Hacker News Reader

Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

I think people are really underestimating how poorly today's tweens think of AI. "That looks like chatgpt" is an insult. Kids avoid things because they heard somewhere that AI might have been involved and have a sense that means it is bad or immoral or illegal or cheating in some nebulous way, and it's reinforced by their teachers telling them that using AI for homework is cheating.

I think this next generation is going to come up fundamentally believing that AI is generally a bad thing, and it's going to surprise older people.

View on HN

> I think people are really underestimating how poorly today's tweens think of AI.

I think you might be really underestimating how poorly today's adults think of AI. Whenever I see a blog post that starts with an obvious AI hero image, when it has the "It's not X, it's Y" framing, when it has anything that smells like AI, I immediately discount what that person is saying as I assume they are unable to think for themselves.

Far as AI gen images they still make me nauseous due to uncanny-valley stuff. Still see a lot of non-standard number of fingers; so much content elicits a weird double-take and gut dropping feel.

  > Whenever I see a blog post that starts with an obvious AI hero image, when it has the "It's not X, it's Y" framing, when it has anything that smells like AI

yes, n=1 (ok n=2 i guess) but noticing that is an immediate back button press for me but its getting harder and harder to avoid as search results become inundated with this stuff

The kids are smarter than most people give them credit for. They see their future being destroyed in real time, and AI is only accelerating it and largely being celebrated/promoted/used by the same people currently destroying their future. To them, there are few benefits beyond being able to cheat on their homework, and an enormous amount of downsides.

I think it's only a matter of time before we see some more serious, organized opposition to AI (and perhaps even the internet and other technologies) by these young people.

I really hope it doesn't end in some Butlerian Jihad-esque scenario. I like computers, but they're tools. Nothing more than ethical slaves at most

Like all technology, it's not question about it itself but rather how it's used.

> The kids are smarter than most people give them credit for

When they aren't consumed by TikTok?

For some kids, they see their parents get themselves in a mountain of college debt, work for 50 years and struggle to afford necessities, and decide maybe trying to be a streamer/tiktokker is worth a gamble and could set them up for life instead.

Makes sense. I think it’s hard to argue against someone that uses the platform and others as an example of entrepreneurial pursuits. Not “all social media is bad” when to use different lens types.

It's the modern day "I'm going to be a hollywood actor." Every one of my kid's friends has said at some point they were going to grow up to be a famous YouTube or TikTok streamer. The vast majority are not serious, and of those who are serious, the vast majority won't make it.

You might be surprised by how many of them are aware of the harms of social media, while acknowledging that it’s impossible not to engage with it. It’s not their fault we built the toxic slot machine world for them that we have. And besides, I’m pretty sure my boomer parents spend about as much time scrolling slop on Facebook as kids do on TikTok.

Oh, parents no better. I have friends that do nothing other than check TikTok in down time. I do what I can to block and gate my own usage.

When I get a message from a co-worker that seems to have been written by an LLM, I am incredibly turned off and instantly think less of the person. It can be easy to spot: key words bolded, acknowledging that I'm right, longer and with a different tone than their typical messages, with neat bullet points.

It feels a little disrespectful. It feels a little pointless (why am I bothering talking to you if I can get the same result from the AI). I have no idea whether you've given the problem any actual thought, or if you're just copy-pasting an answer. I have no idea if you actually believe what you're telling me (or if you've even read it or understand it).

pr comments from a human that is generated by ai has got me feeling the same... like why this person even here? its totally disrespectful; i want a person to interact with not a machine with a meatsuit.

I've had various arguments online and got literal responses from an LLM after the second or third message. It's extremely disrespectful, instead of engaging with a human acting in good faith, I'm now conversing with a bot with a prompt 'prove him wrong'.

It explicitly undermines the foundation to the only debate I am willing to entertain which is: (1) I enter into the debate in good faith, that both parties intend to seek truth and understand.

And it replaces that with a different debate: (2) I enter into the debate to win, its is adversarial, and I will use a prompt to seek to win regardless of truth or understanding.

That second conversation is pointless for me, I refuse to engage in it. Yet it is obfuscated. The human using a bot to engage secretly in debate (2) while pretending he's a human engaging in debate (1).

My partner was working at an event and a co-worker had prepared a poster using AI - a teenage kid at the event pointed out how the poster "has AI smudges".

Gotta love that - the teenage AI scold.

You know how your parents are weirdly shitty at recognizing obvious photoshops? Kids are constantly surprised that we adults can't recognize obvious AI images.

I've been calling it "AI sheen"; I like "AI smudges" better.

In the 80s, 90s and 00s that's what they thought about coding.

Then when the salaries got good every pretended to have always been a nerd and really into everything nerd. With the result that they kicked all the nerds out.

That was the second iteration of that. Most of the programmers were women until the mid-70s when the nerdy men kicked the women out.

If you consider what assemblers and compilers do programming, sure.

But men didn't kick them out, technology did. Von Numan famously forbid the Eniac from ever being used for assembly when you had a perfectly cheap secretary pool to do the assembly by hand.

Low creativity repetitive work requiring great attention to detail is what the early female programmers did and what was automated first.

If we ever get deterministic AI the same will happen up the chain. I'm not holding my breath for the current generation of models, or the upcoming ones I've seen in papers.

That's underselling their role. One of those ladies doing the assembling for Von Numan was Grace Hopper, who then used that expertise to develop the first compilers.

And the other 100 weren't and didn't.

I'm an adult and I'm beyond tired of AI. All of these posts on linkedin etc. make me sick. The people using this stuff don't know how obvious it is.

God, those self-indulging posts on LI are the worst. Sometimes it feels like half of the world's compute is wasted on that.

I can't recall a piece of technology in which the age distribution of the people embracing it was similar to what we're seeing with AI. In the past, this stuff has almost always been picked up by the young first and foremost, but the embrace of AI seems mostly to be coming from elder millennials through boomers (I'll admit this is anecdotal, so it's possible this is an observation of my own bubble).

Stated another way: Its picked up by all the people who already have jobs and stability (even if only perceived stability until they get affected).

Exactly.

Understandably, the people currently above water want to be able to sleep at night and believe things are just going to continue being acceptable from their perspective, so they may go to unknown lengths to convince themselves of this no matter how unrealistic it is. Then one day reality hits them with a layoff followed by a seemingly endless and fruitless job search.

1000%.

AI is "fuck you; got mine" technology.

I have noticed similar sentiments among some teenagers. It's not a universal sentiment but those who hate AIs really hate them with a passion.

In the meanwhile there is a rising tide of feel good AI content targeted at old people on Facebook. My mother has been sharing with me many "funny videos" that are very obviously AI generated. She evidently does not care, and according what I hear from others she is far from the only old person who gets sucked into "slop." I hesitate to use this word but it captures the feeling too well for me to pass it up.

I don't have data but I sense there is an inverse correlation between age and disgust towards AI generated content.

I'm guessing there's a sizable portion of the HN crowd that are millenials. Millenials who have paid the costs of the Boomer/GenX generations absolute destruction of the "American Dream" for their own benefit. They climbed the ladder and pulled it up behind them leaving millenials holding the bag.

That same set of millenials are now visiting that treatment upon Gen Z. We are building AI that will eviscerate the remaining middle class, raise electricity rates to a level where many people will not be able to power their homes, and poisoning the air and water so that portions of the world will become unliveable.

Gen Z is justified in being upset with millenials. We used to be the victims, but we've become the abusers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com