I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many.
What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!"
You might as well market it as "created by child labor".
But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.
most big ai will never compensate anyone
Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.
They received some money up front in a contract to record the album, and the label make the money from sales.
There is a reason the bands toured and sold teeshirts.
Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.
Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.
150,000,000 streams typically generates $560k _before_ the label cut.
Your posts make clear that you're a wildly immoral person -- not just because you repeatedly lie and distort to defend your position -- but the crux of your argument is "artists had a mediocre deal, so it is fine that the new deal is dramatically worse".
There's no way to respond to that.
No it's not. I'm saying that artists have always had a shit deal, singling out Spotify doesn't help the systematic problems. I don't use Spotify, I purchase via Bandcamp but that's also because long term its cheaper for me.
> Your posts make clear that you're a wildly immoral person
I'm immoral because I don't think that artists have ever had it good? Alright Mr. RIAA.
https://sociallifemagazine.com/the-archive/90s-record-deals-...
If you actually want to defend artists... I suggest _not_ drawing equivalence between the old (bad) deal, and the new (much worse) deal.
At the risk of over generalising, I mostly hear a lot of shit talk from younger generations, distrust from millennials, and more excitement and interest from Gen-x-ish and older.
As with many things, there's a certain level of hypocrisy to the shit talking, because teachers are at the schools are complaining to parents about the kid's use of AI, and pointing out that they will automatically fail any writing that seems to be using AI.
I try to distinguish between the actual tech, which spans light and dark, and the financial and economic engineering around it, which is definitely a darker shade of black.
Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.
You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.
bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.
> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.
This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.
And there it is.
Netflix was just an example. There are other services.
When Netflix started to be online only I tagged along, and it was OK-ish - selection was not that great but but price was not big either and once in a while I would watch a movie. Today ads are very intrusive and the cost for no ads is $20 / month- which is not worth it for me. Compared to this, piracy is clearly a superior choice.
So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.
I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.
What is AOSP really for other than "open source washing" Google's ecosystem? Is it ever making standards that Google has to follow/comply with or is it always just the tail being wagged by the dog to make it look like the dog is happy about open source (but still isn't majority open source)?
A good one to familiarize yourself with, and support.
I am certainly familiar with these things. I just don't see them having a practical effect on the average consumer, just fellow HN commenting nerds. I think I have one friend in real life with GrapheneOS at the moment, and it is not an experience they would recommend to any other friend of mine.
I support such things in theory, sure, but in practice, especially in HN comments there seems to be a lot of forgiveness to the very locked in by Google Android ecosystem purely because these alternatives exist, ignoring the practical realities such as marketshare/mindshare/ease of use/ease of access.
I don't have any easy answers on how to fix AOSP because it seems to be a sociopolitical problem, not a technical one, and I am mostly just complaining without skin in that particular game because I can't find myself caring about Android politics, but when my less technical friends and family that prefer Android are upset at something Google does I don't have good answers because "do months of research into LineageOS or GrapheneOS, deal with most of your apps not working most of the time, and it getting harder to buy phones because you have to make sure that they are rootable" isn't a good answer. "Why don't you just switch to an Apple device?" is at least an easier answer.
and literally your mom could install it via the USB-based walk-through installer, if her life depended on it.
and yes, Apple devices are for your least technical friends and relatives. What’s wrong with that?
> Sure!
>> Ok, I'm connecting you to a human now.
[5 minutes later]
> Hello?
>> Hi! What can I help you with?
> Are you a human?
>> No, I'm an AI agent programmed to help you with anything you need. What can I do for you?
> You said you were going to connect me to a human.
>> That isn't something I can do. What can I help you with?
Turns out "connecting to a human" is something it knows about in its training data so it'll hallucinate doing so.
Most egregiously: VSCode.
No, i absolutely never in my life will want Copilot to summarize anything for me and yet guess what button appeared in the UI and i accidentally clicked on last night....
I have the opposite issue, can generative washing recover the lost odd socks somehow?
Just the other day I was trying to fix someone's laptop and reflexively pressed (what I thought was) the context menu key, only to find no context menu opened, and instead a Copilot window right in the middle of the screen.
In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.
So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.
If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.
In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).
I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.
One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.
I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!
This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:
> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.
Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.
Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.
My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.
They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.
Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.
The same argument is used to justify normal piracy: The consumer thinks they’re stealing from the corporation who distributes it, not the artist.
> artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output
The issue is the notion that an artist gets to control what one does with their personal property that isn't the artist's property. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid. Artists should get paid but setting up a system that surveils everything I hear and see to enforce it is too much.
> Many people just don’t care about this stuff
I agree with this though I don't follow your tie-in to piracy. Most people do not really care about music, and the industry has known this and delivers most music through ad-supported channels and shapes what music production it can to fit this. The ugly truth is that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't mind listening to AI radio, it's probably coming, and it will be good enough that a sizeable percentage of the population will enjoy it and not care.
The real art has always been outside of the industry though, and that won't change in the AI age.
> but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.
I think there's a fundamental problem with this line of argument, which is that it's naive elitism that's been historically leveraged since the 20th century at minimum. "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!" with equivalencies for all mediums of digital art.
There's absolutely a reductionism I think that happens with naysaying generative AI, where it's almost a kind of naive agreement with the VC hypetrain. There's a belief that effective usage of AI is just dumping 20 words into a text input and the maximal quality it's capable of gets spit out 5 seconds later. It's the same variety of reductionism as above where ignorance of how wide the domain is precludes the ability to understand where the skill ceiling is (or what is even involved). The idea that this isn't even the tip of the iceberg nets an expectation that "advanced" AI usage extends to random prompt engineering at most.
Problematically, "AI generated" doesn't really say much about the process, intent, or really much of anything beyond a specific computational architecture being involved at some point of the workflow. It could mean they slapped a tweet-length stream of consciousness into a shitty web prompt, or it could mean constructing a complex pipeline, combining processing steps and multiple models like hotpatching synths, using an intuition built upon thousands of hours of learning their tools, using fine-tuning adaptations that they spent even more time building, and carefully analyzing and responding to the end result. In the former case, I don't think there's much artistry involved and it exclusively produces crap. I think it's a massive disservice to the latter however, to suggest it doesn't involve extensive artistry, or that the paradigm of the tools themselves strip the notion of art away.
I understand wholly why the first case gets primacy, but if we're to philosophize about these tools then I think we have to fully account for the second case.
Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.
Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.
> "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!"
Non sequitur/red herring. I'll explain with an example.
In the late 80's or early 90's, Emu Systems made a device called the Proteus One. It's basically the guts of a keyboard without the keyboard, you bring your own MIDI keyboard.
It will definitely make sounds if you push buttons (keys) on your attached keyboard. If you compose these sounds, pushing those keys, you're an artist.
The unit has a "Demo Mode" where it will play a stored song. If you push this button, the sound you cause this unit to make is not artistry. Specifically, you're not an artist for having pushed this button.
AI generated media (art, music, etc) is very repulsive to interact with and so many products feel like they have led with AI solutions to problems that don't exist.
Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.
Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.
Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.
I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.
I've talked to doctors, drivers, lawyers etc. and most white collar and many blue collar jobs feel the threat. Which, based on various news, feel justified even if not immediate. Even if its not the same llm per se, but the word "AI" is already tarnished as scum backstabbing negative entity, I literally don't know a single person who sees it these days positively.
I mean, I haven't seen AI being used to replace even the most menial jobs. Plenty of companies have been trying to use AI to do things, but embarrassing and costly failures and negative customer response has made progress very slow. How can a lawyer or a doctor be worried about AI replacing them when AI can't even replace the 15 year old worker taking orders at the McDonald's drive thru? At this point I'm not fully convinced of even potential job loss from AI.
And millions of people know exactly what I mean.
Whatever reasons there were to be excited about tech have been subsumed by the things to be worried about.
I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.
For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.
No one cares about plagiarism and artists.
I bet lots of people would even be happy that artists get smacked because they see only high profile and rich artists.
Normal people don’t care about AI and are not afraid that it will take their jobs.
They are pissed off because of they are paying customers they expect some level of respect.
AI bots are slap in the face, they ask basic stuff that human operator should infer from the conversation. But you are hit with a dummy that doesn’t solve any of your issues and have to spend time explaining yourself.
Funny part is that’s exactly the same as low income lvl 1 support.
But there is no comparison study. My idea is people are equally pissed off by lvl 1 support that they have to explain stuff in detail and get no real resolution.
For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use?
The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.
And therefore probably in users' minds, when you say "AI", they think of all the badly done ones, not the good ones, because they didn't notice the good ones as AI. So when you advertise it as AI, that's a negative.
In C-suites AI appears to be some kind of limitless source of goodness and profits, so companies must optimise hard for it, or risk getting left behind.
Everyone else is either "Has some uses if you steer it carefully" or "Hell no."
We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much.
The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature.
Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to hate on AI. But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain, even if the discussion in question has zero bearing on their job. There's polling on this and job security is far and away the populace's biggest concern related to AI.
dont let that fool you into thinking "users were too stupid to undestand our awesome feature so we had to dumb it down for them"
Renaming customer service team to customer success team and claiming customer service issues reduced is like corporate/leadership strategy 101.
I think even this view is missing the point.
My opinion is that most people are overcomplicating this whole issue. When people react negatively to the term "AI", it's simply because the vast majority of features branded "AI" in the vast majority of products, are pure garbage. Searching for some deeper cultural or psychological reason is a waste of time - let's just stop pushing garbage AI products, then maybe someday people's perception of the term will change.
Until then, just leave that word out of the marketing material. Nobody really cares how the product is implemented, just focus on what it does.
“That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”
The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
* My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about
* My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about
The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.
If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth.
It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure.
Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers.
The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet.
Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.
The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.
Without going into details, I have used AI to find genuine, provably effective solutions to multiple real world problems that would either have been impossible without AI or would have taken a very, very long time.
And it would have been a boon if it had been around while I was getting my degree, because it's been excellent at clarifying foundational concepts.
It's not perfectly reliable, but neither are human professionals.
AI is very, very good at spitting out language. It's very, very bad at ascertaining the quality or correctness of the language it spits out.
And the problem with plausibly correct output is that sometimes it's good enough until it isn't, which is the pattern of behavior I've seen with heavy AI driven research.
I'm not going to discount that it's better than google searches. But it's hardly good enough to equate to undergraduate understanding. The act of reading and writing from primary/secondary sources crafted by humans is in itself the way to acquire and retain knowledge. Having it hallucinated at you in a plausibly correct way is dangerous to equate to that.
a) it seems likely to me that in the end, few normal people know what to do with the ability to create their own software for their private use,
b) getting bespoke software working on the platforms that the majority of people actually use (Android and iOS) is somewhere between hard and impossible, and
c) large corporations have a de facto grip on AI as well, local models require you to have the knowhow and beefy hardware to run them, and they’re not magic software machines like Claude.
All in all, it seems rathet optimistic that AIs could do much if anything to help consumers against corporations. But I concede that it is a viewpoint that’s at least less selfish than most.
A peculiar way to call VC vultures with neck deep vested interests.
It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.
It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.
Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it.
Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature.
I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.
But the tech was captured and adopted by marketing-think and corporate opportunism. And that's the real problem.
Both were toxic plagues before AI. And as an amplification technology, AI has enabled them to unprecedented levels of fail.
No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)
"AI" to me means the exact same thing
company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits
it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options
it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse
Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite
If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS
They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again.
The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative.
Nobody likes badly designed menus.
What's the government doing about this? They're stripping the EPA os the power to regulate pollution [2] and suing in support of xAI's gas turbines [3].
Anger about AI is in part a reflection of anger about declining material conditions where corporations and the ultra-wealthy can increasingly stomp over regular cities with impunity while getting ever-richer.
The state's response is going to get ever-more violent and extreme. Over-charging in federal courts, over-policing and violence against peaceful protestors as the law enforcement arm of the government increasingly takes off the mask regarding being the security apparatus for the protection of capital.
Automation (including AI) could be a good thing for society as people would have to work less and we could automate away more dangerous, menial and low-paid work, improving the material conditions for everyone. We don't live in that world.
[1]: https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-clima...
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-help...
Okay… what does that mean?
I'm not saying I 100% wouldn't use AI to help me in product searches, but isn't one of the main selling points of AI that it is general-purpose? Why can't I just boot up ChatGPT and ask it what cars have XYZ things I need? Certainly being informed that Capital One's system is "multi-agentic" doesn't tell me much about what is being offered.
They are tired of hearing AI as a buzzword and having it shoehorned into every app and service they use. Most AI features have been rushed to market to check a box to say a company has an AI strategy, but they don’t work well. They’re just changing a familiar UI and popping up annoying notices.
Everyone also really doesn’t like consuming other people’s AI produced content. They associate it with slop on social media, fake headlines that tricked them, and low quality work their coworkers dump on them to waste their time. Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.
But most everyone thinks their own AI output is the exception: They like being able to type a couple sentences into ChatGPT and have it tell them something or produce some output that would have taken more time if they did it manually.
But those strengths come with serious limitations, and huge society-level trade-offs. Annihilating the power grid in exchange for poorly formatted Powerpoint slides is not really a worthwhile exchange.
For most other products, like my cellphone, AI has no benefit except to further degrade my privacy, experience, environement, and battery life. Ditto for many other products with shoehorned AI.
Sadly for me this was my engineering manager
So they go all pointy-haired boss about insisting it gets shoehorned into everything.
Many CEOs, actually including tech CEOs, are in the foothills of the Dunning Kruger journey on much of the operations of their own businesses. They just don’t know what they don’t know, yet.
It means that most people will never understand how fast the landscape is moving: non-coding and non-homework use cases didn't change that much since last year.
The peak cringe is the mixture of both: convolutes of texts massing buzzwords, links and sales tactics.
This feel like a rip off and a huge time waste.
And lets not talk about LinkedIn: a dumpster for AI generated content, the companies should be ashamed of. Do they actually read what they produce? No, not really.
It is pure insolence and puts them in a bad spot, at least in my book.
There are real dated gaps that have formed thanks to the non-tech hype people.
It's blatant marketing to investors, not users. How anyone can still have doubts about "you are the product now, not the customer" is beyond me.
Everyday folk have never cared much about any specific technology, only the experience, and the overwhelming majority of AI retrofits are lazily conceived from a user experience standpoint.
This anti consumer crap, that people demonstrably hate, worked! It worked to increase share price. We should all see that as a a fundamental failure of the market to transmit information about what brings the consumer value. Instead, it has been rewarded to the tune of trillions of dollars, a huge segment of society's resources.
There is a sense among level-headed people that the market is irrational "right now," but it's been years of this shit. When do we call a spade a spade?
Sorry but I'm skeptical.