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Comment by blt | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Generative AI is bad. Most of the general population already realizes it. Only the tech and computer science bubble remains optimistic.

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The (non-tech) industry I am in generates an enormous amount of text that it's fairly certain nobody reads past the executive summary.

My workmates love it. Amongst the tech community, I see a divide very similar to the crypto one - everybody who has a stake in it succeeding is very optimistic. Everybody working in other areas seems dubious at best.

Yeah, overall it feels somewhat useful in a work context. Nothing transformative though.

Generating huge amounts of stylistically awful ultra-verbose nonsense isn’t actually useful in any industry other than the ultra-low-end journalism/blogspam space. Either no-one reads it anyway, in which case it’s more or less a wash, or someone actually has to read it, in which case it’s a productivity drain.

It's a productivity boost for the people who have to generate the text that nobody reads. At an organisational level it's a wash caused by requiring that text in the first place

Literally every conversation that I am in or hear about AI outside of tech circles (and most of them inside) are negative.

Is there any technology in recent memory where the greator public has turned so universally against it?

I don't think any tech has ever been pushed so hard in front of people so fast. People hated facebook for ages but you could just not use it. While these AI features are shoved in front of your face constantly. Google sticks them at the top of every search, reddit sticks generated slop on every page, every SaaS has rebranded themselves as an AI tool with constant popups telling you to use the new AI feature.

Most other crappy tech you could just choose to not use.

Google+ was like this, in that they shoved that stuff into your face constantly with no opt-out, but just on Google.

What bubble are you living in where it's universal and not mostly apathetic?

Web3/crypto?

Ad tech?

Not that I can think of, but the reason I think it happened for AI so quickly:

AI enshittified way, WAY too quickly.

The thing is that all these tech companies are really just innovating new ways to scam consumers into adopting something that's worse for them. They just subsidize the bad stuff and, eventually, have to start bleeding consumers dry.

Uber is now more expensive than taxis, AirBNB is more expensive than hotels, placing an order online is more inconvenient than calling, and on and on. But it took decades for this to transpire. For a long time, these new things were actually better.

But AI was pushed so hard, so severely, that it became enshittified way too quick. And consumers are already on guard after seeing tech A-Z slowly make their life worse.

3D tv maybe? It was never as prominent, but people exposed to it mostly strongly disliked it.

Maybe ‘the metaverse’.

I don't think that this is tree. I'm a high school student, and I've overheard quite a few conversations between our admin about whether they prefer Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT.

That may not be because they like it but because they're required to use it. The teachers in my area, at least, are mandated to use AI themselves and integrate it into their curriculum.

I think people in the cs bubble will be optimistic up until it directly affects them by destroying software engineering as a (good) career.

that's already happening for Juniors, combination of ai and less funding

It's already happening for all the seniors who got hit by the layoffs ("because AI make code go brrrr") in these past two years, too.

Yet non-tech people are paying for ChatGPT which blows my mind.

What do you mean by tech and compsci bubble? Many of the software engineers I interact with don’t seem all that optimistic or positive about the AI tools. There are bubbles for either side I think.

But I’m one of those who hasn’t had great experiences using them for anything beyond toy projects.. so maybe my bubble falls more on the AI skeptic side.

I think it's the money-generating part of "tech".. they see this "glorified spellcheck", assume endless possibilities that everyone will want to buy, and are busy placing "buy AI now" buttons everywhere.. (well, more like "Try it, try it, you'll be amazed, and if you give us money for the premium version you'll be even more amazed!" buttons)

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