The AI Hate Progression
xodium.net
xodium.net
I have a coworker that does the same. His logic was sound -- when something is heavily subsidized, abuse it.
(saying that as a Ukrainian who observes the same vibe-coding-at-job mess)
We live in the time of Uber Eats letting you pay 50 cents to hire a limousine that will deliver a burrito to your stoop.
Not sure if we can confidently say that unless the first of these companies goes public.
Considering that hyperscalers are effectively funded by hype, you can also make the argument that by using AI you are helping their business by adding one to their active user number and making their business look ever so slightly better to investors.
Not to say your original argument is wrong. Just want to point out that the economics of AI is a mysterious mess.
Given enormous competition and good progress on the part of the Chinese and open models, I'd say let's enjoy the situation while it lasts. It's like chap Uber drives a decade ago subsidized by Saudi money. I have no sympathy neither for sama/amodei nor people who invest in their companies, and happy to use their resources in this crazy show where everybody pretends something and pushes their own agenda.
Such is the tragedy of the world. Everyone claims they have strong morals, then shed them whenever convenient and no one is looking.
You can't say you "go out of your way" to avoid something and then you do the literal opposite, not even with a little bit of humility or moderation, but, in fact, going out of your way to using it as much as humanly possible.
I'm not even sure what is the point of your comment than just demonstrating your hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness.
Then, knowing how the sausage is made, this person refuses to spend that paycheck on more AI-generated content. They are sabotaging their employer, forcing reconsideration of AI-first culture, and then refusing to re-integrate that cash into an AI-obsessed economy. It's a lot more of a principled position than just "I like AI" or "I want to see AI fail" that we hear from most sidelines pundits.
Their employment is corollary to telling this story, it's not any kind of subtle brag.
It is worsened by the fact she, too, now, has been unemployed.
The status-quo is awful. Leeches in C-suite doing everything they can to squeeze pennies from the people, leveraging their capital to in turn abuse those in other countries.
The world needs to come together and cap how much value can be retained without reinvesting it back into the lifeblood of society.
One thing I would disagree with is the idea of AI getting a do over. Even if they somehow managed to do that, the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted for whole generations of people, and its reputation only gets worse every day. There's no coming back from that any time soon.
What does this even mean? You don't like machine learning? You don't like the letters AI? There's no coming back to what?
Do you work in the tech industry?
I read the op and authors text as hope and cope that AI is held back by popular sentiment because they have some sort of personal fears about it. Computers are tools, and LLMs are a tool. Is it wrong to have issues about the way tech companies are abusing the system?
Where were these people when other industries were being "disrupted" and breaking the law?
I have a lot of issues with tech companies and their CEOs, but very little problems with the technology.
We can readopt Machine Learning for the other algorithms, which is significantly better, but still not without flaws. I hope we go further down and just say statistical inference, and if we want to be any more specific and just say which algorithm we are using (supervised learning, Markov Chains, Kalman filter, etc.)
The dark night of the soul will be sublime.
I mean the idea of AI (or at least what these companies are calling AI) is fundamentally tainted in the public's eye. People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so, even if it was somehow restarted.
> Do you work in the tech industry?
Yes, I do. Do you? Is there a point to this condescension?
You blame others -- "They're lumped into the same bucket even when they shouldn't" -- some of that is on you for lumping what is a marketing labels in with the fundamental technology.
"People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so"
That's not the way it's going to go. Tools will develop in ways beyond what is seen today, and it will fade into the background noise, just like the internet, search and other tools, but only moreso.
Why should they be separate? The same technology generates text, images, video, audio, 3D models, actuator and stepper motor control sequences, video game controller input streams, and literally everything else that can be transformed into data.
I'll let alone the question of whether or not any of the tech is "tainted", because it doesn't matter. Planck's principle tells us how this will play out in the long run.
I have for 20 years. I use AI every day. And I agree that the parent's observation is plainly true.
Your question is hideously condescending. You should examine what disconnect might be putting you in such a bitter-feeling position compared to most people on HN. This does not necessitate that you are wrong - only that you are perhaps not extending an attempt to connect with humans as much as you could.
Public perception of a specific, limited implementation of AI that is over-marketed and overly misapplied may be tainted. Folks who work with technology should have a better estimation for its potential. Even for the grumpy ones, we are generally optimists.
Maybe that acronym is tainted, but the technology isn’t going anywhere.
Funny, I could say the same about this condescending statement. Maybe it depends on who you interact with. I associate with almost no tech people outside of work, and am probably a bit on the younger side compared to most people on HN.
This is all purely iterative on what we already had long before the buzz about "AI". At some point you just have to admit this was all a grift scraped together to drum up some business during an economic downturn. I don't think many are that mad about it, but the hype needs to stop already.
People were underwhelmed. We're heading into another AI winter. The datacenters were always for defense and surveillance. Deals will fall through and only half will finish being built.
The majority of experts were saying this years ago. Let it go man.
We have a product used in call centers. It turns out ai is amazing in triaging (surveying) people. We can ask a question in English and if they respond n another language (any language) the ai will switch to that language, ask its questions, and then give us the answers in English. This was stuff that was impossible 10-years-ago.
That ability won him over. The software is written in Java and spring-ai so I have control over the system and user prompts so jailbreaking isn't an issue.
The question is do you care? if a user asks your chat bot for baking instructions and gets them, does it matter?
The answer depends a lot on what capabilities your agent can leverage via tools and your intended use case, but it's not something you defend with Java or spring, it is inherent the llm.
That’s great, but the problem is wayyy more companies are using AI so they can drop the call center and just offer you no real way to talk to a person and no real way to resolve problems any more complicated than the lowest common denominator.
And put a guy on every gas pump in the country so they could pump your gas.
And bring back the telephone network operators that connect you to whoever you want to talk to.
Nah, paying people for work is crazy.
Using an LLM/AI to provide customer service is using ridiculously overblown tech to replace human interaction which pretty much nobody wants (i.e. nobody wants to phone up customer support and get an LLM).
Imagine if traffic signals got replaced with AI systems - it'd be hugely expensive and likely cause completely un-traceable issues from time to time as it hallucinates traffic.
Paying people for work that people are good at is not crazy.
You don't actually know that it's a) asking them the questions you asked, rather than just something it hallucinated that seemed plausible in their language, or b) relaying to you a translation of their answers, rather than just something it hallucinated that seems plausible in English.
Because LLMs will always, always, always hallucinate. They are not reliable, and this is not fixable. And if you do this as a matter of policy, you are populating your surveys with incorrect data.
However these llm models are surprisingly good at understanding metaphors and how they are interpreted in different cultures. Better than a human.
You're not going to convince anyone here. We know they are not reliable, but we can still stochasticity extract value.
this was gone before chatgpt was even a twinkle in someone's eye.
"maybe later" replaced "no" on popups. automatically being opted-into mailing lists when ordering pizza or whatever (pizza hut is the worst). B2B emails that have size 3 font with a random word selected that i have to put in the subject line to unsubscribe from the spam. updates that turn on settings i have deliberately turned off. privacy policies changing on a whim that you "automatically accept by using the service" but logging in to delete your account counts as "using the service". etc.
there are a million+ examples of tech companies ignoring any concept of consent going back at least 20 years.
I am sure there are people who'd object to even being indexed but most niche communities were pretty rabid about getting more visibility to find more members.
Following the same logic, is there a fair difference between pure training and reoffering?
> I am sure there are people who'd object to even being indexed but most niche communities were pretty rabid about getting more visibility to find more members.
Here the logic seems to be: it's OK as long as they derive some kind of benefit from it to look past it.
This is the kind of hair-splitting that I was trying to avoid (because, at the end of the day, there is no functional difference, is md5 okay, maybe Markov chains, just a very simple one-layer perceptron?). Once you take someone's copyrighted work and you do anything with it without consent, you're breaking some implicit trust.
However, obviously there's a lot of tension here: free speech. transformed works, copyright owners, profit making, etc., etc. That's why I don't think it's really that important to exactly figure out what consent was broken and when, but rather it's important to be forward-looking and plan for what might come next.
While I agree there's a parallel, do consider what that trust is with regards to putting up an HTTP server. It's kind of like handing out flyers you made yourself. The server is yours and you're handing out your content on your own. Someone is going around accepting such flyers and putting them in their pocket (HTTP cache, maybe a browser's, maybe an indexer's). Then somebody asks them where they might find a barber, and they remember one such flyer was about barbers and they show them the flyer or part of it.
What implicit trust was broken? This is HTTP, the online equivalent of handing out flyers.
Part of the problem here is that copyright is quite a broken concept. That's why it's got such big wiggle room as "fair use" and such.
Not a lawyer, but 1) consider that sharing flyers is the normal use of the thing, and it's precisely what the business wants, to have their marketing spread to whoever needs them. 2) Doubt there's a law that whatever permission you implicitly granted by personally handing your work is revoked as soon as they find a way to make money from it. 3) This is kind of Groupon's business model: to group coupons (which business flyers also typically are). It benefited the businesses and I don't think Groupon needed to pay the businesses for a copyright license to do them the favor of furthering their marketing. Rather Groupon got better deals from the businesses because Groupon had better reach. They had better reach because people that wanted coupons to save money could just buy the little booklet instead of driving around collecting one or two at different locations.
> permission you implicitly granted
There is nothing you implicitly grant anyone, except for ownership (which is explicit, because I gave the thing to you).
The pendulum has swung so high that it's going to break on the return.
They’re gone now, presumably to appease copyright holders.
Also, YouTube was built on people uploading copies of commercial video.
Also my preferred outcome isn’t knownto you or to me. My feelings on this subject aren’t clear at all and the reports I’ve read were probably all pushing their point of view.
Seen from that perspective, adding friction (for example, not releasing Mythos widely and suspending Fable for a while) is not so bad. If the bubble collapsed then that would also give us more time.
I think this is, for the most part, the ground on which AI hate is founded on, no?
Outside of the artist case, which I sympathize with, the real issue isn't the technology itself, its the attitudes and business practices around it.
I don't hate AI. But I do hate that OpenAI effectively cornered the dram market on a scale close to what the hunt brothers did to silver, ruining personal computing as being an accessible thing. I do hate the incessant push to put a chatbot into everything, even places where a chatbot is not even remotely useful. I hate the SaaS pricing increases going on across the board as they bundle the AI into base plans as justification for raising prices, offering no option to buy without AI at the old price. I hate ridiculous tone and fear mongering coming out of places like Anthropic, playing on people's fears of a big existential crisis as a marketing ploy. I can go on and on.
Point is, yeah, the tech itself is not the problem. The culture the arms race/gold rush has created is a huge problem, especially when listening to non-technical people buy the hype and talk like this is some crazy magical machine god in a black box. It gets incredibly exhausting trying to be the adult in the room when it comes to AI discussions in the workplace.
I got into computers because I like computers and programming. Not whatever the fuck this is.
"Find a way to say yes."
My greater concern is that we are trading away hard earned truths for drastically inferred best guesses and slop that is just good enough to work. Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time. LLM agents fudge over and cut corners. What people don't understand is the exponential damage that will be done as we keep baking these errors and untruths into everything we build, and build with.
What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
But it wasn't ON PURPOSE. The INTENT, by the people serving the search, was for the information to be correct. Algorithms tried to reward correctness, people would curate information, etc. Sure, bad actors tried to game it. But since the intent was for it to be correct, search providers fought back.
With AI, you're literally intending for there to be this chance - and it's very hard to gauge what percent it is because it depends tremendously on your query - that the result is just straight up fucking wrong. Google search results didn't used to have a "btw this might just be totally madeup" disclaimer on them, or even on the quick-answer box.
The intent matters so much.
(I think this honestly extends to code too, though I won't belabor that point in this text box.)
This is a similar logic to saying, so what if the LLMs introduce bugs, did humans not make mistakes before? Or, so what if I'm cheating, does no-one around me cheat? Corruption doesn't justify larger scale corruption.
All of this matters, and all of it is erased when it's just Google itself apparently telling me in black on white text above all the search results "here's the answer you're looking for ps. I'm an AI and can make mistakes, btw this space will sometimes secretly be an ad lol"
AI summaries removes that ability from you, and even when it gives the source it may paraphrase it incorrectly just because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable. The level of trust to give LLM summaries is 0.
As a programmer, I'm comfortable judging the coding output of an LLM. But now, anyone can go and start building without any knowledge, and at first it may look fine, but you are creating software using a pretty weak foundation, bad maintainability, etc.
I think LLMs allow everyone to skip an important step of building anything, which is understanding how things work.
Sometimes all you want to do is use something and it works.
For the main product of your company I think it's fair to say that people should know and understand what they are doing
People are wrong/lie in different ways from AI. We have highly developed personal heuristics about where to place human writing on a gradient from 0% to 100%, based on the source, the topic, and a hundred other variables we don't even realize we're ingesting. Even without a way to verify, we are comfortable with this state of affairs. AI lies in more randomly distributed, unpredictable, confident ways. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that these falsehoods are rarer than human falsehoods, it creates a constant background of cognitive stress (FUD) and a feeling of indignation.
Further, the "who is wrong more often" question is complicated because we ingest human-created and AI-created data in different contexts. But it seems both evident and intuitive that AI is wrong more often, as long as you accept "I don't know" as not being wrong. You can ask it anything, and it will much more rarely say "I don't know" than a human who also doesn't know would. For example, if you accidentally ask it a question that contains a false implication, it will more often than a human just assume your implication represents reality.
Also, nobody claimed 100%. It's a red flag to write in black-and-white like that.
Now I don't google at all anymore, instead I spend 10min flipping through the manual to find the spec. One might argue that I should have been doing this all along, but it sure was convenient to have basically a 100% reliable, fast alternative. Now that's gone.
This is clearly false. By now it's evident that AIs can hallucinate in ways that contradict their training data. That means that, beyond any errors or misinformation present in their input, AIs also naturally introduce their own level of error on top.
Beyond this, of course, AIs are much easier to manipulate during training, much more so than the Internet at large. So they represent yet another source of intentional deception aimed at the user.
Why are these mega corps rushing to make money? Will they magically keep existing forever, or will they disappear into dust, along with everything and everyone else? So what would be lost if they were dissolved today?
> AI just makes it easier
Oh? So does it literally take zero effort, energy and time? Or is it actually not quite so easy? What, fundamentally, would change if instead of mumbling something into the mic to get half hallucination, half garbage back, users had to push a rock up a hill, with that rock tumbling down just before they reach the top?
The mania and lament continues at full speed, I suppose. And related to the brazen contempt for consent:
I like the article's sentiment, but a do-over sounds... unrealistic. Sadly, this is very common with the lamentation links, where the article accurately describes the problems at hand, but is alack of actionable advice.
There's really no amount of conscientious objecting or whatever that is going to penetrate the hype cycle going on
If expertise is there, proper rules of using / benefiting from AI will be created rather sooner than later.
The amount of money that would evaporate if we did AI ethically is unfathomable. Most of big tech would collapse if they had to undo anything they did using stolen IP, as would a large section of the economy that's dependent on it, many people's jobs, and most people's investments.
This isn't an argument against doing AI ethically; in fact it shows how bad things have gotten. But what's the fix?
When people feel this way are they arguing for revolt? A Butlerian Jihad? Or is there another practical solution?
The analogy I use is this. What was a bigger leap in productivity: assembly to vb6 or vb6 to Ai?
I think it’s definitely the first.
[0] I'm willing to concede this point, but I still maintain nobody has really shown it to be true in any rigorous sense. Maybe that doesn't matter. If people feel it makes them more productive, that's good enough for me.
And you sound like a kid, bitching about capitalism has gone on for a long time. Why do you think the US.gov was so anti-communist, they didn't want any competition and so turned capitalism into an identity.
> It very necessarily leads to oligarchy when left unchecked.
Great, let's not leave it unchecked. Unlike other -isms, capitalism does not need to be treated like an ideology to work. Also, maybe let's not attribute obvious failures of the political system to the underlying economic system.
In fact, capitalism tends to trend towards monopoly which is the opposite of a free market. Investing in a monopoly tends to be a Very Good Idea for investors but we want a free market so we go against the ideals of capitalism to break up firms and limit acquisitions.
Once you can invest and reliably make money invested by its very nature you get Rich-Get-Richer.
You can say this is a fine trade off for the benefits if you like, but it’s pretty well baked into the design. IMO we don’t have to go all the way to some other -ism either but we have a trillionaire that bought the government, that’s waaaayy too much capitalism if you ask me
Is it because it's "fashionable", or is it because million of people started directly feeling the adverse effects of it and saw the perpetrators get off scot-free?
> and saw the perpetrators get off scot-free?
And your argument is that the reason for that is free market and private property? I would suggest it might be corruption in the political system, which happens to be "a federal republic" (since we are discussing the US).
I am hoping for a more regular kind of reckoning where the market realizes the bubble was silly and we get more rational consumer offerings that are actually priced near to cost - then the utility of these tools will be seen as helpful but in a more limited scope.
This author wants consent from companies deploying LLM. What can one say about this lol..
I totally disagree with the comparison to something like NFT. While AI is being pushed aggressively and it can definitely be annoying, AI is actually useful unlike NFTs.
Much like the author, I also enjoy photography, graphic design, and other creative hobbies. It's entirely my choice how much and where to apply AI.
We have to accept that yes, it's useful, and yes you can definitely produce good deliverables with it, not just slop. Yes, when looking for assets and not the artistic process, many people will use AI and the cost of creative work will plummet. It's not great but that's the way it is.
But it's not like we should just stop creating, especially if it's a hobby. Do it for fun. Or, maybe use AI to try something new.
Either way AI is too useful, it's here to stay and it doesn't need a do-over. It's true, we should accept the world is changing, and no amount of moaning or complaining will make this disappear.
The platforms are now flooded with AI slop and it's getting more and more difficult to discover new (honest) art and to present your own art to the public. The problem is exactly that there's no consent: we can't prevent AI companies from using our art or software for training and we can barely prevent our platforms from being eroded by AI slop.
> Either way AI is too useful
The jury is still out on whether the advantages and opportunities of AI outweight all the negative sides.
> It's not great but that's the way it is.
Why does it have to keep that way? Do you also think like this about political topics? Why should artists have to put up with this gross violation of copyright on a massive scale? Did anyone ask us if we actually want this? As the people we always have the right to say: "this is not ok and we demand change". Yes, there is no going back, but we can still shape the direction we are heading!
What did we do before "platforms"? This wasn't that long ago (20 years give or take). If you want to share, join a club, meet people, do your hobby with a group. Personally I create for the joy of it so I don't really care what's going on on "the platforms".
> The jury is still out on whether the advantages and opportunities of AI outweight all the negative sides.
The jury is extremely clear on the benefits of AI, even if it is very annoying and being pushed everywhere. We are not going back to a world without AI, and this is something you just have to accept.
> Why does it have to keep that way?
Because you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
> Why should artists have to put up with this gross violation of copyright on a massive scale?
I don't think this is necessarily true anymore. Adobe is training their models purely on legally licensed material, for example. Many of the open source models aren't available for commercial work by default. My guess is the copyright issue is not why people hate AI. People hate AI because it's a replacement for humans and for human creativity, which sucks. But it can be legal.
> Did anyone ask us if we actually want this?
Who is us? I want AI models. Lots of people want AI models. It's not all nefarious. You can have some fun with AI as a hobby and see what it enables you to create.
> As the people we always have the right to say: "this is not ok and we demand change"
Okay, what kind of change do you want?
The thrust of your argument seems to rest resigning yourself to the impossibility of unhitching the global economy from the AI bandwagon and being unwilling to want to do it because it works for you; this part I don't personally care about very much about. The annoyance, I think, stems from you then suggesting the same resignation others as well while skirting around what I thought were pointed questions with unhelpful responses:
i) You don't bother actually stacking up the harms of generative systems against their benefits. ii) You don't actually bother backing up your own position of resignment to the status quo. iii) You forget that your opinion is your's alone while ignoring that the vast majority of humanity had no say in society being upended in this particular way. This assymetry has largely held through history, but is least defensible today. iv) Finally you forget that people aren't bound by laws in the way we like to believe they are.
A more cynical person might infer vested interest from the state of your argument.
I hope for your sake you continue getting the same joy from "creating" as society continues it ride down to the bottom.
The more I see AI videos, AI songs, AI writings, AI whatever etc, the more angrier I get. Fucking piece of trash pushed by mediocre bastards who don't want to bother investing skills to do good music, art, in the first place and steal their IPs and "look ma, my dick is making new songs just by prompting Suno with the liquid I ejaculate, screw those starving artists!"
The tool is being created and used very irresponsibly by society. It wont' get better, it will get worse.
I am going to try to find a way to block all Youtube channels that I find using AI. Next, I will also block all domains that use AI writings, AI images, etc. If this makes my internet usage unusable, so be it.
I started from just literally cutting ties with someone who said "my kids make videos and games using AI, and you will be left behind" to my face. Yup, I cut ties with that person not because of political discourse, not because of Trump, but because of AI.
The only thing that I can't avoid is using AI in my job because my fucking employer tells me so. I still have to put food on the table or I risk bringing literal swords, guns or ropes and go to literal death march against these "tech leaders". I hope that day will never happen. But who knows, maybe society will be desperate enough to finally have to use violence as the last resort.
It's not going away, your anger isn't going to help you or anyone else.
People have been pushing out low quality everything for a long time, technology is making that more efficient. It's an old story being retold again.
There is no reason for not liking something to breed this much hate and division.
I guess I'm saying you're not alone, and there's likely dozens of us.
Other than the fact that the tool itself is being used to spread actual hate and division, and is currently destroying the fabric of society.
Dismissive and condescending comments like this also only serve to further push people away from AI. Writing it off as someone just not liking something new does not make the actual issues go away, nor does it make people's anger go away. If you earnestly believe that's all it is, I think you're in for quite a shock in the future.
It's not that important, the hate won't make it go away.
The question being is this kind of cheeseburger enthusiast A) morally reprehensible or B) annoying.
I'm 100% on board with B, and distancing yourself from the annoying dude who ate at McDonalds twice and won't shut up about how cheeseburgers are the future. Not about going on an angry tirade about how cheeseburger people are evil.
But I don't intend to diminish the possibility of existence of morally reprehensible AI pushers.
An old friend of mine got super AI pilled. He's an AI musician now too. When he sends me his latest suno track, that's merely slightly annoying. I haven't cut ties.
"If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it."
That's not going to happen. A lot of these AI-skeptic pieces would be more persuasive or at least more legible if they acknowledged basic facts of the world. A plan that drastically curtails the AI business on a forwardgoing basis is legible to me. A plan where we "start over from zero" sounds utopian, which gives me permission (really, bashes me over the head with it) not to care.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/11/19/trust-in-ai-far...
Just a wild guess
They stopped publishing Youth unemployment data, Youth unemployment data is categorized as age range 16-24 and currently not enrolled in education.
The reason why they stopped publishing this data was because it was extraordinarily high. This is due to the large number of engineers, technical graduates, and China's large numbers of high tech companies.
This is because technical/high tech interviews aren't 1 day things especially in china, but they take months and have 5+ , 10+ rounds of interviews and examinations. In the technical world you can't just say I know Abelian groups, C++, CFD, etc... They need a senior engineer to test and grill you, they need to give you actual problems and see how you approach and tackle them.
China is undergoing a massive recession and they haven’t protected citizens. They won’t let citizens be refunded or cancels their mortgages bankrupting them.
They are shoveling money into AI and burdening their cities with massive debt and leaving behind 500 million people in agrarian rural towns. There is now a shift backwards to rural life because AI is high skilled, unlike their manufacturing boom.
Where did you come up with this nonesense?
I can't really trust any anti-AI argument when it feels more of a tribal grievance than a rational explanation of concern. Especially with the overuse of the "techbro" pejorative, it seems more a lament against a certain type of attidude in the tech world and a hatred that that attitude has translated into massive material wealth.
Personally I disagree with the finding that it is fair use. I think the fact that it was found to be fair use is a miscarriage of justice. Am I allowed to have dissenting opinions on that topic?
The essence of fair use is that it is ok if the use of the copyrighted material is transformative. LLM training I believe is transformative, as it is taking the data (as in a work of text, an image, video), and feeding it through the layers of a neural net to marginally update its weights. It is factoring each work into a very very small fraction of the model's overall sense of the world.
Now, AI models are capable of reproducing copyrighted works to a degree of high accuracy, especially if those works recur very frequently in the training data, but I believe that's a different issue. Any video camera is capable of taking a photo of a copyrighted work, but that isn't essential to the value of the camera, though it is undeniably what certain cameras are used for. The exact reproduction of copyrighted works is a likewise something that LLM's can do, as any intelligent person could recite song lyrics or a work if they memorized it, but each individual work is only marginal to the overall effectiveness and value proposition of the model.
I disagree. I think it is the exact issue. I think that treating it as a different issue is legal stickhandling that goes against the spirit of what fair use is intended to be, to get the outcome that the rich and powerful want.
This reversal isn't making it better to be a poor artist you know. It's further consolidating power and wealth upward by looting the public (and not so public) domain
Don't believe me? Disney is making deals with big image model providers to allow generation of their characters, meanwhile poorer online artists will get nothing
That's just one example
This is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. Fair use is much more complex than you think.
Who is "we"? The concept of "fair use" is pretty specific to the US. There is no "fair use" in Germany, for example.
Personally, I like the idea of "fair use", but I personally don't think that it applies to commercial closed-source AI model training. The US Copyright Office seems to agree with this assessement:
> Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market. When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research—the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness—the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
Isn't this a good argument for models produced by proliferation of said information to also be open-weight then?
Or perhaps your line of thinking is more that AI companies shouldn't have legal recourse should the weights for a model get leaked because this too would clearly contribute to economic growth.
It seems the author is in fact hating on disrupt-everything hypercapitalism of the American techbro kind, not generative AI...
This is extremely disingenuous, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer product for a reason. Part hype, part usefulness, part novelty. The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes. It's not that hard to criticize the AI hypetrain without a strawman.
> I'm sure copyrighted material was already being fed into LLMs at this point (I mean, you also had people willingly feeding it in, like the example I gave above) but once the techbros caught on and wanted to accelerate this, suddenly EVERYTHING public facing was fair game to training their models.
This is also just extremely disingenous. For full disclosure, I'm technically a stakeholder here, as I wrote two books which made it into training sets (and part of two class actions), but this cat is way out of the bag. Unless you really want to start splitting hairs about "ingesting" vs "processing" vs "training" vs "transforming," Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer. Folks were bringing this up decades ago, especially record labels that were suing google for copy-pasting lyrics to their main search pages; were you complaining then, too? Because some people were.
> All because investors demanded it, and companies didn't want to be caught with their pants down if these inflated claims of it being the next big thing proved to be true. This is where the hate for me really started, because a lot of these companies forced AI upon you, with no means to opt out. FOMO is a hell of a drug on a corporate scale, ho-ly.
Corporate FOMO is pretty run of the mill, this shouldn't be surprising in the least. I must've done like half a dozen "blockchain hackathons" or "VR demos" back when those technologies were all the rage. I don't really see how it's that big of a big deal, other than being mildly annoying.
> You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet. It was doubly gone when Facebook sold PII data to advertisers. It was triply gone when Experian got hacked and the SSN of every taxpayer in the USA was leaked (and no one went to jail lol). Let's stop being dramatic. It just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how data collection works.
> Good luck avoiding AI if we buy up all the components for you to build your own computers and devices! Submit everything to the cloud, it's now the only affordable option, suckers!
Blog author and hobbyist photographer discovers free markets.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but this kind of take is boring, uninspired, and (ironically) could've just been written by ChatGPT. Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
Instead I got another one-sided unhinged rant that looks straight out of a typical Reddit post.
> Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer.
Your argument boils down to: companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care?
The answer is: it was wrong back then and it is still wrong now, but on a completely different scale! We have reached a tipping point where many people are (rightfully) furious.
> Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet.
People do not have a problem with Google indexing the web because they want their websites to be found. That's the entire purpose of putting stuff out on the internet. AI is now doing the opposite: traffic is directed to chatbots and platforms are flooded with AI slop.
As you said, people were already complaining when Google started to show their own summaries, preventing users from visiting the original sources. People have been complaining about Facebook drowning the frontpage with clickbait. But this time it is so much worse.
Sure, LLMs can be useful, but on the other hand the potential for abuse is humongous. People are already seeing the negative consequences and they are rightfully angry.
> Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
I do think that the author made a good point by bringing up the issue of consent. We are now in a situation where I can't post anything online without AI companies possibly scraping the content and feeding it into their models without any attribution or permission. And there is no way of opting out. Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?
This is not a very charitable take. My argument is: that cat is out of the bag, so what do we do next? Do you have a plan? Ranting about consent or privacy or copyright won't somehow untrain these models. At least the math people put out the pretty sensible Leiden Declaration[1].
> Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?
This is a lot like saying "do you not see a problem with nuclear weapons? They can wipe out humanity!"—I mean, yeah, sure I do, but ranting about the technology won't somehow put that cat back in the bag, either.
I did not see this argument in your first post at all. Instead you tried to dismiss the author's complaints, arguing that none of their complaints are new. (Which is true in a sense, but it ignores the most important point: that of scale)
> I mean, yeah, sure I do, but ranting about the technology won't somehow put that cat back in the bag, either.
Fair enough, the author did not propose any concrete solutions. However, their analysis is still correct. The first step towards change is to acknowledge that we have a problem. Your first reply did not seem to do that, on the contrary, it seemed to downplay the authors concerns. Maybe that was not your intention, but that's how I read it.
I certainly agree that we need to find solutions. Yes, the cat is out of the bag, but with proper legal frameworks and regulations we can keep it from pissing all over the living room.
On the other hand pointed, organised, public dissatisfaction and upheaval could lead to legislation requiring companies caught in the act of theft to fork over their profits to the state to be used for public good. Think about it :)
Come on. The author's take, while maybe not flawless, is far more balanced than the equivalent AI-hype-man take. All of your criticisms are not charitable.
If you are using LLMs to write your e-mails, deceiving me in thinking I'm conversing with a human, you are violating me.
If you are publishing AI generated books or music without a big disclaimer, you are violating me.
If you are scraping the net and using my work for AI training, you are violating me.
If you are scraping the net and overloading my servers, you are violating me.
Etc.
But he lost me at "As it exists right now, I don't give a toss what good it can do, what practical benefits it has once the techbros move on to their next mark. I don't care about any of it at all...". Because he feels hatred, we are supposed to look the other way when it can and does create benefits?
Just find a way to use it to your liking (maybe that's zero) and ignore the stuff you can't be bothered with and maybe that means being less connected to technology, which honestly, is pretty great at times.
I'm certain I don't know where you're looking then because I'm seeing disinterest trending towards outright disgust. Outside bay area tech forums I have yet to encounter a single human being that is in any way enthusiastic about or interested in the capabilities of AI tooling. Without exception every time AI comes up in conversation around here it's someone expressing frustration at the growing difficulty of avoiding slop content, annoyance at coworkers slop work product, or grumbling about upper-middle-management edicts to include AI tooling in even the most routine office workflows. The ubiquity of the term "slop" alone should be enough to give folks pause because it's a very clear indicator.
If this was actually possible, there would be far less backlash to AI. As it stands, it's being forced into every aspect of our lives without consent. Even if you avoid technology as much as possible (which is a good thing), it's still affecting every aspect of society. Even if you avoid technology altogether, you still live in a society full of people who can't or don't, and you can't escape the consequences of it - such as if the CEOs get their way and eliminate human employment like they have constantly threatened and fantasized about.
> You, yourself, are ganging up on commenter and painting people with broad strokes.
No need to complain about "not being allowed to have a dissenting opinion" and then complain about people disagreeing with you. That's not what "ganging up" means. If we're concerned about the HN guidelines, maybe also avoid complaining about downvotes.
You don't need to define my position or my definitions, I said what I said and meant it as such based on a specific comment in this thread you authored.
I'm not saying that AI is like those things but that as society tallies the cost-to-benefit ratio public opinion on AI trends closer and closer to negative; most people are realising that ripping a big old hole in our social fabric isn't quite worth faster emails. I agree the productivity gains are huge but aren't equaly distributed across industries (or even employees even within the same industry).
Of course you're open to your opinion but as with most things whether not people share it will continue to change over time. I personally hope expressing thoughts like you did becomes unacceptable in the short to medium term, no offence.
AI can and has already shown to be really helpful in emerging medicines and medical break throughs. Should we just throw that out with everything else based on the argument of the article that it is annoying that people are hyped about a new technology?
The tally of society hasn't been set and I would urge you to understand that the opinions online formed in echo chambers don't represent the majority.
I agree with your statement in isolation but it doesn't describe why I wrote what I did. The point of listing out the horrible things is that there are many things most people agree are horrible and won't entertain conversation about them in interest of giving room to dissenting voices. So, complaining about how a "gang of commentors" wouldn't let you express your opinions without them pushing back isn't a meaningful complaint.
> AI can and has already shown to be really helpful in emerging medicines and medical break throughs.
That's great! I'm not opposed to this and I think you'll find that most other commentors "ganging up" against you aren't either. But I think you'll also find that tools such as coding harnesses and image generation systems don't quite qualify as medicine. Nor does the use of AI in medicine have major social repurcussions.
> opinions online formed in echo chambers don't represent the majority.
Right back at ya buddy :)
It's interesting that you prop up benefits but fail to address the harms of AI. Is it that you think there are none? Or do you not care because they don't affect you?
>You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
This is ... not how consent works. At all.