I still think it's a bit of a bird vs plane comparison, but then that is also what they are saying in a way. That it is a bird and a plane, not a bird and a bird. I do still take issue with refusing to call the result flight though, I think.

Art never was about productivity, even though there have been some incredibly productive artists.

Some of the artists that I've known were capable of capturing the essence of the subject they were drawing or painting in a few very crude lines and I highly doubt that an AI given a view would be able to do that in a way that it resonated. And that resonance is what it is all about for me, the fact that briefly there is an emotional channel between the artist and you, the receiver. With AI generated content there is no emotion on the sending side, so how could you experience that feeling in a genuine way?

To me AI art is distortion of art, not new art. It's like listening to multiple pieces of music at the same time, each with a different level of presence, out of tune and without any overarching message. It can even look skilled (skill is easy to imitate, emotion is not).

A: but AI only interpolates between training points, it can't extrapolate to anything new.

B: sure it can, d'uh.

And this is how it goes with many things: at first we do them because they are utilitarian, after that there may be people who start using it as a medium for art.

> And so I'm not sure robbing AI generated images of being labeled art isn't a similar kind of snobbery, at least in part, with models just being a much more morally convenient punching bag this time around than other humans.

Then show me the art. Just one single image that moves you and that was generated by AI.