Americans are outliers; the rest of the world has a much more favourable view of AI.
> AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the U.S.
— https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-optimism-asia/
> U.S. Workers Are More Wary of AI Than Their Global Peers.
— https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/what-leaders-should-...
> Majorities of Americans have pessimistic views toward the impact of AI on internet disinformation and the job market, outpacing most of the 32 countries surveyed in the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026. Americans were also the most likely to feel AI will make their country’s economy worse. Not every country is pessimistic about AI. Americans clearly are.
— https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/comparing-us-and-global-attitude...
Also from your last link;
> The pessimism isn’t uniquely American. Consistent with international Ipsos polling from 2025, the U.S. sits alongside other countries in the Anglosphere – such as Canada, Australia, and Great Britain – in being more nervous and less excited about the technology.
> Put simply, AI is built on weak social pillars. Despite growing adoption, many feel that AI poses a risk not only to their jobs, but to humanity as a whole. Amid a backdrop of widespread systemic distrust, the technology feeds into Americans’ belief that the economy is “rigged for the rich and powerful.”
> Until Americans feel the upsides of AI clearly outweigh the downsides, views of AI will likely remain negative. If AI is here to stay, so too is the backlash.
I think that last piece is the key part. AI hasn’t significantly improved anything for the average American. It only poses large structural risks. So, what’s to like about AI unless you’re in Asia and stand to gain from it?
Yes, I'm trying to leave. Guess how fun AI has made that process
For those either outside computer culture, or those within who might view "craft" as virtue, automating that craft is an affront.
Right now, the "automators" (pro-AI) folks seem to be pushing that culture onto the "crafters" and naturally getting pushback.
I've said this before, but generative AI proponents are walking into creative spaces with their slop and expecting to be treated as equals despite not sharing any of the same experiences or values; effectively they're trying to redefine what craft is for the original group.
Obviously this is unpopular.
- The first data point Pew presents is ~50% of Americans use Ai chat bots
- The second data point shows 25% of those using it is for fun and entertainment (1:8 overall)
- 1/4 of Americans use it daily
Krugman lost me when he said "Ai is dishonest" as if it has intent. He makes too much rage bait these days.
https://susam.net/inverse-laws-of-robotics.html
Ai is highly non-deterministic by design, it's a core feature that gives it the capabilities and drawbacks. Don't expect it to be accurate, stay HIL my friends
And suddenly, here come all these huge, horrible companies that literally steal all the artist's work, by pirating it (which we've all been gaslit into thinking is something illegal but it turns out like so much else, it's only illegal if you're poor), and these huge companies have suddenly automated all this artistic creation, this previously human endeavor of creating meaning and joy and sharing passion. This makes people deeply uncomfortable because we recognize how wrong it is for all of these billionaires and trillionares to be getting ever richer while eating the creative genius of humanity and giving as little as possible back.
On top of that, they're spying on everything we do and feeding it to the ever hungry AI maw to automate every possible job away, and people (rightfully) think this will steal a lot of meaning from human society, converting it via LLMs into a dollar value, which, again, sits in the billionaire's pocket, not yours.
So yes, people are angry about this in a way they weren't angry about e.g. spreadsheets, or cheap international communication. Because it's genuinely different, and people recognize that.
AI is out of the bottle, and we cannot put it back. But equally, we cannot live in a world where it creates trillionares, where everyone is made poorer and poorer while the things that give them meaning get automated away (whether that's art, science, philosophy, mathematics, coding, or anything else).
The only way I can see forward is of this gets treated like a utility, with strict controls on AI companies - training on public data allowed but then the thing you create gets recognized as a public good, and you earn the money back by serving it via an API, but with strict limits on how much you can charge and no ability to arbitrarily lock people out.
I don't see the US achieving this, unfortunately, and it'll probably be looked back on as one of the long list of things that lead to it's downfall.
And I think this is also reflected in a lot of AI-generated art. Yes, it is fascinating to a degree and it "looks" like art, but it doesn't "feel" like art. It's heartless. It's soulless. And I say that as someone who doesn't even believe in a soul.
For example..
Even if prices were normal, there would still be plenty of reasons to hate LLMs, AI companies, and their products.
The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.
It never does anything interesting or inspired. It never gets halfway into building something and then questions the entire premise of your app. It's automated milquetoast.
If only middle management and c-suite knew that
I asked Sonnet to port an old game I wrote in college to HTML5.
It threw out the audio and graphics system, made it a single HTML file with no dependencies, no assets, everything dynamically generated, added new backgrounds, and new music.
I just asked it for a port, so I was like wtf, though some of the choices it made were better than the original ones.
Would be nice if that "initiative" could be turned on or off on demand though. I haven't tested that. (Some guy told me "if you want creativity, use Claude. To turn the behavior off, use a different model!")
Just last week finally I had to buy a new phone, and so I went shopping again - this time no AI was mentioned anywhere. Not online, not on the stands in the shops, nowhere. The silence speaks volumes, as they say.
1) Increasingly more sophisticated cameras.
2) Fake slimness with protruding lenses.
3) Removing headphone jack.
4) Adding AI.
Is this really a mystery?
For example, BitTorrent is a great peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol. In principle you could use this for legitimate media distribution, and in fact Rainberry Inc. (a.k.a BitTorrent Inc.) tried to do this for decades and succeeded in some one-off partnerships with legit broadcasters:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/02/sharing-d...
In practice BitTorrent as a protocol is still mainly used for pirated video files, the same as it was 20 years ago. Meanwhile BitTorrent the company was bought by a cryptocurrency startup in 2018 and laid off most of its employees in 2023.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainberry,_Inc.>
Edit: fix link and clarify
The management class in corporations are obsessed with it, they are delusional and think they can finally use it achieve their dreams of having no workers. They are forcing their workers to use it somehow. The are also foisting it unasked onto consumers in their products in the most stupid way. just wrecking their products.
And the reality of it is that.. The current crop of LLMs are excellent chatbots; they're very good at fooling a human into believing that they are intelligent.. They're good for shitposting and making silly images.. They have a few other quite situational niche uses, but that's about it.
I'm just pissed off at the stupidity and waste of it all. Like the Easter Islanders, our elites are driving our society straight into the ground.
Yes, there's too much hype, and forcing the use of it does no one any good. And for sure a lot of that demand detached from results, and this means the demand will ebb. But I don't think this is like the dot-com bubble, it's more like the OPEC oil embargoing the 70s where soaring prices detached from results led to a collapse in demand that lasted a long while.
Crypto and NFTs were *speculative* bubbles, the assets had no inherent value whatsoever, people bought exclusively because they hoped to sell to a bigger fool later on.
Dot-com and AI are *tech* bubbles. The new technology is transforming a lot and growing fast and people are buying in in incredible numbers. But every technological adoption is an S curve, with an exponential phase followed by a logarithmic phase where it asymptotically levels off.
The tech bubble forms during the exponential phase. As long as we are in the exponential phase, it is mathematically impossible to guess where the ceiling will be based on the trend alone, so any bet is justifiable. The crash comes when adoption inflects and growth slows and we all learn where the curve will level off. The losers in the bubble are the people who made bets on the ceiling being higher than where it actually lands, and people who made more conservative bets come out basically untouched.
The outcome is dark fiber, or like we'll probably have in a few years, dark data centers. Infrastructure built by bankrupt firms who made big bets to get ready to service demand that is never going to come. But that infrastructure can be repurposed (the glut of bandwidth left by the Dark Fiber networks of 2001 basically enabled skype and voip).
I can tell you from observing high schoolers for a week, everybody there was using it, teachers and students alike. Do they like it? I don't know, but they are using it.
The numbers against it aren't as big as the most vocal critics would have you believe.
Why wouldn't you use the cheat-at-homework machine?
Part of me likes having an easy mode button for so many things.
But all of me knows I can’t be the one person who can’t leverage it.
It removes jobs without, at least currently, substituting an equal amount of new jobs (and even if it did, they wouldn't apply to the same people who lost theirs.
It serves for spam, public manipulation, and mass surveillance.
It constitutes massive copyright fraud.
It fills the web with slop.
It's added to products despite that users say they don't want it there, and even say they dislike it.
It's also peak "tech hubris". The broader world has largely complained about Silicon Valley's "we know better than you" attitude for a long time, and the push for AI/LLMs is that attitude on steroids.
People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into learned helplessness on those things. Nothing can be done. Both parties are bad. The right promotes corrupt oligarchy and regressively transfers wealth upward, the left prevents new home construction (driving real estate costs) and regulates away everything but service industries and white collar jobs that AI is now replacing.
The worst AI hate I've seen comes from artists and creatives. I've found the AI hate in those communities to be white hot bordering on people talking about violence.
My early take, which I think is still valid, is that actual art is very unlikely to be replaced by AI. AI generated visual stuff looks bland, cliche, or has this weird "plastic" look. AI generated prose is boring. AI generated stories are hilarious barrages of tropes played exactly straight, cliche characters, basically just like paint by numbers bad TV writing or even worse. If real artists find ways to use AI, it won't be this way. It'll be as an assistant or they'll get in and hack it and make it do exactly what they want, much like artistic experimental photography.
But I'm only half right, and when I realized this I understood the hate.
AI is not replacing "true art," and it won't even if true artists end up finding ways to use it (like artistic photography etc.). But what it is replacing is what a lot of artists make their money doing: commercial art, making "content," ghostwriting, first-pass editing, graphic design, web design, that kind of thing.
That's not pour-your-soul-into-it capital-A Art, but it's what pays the bills. AI is absolutely decimating the market for that.
So back to my first point: it's all economic.
The inconvenient reality of most "creative" work that AI has excelled at supplanting is that it already is, and has been, exactly what people accuse AI to be doing to the form: pure commercial churn, meant solely to occupy temporary space, occasionally brilliant, mostly by accident, but nearly always produced lazily, insincerely, and without pride by people who are not paid enough to care and would rather be working on anything else. AI accelerates human mediocrity not because it is inherently mediocre by nature but because most people, and the things they produce, are. And I very squarely place the bulk of all my own creative efforts and accomplishments within that category too.
- Everyone says it's going to take my job. Are they correct? I don't know, but I'm not excited to roll the dice.
- It's pricing out consumer computing.
- It's the final nail in the coffin for the free internet in multiple ways:
- Websites are blocking anyone with a non-standard browser to attempt to clamp down on bot scraping.
- The web is moving towards denonymization, in part to combat bot traffic.
- Websites and forums themselves are being assaulted by bot traffic, much of it divisive propaganda.
- It represents an aggressive centralization of power and resources in the hands of people with money and power.Which of course it is for a lot of us.
Definitely, the tech industry has earned this skepticism, it didn't come out of nowhere. Decades of dark patterns, ads crammed down our throats, and now everyone has to use AI for everything? Features nobody asked for or wanted, which their bosses are tracking their usage of?
Aside from the obvious reasons, I am also convinced there's a state-sponsored astroturfing campaign against AI and datacenters on social media. I see dozens of accounts (some of individuals inactive for years before they starting going crazy with anti-AI/datacenter posts) posting the same things with similar or identical wording - not resharing, but creating new images with similar or identical wording.
It's exhausting to find a job, it's annoying to have to parse through a plethora of AI generated content for real knowledge, it's becoming increasingly frustrating to build something when people assume you've made it using AI tools, and it's very annoying to see the only things that popup to be stuff like: AI tools listing directories, agentic this and that, AI detectors, AI creators, AI tools created to handle other AI tools, and so on.
It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.
The whole leadership of the AI industry, with almost no exceptions, sounds like a bunch of psychopaths who have no qualms about lying and get off on the idea of a populace being oppressed and demoralized by their companies.
I think that's what a lot of people are expecting. Several people told me unironically they're becoming plumbers to try and delay the worst. (I think blue collar has a decade or so after white collar.)
They'll probably roll out UBI or a fake jobs program before things get really ugly, but I think the social and psychological adjustment will be more difficult than the economic one. (We already figured out how to send everyone free money.)
It's insulting. It makes people feel irrelevant.
This is IMO one of the factors that people who want us to be China hawks have missed; there isn't a huge industry of Chinese thought leaders being obnoxious in English on English-dominated social media. While the US powerful thought leaders like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and (to a much lesser extent) Larry Ellison all own social networks which they use constantly to beef with the general public.
Is it unfair and does it suck that creatives aren't getting paid? Yes. But this is nothing new and I don't know how I feel that they deserve special compensation when people work their entire lives for pennies to support their families. It is though the artist is thought of as superior because "creativity" but other jobs are seen as lesser. I don't find the same uproar on HN when those jobs were shit and have been. It's when it touches us, the creatives, that we care. I don't feel that way.
If you want to put your heart into something, the output is what you created, artists have often not worried about compensation or recognition because often they don't get it. You have to do it because you want to, and nothing has changed from that perspective.
That seems more likely your own sentiments, rather than an plausible explanation as to why most people have feelings on this issue.
I'm not saying that this isn't the main reason for some people (for example artists fearful about the technology) or that it doesn't come up in conversation in some niches--young educated people from the West who are terminally online.
But is it really likely to be a true root cause of broad concern across society?
It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code, but that requires a hand-crafting expert human engineer and takes a long time.
I predict that the latter will be reserved for the highest value, longest lived, or special (high performance, high security) parts of systems.
As of June 25th, 2026. Read your comment in four years, and tell me you believe what you've posted.
Maybe one year? Four months?
Ever since Claude Opus 4.7 it's been helping me greatly ship around 3x to 5x faster, and it's good code if I tell it to follow my existing code's structures. Otherwise you have to create .md guideline files and it works.
It's not perfect, but again, 3x to 5x (!!!)
Web apps and CRUDs, if may I ask? Or is AI helping you with something that you couldn't ever do by yourself? I have mixed results across different technologies like frontend, backend, infra and hardware.
I know from experience that to make it a non-toy project I am probably going to need to spend some, if not most of that saved time cleaning up in the future due to technical debt.
For backend, it is mildly useful at best, helpful with boilerplate and when I know exactly what needs to be built. I have not yet firsthand experienced these 10x, 100x productivity gains.
Frontend, forms,tables and generic dashboards is pretty good, I am sure one could get it done faster and better over the long term with proper technique and methods, but I just hate css
This reeks of self flattery. Using AI isn't "hard". Any experienced developer can simply pull in a skill into your harness and have it writing code at a similar level to others with the same harness.
That doesn't give you good taste, but .. for yer basic line of business or enterprise app, expectations were already low, and most websites have user-hostile design written into the requirements, so the damage isn't too bad.
I do think we've yet to see what the worst case for government contractor software project + vibe coding is. The benchmark is the Canadian gun registry https://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=1949 "In what may be the worst budget overrun in history, the costs to implement a registry of firearms balloons from $2M to $860M". Now add token spend to that.
Doubly so if the product also has quality problems inherent in AI art, video, music, not only does it communicate "your attention is not worth my time" but also "your attention is not worth putting in effort to keep".
The actual quality of the AI output is what created that reputation.
It's not surprising given that "Sixty percent of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds"
It has been a majority opinion that social media is a net negative for society since, what, 2016? But Facebook and Twitter didn't vanish that year, or in any of the years since, despite ever increasing shares of people believing they are harming us. Tumblr and Reddit users have been calling their respective forums "this hell-site" since around 2014, but that didn't make them go away. "Doomscrolling" has been in dictionaries since 2020.
This isn't some crazy concept, it has a million names when looked at from different angles:
Addiction, Perverse incentive, Cognitive Dissonance, Ego Depletion, The Tragedy of the Commons, The Prisoner's Dilemma, Pareto Divergence, Externalities, The Multipolar Trap, The Race to the Bottom, The Collective Action Problem, Coordination Failure, Pluralistic Ignorance, Normalization of Deviance.
This is exactly how almost all bad things and behaviors are able to exist. Not because people think bad things are good, even the worst tyrants dislike tyranny, but because the incentives of the environment make them the right choice for the person in the moment.
mrhottakes•1h ago