Have you caught these models violating copyright in responses?

Or are you saying that learning is a violation of copyright?

I think that the creepiness of the tech CEOs that show up in media has a ton to do with this too, as they seem like cartoonish villians.

Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.

Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.

I remember reading about superstitious behavior in pigeons.

You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.

In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.

As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.

So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.

The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.

I have to wonder sometimes if the people of the US will ever realize that their housing shortages are self-inflicted. It seems like a massive number of people have somehow been hypnotized into thinking that building more homes increases home prices.

Right. It's not AI. It's the corporations behavior in relation to AI. But most people have no experience or interaction with AI outside of corporate services or AI features in things that shouldn't have AI or make it worse (like phone support). So in their lived experience all AI sucks and you can't blame 'em for that perception.

But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.

People also hard slop images

Fortunately the complaints about the economy and homeownership are also just folk wisdom that doesn't really reflect reality https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-gene...

The economy, real wages, etc are basically higher than ever (despite idiot Trump's best efforts).

People are mad because being mad is fun and we're all on being mad machines 24/7.

This seems to be a problem limited to specific metros. On the whole, Gen Z is more likely than millennials to be a homeowner at their age. Millennials in turn were more likely than Gen-X to own a home when Boomers were at that age. The idea that living standards and financial milestones have gone down for more recent generations doesn't seem to bear out, this Economist piece digs into detail: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...

Hopefully non-logged in users can at lease see the income-by-age graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=480,quality=10...

I actually completely disagree, and think that AI hate is just going to grow. My take is:

1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).

2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).

3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.

4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.

Axios = Company

Madison Mills = reporter (no control over Axios)

AI wave timeline:

Investors throw money at AI and companies using AI

Company X sees investors throwing $$$ and starts dancing too

Axios (monkey see monkey do)

Future:

Investors stop throwing money then dancing stop.

It's always been this way, the branding changed.

Same happened in the dot-com boom. There was a bunch of folks who were in it because they were genuinely interested in building cool stuff. And then the money got interested, and suddenly there was a wave of scam artists and grifters. That receded (but never entirely went away) when the money bubble burst.

Same. I was convinced software was beautiful by previous generations - and as far as I can tell, it was.

When people started making serious money it attracted all the bros and psychopaths from the finance industry

It's been on the downhill for a while even before the AI wasn't it?

That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.

Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.

Are your tokens earning dollars and do they translate into a sustainable form of income? Honest question. I know people who have been laid off and their answer seems to be "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win". All the while actually paying these AI companies to train on their thoughts or slop or whatever it should be called now.

I think there is some mass confusion happening right now (psychosis even) and things are getting scary.

> Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag.

Why would AI providers benefit from anti-AI propaganda?

> The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich

Are you seriously mulling that as a question?

> People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.

I've had some interesting conversations about the pre-AI slop and how the distinction is often not too meaningful. I mean, on some level /knowing/ that the corporate slop was written by a person kind of loses its meaning when one considers the amount of filtering, rules, rewriting, and so on is involved by a string of people who either don't care about what they write or actively dislike it.

A lot of this stuff often had at least flickers of a human soul behind it. I imagine for a lot of the soaps, hallmark movies, and romance novels this might've made some difference, even if just subconsciously recognizing the author(s) and building up some kind of image around the other by yourself or with others.

I'm reminded of some of the truly awful 'worship' songs I grew up with, and how some of the authors (often of course sticking close to the source material) even had a kind of following. some of these songs were just a little 'too' predictable, but others felt pretty much like they were written by AI, except back then none of us imagined that AI could really do this back then.

Or the pastor I spoke to who was convinced that chatgpt had access to his more personal notes, because as an experiment he made it write a sermon, and it (probably? obviously?) extrapolated from the prompt the more specific theology he followed/ascribed to.

I'm not knocking the value of a sermon or song, even if boring and predictable, or perhaps even when AI-written. they often explicitly /don't/ serve the purpose of being novel or new, but I find it super interesting how these aspects of real life are, to a degree, not too hard to replace with AI.

Thankfully for this pastor, most of his value involved human connection, knowing whoever just married, died, got sick, and having his full humanity on display from the pulpit!

It's simple. AI companies don't have a long term plan besides "sell AI" and "reduce labor costs with AI". Any promises made outside of that are simply them saying whatever they think will help to sell AI.

I'm not so sure "ai" (LLMs) is superior to us. LLMs are actually incapable of being superior, maybe some years down the road some new tech makes my statement mute, but today is not that today.

Lmao what on earth is this crap.

Perhaps you software engineers are in a bubble - people I know from accountants, portfolio managers to mechanical engineers are barely using AI - they use it more to tell jokes.

> AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow

It is going to make human society better. And it already is doing it.

The problem is neither you nor me are a part of the society. The AI bros are.

The question is how to handle it and what do we do with society.

Right now, seems like we are heading directly towards "hoover towns" [1]. The US government has abandoned any notion of protecting or providing for the citizenry.

We got out of hooverville last time through massive government investment into the general public. A "new deal" where the government provided good paying jobs to the unemployed for the public good. Yet, slowly ever since the enactment of those protections, we've been seeing a slow whittling away of the notion of the government protecting the people. Instead, we've become a government that only protects profits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville

Sure, but sentiment is harder to compare. People can't just go burn down a data center so simply. I think if "AI" was just a machine in the field outside, people would be destroying it.

I can't wait for it personally. I'm expecting the backlash against tech to be massive and terrible. It will be well deserved

This. The internet killed high-street retail.

It may not be as big as tech layoffs but my wife negotiated a relocation. We used a broker and a lawyer for the first time. We did consultation with a new set of brokers and lawyers. My wife felt they were not aggressive enough. She negotiated EVERYTHING with the landlord (a very large regional landlord). She got more than what she would get and everything was in her favor.

Not only did she gain $50k more in tenant improvement/free rent/et and other freebies that the brokers/lawers she did not get, but easily saved $10k to paying these "professionals".

I've personally used Codex to reconcile financial data, and met a guy who basically built his own AI inference engine to help him fight a custody battle for his daughter (semantic search over gigabytes of documents).

I'm not saying lawyers and accountants are going to all be out of a job (at the end of the day, they do more than just comb over documents to find the needle in the haystack), but a lot of the manual grunt work can be automated there too.

Artists for one are impacted by AI, teachers are impacted too combined with the whole education system and the job market is really weird in all industries not just tech because all of these factors combined with all others

One can argue that hard labour is the one which isn't impacted but even those dont pay enough to break your body completely over unless you own your business, and even then, to say that AI/Robotics companies are definitely going to or are already trying to position themselves here too.

My point is that a lot of industries feel unsafe right now because of AI, but its just that tech has the most direct impact.

Yes, you are totally correct and I really appreciate this type of comment. I used luddite just because of ease/laziness, but it was not correct at all in hindsight.

I totally agree with all your remarks btw. I think society having lots of skilled tradespeople is a major win for everyone. Yet we as a society seem to be doing everything we can to stifle and destroy a lot of skilled tradework. Much has already died over the last few decades and either will never return, or will take herculean levels of effort to get restarted.

> I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.

Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.

> But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.

Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.

The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.

[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii