The amount of money that would evaporate if we did AI ethically is unfathomable. Most of big tech would collapse if they had to undo anything they did using stolen IP, as would a large section of the economy that's dependent on it, many people's jobs, and most people's investments.
This isn't an argument against doing AI ethically; in fact it shows how bad things have gotten. But what's the fix?
When people feel this way are they arguing for revolt? A Butlerian Jihad? Or is there another practical solution?
The analogy I use is this. What was a bigger leap in productivity: assembly to vb6 or vb6 to Ai?
I think it’s definitely the first.
[0] I'm willing to concede this point, but I still maintain nobody has really shown it to be true in any rigorous sense. Maybe that doesn't matter. If people feel it makes them more productive, that's good enough for me.
One thing I would disagree with is the idea of AI getting a do over. Even if they somehow managed to do that, the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted for whole generations of people, and its reputation only gets worse every day. There's no coming back from that any time soon.
What does this even mean? You don't like machine learning? You don't like the letters AI? There's no coming back to what?
Do you work in the tech industry?
I read the op and authors text as hope and cope that AI is held back by popular sentiment because they have some sort of personal fears about it. Computers are tools, and LLMs are a tool. Is it wrong to have issues about the way tech companies are abusing the system?
Where were these people when other industries were being "disrupted" and breaking the law?
I have a lot of issues with tech companies and their CEOs, but very little problems with the technology.
>You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
This is ... not how consent works. At all.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/11/19/trust-in-ai-far...
The mania and lament continues at full speed, I suppose. And related to the brazen contempt for consent:
I like the article's sentiment, but a do-over sounds... unrealistic. Sadly, this is very common with the lamentation links, where the article accurately describes the problems at hand, but is alack of actionable advice.
I totally disagree with the comparison to something like NFT. While AI is being pushed aggressively and it can definitely be annoying, AI is actually useful unlike NFTs.
Much like the author, I also enjoy photography, graphic design, and other creative hobbies. It's entirely my choice how much and where to apply AI.
We have to accept that yes, it's useful, and yes you can definitely produce good deliverables with it, not just slop. Yes, when looking for assets and not the artistic process, many people will use AI and the cost of creative work will plummet. It's not great but that's the way it is.
But it's not like we should just stop creating, especially if it's a hobby. Do it for fun. Or, maybe use AI to try something new.
Either way AI is too useful, it's here to stay and it doesn't need a do-over. It's true, we should accept the world is changing, and no amount of moaning or complaining will make this disappear.
The platforms are now flooded with AI slop and it's getting more and more difficult to discover new (honest) art and to present your own art to the public. The problem is exactly that there's no consent: we can't prevent AI companies from using our art or software for training and we can barely prevent our platforms from being eroded by AI slop.
> Either way AI is too useful
The jury is still out on whether the advantages and opportunities of AI outweight all the negative sides.
> It's not great but that's the way it is.
Why does it have to keep that way? Do you also think like this about political topics? Why should artists have to put up with this gross violation of copyright on a massive scale? Did anyone ask us if we actually want this? As the people we always have the right to say: "this is not ok and we demand change". Yes, there is no going back, but we can still shape the direction we are heading!
Seen from that perspective, adding friction (for example, not releasing Mythos widely and suspending Fable for a while) is not so bad. If the bubble collapsed then that would also give us more time.
I think this is, for the most part, the ground on which AI hate is founded on, no?
Outside of the artist case, which I sympathize with, the real issue isn't the technology itself, its the attitudes and business practices around it.
I don't hate AI. But I do hate that OpenAI effectively cornered the dram market on a scale close to what the hunt brothers did to silver, ruining personal computing as being an accessible thing. I do hate the incessant push to put a chatbot into everything, even places where a chatbot is not even remotely useful. I hate the SaaS pricing increases going on across the board as they bundle the AI into base plans as justification for raising prices, offering no option to buy without AI at the old price. I hate ridiculous tone and fear mongering coming out of places like Anthropic, playing on people's fears of a big existential crisis as a marketing ploy. I can go on and on.
Point is, yeah, the tech itself is not the problem. The culture the arms race/gold rush has created is a huge problem, especially when listening to non-technical people buy the hype and talk like this is some crazy magical machine god in a black box. It gets incredibly exhausting trying to be the adult in the room when it comes to AI discussions in the workplace.
We have a product used in call centers. It turns out ai is amazing in triaging (surveying) people. We can ask a question in English and if they respond n another language (any language) the ai will switch to that language, ask its questions, and then give us the answers in English. This was stuff that was impossible 10-years-ago.
That ability won him over. The software is written in Java and spring-ai so I have control over the system and user prompts so jailbreaking isn't an issue.
The question is do you care? if a user asks your chat bot for baking instructions and gets them, does it matter?
The answer depends a lot on what capabilities your agent can leverage via tools and your intended use case, but it's not something you defend with Java or spring, it is inherent the llm.
But he lost me at "As it exists right now, I don't give a toss what good it can do, what practical benefits it has once the techbros move on to their next mark. I don't care about any of it at all...". Because he feels hatred, we are supposed to look the other way when it can and does create benefits?
Just find a way to use it to your liking (maybe that's zero) and ignore the stuff you can't be bothered with and maybe that means being less connected to technology, which honestly, is pretty great at times.
If this was actually possible, there would be far less backlash to AI. As it stands, it's being forced into every aspect of our lives without consent. Even if you avoid technology as much as possible (which is a good thing), it's still affecting every aspect of society. Even if you avoid technology altogether, you still live in a society full of people who can't or don't, and you can't escape the consequences of it - such as if the CEOs get their way and eliminate human employment like they have constantly threatened and fantasized about.
This is extremely disingenuous, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer product for a reason. Part hype, part usefulness, part novelty. The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes. It's not that hard to criticize the AI hypetrain without a strawman.
> I'm sure copyrighted material was already being fed into LLMs at this point (I mean, you also had people willingly feeding it in, like the example I gave above) but once the techbros caught on and wanted to accelerate this, suddenly EVERYTHING public facing was fair game to training their models.
This is also just extremely disingenous. For full disclosure, I'm technically a stakeholder here, as I wrote two books which made it into training sets (and part of two class actions), but this cat is way out of the bag. Unless you really want to start splitting hairs about "ingesting" vs "processing" vs "training" vs "transforming," Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer. Folks were bringing this up decades ago, especially record labels that were suing google for copy-pasting lyrics to their main search pages; were you complaining then, too? Because some people were.
> All because investors demanded it, and companies didn't want to be caught with their pants down if these inflated claims of it being the next big thing proved to be true. This is where the hate for me really started, because a lot of these companies forced AI upon you, with no means to opt out. FOMO is a hell of a drug on a corporate scale, ho-ly.
Corporate FOMO is pretty run of the mill, this shouldn't be surprising in the least. I must've done like half a dozen "blockchain hackathons" or "VR demos" back when those technologies were all the rage. I don't really see how it's that big of a big deal, other than being mildly annoying.
> You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet. It was doubly gone when Facebook sold PII data to advertisers. It was triply gone when Experian got hacked and the SSN of every taxpayer in the USA was leaked (and no one went to jail lol). Let's stop being dramatic. It just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how data collection works.
> Good luck avoiding AI if we buy up all the components for you to build your own computers and devices! Submit everything to the cloud, it's now the only affordable option, suckers!
Blog author and hobbyist photographer discovers free markets.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but this kind of take is boring, uninspired, and (ironically) could've just been written by ChatGPT. Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
this was gone before chatgpt was even a twinkle in someone's eye.
"maybe later" replaced "no" on popups. automatically being opted-into mailing lists when ordering pizza or whatever (pizza hut is the worst). B2B emails that have size 3 font with a random word selected that i have to put in the subject line to unsubscribe from the spam. updates that turn on settings i have deliberately turned off. privacy policies changing on a whim that you "automatically accept by using the service" but logging in to delete your account counts as "using the service". etc.
there are a million+ examples of tech companies ignoring any concept of consent going back at least 20 years.
I am sure there are people who'd object to even being indexed but most niche communities were pretty rabid about getting more visibility to find more members.
"If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it."
That's not going to happen. A lot of these AI-skeptic pieces would be more persuasive or at least more legible if they acknowledged basic facts of the world. A plan that drastically curtails the AI business on a forwardgoing basis is legible to me. A plan where we "start over from zero" sounds utopian, which gives me permission (really, bashes me over the head with it) not to care.
I have a coworker that does the same. His logic was sound -- when something is heavily subsidized, abuse it.
We live in the time of Uber Eats letting you pay 50 cents to hire a limousine that will deliver a burrito to your stoop.
It seems the author is in fact hating on disrupt-everything hypercapitalism of the American techbro kind, not generative AI...
The more I see AI videos, AI songs, AI writings, AI whatever etc, the more angrier I get. Fucking piece of trash pushed by mediocre bastards who don't want to bother investing skills to do good music, art, in the first place and steal their IPs and "look ma, my dick is making new songs just by prompting Suno with the liquid I ejaculate, screw those starving artists!"
The tool is being created and used very irresponsibly by society. It wont' get better, it will get worse.
I am going to try to find a way to block all Youtube channels that I find using AI. Next, I will also block all domains that use AI writings, AI images, etc. If this makes my internet usage unusable, so be it.
I started from just literally cutting ties with someone who said "my kids make videos and games using AI, and you will be left behind" to my face. Yup, I cut ties with that person not because of political discourse, not because of Trump, but because of AI.
The only thing that I can't avoid is using AI in my job because my fucking employer tells me so. I still have to put food on the table or I risk bringing literal swords, guns or ropes and go to literal death march against these "tech leaders". I hope that day will never happen. But who knows, maybe society will be desperate enough to finally have to use violence as the last resort.
It's not going away, your anger isn't going to help you or anyone else.
People have been pushing out low quality everything for a long time, technology is making that more efficient. It's an old story being retold again.
There is no reason for not liking something to breed this much hate and division.
This author wants consent from companies deploying LLM. What can one say about this lol..
I can't really trust any anti-AI argument when it feels more of a tribal grievance than a rational explanation of concern. Especially with the overuse of the "techbro" pejorative, it seems more a lament against a certain type of attidude in the tech world and a hatred that that attitude has translated into massive material wealth.
And you sound like a kid, bitching about capitalism has gone on for a long time. Why do you think the US.gov was so anti-communist, they didn't want any competition and so turned capitalism into an identity.
Is it because it's "fashionable", or is it because million of people started directly feeling the adverse effects of it and saw the perpetrators get off scot-free?
I am hoping for a more regular kind of reckoning where the market realizes the bubble was silly and we get more rational consumer offerings that are actually priced near to cost - then the utility of these tools will be seen as helpful but in a more limited scope.
I mean the idea of AI (or at least what these companies are calling AI) is fundamentally tainted in the public's eye. People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so, even if it was somehow restarted.
> Do you work in the tech industry?
Yes, I do. Do you? Is there a point to this condescension?
You blame others -- "They're lumped into the same bucket even when they shouldn't" -- some of that is on you for lumping what is a marketing labels in with the fundamental technology.
"People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so"
That's not the way it's going to go. Tools will develop in ways beyond what is seen today, and it will fade into the background noise, just like the internet, search and other tools, but only moreso.
Maybe that acronym is tainted, but the technology isn’t going anywhere.
Funny, I could say the same about this condescending statement. Maybe it depends on who you interact with. I associate with almost no tech people outside of work, and am probably a bit on the younger side compared to most people on HN.
I got into computers because I like computers and programming. Not whatever the fuck this is.
That’s great, but the problem is wayyy more companies are using AI so they can drop the call center and just offer you no real way to talk to a person and no real way to resolve problems any more complicated than the lowest common denominator.
Instead I got another one-sided unhinged rant that looks straight out of a typical Reddit post.
Other than the fact that the tool itself is being used to spread actual hate and division, and is currently destroying the fabric of society.
Dismissive and condescending comments like this also only serve to further push people away from AI. Writing it off as someone just not liking something new does not make the actual issues go away, nor does it make people's anger go away. If you earnestly believe that's all it is, I think you're in for quite a shock in the future.
adamddev1•1h ago
"Find a way to say yes."
My greater concern is that we are trading away hard earned truths for drastically inferred best guesses and slop that is just good enough to work. Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time. LLM agents fudge over and cut corners. What people don't understand is the exponential damage that will be done as we keep baking these errors and untruths into everything we build, and build with.
ragequittah•1h ago
What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
flerchin•1h ago
atomicnumber3•59m ago
But it wasn't ON PURPOSE. The INTENT, by the people serving the search, was for the information to be correct. Algorithms tried to reward correctness, people would curate information, etc. Sure, bad actors tried to game it. But since the intent was for it to be correct, search providers fought back.
With AI, you're literally intending for there to be this chance - and it's very hard to gauge what percent it is because it depends tremendously on your query - that the result is just straight up fucking wrong. Google search results didn't used to have a "btw this might just be totally madeup" disclaimer on them, or even on the quick-answer box.
The intent matters so much.
(I think this honestly extends to code too, though I won't belabor that point in this text box.)
adamddev1•58m ago
This is a similar logic to saying, so what if the LLMs introduce bugs, did humans not make mistakes before? Or, so what if I'm cheating, does no-one around me cheat? Corruption doesn't justify larger scale corruption.
rightbyte•57m ago
adamddev1•55m ago
mrguyorama•24m ago
mikepurvis•57m ago
All of this matters, and all of it is erased when it's just Google itself apparently telling me in black on white text above all the search results "here's the answer you're looking for ps. I'm an AI and can make mistakes, btw this space will sometimes secretly be an ad lol"
Krssst•55m ago
AI summaries removes that ability from you, and even when it gives the source it may paraphrase it incorrectly just because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable. The level of trust to give LLM summaries is 0.
gonzalohm•55m ago
As a programmer, I'm comfortable judging the coding output of an LLM. But now, anyone can go and start building without any knowledge, and at first it may look fine, but you are creating software using a pretty weak foundation, bad maintainability, etc.
I think LLMs allow everyone to skip an important step of building anything, which is understanding how things work.
happytoexplain•55m ago
People are wrong/lie in different ways from AI. We have highly developed personal heuristics about where to place human writing on a gradient from 0% to 100%, based on the source, the topic, and a hundred other variables we don't even realize we're ingesting. Even without a way to verify, we are comfortable with this state of affairs. AI lies in more randomly distributed, unpredictable, confident ways. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that these falsehoods are rarer than human falsehoods, it creates a constant background of cognitive stress (FUD) and a feeling of indignation.
Further, the "who is wrong more often" question is complicated because we ingest human-created and AI-created data in different contexts. But it seems both evident and intuitive that AI is wrong more often, as long as you accept "I don't know" as not being wrong. You can ask it anything, and it will much more rarely say "I don't know" than a human who also doesn't know would. For example, if you accidentally ask it a question that contains a false implication, it will more often than a human just assume your implication represents reality.
Also, nobody claimed 100%. It's a red flag to write in black-and-white like that.
bigstrat2003•47m ago
jcgrillo•17m ago
Now I don't google at all anymore, instead I spend 10min flipping through the manual to find the spec. One might argue that I should have been doing this all along, but it sure was convenient to have basically a 100% reliable, fast alternative. Now that's gone.