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crotetoday at 5:59 AM1 replyview on HN

Have you considered the possibility that most non-programmer people mostly experienced the negative effects?

Blockchain turned out to be an absolutely awful payment method, so most people only know it as 1) a way to do crimes like ransomware, 2) a get-rich-quick scam, 3) some buzzword companies threw in everything, 4) the thing that made GPUs unaffordable.

AI is now the thing that 1) is drowning the internet in slop, 2) companies throw into everything - to the point of making apps unusable, 3) makes most computer parts unaffordable. And what they get in return is... a kinda okay-ish Google? A homework plagiarism machine?

Their opinion about AI or blockchain most likely has absolutely nothing to do with you. They are just seeing the world noticeably get worse, and are desperately trying to protect their communities from it in any way they can.


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protocolturetoday at 6:33 AM

>Their opinion about AI or blockchain most likely has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Which is why I left before I was banned. I no longer felt comfortable and they probably likewise. They wanted a safe space to hate on people involved in AI art and my leaving contributed to that. That said, I doubt I could have posted content calling for the death of authors or honestly any other group in that space without being ostracised.

Its a bit like saying "A witch might have burned down their house, so their reaction against witches is understandable" maybe in abstract. But that doesn't mean the subsequent actions are acceptable.

> Have you considered the possibility that most non-programmer people mostly experienced the negative effects?

Yeah absolutely. These people in particular, at the time, really on experienced it through 2 factors:

1. They (like many people) posted a lot of their midjourney creations for a few months. (21/22 was like that)

2. They saw an increase in low quality submissions.

So gripes about AI art and low quality submissions seem perfectly valid.

>Blockchain turned out to be an absolutely awful payment method >AI is now the thing that 1) is drowning the internet in slop, 2) companies throw into everything - to the point of making apps unusable, 3) makes most computer parts unaffordable. And what they get in return is... a kinda okay-ish Google? A homework plagiarism machine?

Yeah so I am not complaining about people having negative opinions, I was sort of talking about the over meme, the zeitgeist switch where suddenly the entire conversation goes from pros/cons to what appears to be a standard, negative message that everyone absorbed in a short time. Basically used like a thought terminating cliche. I have problems with crypto, and I like things about crypto. I can have a great conversation with most people, but for 12 months or so, you couldn't have a conversation without people loudly shouting about how the power use was going to destroy the environment and that it was going to use X% of the power by Y date. They didn't want to talk about it, they had been given evidence that the discussion was over and everything was solved in favor of their beliefs. The AI debate has now roughly arrived in the same place, there's no longer really a discussion, but the zeitgeist has this one single mode that's constantly debated. To the point where you could be running a local LLM trained only on data from the 1800s and you can still be considered to be responsible for some data centre single handedly draining a lake.

My point is, like crypto, this fixed idea will eventually erode and the hate train will move on. People with well thought out negative opinions are still going to exist past that time, they just wont have people screaming at fever pitch about it constantly.

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