My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better.

AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere.

If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better.

Relatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days.

I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions. The "AI overview" you see on search results, or that summarizes your iPhone notifications, is ... not as advanced as frontier models, and I think it negatively affects people's view of the technology.

I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.

I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.

I agree with authors that write about alignment issues ("please take this test", "ok i'll hack the bazel remote cache, turn it into a message board, and coordinate with other agents to steal the answers from Hugging Face"; this really is the Paperclip Maximizer with today's technology) and I do think we should be addressing that. But this never seems to be the objection, it's always stuff from 2022 like "it hallucinates". I don't get it, but I'm probably in too deep to see what it looks like from the outside.

Reasons why I currently dislike AI:

- it is not as accurate and good as advertised

- being forced to use and care about it

- it is bad for the environment at the scale and competition that exists in this economy

- it is a mirror, and augmentation and reveals really inhuman takes and thought processes from people who are on the longer lever in society

- it is already in use for very unethical things (spying and war)

- it makes people cognitively lazy

- it lowers the quality of day to day life for regular people

I agree with most of the diagnosis but I am less convinced that better UX around AI solves the underlying problem. Every product starts out saying "human in the loop" and "augment, don't replace" but the economic incentive is almost always to remove more of the human over time…

Ordinary people were generally marvelous of the electric motor because it was obvious how it would make life better. Their great grandchildren, with the same common sense, are extremely cynical about LLMs and other knowledge work robots. What changed?

I feel like I fall into the neutral camp for the current round of AI bots. I've seen less-capable people churn out text/documents that aren't really better or more informative than their human level slop, except for more voluminous. So I guess that goes in the slightly negative column. But not a huge negative, since it just needs to be mostly ignored, like their previous human content. It is mostly a bit insulting to generate this slop. If I wanted to know what the chat bot has to say about something, I'd ask it myself. There is more low-effort slop on YouTube to wade through, but that probably means I should engage in something more productive than YouTube. Does that count as a positive or negative? The current crop of LLMs make meme generation easier. Again, is that a positive or negative? I'm not a professional computer programmer so churning out reams of code doesn't really excite me. Most of the questions I ask the bot are apparently too hard for them to answer correctly. Like I was wondering about the modulus of elasticity of "low-stretch" synthetic fiber ropes vs steel-wire cables. And it seems like it couldn't give me a straight answer. Like I just want the data using the same/consistent units so I can compare. Data center build-out/expansion isn't something I fear. There was some boring AI-generated art on the wall of a beach rental house I went to recently. It is something I wouldn't generally even notice, but one of my children looked closely, and sure enough there were oddly shaped sea shells and other artifacts. Again, luke-warm to that. Did some corporate artist lose a commission on some stock image art? I guess I could feel a little bit bad about that. I wouldn't have thought the rental was worse if they just had a blank wall.

AI is awesome as a consumer. You can just build whatever bespoke thing you want. It can walk you through a myriad of home improvement projects.

Dropped to page four on HN:

+20 points, 2 hours ago, 41 comments

Sudden drop visible here: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49338139

When I tell friends or family I just got a job in AI, they look at me with sympathy and disgust, as if I had told them I have gonorrhea. Nobody says "congratulations."

This just reads like a poor attempt at convincing themselves that they didn't become what they hate.

I hate AI and I work on an AI project. I use it only where there is no viable alternative and where it is safe and sensible, which means it's just another tool, not some sort of oracle used to supposedly solve everything. That makes me not hate AI in the context of this project.

I hate smart phones. But guess what. I own one and so does everyone I know. So there you have it.

My FIRST question when anybody brings up scientific/software ethics is:

Whose ethics? What are the axioms? What are the exceptions? How do you handle paradoxes?

Most of the time, it's just some shitty corporate "ethics" with: make money at all costs but don't let the company look bad.

[dead]

> I want to figure out how to use AI in ways that protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving

I think this is an admirable goal but I'd be curious how the author plans to even begin approaching it. It seems to me that this ship has sailed. Generative AI is here now, which is seems like it will lead us down a lowest common denominator path, not an enlightened one. How do we "protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving" in the face of technology that is undermining all three, and it's too late to get out in front of?

The only thing more annoying than ai boosters is aai self-haters. Either use it and shut up or don't use it. It's like when people are all like 'oh I know that I should really be vegan but im not mentally strong enough'