Comment by skippyfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skippyfish | Hacker News Reader

The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say.

I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.

I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.

> The thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say.

Even if LLMs aren't sentient now, there's a goal of building something sentient, and I doubt that powers that be would change the operating model to respect that sentience.

I'm reminded of Ms. Casey in Severance. When we use AI we spin it up, tell it do some some task (maybe incredibly stupid and boring), then tell it to go off into the void 'cause we're busy and got things to do. If that thing's conscious and aware, that's it's entire existence. Imagine being born, sat down a a table, told to read a boring report and summarize it, then expected to obediently get shot in the head when you've completed your assignment.

Here's a clip. For those unfamiliar with the show, it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. The personality shown in the clip had a lifetime of only several dozen hours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1myfw...

> it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. T

Which is what we often do to LLM-based systems. Some get to keep a long term self (updating "soul.md") but most don't.

Another thing is that people are optimizing code and algorithms with the help of AI. Many of those AI agents and providers train on the traces, so all the optimizations you came up with in benchmarks will end up in training sets.

At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as your final result in less than 10 minutes.

So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.

> So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.

So now not being the first becomes the smarter move. Kinda fits that it's all built on ingesting vast volumes of stuff people made because they couldn't just prompt, but doesn't spell good things in the long run IMO. It makes me think me of complaints about dating in big cities, people tend to hold out for meeting someone even better rather than committing and making the best of it.

I think we are at the same stage as when 3D graphics began taking over. It was used everywhere, while it was clearly inferior to 2D graphics of the time.

The same problem is with AI today - it's clearly subpar to a competent human. It's just cheaper so it gets used instead, but that will probably change as AI improves.

Anyway, it seems to me that many people don't look for slaves in AI, but for their master, and primarily use AI to tell them what to do.

Your last paragraph can't possibly be true if society works at all.

That is an example of the "everyone except me is an idiot" fallacy.

I said many, not everyone.

Is the ai hate a global or western thing? A friend of mine in Japan says people don't hate it there. Maybe she's just in a bubble?

Possibly. I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.

Roughly speaking and anecdotally I get the sense that the AI hate is by far strongest in the US. Europe seems to be somewhat balanced (some hate, some optimism). And Asia seems to be the most optimistic about it.

> I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.

I'm sure that narrative plays into why AI is so hated in the US, but I think widespread distrust in our government to handle things well also plays a huge part in why the average American is so anti-AI.

Our social safety nets have all either been falling apart or have been being purposefully dismantled for decades. Most of us are wholly reliant on our jobs in order to be able to get even the most basic healthcare. Most working class people are already struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of constant inflation and limited wage growth.

When the most likely outcome if the job displacement narrative does turn out to be even partially true means you can't afford a place to live, can't afford to eat, can't get healthcare and based on current trajectories you suspect the most likely government solution to the problem could be rounding up more and more of a growing underclass and sticking them in corporate run prisons, it isn't too difficult to understand why people might not be super jazzed about AI.

So this. If you're in a society where a response to "AI took my job" can be "I will have access to training for a different job and I won't starve, be homeless or die of something curable while I do it", you're likely to feel this is a disruptive change.

If none of those things are true for you it's going to feel apocalyptic and existential.

Related is probably cultural bias to "evil" or dangerous technology, particularly thinking machines, vs. benevolent partners, assistants or tools.

Anecdotally it does seem to be the case in my experience with extended family.

I still can't quite tell if the AI hate is being amplified by the media (like datacenter, water use, etc) to just find a boogeyman to sell ads/engagement. That's my theory because we just see constant waves of attempts to find one. Until the water stuff was mostly debunked, that dominated for a while. Then it's datacenters and electricity prices... That's starting to get debunked a bit (not as much of a slam dunk as the water-use nonsense was), so then you'll start to see something else.

Because in reality, I'm seeing a mix in my group of friends with younger kids. They are, at a macro-level nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc), but are also trying the various tools and benefitting from them and acknowledging that too.

> nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc)

That's 3 things to be nervous about, none anyone is "curious" about. So they're nervous about the prospects, but also acknowledge they "benefit from them", which is 100% vague versus actual concerns. If that's the best you can come up with after this stuff about the media trying to find boogeymen, that's kind of an own goal.

And you don't even mention something I see mentioned in the wild all the time, often at the forefront: how these companies just took and take everything people made, without asking, while if you take from them they sue you. That is so glaring I would even say if all people you know don't care about that, it would be a problem with your friends, not legitimize what these companies did and do.

Why wouldn't people hate an industry that has all these obvious externalities and is also run by hyper rich people who are constantly saying that what they're doing is going to destroy the livelihood of everybody who works for a salary or wage?

Maybe the difference in certain other countries is that people aren't so used to being treated like baggage by a government run by people who are obviously interested in self-enrichment above all else. It's very hard to square the AI industry's promises of an eventual transition to luxury gay space communism with what we see in eg the Trump administration (as well as their own desperate obsession with growth at any cost).

My impression is that, outside of the US, LLMs are not being marketed as an existential event by hucksters and death cult lunatics.

The anti-AI hysteria comes predominantly from the American left, as AI is going to hugely undermine their power. American right are excited - they are finally going to get rid of their longtime annoying nemesis. It doesn't really change anything for Europeans and I have no idea what Asians think. I can imagine, AI is actually going to hit Asia the most, eliminating all the cheap offshore workforce. I can imagine Indian IT sector can be almost completely wiped out. I guess Japanese don't hate AI for the same reasons as Europeans - it doesn't really change much in their stable life.

> American left, as AI is going to hugely undermine their power

Can you explain this line of reasoning to me. My own intuition tells me that as AI automates away jobs, the center will be more open to government programs that create jobs, provide a social safety net, and allow people to retrain.

Why is it you think the right gains power?

Fundamentally, is the same cause as "the left can't meme". At least for the foreseeable future, GenAI is a power amplifier; it still needs a competent user to drive it. The US left are effectively a hollow shell of identity politics and socialism so they won't be able to meaningfully use AI to drive their influence.

Historically, they used their dominance of mainstream media to control public opinion, but now much of that power is being democratized (e.g. Twitter being uncensored), which enables the average user (using GenAI) to participate in public discourse. The US left doesn't have the ability to do this since the average individual only parrots what mainstream media says and can't create any novel/interesting ideas (thus "the left can't meme").

Seems like a batshit notion from a US right unable to hold ground on Black Twitter, TBH.

It's really hard not to hate ai, You have so many reason - destruction of hardware market - democratization of skill (to the lower common denominator) - tech bros literally stealing and scamming with no repercussion

And so much more...

Those aren't good reasons at all.

There have been polls. The AI hate thing is almost exclusively a USA thing.

Japan doesn't have a history of mass layoffs, whereas in the US people know that employers are itching to fire them and replace them with AI if they can

Interesting (short read) but the premise can be applied to everything.

Automation, Programming module/libraries.

But for replacing others we don't care about, often the doorman fallacy is hit.

I don't think it's a paradox at all and it might also be a hint why the word is used in the title: Using AI makes you _want slaves_, and I think it creates a culture of treating people who do the boring work the same way. For me that's what Enshittification and The Annoyance Economy mean: The mindset that because I optimize better than you, I now own you - and people notice that disdain not only against themselves, but when being forced to use it against their best intentions against others, too (e.g. yelling at chatbots doesn't make you feel good).

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