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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I've found that the sort of people who complain about AI or cryptocurrency don't care if it can be disabled. The mere fact that such functionality exists taints the product for them. I can't say I understand the reasons (I like AI functionality), but that's what I've noticed.

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I do care that it can be disabled. My problem with such functionality is that it becomes the sole focus of the development team, drifting their attention away from improving core experiences, such as language and plugin support, polishing ergonomics, and pruning papercuts.

The focus of the team is gone. Their target now is not to make a great product, but to make an engaging product that makes money however they can.

The AI is a symptom of the problem. If it weren't AI, it would be something else.

make an engaging product that makes money however they can.

Is that not what your employer does?

It is, because they're VC-funded.

Yes. I don't want to give support or market share to a company that is using AI as it is an unethical technology.

Do you also refuse to use search engines, cars, phones, computers, etc? Or by "AI" do you specifically mean LLMs?

AI is such a bad and tainted term and since LLMs became so prominent it has kind of become synonymous with LLMs and generative AI more broadly.

I honestly think this is for the better, (un)supervised learning models and other machine learning models with a reasonable number of parameters (k-means clustering, Markov Chains etc.) are usually not called AI any more (and honestly haven’t been for some time; machine learning has been much more popular for at least 10-15 years in my experience).

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