"Why are the biggest backers of generative AI so incredibly stupid? And why do they think we're as dense as they are?"

Well said!

The corporations are the problem, not the people, not even the AI. It's incorporated persons and their perverse profit incentives causing them to behave this way. Nothing intrinsic for AI is talked about in this write up. It's all about corporations and their bad behavior.

The common denominator is clear. Don't blame the paintbrush, blame the non-human corporate persons holding it.

It is a problem that most people's only experience with AI is through corporations though.

The anger : content ratio in this article is way too high to be worth reading. If you have read a few critical articles about AI, then you have read this guy's critiques, albeit with less aping of Maddox, and you can safely ignore this article. I say this as somebody who broadly agrees with these critiques.

I'm sorry if this seems flame bait, but then again the article is intentionally extremely inflammatory, but it just feels like a substantial portion of Hacker News posts these days is just the Upton Sinclair quote of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It's just so tiring.

This stuff works so great and is miraculous, and it's the worst it will ever be. You can be a contrarian if you want, and I guess over the next few years we'll see who still has jobs and who doesn't. I personally know of one person who was let go because they dug in and absolutely refused to integrate AI into any of their workflows.

This type of anti-AI article is as vacuous and insipid as the superficial hype pieces peddled by pro-AI influencers.

Saying generative AI is inherently shit, that there is 0 future in it, that it’s not good at anything, that it hasn’t improved since GPT3, calling it all a con? Just launching insults at anyone working in tech?

This is the same kind of person that would have poo-pooed the internet in the 90s, saying 64kbps mp3s sound like crap and to just stick to CDs, downloading a 144p video takes ages, and who would even trust a website enough to put their credit card number on it? All of those dotcoms are worthless and are going to be bankrupt in a year, and we’ll go back to mail order catalogs and fax machines in no time.

Or worse, because they’re saying outright falsehoods that anyone who’s used Claude to generate a single python script can easily debunk. I get that the hype over AI is annoying, that people are trying to shoehorn the tech into places where it’s not ready for yet, that it doesn’t do everything the marketing says it can, but just reversing the claims and saying it can’t do anything is profoundly stupid. Especially when it’s accompanied by so much vitriolic hatred that makes the writer blind to reality.