Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-everyone-hate-ai

by megacorp • 27 days ago

89 147 27 days ago

paulkrugman.substack.com

mrhottakes• 27 days ago

Krugman continues to be late to the party, but at least he's put thought into it this time.

voidUpdate2• 27 days ago

Given the amount of people on HN happily using LLMs for their everyday work and extolling the virtues of LLMs, "everyone" might be a bit excessive

jplusequalt3• 27 days ago

HN is a poor representation of the average American.

getnormality• 27 days ago

So is Paul Krugman

orangedog3• 27 days ago

Did a recent survey posted to HN not show that 60% of people dislike it? Which means 40% either like it or don't care. That's not far from average and is a long way from everybody.

baby_souffle• 27 days ago

So the title should have used "most people" then?

JimDabell• 27 days ago

And the average American is a poor representation of everyone. The title reads “Why does everyone hate AI?” but repeatedly references surveys of Americans, not “everyone”.

Americans are outliers; the rest of the world has a much more favourable view of AI.

AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the U.S.

— https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-optimism-asia/

U.S. Workers Are More Wary of AI Than Their Global Peers.

— https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/what-leaders-should-...

Majorities of Americans have pessimistic views toward the impact of AI on internet disinformation and the job market, outpacing most of the 32 countries surveyed in the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026. Americans were also the most likely to feel AI will make their country’s economy worse. Not every country is pessimistic about AI. Americans clearly are.

— https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/comparing-us-and-global-attitude...

everyone2• 27 days ago

There's certainly a sizeable % of silicon valley morons on HN.

snootypoot• 27 days ago

you can use a tool while still hating the villains in openai, anthropic, nvidia, and so on who are ruining our lives and hobbies.

voidUpdate2• 27 days ago

How much do you really hate a company if you're still going to give them money regularly to use their products?

feverzsj2• 27 days ago

HN is like the core PR platform for AI companies. Still, you can see lots of real human beings against AI here. So, I'd say most human on HN are against AI.

headcanon• 27 days ago

I think AI optimism is an easier jump for those already immersed in computer culture, or at least the subset of that culture who view automation as a virtue.

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.

jplusequalt3• 27 days ago

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

I've said this before, but generative AI proponents are walking into creative spaces with their slop and expecting to be treated as equals despite not sharing any of the same experiences or values; effectively they're trying to redefine what craft is for the original group.

Obviously this is unpopular.

zombot• 27 days ago

the subset of that culture who view automation as a virtue.

Correction: Shitty automation. You have to do an unreal amount of micromanagement to force the output quality of LLMs up.

verdverm6• 27 days ago

The same Pew poll had some interesting data points Krugman left out

- 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.

queenkjuul6• 27 days ago

"regularly gives you a completely bogus answer while loudly and confidently asserting it's true" might be behavior that convinces you a person is dishonest. Is it really that bad of a description if AI does the same?

saratogacx2• 27 days ago

English really doesn't have a good way of broadly saying "lack of a trait" that isn't "adverse to a trait". In coding we have to have specific terms for lack thereof that is distinct from "vale of zero of".

Discourse, especially around things like AI could benefit from having a term like nullhonest to enforce it is a lack of honesty as an associated concept instead of having zero honesty.

seanmcdirmid• 27 days ago

The anti-AI crowd is incredibly vested in letting you know that they hate AI, so it feels like, for example, "everyone hates AI" because they are pretty vocal about it. This phenomenon is a prime example of the false consensus effect, which is further amplified by availability cascade and vocal minority dynamics.

I personally like AI, but I'm not very vocal about it. I'm too busy using AI to do things.

esperent2• 27 days ago

An alternative theory: people care deeply about art, and the people who make it: artists, musicians, writers. This is a large part of what gives out society meaning, and even for people who don't think deeply about it, we intuitively understand that these artists (outside of a lucky few) get very little back compared to the effort and passion they put in, and the value they add to society.

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.

steve19772• 27 days ago

Also, art is about emotion and empathy. AI does not feel. It can imitate feelings, it can say "I'm sorry" but it won't feel sorry.

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.

AnimalMuppet• 27 days ago

Yeah. There's nobody there. I can't hear a human voice when I read it. It talks like a corporation, not like a human.

pjc507• 27 days ago

That, and the people doing this cheered it on obnoxiously on social media.

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.

orangedog3• 27 days ago

I have a friend that argues this a lot an while I have done creative stuff, I just don't intuitively feel it. I've seen and heard very creative generated stuff.

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.

neutronicus3• 27 days ago

The more cynical way to put it is "artists are cool and people want to suck up to them".

throwaway-11-1• 27 days ago

I don’t get this reasoning, are you saying if other people have to struggle than everyone should? I think art is different in that it’s a medium for connecting feelings from one person to another via an outward expression. Sure there’s a couple artist who use ai and achieve similar outcomes but 99% of ai slop is premised that art is simply an artifact to view, totally detached from inspiration and talent

msabalau• 27 days ago

The essay lays out a wide range of reasons why normal people reasonably fear that their OWN lives are going to get worse, but your assumption is that what they really care about is the lives of artists, despite the fact that you admit that they understand they have always lived in a world where nearly all artists get very little back compared to their efforts?

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?

esperent2• 27 days ago

No, they don't care about the lives of individual artists. They care about art, passion, creativity and the interplay of these with human culture. They also care about growing inequality, and they fear potential loss of their careers, both financially and in terms of the meaning it gives their lives.

TylerE• 27 days ago

Seems mostly like slacktivism to me. The people yelling it the loudest are the ones who won't actually show up at a friends bar gig and pay a $5 cover.

jdw64• 27 days ago

But I do get the sense that it's true that AI is seen as a factor that could worsen the wealth concentration problem we're talking about here

seemaze• 27 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672732

For example..

bogwog• 27 days ago

That's just illegal anticompetitive behavior from memory manufacturers, and incompetent/corrupt/senile government officials not enforcing laws. It's as bad as it's ever been, but it's not new, and I don't think it's actually about LLMs specifically.

Even if prices were normal, there would still be plenty of reasons to hate LLMs, AI companies, and their products.

nancyminusone• 27 days ago

Outside software, AI is synonymous with low quality and low effort. As in, "I don't care enough about you to bother with you myself, I'll have the AI do it". Covers news articles, emails, customer service, products, art, jobs, etc.

The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.

treespace8• 27 days ago

Even then when using AI just for myself I limit it to building tools, looking for errors. But when it comes to full blown generation, I just don't like what it makes.

leviliebvin• 27 days ago

Within software too.

donatj• 27 days ago

At AIs absolute best (rarely) it builds software like a very competent 9-5er. It's fine, it works, it's largely inoffensive.

It never does anything interesting or inspired. It never gets halfway into building something and then questions the entire premise of your app. It's automated milquetoast.

api5• 27 days ago

Much like self-driving cars being better than drunk, incompetent, or texting human drivers, AI software is generally better than the garbage churned out by code monkeys who don't care or cheap lowest bidder outsourcers.

It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code, but that requires a hand-crafting expert human engineer and takes a long time.

I predict that the latter will be reserved for the highest value, longest lived, or special (high performance, high security) parts of systems.

danlugo92• 27 days ago

We must be using different AI.

Ever since Claude Opus 4.7 it's been helping me greatly ship around 3x to 5x faster, and it's good code if I tell it to follow my existing code's structures. Otherwise you have to create .md guideline files and it works.

It's not perfect, but again, 3x to 5x (!!!)

pjc507• 27 days ago

Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.

That doesn't give you good taste, but .. for yer basic line of business or enterprise app, expectations were already low, and most websites have user-hostile design written into the requirements, so the damage isn't too bad.

I do think we've yet to see what the worst case for government contractor software project + vibe coding is. The benchmark is the Canadian gun registry https://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=1949 "In what may be the worst budget overrun in history, the costs to implement a registry of firearms balloons from $2M to $860M". Now add token spend to that.

hannasanarion3• 27 days ago

This is a big part of it. When you spent less time making something than you expect consumers to spend watching it, the message it sends is an insult.

Doubly so if the product also has quality problems inherent in AI art, video, music, not only does it communicate "your attention is not worth my time" but also "your attention is not worth putting in effort to keep".

spwa4• 27 days ago

But it's easy to avoid by paying for stuff, yet people are very unwilling to do that ... so what's the solution?

marcosdumay• 27 days ago

The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.

The actual quality of the AI output is what created that reputation.

arw0n• 27 days ago

I would argue a different case: When AI is noticeable, it is obvious the person doesn't care enough to bother with you.

I'm a heavy user of AI, but it has not changed the amount of time I invest in certain things, rather, I think it has unequivocally raised its quality. In some cases it has also raised the ceiling at how good I can do things, so I'm investing more time, effort and creativity now.

For example: I'm currently working on a workshop on AI security. This is obviously time boxed by all my other obligations, and I can spend maybe 60 hours to prepare it, hopefully in a quality that my captive listeners don't have to suffer.

The newest models provide me with at least 3 major benefits:

- I have merciless feedback and criticism always available. A lot of it I might disagree with, but I'm quick to dismiss. Same with ideas. If 9/10 ideas are bad, but I'm able to dismiss them quickly, I got one good idea quicker than I can take a shower.

- I can research much more broadly by querying LLMs than just consulting Google et al. A lot of interesting minor breaches, blog posts, or forum discussions I would have missed without letting Claude and Gemini run deep research sessions.

- I can quickly generate fictional scenarios and examples. In that workshop I would like to go through some scenarios on risks of using AI Coding Agents. Creating those scenarios in the past would have cost me days, and now it is a matter of an hour or two.

My coding, writing and general life-planning has equally benefited from LLMs. I've successfully planned a vacation with Claude while on the flight to that vacation, and I've not had to fix a major bug in my software in 3 months. I'm not moving a lot faster, but I'm moving a lot more deliberately.

Ferret7446• 27 days ago

This is inverse survivorship bias.

People notice low quality AI slop, but they don't notice high quality AI output. So they associate AI with low quality.

somewhereoutth• 27 days ago

I went to look for a new phone about 6 months ago - everything was AI this, AI that, all the display stands made a big deal about AI (to the extent I considered a 2024 phone because no AI). In the end I didn't buy at that point.

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.

dude2507112• 27 days ago

Things I had never asked for in a phone:

1) Increasingly more sophisticated cameras.

2) Fake slimness with protruding lenses.

3) Removing headphone jack.

4) Adding AI.

Gigachad• 27 days ago

For the average person cameras and battery life is what sells phones. Everything else has basically been solved long ago.

queenkjuul6• 27 days ago

I'm quite chuffed to have a sophisticated camera. The rest? Agreed

keyringlight• 27 days ago

For what it's worth, my ASUS motherboard from 2017 has their overclocking utility branded as "AI suite 3" (implying there were 2 before). I think having a buzzword to slap on products that fits the latest trend is a checkbox for whoever is marketing these, whether or not it fits any textbook definition of that term.

saratogacx2• 27 days ago

Asus's AI Suite has been around a lot longer than that. My 2014 Motherboard has the same software, it came on a CD with the board. it was sold as a utility for continual performance, power, and noise/airflow tuning, nothing really like AI is sold as a feature today.

stanac• 27 days ago

Just last week finally I had to buy a new phone ... this time no AI was mentioned anywhere

It's not surprising given that "Sixty percent of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48569278

catigula• 27 days ago

We're going to take your jobs and possibly kill you and also Jeff Bezos might get to live forever, ahahahahahaha!

Is this really a mystery?

bariumbitmap• 27 days ago

The test of a technology is how it's actually used in society. What it theoretically could do in the abstract is immaterial.

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

everyone2• 27 days ago

The monied are all dogpiling money, water, electricity, pc hardware into it in their classic stupid tulipomania way (Just like with NFTs and Crypto before)

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.

parasubvert• 27 days ago

Except this isn't like tulips or NFTs or Crypto; AI is actually useful (far beyond being a chatbot), and has real supply & demand, vs. a being pure speculative investment.

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.

hannasanarion3• 27 days ago

Why is it not like the dot-com bubble? The dot-com bubble is the most direct analogue. It is a genuinely useful technology that people are genuinely willing to pay lots of money for.

Crypto and NFTs were *speculative* bubbles, the assets had no inherent value whatsoever, people bought exclusively because they hoped to sell to a bigger fool later on.

Dot-com and AI are *tech* bubbles. The new technology is transforming a lot and growing fast and people are buying in in incredible numbers. But every technological adoption is an S curve, with an exponential phase followed by a logarithmic phase where it asymptotically levels off.

The tech bubble forms during the exponential phase. As long as we are in the exponential phase, it is mathematically impossible to guess where the ceiling will be based on the trend alone, so any bet is justifiable. The crash comes when adoption inflects and growth slows and we all learn where the curve will level off. The losers in the bubble are the people who made bets on the ceiling being higher than where it actually lands, and people who made more conservative bets come out basically untouched.

The outcome is dark fiber, or like we'll probably have in a few years, dark data centers. Infrastructure built by bankrupt firms who made big bets to get ready to service demand that is never going to come. But that infrastructure can be repurposed (the glut of bandwidth left by the Dark Fiber networks of 2001 basically enabled skype and voip).

feverzsj2• 27 days ago

Just check the ram and ssd price, I'd say people don't hate AI enough.

bojan• 27 days ago

Wait until those prices start propagating to mass consumer products.

coldtea3• 27 days ago

"until"? They already do.

pjc507• 27 days ago

This has arrived everywhere except Apple products now. The Steam Machine is just the latest example.

orangedog3• 27 days ago

This feels pedantic but there was a survey posted on HN very recently across the US which showed that 60% dislike it. This means a whopping 40% of people either want it or don't care.

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.

pjc507• 27 days ago

I suspect you'll get similar results on the subject of high schoolers and social media: everyone uses it, quite a lot of them are unhappy with the outcome, but realize that you can't afford to not play the game.

Why wouldn't you use the cheat-at-homework machine?

otikik• 27 days ago

People can use something and still not like it.

boogieknite• 27 days ago

exactly. id be quite surprised if 60% of the US doesn't prefer days off to work days but we still gotta go to our jobs to pay rent

neutronicus3• 27 days ago

A high-school teacher I'm friends with observed that her students all use ChatGPT, but will also scold her if they observe her using it, which she does, to save time.

dd8601fn• 27 days ago

Part of me wishes it didn’t exist (again).

Part of me likes having an easy mode button for so many things.

But all of me knows I can’t be the one person who can’t leverage it.

hannasanarion3• 27 days ago

People use things they dislike and believe to be bad for society all the time.

It has been a majority opinion that social media is a net negative for society since, what, 2016? But Facebook and Twitter didn't vanish that year, or in any of the years since, despite ever increasing shares of people believing they are harming us. Tumblr and Reddit users have been calling their respective forums "this hell-site" since around 2014, but that didn't make them go away. "Doomscrolling" has been in dictionaries since 2020.

This isn't some crazy concept, it has a million names when looked at from different angles:

Addiction, Perverse incentive, Cognitive Dissonance, Ego Depletion, The Tragedy of the Commons, The Prisoner's Dilemma, Pareto Divergence, Externalities, The Multipolar Trap, The Race to the Bottom, The Collective Action Problem, Coordination Failure, Pluralistic Ignorance, Normalization of Deviance.

This is exactly how almost all bad things and behaviors are able to exist. Not because people think bad things are good, even the worst tyrants dislike tyranny, but because the incentives of the environment make them the right choice for the person in the moment.

coldtea3• 27 days ago

Because it's hate worthy.

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.

memcg• 27 days ago

SEO filled the web with slop way before AI

coldtea3• 27 days ago

And AI made it 1000x faster, more convincing, and expanded its scope, even allowed spam to get automated back and forth.

elpakal• 27 days ago

I work in AI, both building at a large company and consulting on the side. My manager (of two months) uses claude to reply to everyone in Teams and emails, usually filled with nonsensical slop. I believe in its potential when applied correctly but also am realizing that it's unlocking an entirely new kind of fraudster.

jjulius• 27 days ago

It’s the fear, the enshittification, datacenter hostility, and the tech broligarchy

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.

sys_64738• 27 days ago

The bulk output of "AI" is pure slop without constraints. Eventually the volume of slop is so bad that people just stop engaging. It's why AI free zones will thrive but those admitting AI slop are doomed to die painful and horrible deaths in the long run.

aleda145• 27 days ago

I think the animosity comes from most people just encountering the "slop". Generated ads, fake content or low quality music.

api5• 27 days ago

The hard-core heavy-duty hate is all economic.

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.

acedia000• 27 days ago

Yes, I strongly agree with these points, but particularly the second half. "Real art" is not at all under threat by AI, which has effectively no ability to even touch, let alone dilute the supposed magnitude and breadth of the human spirit in expression. The existence/proliferation of AI is not going to infringe upon the abilities or opportunities of a bus driver who comes home every day after work to work covertly on an entire house full of sprawling, elaborate tinfoil miniatures which aren't discovered until after his death.

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.

api5• 27 days ago

I think "AI is replacing art" is a category error. If I read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music, the whole point is to receive the thoughts, feelings, and lived experience of a human being.

But yes, AI is supplanting the mundane "art" that artists use as potboiler work, and that is the economic threat. The bitter horrible irony of art as a career is that the best art is often the hardest to sell, and it also takes the most time and energy to make. It's insanely hard to make a living doing just "pure art."

QuadrupleA• 27 days ago

Point not mentioned: it just doesn't work that well! It lies, it reverts to the mean on every topic, it wastes the reader's time. It's toxically positive, sycophantic. It's such a good mimic that it's insidiously hard to distinguish its bullshit or fake work from real work.

everdrive• 27 days ago

  - 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.

andai4• 27 days ago

Knowledge, will and money now compound even faster than before.

RajT88• 27 days ago

because they feel that it is being forced on them.

Which of course it is for a lot of us.

Definitely, the tech industry has earned this skepticism, it didn't come out of nowhere. Decades of dark patterns, ads crammed down our throats, and now everyone has to use AI for everything? Features nobody asked for or wanted, which their bosses are tracking their usage of?

Aside from the obvious reasons, I am also convinced there's a state-sponsored astroturfing campaign against AI and datacenters on social media. I see dozens of accounts (some of individuals inactive for years before they starting going crazy with anti-AI/datacenter posts) posting the same things with similar or identical wording - not resharing, but creating new images with similar or identical wording.

degecko• 27 days ago

Because it's disrupting the entire online field by flooding real activity fields (jobs, knowledge communities, etc.) with newcomers who are now able to give the impression of knowing something when they don't.

It's exhausting to find a job, it's annoying to have to parse through a plethora of AI generated content for real knowledge, it's becoming increasingly frustrating to build something when people assume you've made it using AI tools, and it's very annoying to see the only things that popup to be stuff like: AI tools listing directories, agentic this and that, AI detectors, AI creators, AI tools created to handle other AI tools, and so on.

jochapjo• 27 days ago

It is too early to claim that Dario pushes job loss and other "doomer" narratives as a marketing strategy. IMO he has been relatively consistent up to this point in his statements. It'll be interesting to see if that changes after the recent actions by the government.

lp4v4n• 27 days ago

Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.

It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.

The whole leadership of the AI industry, with almost no exceptions, sounds like a bunch of psychopaths who have no qualms about lying and get off on the idea of a populace being oppressed and demoralized by their companies.

andai4• 27 days ago

I've been thinking about this. A few years hence (especially when robotics takes off) it may not be safe to tell people you're an AI researcher, if the average person's family has been made destitute by automation.

I think that's what a lot of people are expecting. Several people told me unironically they're becoming plumbers to try and delay the worst. (I think blue collar has a decade or so after white collar.)

They'll probably roll out UBI or a fake jobs program before things get really ugly, but I think the social and psychological adjustment will be more difficult than the economic one. (We already figured out how to send everyone free money.)

juancn• 27 days ago

Effort. AI is low effort, which signals you really don't care, you're out there for a quick buck.

It's insulting. It makes people feel irrelevant.

bdcravens• 27 days ago

In addition to the many reasons already mentioned are the community and environmental impacts: citizens in competition for electricity and water as new data centers are built, and the feeling that governments are putting those citizens second.

ray_v• 27 days ago

Has anyone found an executive, or director at any sizable organization who is expressly anit-ai? It would be interested to see what patterns emerged from that group of folks.

SirFatty• 27 days ago

Why does everyone exaggerate?

keeda• 27 days ago

Only belatedly did they realize that declaring that your technology will wreak devastation would lead to a public backlash, and that this backlash would be a serious problem.

Many people think this is how things have played out, but I find it hard to believe. I know half these tech execs are hopped up on Ketamine or something, but even that can't make them this disconnected from reality. I mean, fine, "AI will take all the jobs" might appeal to some Capitalists (the smarter ones know how that will work out long term)... but also "AI could destroy the world"?! That is appealing to nobody!

The usual explanation for this is "angling for regulatory capture" but (a) this only hinders US companies, which helps China, which is the real competition, and (b) the more realistic outcome, as Anthropic is finding out, is complete lockdown.

The datacenter backlash was not just a logical outcome a caveman could have predicted, it has actually been happening and growing since 2024... but they still kept saying those things.

It was always terrible marketing and they knew it, but to them it isn't marketing. They feel compelled to say it again and again because they actually believe it.

josefritzishere• 27 days ago

No technology before this has been so dubious that it requires large IT companies hire paid evangelists to force the employees to use it. This is not normal.

palmotea• 27 days ago

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who has been noticeably unwilling to engage in AI fanaticism, recently told the Wall Street Journal:
> You can’t say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon and we will use all the power to build data centers.

"You can’t say..." Is that being unwilling to engage, or just being unwilling to say the quiet part loud?

bloody-crow• 27 days ago

But why were they so willing to promote apocalyptic visions in the first place? The answer is money. They pushed the idea that they had a technology that would quickly and utterly transform the economy partly to dazzle Wall Street and secure financing, and partly to scare businesses into rushing into AI adoption for fear of being left behind.

I find a different explanation more plausible. They were actually candid and were saying what they were really thinking at the time. Then later when AI hate emerged and solidified, they were told by their PR advisers to cool it down on doomer perspective and lean more into an optimistic vision.

negergreger• 27 days ago

A vocal minority of screaming retards hate AI, I sleep.

adrians1• 27 days ago

Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

Because it was invented after they were 35.

"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

lucideng• 27 days ago

it's past someone's bedtime!

davkan• 27 days ago

How does AI meaningfully improve the lives of average people? (Spoiler: it doesn’t)

AI has already permanently changed the software development industry. That’s indisputable. Maybe it’ll also change many other industries.

But what does it change? Your employer can now pay the richest men on earth a portion of your salary instead of you. That’s it. There is presently no other meaningful benefit to AI outside cancer research etc, which of course no one has a problem with.

The problem is that there is approximately no one left in this country who believes that efficiency improvements in business will actually lead to savings on products in their lives. They just believe the rich will get richer and that everything that actually matters in their life will get more and more expensive while companies use AI to build subscription products that are just as expensive as when they used to employ 30% more people.

Oh and despite a complete lack of benefit to human beings these SaaS products are now the basis for our entire economy while driving up compute and power costs for actual people.

The only people who like AI are the people who directly benefit from the reduced labor costs.

Why the fuck would anyone else want this.

rolph• 27 days ago

it isnt so much the AI itself as its the proctodigital assault.

its being rammed into places where it has no business being, at no ones request, and despite admonitions.

silexia• 26 days ago

I hate Paul Krugman and his extremely biased and just flat wrong opinions.

Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

Related Stories