Some people really do hate AI, it's not entirely about the layoffs. This is a well insulated bubble but you can find tons of anti-AI forums online.
And I read a lot of articles about games that seem to love throwing a dig at AI even if it's not really relevant.
Personally, I can see why people dislike Gen AI. It takes people's creations without permission.
That being said, morality of the creation of AI tooling aside, there are still people who dislike AI-generated stuff. Like, they'd enjoy a song, or an image, or a book, and then suddenly when they find out it's AI suddenly they hate it. In my experience with playing with comfy ui to generate images, it's really easy to get something half decent, it's really hard to get something very high quality. It really is a skill in itself, but people who hate AI think it's just type a prompt and get image. I've seen workflows with 80+ nodes, multiple prompts, multiple masks, multiple loras, to generate one single image. It's a complex tool to learn, just like photoshop. Sure you can use Nano-Banana to get something but even then it can take dozens of generations and prompt iterations to get what you want.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/827650/indie-develope...
That's a big aside
>Like, they'd enjoy a song, or an image, or a book, and then suddenly when they find out it's AI suddenly they hate it.
Yes, because for some people its about supporting human creation. Finding out it's part of a grift to take from said humans can be infuriating. People don't want to be a part of that.
Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".
I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.
One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
Of course knowing the provenance of something you enjoy, and learning that it has dark roots, can certainly tarnish your enjoyment of said thing, like knowing where your diamonds came from, or how sausage is made. It's hard to make a similar connection to AI generated stuff.
I listen to a lot of EDM. Some of the tracks on my playlist are almost certainly AI generated. If I like a song and check out the artist and find that it's a bot then I'm disappointed because that means I can never see them live, but I can still bop my head to the beat.
Anecdotally its almost like they see them like mad scientists who are happy blowing up themselves and the world if they get to play with the new toy; almost childlike usually thinking they are doing "good" in the process. Which is seen as a sign of a lack of a type of intelligence/maturity by most people.
Lets say I'm a small business and I want to produce a new logo for some marketing material. In the past I would of paid someone either via a platform or some local business to do it. That would of just been the cost of business.
Now since there is a lower cost technology, and I know my competition is using it, I should use it too else all else equal I'm losing margin compared to my competition.
It's happening in software development too. Its the reason they say "if you don't use AI you will be taken over by someone who does". It may be true; but that person may of wished the AI genie was never let out of the bottle.
Negative sentiment also comes through in opinion polling in the US.
It's clearly not that straightforward.
That is not the only reason to use a tool you think is bad. "good enough" doesn't mean "good". If you think it's better to generate an essay due in an hour then rush something by hand, that doesn't mean it's "good". If I decide to make a toy app full of useless branches, no documentation, and tons of sleep calls, it doesn't mean the program is "good". It's just "good enough".
That's the core issue here. "good enough" varies on the context, and not too many people are using it like the sales pitch to boost the productivity of the already productive.
I'd wager that most people would find both as "good" depending on how you framed the question.
> in what way is the opinion "generally negative"
I'm just trying to tell you what people outside your bubble think, that AI is VERY MUCH a class thing. Using AI images at people is seen as completely not cool, it makes one look like a corporate stooge.
In polling japan and sweden are very similar in terms of sentiment though: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...
"Region of the world" correlation looks a lot stronger than that.
I wonder if these feelings are what scribes and amanuenses felt when the printing press arrived.
I do enjoy programming, I like my job and take pride on it, but I actively try for it not to be the life-mean giving activity. I'm a just mercenary of my trade.
Cool, you "made" that image that looks like ass. Great, you "wrote" that blog post with terrible phrasing and far too many words. Congrats, I guess.
And I will not be replying to anyone who trots out their personal AI success story. I'm not interested.
That's probably me for a lot of people. The reality is a bit finer than this namely :
- I hate VC funded AI which is actually super shallow (basically OpenAI/Claude wrappers)
- I hate VC funded genuine BigAI that sells itself as the literal opposite of what it is, e.g. OpenAI... being NOT open.
- I hate AI that hides it's ecological cost. Generating text, videos, etc is actually fascinating, but not if making the shittiest video with the dumbest script is taking the same amount of energy I'd need to fly across the globe.
- I hate AI that hides it's human cost, namely using cheap labor from "far away" where people have to label atrocities (murders, rape, child abuse, etc) without being provided proper psychological support.
- I hate AI that embodies capitalist principles of exploitation. If somehow your entire AI business relies on an entire pyramid of everything listed above to capture a market then hike the price once dependency is entrenched you might be a brilliant business man but you suck as a human being.
etc... I could go on but you get the idea.
I do love open source public AI research though. Several of my very good friends are researchers in universities working on the topic. They are smart, kind and just great human beings. Not fucking ghouls riding the hype with 0 concern for our World.
So... yes maybe AI haters have a slightly more refined perspective but of course when one summarize whatever text they see in 3 words via their favorite LLM, it's hard to see.
I get your overall point, but the hyperbole is probably unhelpful. Flying a human across the globe takes several MWh. That's billions of tokens created (give or take an order of magnitude...).
My point is mobility, especially commercial flight, is extremely energy intense and the average westerner will burn much more resources here than on AI use. People get mad at the energy and water use of AI, and they aren't wrong, but right now it really is only a drop in the ocean of energy and water we're wasting anyways.
That's not what I heard. Maybe it was in 2024 but now data centers have their own categories in energy consumption whereas until now it was "others". I think we need to update our collective understanding in terms of actual energy consumed. It was all fun & games until recently and slop was kind of harmless consequence ecologically speaking but from what I can tell in terms of energy, water, etc it is not negligible anymore.
AGI? No, although it's not there. LLMs? Yes, lots. The main benefit they can give is to sort-of-speed-up internet search, but I have to go and check the sources anyway so I'll revert back to 20+ years of experience of doing it myself. Any other application of machine learning such almost instant speech to text? No, it's useful.
In real life, I don't know anyone who genuinely wants to use AI. Most of them think it's "meh", but don't have any strong feelings about using it if it's more convenient - like Google shoving it in their face during a search. But would they pay for it, or miss it if it's gone? Nope, not a chance.