Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything A while back, I stopped using Facebook because I just couldn't take it anymore. Just totally sick of it. I'm honestly getting there with AI. At this point, I would prefer to have anything AI related just be blocked at the browser level. |
There are ideas that can deliver VC-sized returns but they depend on a system state different from ours - scaled up energy system, housing market, education system, manufacturing capacity, research capacity, etc etc. Until we unscrew the current status quo, we(USA) will continue limping through these innovations without the capacity to fully utilize them.
Oh and messages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
This all started with zucks obsession with virtual avatars and you can really see this in VR.
Enjoy your newfound freedom and live a real life.
I used to be able to curate my feed and pay attention to people I knew. I could see the photo projects my friends were working on, hear about life updates from past acquaintances, or reach out if someone was having a rough time.
Now, all cohorts, from recent coworkers to childhood friends I made before the first web browser, routinely spew paragraphs of LLM slop to shill a career coaching podcast. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Social networks are only a small part of it. It’s email, mailing lists, billboards, sheets of paper stapled to utility poles, newspaper articles, dentist office phone lines, jigsaw puzzles, home furnishings, homework assigned to grade schoolers, birthday cards and on and on.
It has gone from this cool inter-human knowledge hub and space for creation to a place where everyone tries to sell you something and make the sales pitch unskippable. It’s miserable.
It started getting weird when the full home invasion of Internet-connected nonsense started. I have eyes, I can see there is no milk in the fridge, I don’t need a push notification or glowing circle that says, “May I have your attention, please? Here are five Bezos offers for milk.”
I put up a wall of cheap 3D-printed waterproof enclosures near the local train station with the one in the middle having a handwritten letter from me and a bunch of blank sheets behind it, that asks people to write down knowledge that they think is useful for the rest of the community.
Only rules, no AI-generated content or printouts from websites. If it’s not handwritten or has ads, everyone passing by is allowed to remove and destroy it.
Everything else stays for exactly one week, then it gets removed to make space for something new.
If every enclosure is full, I put a few more up and watch and remove those who stay empty at the end of the week.
Went through 600 sheets of paper so far but people also started putting little hand-drawn artworks and their own colourful paper sheets in by themselves so the cost is more than manageable, as I just walk into the local town hall and take a bunch of paper from their copy stations from time to time.
Every week I go there to remove the letters from people and collect them in folders to make space for new ones. From live advice to cooking recipes with local ingredients, art, poetry, it’s pretty cool to see how many people are getting off the Internet and rather spending time doing this for their local community.
Often when the news are bad and I feel stressed and the next catastrophe is looming I go there with some coffee and watch people look at everything and talk about the stuff put up.
Soon I am running out of wall and will have to look for an extra space.
I simply do not longer believe in sharing valuable knowledge over the Internet as it gets hammered by AI crawlers and then integrated into models and no longer giving credit to the people who created it. So why bother.
My prediction is, that the more (generative) AI is used on the internet, the smaller the world will become.
Most of you will have a miserable life if your livelihood belongs to slaving away for companies relying on being present on the internet, and local knowledge hubs, which are reserved for human knowledge and creativity only, will be the places you meet real people and enjoy sharing knowledge and culture again.
I think AI having the potential to kill the current iteration of the Internet will probably be the best thing it is capable of doing for humanity.
Adapting is what we humans are best at, and I think most humans will adapt away from an internet mostly free of human-first created knowledge and culture. With a bit of luck I’ll live long enough to see if I am right.
AI is the same, but amplified and affecting a lot more people.
So I just recall Web 2.0 era and know that this too, shall pass.
But AI tool in the hands of professionals that care about what they produce is becoming revolutionary. We are doing things we would never have done. Projects I never would have even started I am doing with new enthusiasm. I and the people I work with are using agents to learn new topics so fast. AI makes mistakes all the time, I found myself getting gaslit last week that refreshing my auth token would update my permissions (authentication and authorization are not the same thing)
If you are just looking at the output in images and garbage posts. Yes it is an abomination that must be stopped. But I cannot imagine a world without it now. And for the better.
I'm a person who loves learning but I don't really understand this claim. My brain quickly reaches a saturation point when learning new topics. I need to leave and come back multiple times until I begin to understand, but this seems to me to be a normal part of the process. It's the struggle that forms the connections in my brain.
Being spoon-fed information isn't the same as learning, to me. Are you also using AI to test you on your new knowledge? Does it administer these tests periodically? Or are you just reviewing notes and saying to yourself "I know this now"?
How are you ensuring you've learned anything at all?
Cramming often feels more satisfying, more like you're learning, but actually leads to worse retention. Spaced repetition that includes the struggle of recalling something just at the edge of being forgotten, on the other hand, feels worse but leads to much higher retention.
It's like it distills it for you. I feel like you're thinking of an example like trying to learning operating systems by reading wikipedia articles (i.e. it gives you a high level summary but nothing more).
The way I see it, code says a lot, but it takes time to scroll through it and cmd+click back and forth. But if you just ask the AI "where's x thing happening around this file" it will just point you right to it. So I feel like less cognitive energy is spent dealing with the syntactic quirks of code and more is spent on the essential algorithmic task.
I don't really like using it to summarize natural language written by one author or group, like a paper for example, that just feels like laziness to me.
Most of all I am sick of people being sick of it!
I am an experienced developer, and, if I know what I am doing, then AI tools are an average junior programmer that I can beckon.
I have also dabbled in music creation with AI, first generating the lyrics, and then the music with vocals. Is it good. Nope. Is it average, some might say so. Is it a great use of my time, sure. Like a paid video game.
and it's similar with trying to watch Youtube on TV (Smarttube), too much AI slop though try to be picky when choosing suspicious videos
The parallel is the same. It's a revolutionary technology, and it's being used everywhere because it's NEW. Fast forward 10 years, it'll be everywhere and nobody will complain about "aw shucks, this appliance uses electricity! I miss the good old days of manually cranking it"
And I think you’re right that AI will give a lot of people the push they’ve needed to get back to real life, even if at the same time it pulls a majority of people further into the matrix
(2) Worked for a startup trying to teach RNNs to read clinical notes; people typecast me as the idealist but I would have preferred the cynical business plan of a product for medical offices to "rebill" insurance to maximize revenue, like the value is clear and nobody dies if it screws up.
(3) Worked at another startup that was training CNNs to read all sorts of documents and datasets you see in corporate environments. That summer I had a methodology I called "predictive evaluation" and a sheaf full of notes that proved that variations of the system we had wasn't really going to work (but they did get it to work enough for one at least one customer) and there was that meeting when we talked about BERT and I said "that seems to avoid all my objections" but the team was through with developing new models and my methodology would have underestimated what BERT could do because it didn't give credit for getting the right answer by the wrong method! Turned out transformers also fixed problems those RNNs had too!
(I'm going to guess you mean generative AI such as image/video/text generation used to create slop on Facebook, but I really wish posts like this would clarify.)
> Everyone seems to have their own personal definition of acceptable AI use. If you Vibecode an entire app, it's because you are lazy and unskilled. But use AI for code review and writing tests? You are smart and efficient.
> You could use AI to remove photo backgrounds or clean up artifacts, that's just good editing. But generating an image for your blog post? You are stealing from hardworking artists. You are a fraud! You probably use AI as a writing assistant like a monster. But using it to generate documentation from your code is indispensable.
Couple with that the frequent press about “AI is going to replace your job” and the public image problem is pretty bad.
AI replacing jobs is a good thing. I don't know why people want to keep doing stupid jobs that even a machine can do. As for their income, they should vote for politicians that give them benefits rather than take them away.
I am sure there were people for a few decades that complained that horses were no longer in demand, but these people are now extinct, and the AI doomers will be too.
I love all computer technology except printers.
Gimme more - looking forward to further leaps forward in AL and LLMs - the party has just started.
Am I the only one that wants to print on dot-matrix printers again? Maybe find a copy of The Print Shop (Broderbund). It could just be nostalgia kicking in.
Even the top post on HN about ChatGPT’s image generation is full of a bunch of comments just saying “wow this is epic”, “I can make so many mangas with this”, etc. Or a post about a new model where people are saying bland stuff like “this doesn’t write Typescript as well as Nut43-2.1-Max”. Compare those to a post about language design, for instance, and you’d see a lot more interesting discussion and opinions.
Just my opinion though. It seems like the more interesting topics in AI are related to its divisiveness, and even that is getting super old after years of it going on.
What we see today is stuff of sci-fi. The amazing and deep stuff Asimov and many others wrote about.
Here's to reading HN projected through the lens of manga comic strips sometime after we solve the GPU shortage..
The linear function do not work any more - we'll all deal with AI on some level, handwritten programs would be like assembly programs, there will be some, but not many.
But everyone is currently focused on the second derivative - using AI to further AI stuff - that's a valid goal but not in of itself, AI is just a tool, a tool that gets better is still a tool. It still needs to build something other than itself.
First derivative is where the money is. Let me grab this tool and do something useful/fun with it. Thanks for the fierce competition to build me the best tool in the mean time.
Like adding erosion to this hydrology simulator that I felt too complex a few years ago: https://aperocky.com/hydrosim
I was making a point that saying "I hate AI" is intellectually lazy. The discourse here can be a whole lot better if people put more effort into clarity.
I want Hacker News to be a better place for technically sophisticated conversations than most of Reddit.
Fugazi as fuck
Or generative AI that was used to find 272 vulnerabilities that were fixed in Firefox 150 this week: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer...
Fixing 272 FF vulnerabilities, compared to the nuking of the web and everything, what someone here called invasion of the body snatchers, is like a bottle of water in exchange for boiling all oceans and making rain fall stop forever. It's that meaningless and trivial in my eyes. We would have had bug fixes anyway, we could have coded anyway. The destruction, and "just" of society and communication and thought, not even talking about the goons who make bank with this stuff, is on a whole new level, and I'd say of a new quality compared to previous iterations of mass society ratcheting up to make people smaller and more alienated. This isn't the newspaper or the radio or TV or the internet, it's all of those and then some, and the worst parts mostly it seems.
We don't need anyone with half an idea to be able to make an "indie" game (not very independent when you first need to suck up everything any human created and put on the web, honestly, this makes the greediest AAA companies look like honest workers) or a "Hollywood level movie" in 5 minutes. Nobody has time to play/watch any of that crap.
The product isn't interesting. That a human made it is, because then I can think what of it I can or can't do. If it's just some artifact shat out by the collective human creativity mushed around until the output is nice, it's just in the way. The web is on the path to become a park full of turds, and you can search for a blade of grass all day.
AI companies may have no moats, but humans will make moats. Just some areas and communities where no "AI" stuff, regardless of hair splitting, is allowed. And then we'll see how pushy the proponents get, if it's really just about some cool new tool or rather some sort of harness everybody gets herded into, with some trinkets like all the slop and yet another "app" not even the maker actually uses.
I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but businesses need to chill. AI seems to amplify existing bottlenecks within organisations, so we should probably tread carefully when it comes to pushing the tech. Fix the organisational problems first and hedge our bets.
I wonder if anyone reading this was around during the dot-com bubble because maybe it felt the same...
In contrast, a lot of companies are just wedging AI into things where ordinary people don't want or benefit from it anywhere near the level needed to actually pay for it, especially with unreliability being an unsolved problem—the amount you'd pay for something to, say, summarize boring business documents goes down considerably when you have to closely read the original looking for errors and omissions and scrutinize any response to make sure it's not critically flawed.
There's also a weird difference in enthusiasm based on the societal impacts: the web let you do things you couldn't do before, but a lot of AI tools and services are really oriented at your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss saying they can layoff half of your department and still get more work out of the survivors. There's some cool stuff, yes, but unlike the mood during the dotcom era we now have a prominent tone of dread about deprofessionalization and larger concerns about how businesses will even work if a significant chunk of customers are pushed out of stable employment.
I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.
But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.
For a time.
But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....
Slapping AI on everything is easy in comparison. And mentioning AI to investors makes them drop pants.
There’s something uninspiring about a machine thats supposed to “do the hard things for you” so to speak. I like using my mind and understanding things deeply.
Sure you could say that “managing the AI” can be deeply understood in a way but it’s just not exciting.
I would rather spend 2 hours working on a problem, fully thinking through all the approaches and design considerations, than have an LLM write some code and be done in 30 minutes.
That's just a lot more fun for me.
I still use LLMs for faster, focused, searches that cater the results to my specific needs; but I'd still rather build stuff with my own hands.
Maybe have AI Tuesdays, where you only post AI crap every Tuesday?
Nowadays, either it is something with an outstanding presentation like copyparty, or it's all just AI and AI serving schlock.
Apparently "on-device AI models" are a thing. And are downloaded separately after the install of Chrome.
Deeply frustrating on a mobile connection.
Step 2: insert reference to AI
Still a lot of overlap with running a datacenter of ASICs and a datacenter of GPUs, but both are significant capital investments.
After watching the GPT images release video, it reenforced my skepticism that society will adapt. Then I thought about AI analysis of people's movements in public and realized that governments already capture everything, and now will be able to use infinite AI surveillance agents to watch all things all the time.
Any disobedience or crime (but really only against the government and gentry) can be instantly investigated by asking AI to analyze the behavior of all people and vehicles in the days prior to and after the incident. That's if they can't identify you immediately at the time of the crime.
When the time comes that civilian disorder is required to change the behavior of government, it will be impossible.
AI is the destruction of individual freedom. It is the destruction of citizens' ability to rebel against power.
We would be far better off without it.
[1] https://inv.thepixora.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
youtube version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
Having infinite, instantaneous, amoral agents of the state analyzing video for patterns - some of which humans can't immediately notice - will revolutionize government oppression.
And just because NK can already do oppression with a heavy hand doesn't mean western countries won't up their game with more subtlety.
Personally I find AI great and where I can , everything is AI enhanced
- Coding / Software dev (obvious one)
- Health ... been super useful as I recently had a thyroidectomy, it's given me a lot of information the drs didn't and also spotted a mistake my dr made in post surgery symptoms. I maintain my own set of .md files documenting all medical things now.
- Shopping. Super useful though still has a way to go, but relative to google I tend to use the AI results more often.
- Random problems... Insanely useful!
- Fact Checking, pretty good for the most. But you have to fact check your fact checking.
- Market Research, surprisingly good
- Philosophy, really good and useful
So basically anything.
I have had the opposite experience, philosophy questions tending to show the various chatbots at their most irrational and confabulatory.
Before AI, when someone showed you a presentation or an Excel sheet, even if it was complete horseshit that they had made up, they knew what was in it: they knew more about it than you, by definition.
Now, not so much; people output things they know nothing about, and when they show it to you they are discovering it just as you are.
This is novel, and discomforting.
I do not dislike AI. It has potential to change and improve the human condition. With that being said, it has its downsides with workforce displacement being at the top of the list, for me at least. Unemployment, however, has been prevalent in the US for many decades, mostly due to political maneuvering of previous politicians. AI has just made things a bit more difficult for the workforce, especially the recent generations who were already dealing with unemployment due to unmarketable degrees from colleges. I am not ashamed to say that, though I've been in tech for years, I am one of those statistics, unfortunately.
To fix this, AI companies should refocus their goals to account for the displacement of human roles as they continue to improve AIs. They should start doing that sooner rather than later.
The reality is that AI already does things better than some humans ever could. From what some individuals have been telling me, in education, for example, AI is already disrupting the classrooms. Teachers are feeling the AI-burn in the already declining education sector.
Though, I see a decline in human creativity and influence due to AI, I myself have used it to learn certain OS-related concepts or tweaks that would have normally taken me months to figure out had I focused solely on google searches, reddit threads and similar.
If I could do more, I would but I am limited by the lack of better, powerful hardware with the price being what they are.
It's a good thing then, that corporations have such a good reputation for never externalizing the costs their products inflict on society & the planet.
Perhaps an overhaul of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, Business Judgment Rule, and any other Antitrust Protections, that harm citizens without destroying the fabric of society is in order.
Please note that while the, above, protections are substantial, corporations are still subject to various regulations, lawsuits, and legal challenges. However, they represent a significant legal advantage compared to individuals.
FYI: I personally am poor as mud and use local LLMs and Ollama to do most AI-related endeavors due to the same reasons you mentioned, including the above research so do not misinterpret my comments.
I remember being frustrated at every company claiming to be "innovative" in a past job search.
So, basically: just bear with us a little bit longer and then drop all computer usage (this will include every tech which blinks).
And it's only going to get worse. Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace? I keep waiting for the backlash, for people to get sick of the plastic sheen on everything, but they conveyor belt just keeps moving. Maybe I'm just turning into my parents griping about all the weird music videos on MTV? =P
I don’t think so. Some societies are racing to embrace mass surveillance and abuse of civil rights. Pointing this out and complaining about it is not “hate” and not reserved for old people only. :)
At this point I am certain even the most pro AI people on this site would like a bit more variety. The saddest part is that I’ve had to turn to Reddit to get a bit more colour to my media diet.
There's a LOT going for "AI" and language models in general, but the general population only sees the tip where people post obvious AI slop "art" and screenshot ChatGPT answers on actual questions.
Most Americans are using AI but are sick and tired of hearing about it (2 points, 12 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47717956
I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era (322 points, 23 days ago, 240 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571279
I am leaving the AI party after one drink (121 points, 25 days ago, 130 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545030
Is anybody else bored of talking about AI? (746 points, 28 days ago, 527 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47508745
I'm Sick of This AI Shit [video] (48 points, 2 months ago, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086392
Ask HN: AI Depression (56 points, 2 months ago, 28 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47001833
I am just sooo sick of AI prediction content, let's kill it already (74 points, 5 months ago, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45982542
'Attention is all you need' coauthor says he's 'sick' of transformers (432 points, 6 months ago, 224 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690840
Ask HN: Is anyone else sick of AI splattered code (89 points, 7 months ago, 84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45278819
AI is ruining everything.
- Write a new top 40 song no talent required
- Write a business email, a school paper, etc & no talent required
- Design a logo, a website, an app, a billboard, etc and no talent required.
AI is the best thing to happen to humanity as it mimics & steals humanity for a few pie holes and us the majority does nothing to stop it!
Now that anyone can generate a halfway decent pop song at the snap of the finger leads to one of three outcomes. We all just listen to our own interactive stations and have no shared culture, pressure is put on industry to differentiate with a higher quality product, the technology is democratizing and unlocks a new generation of creatives who are able to work with it creating an amplified output.
LLM's are fast at applying information, but thinking deeply, they do not.
I love LLM's, because now I can focus more on the creative and thinking deep aspect, and leave most of the typing and stack overflow browsing to the LLM.
Your parents could afford a house, have kids etc etc at a far younger age but now you are single with no kids and choosing food or rent or power. You spin the wheel! Lucky! You get to eat.
Progress!
So can any other idiot. And we only need so many of them.
Like I had a connector made for service X. Needed one for Y and Z, all use the same basic authentication scheme, but slight differences on where they want the bits set at.
That used to be a week-long project easily with me going through the docs for each service, maybe copy-pasting something from service X and modifying the bits by hand.
Now I can just go "look at projects/service-x-api, now do that but for Service Y in projects/service-y-api" to an agent, tab away and come back to a 90-100% working thing. It went through the API documentation by itself, looked up some blog posts on the undocumented crap they added in January that broke the official flow and made it work.
Meanwhile I could do something with actual impact, helped other people learn stuff and wrote internal guidelines.
I know that AI has some different characteristics than those technologies, but my point is that I don’t think your issue is that does the hard things for you… there has to be something else going on.
> do the hard things for you
The only people advocating for that are the same kind of people which were pitching the cloud as a solution for your hosting needs.
Ime the sweet spot for development with LLMs is to figure out what you need to do and then do that through AI. Yes, it'll still make some decisions there, but did you really get satisfaction from the decisions of eg what to call a class before? At last I didn't.
You can of course try to offload everything to the LLM and not tell it what to do, but only specify what it should enable (spec driven), but at that point youre gambling wherever the output will work and the project becomes unmaintainable - which may be fine too in certain scenarios, that's just pretty rare in a business context
To be fair your response seems somewhat revealing of your own situation.
> CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) errors on Wi-Fi indicate that data frames were corrupted during transmission, often caused by high electromagnetic interference (EMI), physical layer issues, or faulty hardware. They cause packet loss, slow speeds, and intermittent connectivity. Common solutions include replacing cables, reducing interference, updating drivers, and adjusting radio power
This is all well and good except: read the prompt carefully. It never actually says what CRC errors are. This is the average AI user: literally work on, build, and fix things without the slightest clue about what it is you're actually working on.
He makes >6 figures lol
Honestly, quite a tragedy for many. Myself, I have to be constantly fighting against this to slow myself down
But I understand that many people don't do that and just finish their task with AI and then don't do anything anymore.
Schools are not publishing houses for homework assignments. Struggling with the homework is the process training the student.
Was
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BIRD/
This felt a lot like the various companies which got a lot of attention for taking an existing business concept, adding “on the internet”, and cratering when it became obvious they lacked a viable business.
I’d say the likelihood of that is about as likely as the Communists dream of revolution.
There are two societies. The one you exist in, and the one that the people crafting this kind of legislation. It’s harmful to your society, but beneficial to theirs.
Only a complete psycho doesn't copy-paste code when doing something thats 90% repetitive.
Ironically our AI PR review has caught a bunch of those during unrelated commits :D
On the other hand, I worked for a startup selling product information management software to large retailers, and was about as non dot-com as you could get. When the bubble burst, all the funding disappeared for all tech companies, not just the dot-com ones, so we were also all out of a job. Which was not fun.
It was watching all the potential being squandered and the internet basically being relegated to click farming and selling people crap they don't need.
All the really cool stuff seems to have died with the bubble...
You sound like my doctor! : )
I'm not one of those, my brain doesn't give me any more dopamine whether I spent a long time doing a thing or took a shortcut. I don't even get dopamine from completing the task, I just get a list of more things that need to be done.
"I doubt, therefore I think, I think, therefore I am" -- if I no longer think, what's left? Biomass? Why us then.. why not goo, or just more parking space?