Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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> people screaming "but AI is the future"

I witnes far more people screaming against AI.

The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now.

Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments.

I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal Engine, and mocap software with diffusion models. The students weren't very polite. Most of the "questions" I got at each of the campuses were simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI.

Good looking and well-reviewed indie games that incorporate AI elements or tools are dumped on by these folks. It's like butting into conversations to say something bad about AI scores points or something.

> Mozilla keeps jumping on fads

Agreed on this point, though. They're rudderless. And Google is probably quite happy about the fact that their antitrust litigation sponge can't steal away their users.

> I witnes far more people screaming against AI.

If you shove it into people's faces, they will have knee jerk reaction and hate it.

If the AI industry didn't desperately try to push it in every possible way in desperate bid to be profitable and it was just a thing that slowly gets better and is value added, not a nagging push, there would be far less of that.

But companies like MS have idea of consent of average rapist and will not even give option "no, I don't want copilot in teams", there is only "add it now" or "remind later"

"AI" is the technology that makes your computers and electricity more expensive, while slowly ruining the authenticity of everything you come across on the internet.

I saw a sad post on bsky today about how the joy of animal behavior videos has been destroyed for that poster, because they can no longer be sure if it's real or just a fake.

Add to that various hardware shortages caused by the AI mania or more examples of AI missuse and I wonder where we might end up eventually if people will get even angrier.

I’m quite sure that these shortages aren’t caused by mania, but oligopolies, and unpredictable countries. In undistorted markets, these should be way shorter. A year, or two maximum. At least that what supply side told us in 2020, and early 2021. It seems and predictions also say, that the shortages are with us long term. It’s even more telling that some companies leave markets where these “shortages” are, ie huge profit margins.

People tend to complain about stuff that's annoying and broken and just ignore things that work well.

Like Chrome uses AI to translate language and everyone just takes it for granted.

If you keep shoveling a thing to people who don't care, you'll get tons of irrational pushback no matter how the good this thing is. And AI isn't even particularly good.

There is a clear substance behind the pushback on AI in creative work, and it would be foolish to dismiss it as irrational. You might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus too much in implementation details, the dislike for is AI is a bit deeper than that.

On the other hand, it also sometimes feels as if some "old media" journalists see AI as a convenient target to avenge the tech sector for disrupting them. Not that it makes AI slop any less sloppy.

Nothing prevents the prevailing trends from being utterly stupid. Just the opposite, really.

I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore?

Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.

And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.

And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.

But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.

Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!

> simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI

I wonder what that might mean!

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