Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us

https://newrepublic.com/article/213004/everybody-weirded-ai-except-people-foist-us

by jamesgill • 5 days ago

68 74 5 days ago

newrepublic.com

sergiomattei2• 5 days ago

But would it have improved my comprehension? The research says no.

I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI.

I find myself doing more projects outside of work.

I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown.

I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work.

I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by a tutor that won’t get tired or annoyed.

Look— I’m not exactly thinking AI is free of criticism, but it’s definitely a revolution in access to information and at least to me that’s a big deal.

reticulates6• 5 days ago

it’s definitely a revolution in access to information

Did you mean: Google?

socalgal22• 5 days ago

Google was the previous revolution. AI is the next. I get info from LLMs way better than I generally got from Google, at least for some large subset of things I used to try to get from Google.

sergiomattei2• 5 days ago

An example from last night. If I Google “how much is 7KwH”, I get a list of calculator websites for converting units.

If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!”

The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.

joenot4433• 2 days ago

No, they’re talking about LLMs - they’re a different technology from search engines.

EGreg7• 5 days ago

If I may, I think it has to do with this... and it's about to get weirder and weirder unless you change the paradigm:

https://safebots.ai/declarative.html

Terr_3• 5 days ago

My first-impression is that this site is vaporware generated by someone prompting an LLM to babble about how an LLM could be secured.

At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing.

[Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions

This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction.

Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments

Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?

reticulates6• 5 days ago

Read enough of EGreg’s posts and you’ll immediately recognize that this site is definitely his but at least LLMs stopped him posting about qbix all the time, a sweet mercy

EGreg7• 5 days ago

Pretty sure there is nothing about “complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments”. Did you just make that up to add some oomph?

The actual point of the article was: recursive self improvement is scary and upredictable, you can get 99% of the benefit by doing the reliable and predictable thing instead. Did you even read the actual article? I didn’t see anything in your comment about that main thesis which is woven through — well — every paragraph.

Update: oh, I went through your recent comment history and apparently most of it is just snarky criticisms of surface level things. Okay :)

dboreham2• 5 days ago

I mean, I'm concerned about the societal impacts too, but this article is pure nonsense as far as how useful today's AI tools are. I know multiple people with very high paid jobs who have told me they simply couldn't do that job now without AI. I create software much quicker and better than I have in the past 40 years using AI tools. I've learned all kinds of things technical and otherwise from LLMs. This writing is about as useful as the people who said calculators would mean nobody understands mathematics, or that watching tv would turn everyone into a zombie (obviously it was smart phones that did that).

Legend2440• 5 days ago

Everyone? Speak for yourself. I'm not weirded out by it.

TRiG_Ireland2• 5 days ago

Really? Interacting with an LLM feels like stepping on a slug. It's just gross.

derac• 5 days ago

I disagree, though I highly dislike the affect of Anthropic models.

antonvs2• 5 days ago

It’s one of the most amazing technological achievements of the 21st century to date, if not the most amazing by far. But it’s still a machine executing a program. Your emotional reaction to it might be because you’re seeing it as something more than that.

ianm218• 5 days ago

Do you mean like inadvertently interacting with an LLM like when you call a customer service line and you get AI?

I find it hard to imagine having a chatbot fix your broken SQL query or summarize some event be experienced as gross.

keane3• 5 days ago

“Everybody…except [those advocating for it]” –– rhetoric that borders on tautology but, regardless, the author cites the Gallup poll showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers and alludes to other widely-held sentiment. But it’s not about your feelings (or their feelings).

This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention to major yet-unsolved and generally uncontested issues such as AI output being unoriginal (fundamentally, due to next-word prediction), the output polluting future training (garbage in garbage out), and errors only being caught by experts (cf. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect). The essay, in a political magazine, intends to warn elected leadership about strategic issues that are likely to arise if our government and experts intertwine AI into their decision making without these concerns being solved first.

squidbeak• 5 days ago

What makes you think that opposition to data center construction in their local area is proof that locals are 'weirded out' by AI generally, rather than just opposed to eyesores that drain their water and put up power prices?

mattas• 5 days ago

"Everybody's Weirded Out by AI-Except the People Who Live in Zip Codes Starting with 940, 941, 944, 950 and 951"

efficax• 5 days ago

hey now there's plenty of ai fanatics in zip codes starting with 100 and 11

tanseydavid2• 5 days ago

Hey, there are some AI-affirmative people in Marin County (949).

gs17• 5 days ago

There's some 98XXX codes that make the list too.

kenforthewin• 5 days ago

A study by MIT found that students who use AI to write show far less brain activity than those who used classic Google searching (with AI off) or those who used neither. Other studies find that students who use AI retain far less of the information that ends up in their writing, possibly as a result of “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.”

I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

cabaalis• 5 days ago

This sounds like a very much wanted release of mental stress to me.

fzeroracer• 5 days ago

What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.

On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.

cyanydeez• 5 days ago

yeah, I think we have plenty of evidence that a certain sector of the population absolutely "vibe codes" life.

AngryData3• 5 days ago

Im not sure if the internet made anyone dumber. It is just early on the average idiot self selected out of internet usage and there wasn't as much corporate or advertising money it to be worth manipulating.

AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations.

Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.

christophilus• 5 days ago

Dunno about that. I can fix a lot more stuff around the house thanks to YouTube. I have picked up a bunch of programming knowledge via the internet that I never would have without it. The internet has delivered on a lot of its promises.

golly_ned• 5 days ago

I'd love to see the 'AI as personal tutor' approach. Even incorporating things like spaced repetition or the testing effect, or evaluating free-written responses.

A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.

The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.

So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.

layer83• 5 days ago

I don’t think this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because learning still requires struggling even under the best of personal tutors. For most of the “80%” it requires some level of compulsion and submitting to authority that would be bad PR for a product, and that people won’t be very accepting of, coming from an automation.

applicative• 5 days ago

That professor at Brown I think was able to verify that all but one of like 90 students had used AI on the midterm. The heroic naïf improved on the final. The part you miss, if I follow, is that the going view is that youre a chump if you don’t.

It really is absolutely clear that higher education is over for good unless radical measures are taken. You can calculate the economic conquences. Colleagues are adopting 19th c tech and it may be well for universities to enforce them across the board https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessm...

pstuart2• 5 days ago

That was not a very insightful article. It's super easy, and in most cases, correct to hate on AI. But that ignores a couple key facts:

* It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not.

* It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive.

I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society:

* solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible

* integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors

* the personal computer revolution

* mobile telephony

* the internet

* smart phones

* AI

Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.)

We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.

socalgal22• 5 days ago

It's super easy, and in most cases, incorrect to hate on AI.

There, fixed that for you.

I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.

pstuart2• 5 days ago

I think you missed my point: it is incredibly useful. But its important to recognize that there are indirect costs that come from it and more in store.

Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues?

* Distracted driving

* Attention span decimators

* A culture of zombies staring at their screens?

The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that.

Are you capable of dialectical thinking?

arjie• 5 days ago

It's funny how this works. When Apple came out with the iPad Reddit absolutely hated it. No one would want it. It's a crappy product. Who even needs 4 iPhones glued together and so on and so forth. This all reads like that. It's just completely divorced from reality.

AngryData3• 5 days ago

But I don't know anybody that uses iPads? To me it clearly out sold the market it is actually useful for.

layer83• 5 days ago

I’m reading and writing this on an iPad.

I don’t think it makes sense as an analogy to AI, however.

Reason0772• 5 days ago

I bought the original iPad 2 on the day it was released (which was just after the Fukushima earthquake in 2011). Still have it. Still use it occasionally to play retro iOS games. Still runs great on its original battery and iOS 6. Still connects to my WiFi and Bluetooth devices! (Although the Safari is so ancient it’s pretty useless for the modern web)

But I always swore I would never buy another iPad until Apple added one key feature: support for multiple user profiles.

Can’t understand why they’ve never done this. Even Apple TV has user profiles now. Perhaps they think they will sell less iPads if family members can share them.

Reason0772• 5 days ago

Elon Musk himself used to be quite anti-AI, often saying that it was an “existential risk to humanity” or more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

He seems to have changed his mind now that he owns a major AI company.

AngryData3• 5 days ago

Elon talks a lot of crap about topics he has barely a cursory knowledge of so I wouldn't take anything he says at value except for how to manipulate large financials and tax burdens.

tanseydavid2• 5 days ago

This piece is a little odd for me. I don't understand the logic behind this:

"read Kant and found it to be dense and impenetrable...an AI generated summary would have helped"

followed by "Would it have improved comprehension? No."

Why? Because "research says so."

Wut?

(still waiting for one or more HN commenters to freak out because the article has gasp! multiple em-dashes)

ALittleSlow• 5 days ago

As someone approaching their 50s, I do appreciate your diplomacy. You could have just posted "okay Boomer" or an old man shaking his fist at the sky meme. This essay bothers me for a number of reasons. I missed the em-dashes, because I listen to it, (un?)fortunately. But even in audio, it does sound a bit like AI slop. Essentially, it just reiterates every single short-sellers trope that's been developed over the last few years. And if it is, in fact, a real human being — well, that pretty much tells you all you need to know about America, its think tanks, and the caliber of human beings leading this nation for the last 40 years. But I do believe one thing for sure and that is that it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff and consolidate. There will be a lot more of this — the market demands men tilting at windmills, and margins to exploit.

lbrito• 5 days ago

The only field where people are being replaced wholesale is in computer programming, where AI is making leaps in capability.

I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else. Also the layoff peak was 2023.

xnx• 5 days ago

Blanket claims like "Everbody" are trivially falsifiable. I'm not "weirded out" by AI, and I'm not foisting it on anyone.

There's a strange vein of aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous) even if it hasn't yet cured cancer, led to 100% unemployment, solved nuclear fusion, etc.

keane3• 5 days ago

You’re right, that’s a flourish. But more importantly, the author isn’t claiming no one uses it / finds it useful. Her point is about potential problems that could occur as its real (though flawed) utility drives its broader adoption in particular arenas.

tim333• 5 days ago

Also that AI is "making society dumber overall" seems dubious.

joenot4433• 5 days ago

I think a bit of the aggressive denialism comes from sour grapes that American society’s best hope for UBI came from capitalists in tech instead of progressives in policy.

UBI used to be a bit of a funny reddit pipe dream. Now it’s a serious long term hypothetical being trialed in the short term and that’s solely as a result of AI progress.

When that result undermines the tenet that capitalism is the root of human suffering, it’s simplest to just reject the result wholesale.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 4 days ago

"Blanket claims like "Everybody" are trivially falsifiable."

As are claims like "No one" or "99.9%"

How many times per week are such claims made on HN and in similar forums with respect to software and hardware

   curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=no+one&tags=comment |grep -Eo '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+'

Perhaps the term "everybody" is just a figure of speech used in an online title. Can we, should we, forgive HN commenters for making 47,000+ trivially falsifiable claims

How often do HN commenters use the trivially falsifiable term "everybody"

    curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=everybody&tags=comment|egrep -o '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+'

What about the term "99.9%"

I read the article but found no hint of "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)"

Instead I found a statement that the author finds AI "incredibly" useful:

"An AI summary would have been incredibly useful"

Where, specifically, is the "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)" in this article

The author's point as I understood it is about "AI" _hype_ not "AI" usefulness. The issue she has is with the _people_ who are hyping "AI" and the actual or potential effects of that hype

1vuio0pswjnm72• 4 days ago

(Use quotes around the URLs or escape the ampersands)

hackeraccount• 4 days ago

This.

I still think AI is at root at UI improvement for working with computers. It's an equivalent to the general move of command line interaction to WIMP.

Freaking out over this seems like nothing to me so much as that Tracy/Hepburn movie ... Desk Set.

metalman• 5 days ago

There are a lot of people getting very weird while useing AI, another big bunch of people who hate AI, and of course AI itself is weird, but I have no direct contact with AI while it finds my web sites and sends me work through some process that remains opaque to me. I have become quick to close any page that has strange gramar of phrasing, and no longer accept any claims or declarations that I cant verify indipendently. Having always been very very picky about any media I consume, I find it easy to avoid seeing anything that has been made useing AI. The whole upshot for me has been to spend more time doing real stuff and making money, which attracts more people to spend time with me.

ab_wahab01• 2 days ago

we are also greedily chasing it and forcing it upon ourselves.

Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us

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