Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
There's a strange vein of aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous) even if it hasn't yet cured cancer, led to 100% unemployment, solved nuclear fusion, etc.
I still think AI is at root at UI improvement for working with computers. It's an equivalent to the general move of command line interaction to WIMP.
Freaking out over this seems like nothing to me so much as that Tracy/Hepburn movie ... Desk Set.
As are claims like "No one" or "99.9%"
How many times per week are such claims made on HN and in similar forums with respect to software and hardware
curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=no+one&tags=comment |grep -Eo '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+'
How often do HN commenters use the trivially falsifiable term "everybody"
curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=everybody&tags=comment|egrep -o '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+'
I read the article but found no hint of "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)"
Instead I found a statement that the author finds AI "incredibly" useful:
"An AI summary would have been incredibly useful"
Where, specifically, is the "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)" in this article
The author's point as I understood it is about "AI" _hype_ not "AI" usefulness. The issue she has is with the _people_ who are hyping "AI" and the actual or potential effects of that hype
UBI used to be a bit of a funny reddit pipe dream. Now it’s a serious long term hypothetical being trialed in the short term and that’s solely as a result of AI progress.
When that result undermines the tenet that capitalism is the root of human suffering, it’s simplest to just reject the result wholesale.
I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?
On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.
The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.
So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.
It really is absolutely clear that higher education is over for good unless radical measures are taken. You can calculate the economic conquences. Colleagues are adopting 19th c tech and it may be well for universities to enforce them across the board https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessm...
Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.
> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.
AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations.
Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.
I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI.
I find myself doing more projects outside of work.
I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown.
I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work.
I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by a tutor that won’t get tired or annoyed.
Look— I’m not exactly thinking AI is free of criticism, but it’s definitely a revolution in access to information and at least to me that’s a big deal.
Did you mean: Google?
If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!”
The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour
Obviously, LLMs are quite tolerant of typos, and even ignore mis-capitalization, or it may have at least tried to correct your improper usages.
this was you less than an hour ago
Is this deliberate miscapitalization thing a behavior you often encounter?
I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else. Also the layoff peak was 2023.
At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing.
> [Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions
This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction.
> Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments
Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?
Question though — what do you have against what I’m saying or working hard towards?
Trying to create healthier versions of technologies and help people?
Excuse me, for actually trying to build things instead of just bitching and then let people on HN know about them, or posting things that I believe in. According to you, I guess I should have spent more % of my posts being snarky and attacking things others have built, like our friend here.
I have contributed quite a bit — not i n the form of snark, but in the form of actual SOLUTIONS that I built and put on github as open source. If you don’t want to click or use it or even look at it, that says more about you than me.
Safebots isn’t a contribution. You have just reinvented tools but bundled it with thousands of words of AI generated slop and terrible AI generated “ideas”. Everyone with Grok invents a new “computing substrate”. Yes, “substrate” is such a Grokism that I can immediately identify you use Grok for “thinking”.
If you spent just a little more time reading and a little less time self-promoting you would know that you are 12 months behind everyone else, human in the loop approval flows for tool execution are standard. The examples of LLMs doing destructive things are because users provided blanket approval.
https://ai-sdk.dev/docs/ai-sdk-core/tools-and-tool-calling#t...
“I have contributed quite a bit — not i n the form of snark, but in the form of actual SOLUTIONS that I built and put on github as open source.”
Code that nobody has ever used. HN is a discussion forum, you haven’t contributed to discussion. You have always been a slop merchant, quite impressive that you were slopping before LLMs, maybe you are an internet innovator after all.
Also, sadly, your common predilection on HN to ridicule and scorn everything is biasing you against the most important set of solutions in AI. It ain’t about making the models safer - more aligned - or refusals. For what it’s worth I’ll try to share one more article with you, but I doubt you’ll get it: https://safebots.ai/about
So you’d have me engage in “discussion” by which you mean criticizing work others do. Sorry to disappoint you by ACTUALLY building working solutions to actual problems, instead of just bitching 24/7. Must make you really aggravated to have to hear about that. Yes, I have been working on free software for a decade before LLMs. And giving it away for free. Ooh, I’m such a moocher on your time! You’re always free to scroll past and continue “contributing” the next 10 years of snarky comments. Maybe you can even speed it up with LLMs — I am sure it will greatly improve people’s lives :)
I’ll give you a million dollars if safebot is ever mentioned by someone credible. You don’t seem to realize that you are 1 of millions of people doing exactly the same thing, I have read so many of these revolutionary safety ideas, the only thing worse are all the god awful “memory” solutions people keep “inventing”.
"I'll eat my hat". No, you won't.
"I'll give you a million dollars." Sir, you likely don't have a million dollars to just give away like that. And even if you had, you wouldn't do it.
So, one of us is making actual, true claims based on years of hard work. You may consider them grandiose -- and you're entitled to your opinion -- but I can back it up with actual actions. Your claims are... well, just false.
Here is "someone credible" mentioning Safecloud just 2 weeks ago, and by mentioning, I mean writing an article about it appearing on their front page: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
Here are their own "grandiose" claims about themselves:
Help Net Security is an industry-leading cybersecurity publication with over 350,000 readers per month. Since 1998, we have been committed to providing high-quality information to our audience through publishing relevant original content and analyzing market trends. https://www.linkedin.com/company/helpnetsecurity
Okay, that was Safecloud, not Safebots. But what if, say, I give a talk at a conference about Safebots, or it's starting to get covered in magazines? If we get a thousand users all using safebots? Ten thousand? What if Robert Scoble interviews me, or a bunch of influencers start using it? At what point can you say "someone credible mentioned safebot and here's your million dollars" LOL
And I don't mean mention in a dubious way, like when the BBC covered our unfortunate flirtation with using monero mining to pay for our apps... somehow our app was used by enough people around the world that Newsweek, the BBC, 9to5Mac, ArsTechnica (which broke the story) etc. cared: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43386918
That's not the kind of publicity I'm looking for. But honestly, I'm curious. Are you a secret billionaire with a few exits under your belt who would toss a million bucks to me if "safebot is ever mentioned by someone credible"? No? Then maybe the "grandiose" claims are not on my side :)
That raises some interesting questions about the creation process. I like to believe that authors should recognize their own works.
The actual point of the article was: recursive self improvement is scary and upredictable, you can get 99% of the benefit by doing the reliable and predictable thing instead. Did you even read the actual article? I didn’t see anything in your comment about that main thesis which is woven through — well — every paragraph.
Update: oh, I went through your recent comment history and apparently most of it is just snarky criticisms of surface level things. Okay :)
In the quotes I noted [Architecture Page], which is the extremely prominent blue button/link on the SafeBots homepage. (To a PDF.)
It's on the slide "Scalability: Distributed Reasoning & Encrypted DAGs", number 11 with a black background.
> Did you just make that up
I choose to take this false-accusation as a positive sign that we feel the same way.
You read the text I quoted and (just like me) felt it somehow didn't make much sense... and you felt that very so strongly that you could not believe it even existed!
The front page of safebots.ai contains stuff I put up quickly 6 months ago when I was first making the site. I used Google Notebook LM to create the presentation, based on my notes, since people like “pretty designs”. And it put the word encrypted in there, which was wrong. Yes, the data (and graph) is in fact encrypted at rest, so technically it’s true, but not the main point.
I have since actually built the code, and wrote many articles around it, none of which have the word “encrypted”. Here is a good jumping off point:
I didn’t expect you to ignore the entire article I linked to, go clicking around the website and into a PDF from a completely different page, go to slide 11 and post it. Suffice it to say - your conclusion is totally wrong. But I’m glad you highlighted that specific title. It is time to thoroughly redo that front page - so it is more accurate to what the project has become!
* It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not.
* It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive.
I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society:
* solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible
* integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors
* the personal computer revolution
* mobile telephony
* the internet
* smart phones
* AI
Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.)
We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.
There, fixed that for you.
I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.
Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues?
* Distracted driving
* Attention span decimators
* A culture of zombies staring at their screens?
The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that.
Are you capable of dialectical thinking?
But I always swore I would never buy another iPad until Apple added one key feature: support for multiple user profiles.
Can’t understand why they’ve never done this. Even Apple TV has user profiles now. Perhaps they think they will sell less iPads if family members can share them.
I don’t think it makes sense as an analogy to AI, however.
I don’t think the analogy makes any sense whatsoever either.
"read Kant and found it to be dense and impenetrable...an AI generated summary would have helped"
followed by "Would it have improved comprehension? No."
Why? Because "research says so."
Wut?
(still waiting for one or more HN commenters to freak out because the article has gasp! multiple em-dashes)
He seems to have changed his mind now that he owns a major AI company.
I find it hard to imagine having a chatbot fix your broken SQL query or summarize some event be experienced as gross.
I think using an absurd amount of power to train a neural network on stolen data which is then used to perform mundane tasks and performs significantly worse then if done manually. If anything LLMs is one of the least impressive, yet most annoying technological achievement this century.
First, I want to point out how inconsistent you're being in mentioning "electricity with fusion power". We've had the ability to create fusion for almost 3/4 of a century. Most of the nuclear weapons in the world today are primarily fusion weapons (mostly with fission starters.) This is a technology that has killed nearly a quarter million people. But you're touting a variation of it as being one of the most amazing technological achievements this century.
That's fine, but then you have to recognize that you're distinguishing between the capabilities of the technology and its actual usages.
Now do the same thing with AI, and if you're intellectually honest about it, you'll be forced to change your position. The technology represents the greatest technological advance of anything we've seen this century. The political and economic forces surrounding its use are a separate question.
As for your list of technologies - the problem with it is that none of those items seemed like science fiction at the start of this century. Whereas, what LLMs can do now was essentially science fiction as little as five years ago.
In detail:
* mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s. There was little question that they could be made to work in humans, all that was needed was sufficient impetus, which was provided by COVID-19.
* Advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology are incremental enhancements to existing tech. No comparison here.
* Generated electricity with fusion power - that was first done in 1991 at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility. You may be thinking of the so-called "scientific breakeven" which was achieved in late 2022. That didn't actually generate electricity, just heat. It was also a rather arbitrary milestone that doesn't actually mean much, in practice. We're still orders of magnitude away from a true total system breakeven, where the total energy produced is greater than the energy consumed. The system that achieved scientific breakeven is not the kind of system that can be scaled up to address that gap. We're even further away from commercial power breakeven, where the value of the energy produced is greater than the cost of producing it. It's quite possible, even highly likely, that neither of the two goals I've just described will ever be achieved. There's no real breakthrough here, just marketing hype in a multi-decade effort to achieve something that may not even be possible.
* Traveled to Pluto - the Voyager spacecraft passed Pluto's average orbital distance in the early 1990s. Choosing to send a probe directly to Pluto is just a choice that would have been just as possible last century.
* The James Webb Space telescope - certainly a nice incremental advance, but not in the ballpark in terms of achieving something we didn't even know how to do before.
In short, if that's the best list you can come up with, it essentially confirms that LLMs are the greatest technological achievement of the 21st century so far.
The exact same story is with mRNA vaccines. And almost the same with fusion power, though it is still on the minor improvements phase, the latest being the first time we reached an energy gain factor in the National Ignition Facility experiment in California in 2022.
You are applying arbitrary limitations in what counts as “new technology” and then selectively applying them such that LLMs have a lower barrier then other technology.
This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention to major yet-unsolved and generally uncontested issues such as AI output being unoriginal (fundamentally, due to next-word prediction), the output polluting future training (garbage in garbage out), and errors only being caught by experts (cf. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect). The essay, in a political magazine, intends to warn elected leadership about strategic issues that are likely to arise if our government and experts intertwine AI into their decision making without these concerns being solved first.