Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6DM | Hacker News Reader

I don't think AI is the cause, it's merely the mechanism that is speeding up what has already been happening.

Social media was already isolating people. It is being sped up by the use of AI bots (see dead internet theory). These bots are being used to create chaos in society for political purposes, but overall it's increasingly radicalizing people and as a result further isolating everyone.

AI isn't eroding college institutions, they were already becoming a money grab and a glorified jobs program. Interpersonal relationships (i.e. connections) are still present, I don't see how AI changes that in this scenario.

I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.

The article does highlight one thing that I do attribute to AI and that is the lack of critical thinking. People are thinking less with the use of AI. Instead of spending time evaluating, exploring and trying to think creatively. We are collectively offloading that to AI.

View on HN

I rather disagree with this position.

To risk an analogy, if I throw petrol onto an already smouldering pile of leaves, I may mot have ‘caused’ the forest fire, but I have accelerated it so rapidly that the situation becomes unrecognisable.

There may already have been cracks in the edifice, but they were fixable. AI takes a wrecking ball to the whole structure

I agree and disagree with parts of what you said.

AI may have caused a distinct trajectory of the problem, but the old system was already broken and collapsing. If the building falls over or collapses in place doesn't change that the building was already at its end.

I think the fact that AI is allowed to go as far as it has is part of the same issue, namely, our profit-at-all-costs methodology of late-stage capitalism. This has lead to the accelerated destruction of many institutions. AI is just one of those tools that lets us sink more and more resources into the grifting faster.

(Edit: Fixing typos.)

I agree with this. We've made existing problems 100x worse overnight. I just read the curl project is discontinuing bug bounties. We're losing so much with the rise of AI.

That seems a bit fatalistic, "we have lost so much because curl discontinued bug bounties". That's unfortunate, but it's very minor in the grand scheme of things.

Also, the fault there lies squarely with charlatans who have been asked/told not to submit "AI slop" bug bounties and yet continue to do so anyway, not with the AI tools used to generate them.

Indeed, intelligent researchers have used AI to find legitimate security issues (I recall a story last month on HN about a valid bug being found and disclosed intelligently with AI in curl!).

Many tools can be used irresponsibly. Knives can be used to kill someone, or to cook dinner. Cars can take you to work, or take someone's life. AI can be used to generate garbage, or for legitimate security research. Don't blame the tool, blame the user of it.

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

An accurate statement. In places where guns are difficult to come by, you'll find knife crime in it's place. Take the knives away and it'd be fists.

>In places where guns are difficult to come by, you'll find knife crime in it's place.

By how much and how consequential exactly, and how would we know?

There were 14,650 gun deaths in the US in 2025 apparently. There were 205 homicides by knife in the UK in 2024-2025. [0][1]. Check their populations. US gun deaths per capita seem to exceed UK knife deaths by roughly 15x.

[0]

https://www.thetrace.org/2026/01/shooting-gun-violence-data-...

[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04...

Good question. Canada has twice as many registered firearms as the US (though the number of unregistered firearms is likely greater in the US). It's certainly not difficult to purchase guns in either country. And Canada experiences an order of magnitude fewer gun deaths per capita than the US. The US is somewhat unique among western nations in how it handles mental illness, and crime, and I would suggest those are more fruitful avenues of inquiry.

So I'll stand by the stance that individuals are responsible for their own actions, that tools cannot bear responsibility for how they are used on account of being inanimate objects, and that all tools serve constructive and destructive purposes, sometimes simultaneously.

isn't that the point? the estimate is that the US has 1.2 gun per capita (compared to 0.34 for Canada)

and since the US handles guns so lax they are a problem

a vocal minority is making a lot of problems (but the US is not even enforcing its existing gun control laws sufficiently)

individuals are responsible, but that doesn't mean that the tool is not a significant factor.

and hence the recommendation is to have better control of who gets the tool (and not emotionally charged "scary rifle" ban)

I mentioned the estimated unregistered firearms, but they are just that, an estimate. I went looking for some references and found the following: household gun ownership is down over the last 50 years, hunting is down, gun ownership among men is down, gun ownership among women remains steady, gun ownership by race has not appreciably changed: https://vpc.org/studies/ownership.pdf Gun ownership declining would be consistent with increased gun control.

Yet gun deaths by suicide and murder per 100k people hasn't varied widely between 5 and 7 over the same period: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...

I also found the stats on this site interesting (many are estimates):

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Murder...

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violen...

> individuals are responsible, but that doesn't mean that the tool is not a significant factor.

Individuals are responsible. No buts. And there is no solving violence on any scale without understanding and addressing the reasons someone might commit it. This is a rabbit hole of difficult and uncomfortable truths we must address as a society.

Responsibility is a very complex topic. Sometimes it seems straightforward. People training child soldiers are more responsible than the child soldiers, right? The USA financing, training, and arming this or that group seems to be also responsible if those groups do bad things. (Hence all the protests in the US against the way the IDF wages war in Gaza.)

People voting for or against gun control also have some responsibility. (Australia's National Firearms Agreement comes to mind.) Similarly people who (continued to vote, or) voted in the EU to use cheap Russian gas even after 2014, and even after 2022 share again certainly share some responsibility. Maybe even more than the conscripts coerced to be on the front.

I think structural effects dominate in many cases. (IMHO local crime surges are perfect evidence for this, and even though the FBI crime data is slow and not detailed enough, the city-level data is good enough to see things like a homicide spike after a "viral police misconduct incidents" -- https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324 and this is even before George Floyd -- and https://johnkroman.substack.com/p/explaining-the-covid-viole... which shows how much of an effect policing has on homicides.)

Tool availability is an important factor, and in the US it's a drastically huge effect, because the other factors that could counteract it are also mostly missing.

We can simply apply the Swiss cheese model for every shooting and see that many things had to go wrong. Of course focusing only on guns while neglecting the others would lead to increase in knife-deaths.

> Also, the fault there lies squarely with charlatans who have been asked/told not to submit "AI slop" bug bounties and yet continue to do so anyway, not with the AI tools used to generate them.

I think there's a general feeling that AI is most readily useful for bad purposes. Some of the most obvious applications of an LLM are spam, scams, or advertising. There are plenty of legitimate uses, but they lag compared to these because most non-bad actors actually care about what the LLM output says and so there are still humans in the loop slowing things down. Spammers have no such requirements and can unleash mountains of slop on us thanks to AI.

The other problem with AI and LLMs is that the leading edge stuff everyone uses is radically centralized. Something like a knife is owned by the person using it. LLMs are generally owned one of a few massive corps and at best you can do is sort of rent it. I would argue this structural aspect of AI is inherently bad regardless of what you use it for because it centralizes control of a very powerful tool. Imagine a knife where the manufacturer could make it go dull or sharp on command depending on what you were trying to cut.

Blaming only people is also incorrect, it's incredibly easy to see that once the cost of submission was low enough compared to the possible reward bounties would become unviable

Ai just made the cost of entry very low by pushing it onto the people offering the bounty

There will always be a percentage of people desperate enough or without scruples that can do that basic math, you can blame them but it's like blaming water for being wet

or, having a glass of wine with dinner or a few beers on the weekend is fine. but drinking a 6-pack per day or slamming shots every night is reckless and will lead to health consequences.

This is fair as a criticism of the leading AI companies, but there's a catch.

When you attribute blame to technologies, you make it difficult to use technologies in the construction of a more ethical alternative. There are lots of people who think that in order to act ethically you have to do things in an artisanal way; whether it's growing food, making products, services, or whatever. The problem with this is that it's outcompeted by scalable solutions, and in many cases our population is too big to apply artisanal solutions. We can't replace the incumbents with just a lot of hyper-local boutique businesses, no matter how much easier it is to run them ethically. We have to solve how to enable accountability in big institutions.

There's a natural bias among people who are actually productive and conscientious, which is that an output can only be ethical if it's the result of personal attention. But while conscientiousness is a virtue in us as workers, it's not a substance that is somehow imbued in a product, if the same product is delivered with less personal attention then it's just as good - and much cheaper and therefore available to more people, which is the product is good for them, makes it more ethical and not less.

(I'm making a general point here. It's not actually obvious to me that AI is an essential part of the solution either)

I suppose to belabor the analogy, its still not the petrol’s fault - the same fuel is also used to transport firefighting resources, in fact, a controlled burn might have effectively mitigated the risk of a forest fire in the first place. Who left those leaves to smolder in the first place, anyway? Why’d you throw petrol on the pile?

You just have to be careful not to say “this is AI’s” fault - it’s far more accurate, and constructive, to say “this is our fault, this is a problem with the way some people choose to use LLMs, we need to design institutions that aren’t so fragile that a chatbot is all it takes to break them.”

> we need to design institutions that aren’t so fragile that a chatbot is all it takes to break them.

Like, we need to design leaves that aren't so fragile that a petrol fire can burn them.

I don't agree that's more constructive. We need to defend the institutions we've got.

Destruction is always easier than creation, and humans really prefer to be lazy.

It took 2 world wars to motivate us to create the current institutions. You think we will be less lazy and more motivated than those people were?

> I don't think AI is the cause, it's merely the mechanism that is speeding up what has already been happening.

I think the technical term is "throwing gas on the fire." It's usually considered a really bad thing to do.

> I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.

If someone throws gas on a fire, you can totally blame them for the fire getting out of control. After all, they made it much worse! Like: "we used to have smouldering brush fire that we could put out, but since you dumped all that gas on it, now we will die because we have a forest fire raging all around us."

I don't think this argument makes much sense. If you are running down hill towards a cliff then saying that adding a cart to speed up the process doesn't give the cart moral blameworthiness is an unhelpful observation. You can still chose to stop running down the hill or to not get on the cart.

Exactly! Was going to make a similar comment if I didn't already see one. People keep saying things like this and drives me fuckin' nuts. It's not that there are no positives but I don't see how the positives outweigh the negatives.

Dead internet theory original post: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

Man I had forgotten how batshit conspiracy theory that was

Capitalism is destroying institutions. Any new technology must be employed in service of "number go up". In this system externalities have to be priced in with taxes, but it's cheaper to buy off legislators than to actually consider the externalities.

This is how we get food that has fewer nutrients but ships better, free next-day delivery of plastic trash from across the world that doesn't work, schools that exist to extract money rather than teach, social media that exists primarily to shove ads in your face and trick you into spending more time on it.

In the next 4 years we will see the end of the American experiment, as shareholder capitalism completely consumes itself and produces an economy that can only extort and exploit but not make anything of value.

It's not capitalism, it's the monetary system that's the problem. It's not a level playing field. Capitalism requires a fair monetary system as a precondition. Though I can agree that communism would be better than whatever perverse system we have now.

I think you're both right. Capitalism is an important part of a liberal society. But when we let private institutions become all-powerful then they can erode our freedom too. The problem isn't government or enterprise, it's the idea that only one of these things should be paramount. We need government to do unprofitable but necessary things and we need enterprise to pursue risky things. And we need government to regulate enterprise and enterprise to hold government accountable.

You can name a lot of symptoms of the problem but at its heart there's a lack of accountability in any of our power structures whether they be corporate or government.

I disagree with the idea that regulations work. Just consider forever chemicals like phthalates... Known endocrine disruptors. They're everywhere disrupting our hormones and health. Carcinogens are everywhere. How is regulation really working?

What works is the threat of punishment and full liability as opposed to limited liability. Regulations just raise entry barriers and stifle competition which makes the system less fair. It's like trying to prevent a crime before it happens; makes no sense. If liability is limited it means that somebody is not being held accountable for some portion of the damage that they're doing. Limited liability just externalizes the surplus liability to society...

I think capitalism can work if operating on a level monetary playing field within simple guardrails but without regulations. We could have wealth tax above a certain high amount to prevent political power imbalance.

It would be all massively worst without regulations. In fact, regulation provably works. When you remove it, situation with pollution and health gets worst. If you add it, it gets better.

> What works is the threat of punishment

That is what regulations provide.

> full liability

Without regulation and just a court system, this is complete failure. This just ensure that you can harm people who cant afford expensive lawsuits. Which is why big companies who want to pollute preferer this over regulations.

And the most harmed companies are small ones. They do not know in advance what is allowed and what is not.

You're mad about loopholes and lack of enforcement. Not the regulations theselves. If you can't enforce it, it's not a good regulation.

And yes, some things do need higher bars to entry than others. That's a feature. You don't want just anyone handling the food you eat or the money you store.

One of biggest obstacles we will have to overcome is for people stop thinking that communism is the only alternative and cling to capitalism. Capitalism was tried by 120 countries in past 120 years. Not a single country can report harmonious society free of corruption and unnecessary suffering. Every country employ 50% of workforce on pointless jobs only because capitalism requires artificial scarcity.

>Not a single country can report harmonious society free of corruption and unnecessary suffering.

By hat metric, capitalism has failed as well. Any successes came from breaking the pure principle and either breaking apart competition (antitrust), regulating competition to comply, or employing non-capistialistic services to support it (social security being one of the big ones).

No point talking in absolutes.

>Capitalism is destroying institutions.

What year do you think was the first year of capitalism? Depending on your starting point, it caused the American Revolution and French Revolution.

It caused destruction of monarchy.

I'll focus just on food here: people do have a choice. I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something? Eating this kind of food you can even stack your life chances more in your favor. Huge amounts of information abound as to the how you can do that. Consumers, if they are free to choose, determine value and entrepreneurs will respond. It can be profoundly distorted, that's true but at base, capitalism is doing something that someone else finds of value or not.

The basic ingredients are also lower quality and less nutritious. For example, vegetables and fruits these days (at least for the U.S. market) are grown almost entirely for size and appearance, not for the amount of trace nutrients they contain or other quality measures.

Sibling comment is correct, also in the US we have "Food Deserts"[1]: lower income areas that lack typical grocery stores, and might only have convenience stores that only stock prepackaged or processed foods. Any raw ingredients available are expensive and/or low-quality.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Even if we ignore the siblings: but what is being selected for? Pure economic value, right? In other words, imagine two choices: a cheap meal that takes X time and Y money to prepare and eat, vs. a nutritious meal that takes X+n1 time and Y+n2 money to prepare and eat.

If the "fitness function" of the system is "produces more economic value" then it will select for (encourage) the first option because health and enjoyment of the consumer aren't being selected for. They are second-order effects at best, like pollution and other externalities.

I'm reminded of the RFK speech (the dead one, not the death-adjacent Jr.):

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

> If the "fitness function" of the system is "produces more economic value" then it will select for (encourage) the first option because health and enjoyment of the consumer aren't being selected for.

(Re-reading this, the part I glossed over is that choosing the cheap/quick meal leaves more time for "work")

>I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something?

Sort of. To add to what the other replies had to say, the US government subsidizes different things. That's why even basic ingredients may have high fructose corn syrup in it. Be it as a primary ingredient, or to try and dillute the actual ingredient you want in that particular piece of food.

and since it's subsidized, these can be cheaper to eat here than to get some good fruits and veggies.

I think the wrong lesson to draw for this is that it's just a systems problem. Somehow if we do a different song and dance, the outcome will be different. I've been thinking that the end state of capitalism and communism are not that different - what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all? The endpoint is the same, the game becomes about relative power over others, in service of an unending hunger.

Capitalism is the manifestation of the aggregate human psyche. We've agreed that this part of our selves that desires to possess things and the part that feels better when having even more, is essential. This is the root we need to question, but have not yet dared to question. Because if we follow this path of questioning, and continue to shed each of our grasping neuroticisms, the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.

We will have to confront that question eventually because we will always have to face the truth.

>what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all?

Unimaginable wealth means you live as comfortably as you want. no wealth means you are out on the streets and can't even afford the basics needed to get yourself out of the rut society threw you in.

If I'm to take this as a comparison of "wealth ends up in the hands of one", the difference with communism is that the one with the wealth still needs to distribute it, lest they are driven out by a coup or by annihilating all the power they had (the power over their people, who are now dead or fled).

Captistlism makes no such promise of distribution, and who to uprise against is much less clear. toppling a monopoly leader also doesn't necessarily destroy the institution either.

>the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.

If we give up our humanity to someone else, we may as well be. But that's not something I relinquish easily.

That's not capitalism. That's human nature. We want a better future.

Capitalism assigns a price to this, makes it more efficient. (By allowing people to buy/rent productive things (land, machines) hire people, and buy unproductive setups, improve it, and earn a profit on the effect of the improvement itself.)

If you think "shareholder capitalism" overplayed this, well, maybe, but it seems that manufacturing is getting fucked by tariffs, construction is getting fucked by NIMBYism, and ultimately the world is getting fucked by lack of improvements, by standing still, by regressing to a past that never was despite the costs, and not because people want to make number go up!

Of course there's a ton of problems with power concentration everywhere, but market liberalism correlates with liberty and well-being, and the solution is not USSR-style denial of markets (and in general, behavioral-, and micro- and macroeconomics), it's understanding them, and using taxes to help people to participate in them.

NIMBYism is a very obvious form of "number go up". Boomers were promised endless property value growth, and they've destroyed city planning to make sure it happens. If there was a market correction retirees would be furious.

> by regressing to a past that never was despite the costs

People assume that rejecting capitalism requires us to take a step backwards. Why would that be? If you woke up tomorrow and there was more public housing your iPhone wouldn't disappear.

Density brings a lot of value increase.

Theoretically replacing capitalism with something else is not the issue. (As long as there are accurate supply-and-demand signals for efficient allocation of resources).

The issue is that people ideologically want to "set" inconsistent supply-and-demand curves. And since there's no signal things look fine and dandy initially. And then the usual smudging of the numbers start to happen. ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty... )

Of course, in a capitalistic system there's a very crude exchange rate for the things we want and the things we have through the profit motive (with all the speculation and technological (im)possibilities and everything added in), but it's usually more "correct" than numbers set by committees of people really really wanting to have something while denying some specific - usually hard to separate - aspect of that. (For example lot of people really don't like it when people 'inherit' easy money for very good reasons and this gets amplified when it comes to real estate, and this is a very big factor why a lot of NIMBY ideas found good traction with young "progressives".)

If bots are being used to create chaos in society, it really isn't possible that the platforms themselves are just innocent bystanders here. It is technically possible and quite easy for the platforms to block bots if they really wanted to, in fact it's actually in their best interest to have human only organic activity as it increases the platform's credibility and reduces network cost. If they're still letting bots operate and actually post content on their platforms, they're likely in cahoots with the politicians.

>I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.

I'll use a rather extreme example here, but this sounds a bit like "Heroin addiction is just speeding up aspects that society already does. It's so easy to get addicted to smoking cigarettes".

Sometimes the catalyst is the problem, even if it's not the only problem. In this case I think placing some guardrail on both social media and AI is worthwhile.

100% correct in the first part, though I'd like to think there's a bimodal effect with AI users and usage.

Hard working expert users, leveraging AI as an exoskeleton and who carefully review the outputs, are getting way more done and are stronger humans. This is true with code, writing, and media.

People using AI as an easy button are becoming weaker. They're becoming less involved, less attentive, weaker critical thinkers.

I have to think that over some time span this is going to matter immensely. Expert AI users are going to displace non-AI users, and poor AI users are going to be filtered at the bottom. So long as these systems require humans, anyway.

Personally speaking:

My output in code has easily doubled. I carefully review everything and still write most stuff by hand. I'm a serious engineer who built and maintained billion dollar transaction volume systems. Distributed systems, active active, five+ nines SLA. I'm finding these tools immensely valuable.

My output in design is 100% net new. I wasn't able to do this before. Now I can spin up websites and marketing graphics. That's insane.

I made films and media the old fashioned way as a hobby. Now I'm making lots of it and constantly. It's 30x'd my output.

I'm also making 3D characters and rigging them for previz and as stand-ins. I could never do that before either.

I'm still not using LLMs to help my writing, but eventually I might. I do use it as a thesaurus occasionally or to look up better idioms on rare occasion.

I have observed this with students. Some use AI to really extend their capabilities and learn more, others become lazy and end up learning less than if they hadn't used AI.

While I agree with a lot of what you said, your comment implies catalysts and accelerants don't matter.

The roots of the problem are very real and very complex but forcing them to be addressed quickly throws people into panic mode and frankly that leads to sloppy solutions that are going to cause the cycle to repeat (though will temporarily solve some problems, and this is far better than nothing).

  > We are collectively offloading that to AI.

Frankly, this is happening because so many are already in that panicked stressed mode (due to many factors, not just social media). It's well know people can't think critically under high stress. AI isn't the cause of that stress but it sure is amplifying many of them

Honestly, I know I'm going to sound off my rocker but thinking of e.g. Mass Effect or The Matrix, are we watching ourselves getting evolved/replaced in real time?

All of existence has been a to-and-fro of larger organisms emerging by connecting and subsuming smaller ones. Organelles, cells, organisms... Are we creating the instruments of our own ascension (fancy calculators) or are we doomed to watch AI and the internet manipulate and supersede us?

Yes of course AI is just a symptom. The cause is the fiat monetary system. In all history, no fiat monetary system has ever lasted. There have been hundreds. They always fail eventually and lead to the collapse of nations and empires.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com