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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

Companies and people by and large are not forced to use AI. AI isn't doing things, people and corporations are doing things with AI.

I find it curious how often folks want to find fault with tools and not the systems of laws, regulations, and convention that incentivize using tools.

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Many people are, indeed, being forced to use AI by their ignorant boss, who often blame their own employees for the AI’s shortcomings. Not all bosses everywhere of course, and it’s often just pressure to use AI instead of force.

Given how gleefully transparent corporate America is being that the plan is basically “fire everyone and replace them with AI”, you can’t blame anyone for seeing their boss pushing AI as a bad sign.

So you’re certainly right about this: AI doesn’t do things, people do things with AI. But it sure feels like a few people are going to use AI to get very very rich, while the rest of us lose our jobs.

I guess if someone's boss forces them to use a tool they don't want to use, then the boss is to blame?

If the boss forced them to use emacs/vim/pandas and the employee didn't want to use it, I don't think it makes sense to blame emacs/vim/pandas.

Why not both? When you make tools that putrefy everything they touch, on the back of gigantic negative externalities, you share the responsibility for making the garbage with the people who choose to buy it. OpenAI et al. explicitly thrive on outpacing regulation and using their lobbying power to ensure that any possible regulations are built in their favor.

> "AI isn't doing things, people and corporations are..."

Where have I heard a similar reasoning? Maybe about guns in the US???

Guns can and are used to murder people directly in the physical world.

The overwhelming (perhaps complete) use of generative AI is not to murder people. It's to generate text/photo/video/audio.

Generative AI is used to defraud people, to propagandize them, to steal their intellectual property and livelihoods, to systematically deny their health insurance claims, to dangerously misinform them (e.g. illegitimate legal advice or hallucinated mushroom identification ebooks), to drive people to mental health breakdowns via "ai psychosis" and much more. The harm is real and material, and right now is causing unemployment, physical harm, imprisonment, and in some cases death.

Internet is used to defraud people, to propagandize them, to steal their intellectual property and livelihoods, to systematically deny their health insurance claims, to dangerously misinform them (e.g. illegitimate legal advice or hallucinated mushroom identification ebooks), to drive people to mental health breakdowns via "internet psychosis" and much more. The harm is real and material, and right now is causing unemployment, physical harm, imprisonment, and in some cases death.

I was too young, too naive, and/or too ignorant to know the Internet would do those things. I would argue a majority of us were.

AI is _very_ clearly going to lead to a lot of negative outcomes, and I am no longer too young, naive, and ignorant about it.

"X thing was bad and has remained unsolved. Exponentially making X worse is therefore okay, as long as it helps me open 20 PRs per day."

Writing is used to defraud people, to propagandize them, to steal their intellectual property and livelihoods, to systematically deny their health insurance claims, to dangerously misinform them (e.g. illegitimate legal advice or hallucinated mushroom identification ebooks), to drive people to mental health breakdowns via "internet psychosis" and much more. The harm is real and material, and right now is causing unemployment, physical harm, imprisonment, and in some cases death...

I'm sympathetic to your point, but practically it's easier to try to control a tool than it is to control human behaviour.

I think it's also implied that the problem with AI is how humans use it, in much the same way that when anti-gun advocates talk about the issues with guns, it's implicit that it's how humans use (abuse?) them.

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