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Comment by ecjhdnc2025 | Hacker News Reader

ecjhdnc2025

It's this simple: generative AI is poisoning culture.

Everyone knows this -- even the people pushing it. We know what it is doing to art, what it is doing to just being able to find a book on amazon, what it is doing to reviews, to website searches, to authenticity everywhere.

Splitting hairs about whether people think it's the terminology or the functionality is absurd. Stop making generative AI products that are the cultural equivalent of breaking into the community pool solely to piss in it.

People don't really want this. They have an instinct that a lot of AI products are little more than grift (trained by their experiences with "Web 3.0"). And this study is showing that.

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"Everyone knows this", "People don't really want this".

No they don't. Phrasing like this is typical for people who want to persuade others that their opinions are somehow widely shared. It's a cheap rhetorical trick. Populists use this all the time. That doesn't make it any more true.

Some people might want that to be true (including you apparently). But most people haven't got a clue when they are using AI or aren't using AI and can't articulate what it is and are perpetually confused about anything technical.

You are probably right about everyone getting a bit worn out about everybody blabbing about the topic. That's because most of those people don't make any sense. And of course there are a lot of products that are pretty bad that advertise their supposed AI qualities. So understandably, people are a bit put off by that.

If you read a lot of stuff that uses phrasing like you just used, you are likely suffering from confirmation bias. That's a thing that causes people to genuinely believe they are right about something because they unconsciously avoid consuming information that disagrees with their views and seek out peers and sources of information that confirm them. Everything they see and hear confirms them in their biases. A lot of media sources actually prey on this by feeding lots of (AI generated, of course) content that deliberately manipulates groups like this.

All this study really shows is that people are tired of vague AI features that never really deliver on their promises. But they happily read a lot of stuff on twitter, linkedin, youtube, etc. blissfully unaware that they are consuming a lot of generated content that is fed to them by an AI that decides what they should consume next. All those supposed AI haters are hopelessly addicted to things like Tik Tok, Instagram, and what not.

The trick with selling AI is to not talk about it. People love magic. Just don't tell them how it works.

> But most people haven't got a clue when they are using AI or aren't using AI and can't articulate what it is and are perpetually confused about anything technical.

But you said...

> Phrasing like this is typical for people who want to persuade others that their opinions are somehow widely shared. It's a cheap rhetorical trick. Populists use this all the time. That doesn't make it any more true.

Is it only a problem when someone you disagree with does it, then? "Most people haven't got a clue" is also something populists say, I think you will find.

I tend not to write off whole swathes of people as non-technical. There's no such simple thing as a non-technical person, and people can like or dislike stuff without having a deep understanding of how it works. Generative AI is pretty widely distrusted and reviled; we know the damage it is going to do to trust and culture. It is poisoning the well of AI development. Studies like this shouldn't be a surprise.

The only thing that is going to stop generative AI is companies using it not making as much money as they expected. It's probably going to take a crash and another AI winter. Maybe I'm too blackpilled on AI already but I absolutely believe companies will just keep throwing money at it until it's literally existentially impossible to do so, just because the promise of the capitalist version of free energy (delusional as it may be) is just too great to resist.

The degree to which our culture is already largely controlled and manufactured by corporations and sold to us without our input or consent is a separate conversation we should have, collectively, because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard.

> because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard.

It is, and I agree.

But I suspect you agree with me that this is not how people feel.

If you see someone lying on the street, bloodied, and you don't help, expect to be judged by that person about as harshly as they judge the person who beat them up.

Corporate culture has never come for art and writing as dismissively and callously as generative AI does.

This isn't pop stars and TV. This is coming to the artist who has self-taught oil paintings, the photographer who has built their own artistic camera, the pencil sketch artist who has learned photorealistic sketching and saying "hey, I know your work is almost impossible to share with people already and sharing it is the thing that makes you feel good... but I'm going to make that worse by drowning it in autogenerated shit. Oh and hey, you know how you developed a style and sold a couple of things? I've trained my system so that your customers can just generate work in your style without even giving you money, so that should make you happy, right? Happy customers are good."

This is not a mere extension of corporate culture. This is a callous, systematically careless, dismissive kick in the face to people on the ground. And we all feel it, either on our own behalf as creative people, or for those artists we admire.

The degree to which our culture is already largely controlled and manufactured by corporations and sold to us without or input or consent is a separate conversation we should have, collectively, because AI is just pissing harder into an already pissed in pool in that regard.

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