The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.

  - Everyone says it's going to take my job. Are they correct? I don't know, but I'm not excited to roll the dice.

  - It's pricing out consumer computing.

  - It's the final nail in the coffin for the free internet in multiple ways:

    - Websites are blocking anyone with a non-standard browser to attempt to clamp down on bot scraping.
    
    - The web is moving towards denonymization, in part to combat bot traffic.
    
    - Websites and forums themselves are being assaulted by bot traffic, much of it divisive propaganda.

  - It represents an aggressive centralization of power and resources in the hands of people with money and power.

For example, BitTorrent is a great peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol. In principle you could use this for legitimate media distribution, and in fact Rainberry Inc. (a.k.a BitTorrent Inc.) tried to do this for decades and succeeded in some one-off partnerships with legit broadcasters:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/02/sharing-d...

In practice BitTorrent as a protocol is still mainly used for pirated video files, the same as it was 20 years ago. Meanwhile BitTorrent the company was bought by a cryptocurrency startup in 2018 and laid off most of its employees in 2023.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainberry,_Inc.>

Edit: fix link and clarify

For example..

I can tell you from observing high schoolers for a week, everybody there was using it, teachers and students alike. Do they like it? I don't know, but they are using it.

The numbers against it aren't as big as the most vocal critics would have you believe.

It removes jobs without, at least currently, substituting an equal amount of new jobs (and even if it did, they wouldn't apply to the same people who lost theirs.

It serves for spam, public manipulation, and mass surveillance.

It constitutes massive copyright fraud.

It fills the web with slop.

It's added to products despite that users say they don't want it there, and even say they dislike it.

It's also peak "tech hubris". The broader world has largely complained about Silicon Valley's "we know better than you" attitude for a long time, and the push for AI/LLMs is that attitude on steroids.

Just last week finally I had to buy a new phone, and so I went shopping again - this time no AI was mentioned anywhere. Not online, not on the stands in the shops, nowhere. The silence speaks volumes, as they say.

People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into learned helplessness on those things. Nothing can be done. Both parties are bad. The right promotes corrupt oligarchy and regressively transfers wealth upward, the left prevents new home construction (driving real estate costs) and regulates away everything but service industries and white collar jobs that AI is now replacing.

The worst AI hate I've seen comes from artists and creatives. I've found the AI hate in those communities to be white hot bordering on people talking about violence.

My early take, which I think is still valid, is that actual art is very unlikely to be replaced by AI. AI generated visual stuff looks bland, cliche, or has this weird "plastic" look. AI generated prose is boring. AI generated stories are hilarious barrages of tropes played exactly straight, cliche characters, basically just like paint by numbers bad TV writing or even worse. If real artists find ways to use AI, it won't be this way. It'll be as an assistant or they'll get in and hack it and make it do exactly what they want, much like artistic experimental photography.

But I'm only half right, and when I realized this I understood the hate.

AI is not replacing "true art," and it won't even if true artists end up finding ways to use it (like artistic photography etc.). But what it is replacing is what a lot of artists make their money doing: commercial art, making "content," ghostwriting, first-pass editing, graphic design, web design, that kind of thing.

That's not pour-your-soul-into-it capital-A Art, but it's what pays the bills. AI is absolutely decimating the market for that.

So back to my first point: it's all economic.

And suddenly, here come all these huge, horrible companies that literally steal all the artist's work, by pirating it (which we've all been gaslit into thinking is something illegal but it turns out like so much else, it's only illegal if you're poor), and these huge companies have suddenly automated all this artistic creation, this previously human endeavor of creating meaning and joy and sharing passion. This makes people deeply uncomfortable because we recognize how wrong it is for all of these billionaires and trillionares to be getting ever richer while eating the creative genius of humanity and giving as little as possible back.

On top of that, they're spying on everything we do and feeding it to the ever hungry AI maw to automate every possible job away, and people (rightfully) think this will steal a lot of meaning from human society, converting it via LLMs into a dollar value, which, again, sits in the billionaire's pocket, not yours.

So yes, people are angry about this in a way they weren't angry about e.g. spreadsheets, or cheap international communication. Because it's genuinely different, and people recognize that.

AI is out of the bottle, and we cannot put it back. But equally, we cannot live in a world where it creates trillionares, where everyone is made poorer and poorer while the things that give them meaning get automated away (whether that's art, science, philosophy, mathematics, coding, or anything else).

The only way I can see forward is of this gets treated like a utility, with strict controls on AI companies - training on public data allowed but then the thing you create gets recognized as a public good, and you earn the money back by serving it via an API, but with strict limits on how much you can charge and no ability to arbitrarily lock people out.

I don't see the US achieving this, unfortunately, and it'll probably be looked back on as one of the long list of things that lead to it's downfall.

The management class in corporations are obsessed with it, they are delusional and think they can finally use it achieve their dreams of having no workers. They are forcing their workers to use it somehow. The are also foisting it unasked onto consumers in their products in the most stupid way. just wrecking their products.

And the reality of it is that.. The current crop of LLMs are excellent chatbots; they're very good at fooling a human into believing that they are intelligent.. They're good for shitposting and making silly images.. They have a few other quite situational niche uses, but that's about it.

I'm just pissed off at the stupidity and waste of it all. Like the Easter Islanders, our elites are driving our society straight into the ground.

Is this really a mystery?

For those either outside computer culture, or those within who might view "craft" as virtue, automating that craft is an affront.

Right now, the "automators" (pro-AI) folks seem to be pushing that culture onto the "crafters" and naturally getting pushback.

- The first data point Pew presents is ~50% of Americans use Ai chat bots

- The second data point shows 25% of those using it is for fun and entertainment (1:8 overall)

- 1/4 of Americans use it daily

Krugman lost me when he said "Ai is dishonest" as if it has intent. He makes too much rage bait these days.

The inconvenient reality of most "creative" work that AI has excelled at supplanting is that it already is, and has been, exactly what people accuse AI to be doing to the form: pure commercial churn, meant solely to occupy temporary space, occasionally brilliant, mostly by accident, but nearly always produced lazily, insincerely, and without pride by people who are not paid enough to care and would rather be working on anything else. AI accelerates human mediocrity not because it is inherently mediocre by nature but because most people, and the things they produce, are. And I very squarely place the bulk of all my own creative efforts and accomplishments within that category too.

That seems more likely your own sentiments, rather than an plausible explanation as to why most people have feelings on this issue.

I'm not saying that this isn't the main reason for some people (for example artists fearful about the technology) or that it doesn't come up in conversation in some niches--young educated people from the West who are terminally online.

But is it really likely to be a true root cause of broad concern across society?

And I think this is also reflected in a lot of AI-generated art. Yes, it is fascinating to a degree and it "looks" like art, but it doesn't "feel" like art. It's heartless. It's soulless. And I say that as someone who doesn't even believe in a soul.

Is it unfair and does it suck that creatives aren't getting paid? Yes. But this is nothing new and I don't know how I feel that they deserve special compensation when people work their entire lives for pennies to support their families. It is though the artist is thought of as superior because "creativity" but other jobs are seen as lesser. I don't find the same uproar on HN when those jobs were shit and have been. It's when it touches us, the creatives, that we care. I don't feel that way.

If you want to put your heart into something, the output is what you created, artists have often not worried about compensation or recognition because often they don't get it. You have to do it because you want to, and nothing has changed from that perspective.

This is IMO one of the factors that people who want us to be China hawks have missed; there isn't a huge industry of Chinese thought leaders being obnoxious in English on English-dominated social media. While the US powerful thought leaders like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and (to a much lesser extent) Larry Ellison all own social networks which they use constantly to beef with the general public.

Yes, there's too much hype, and forcing the use of it does no one any good. And for sure a lot of that demand detached from results, and this means the demand will ebb. But I don't think this is like the dot-com bubble, it's more like the OPEC oil embargoing the 70s where soaring prices detached from results led to a collapse in demand that lasted a long while.