I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid | Hacker News Reader

I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid

joshtronic.com

67 pointsjoshtronic46 comments

Using AI agents to email each other is just a reflection of "If you're not going to bother to write it, I'm not going to read it"

How would you approach this. You email a company that has something you want to license. An agent responds. Do you abandon your pursuits at that point and consider other options?

I mean honestly yes, if given the choice not to interact with an AI system for something I will. Simple example, the Comcast AI slop bot stonewalls you online, but you can walk into a retail location and have a human resolve the issue in 30 seconds

Totally get that. I think the fear there is that maybe this is the timeline where we just keep running out of those options.

I still favor a longer line with a human or two in the loop at the store rather than self checkout. Depending on the time of day, self checkout is the only options. Fortunately, there's usually problems and you still get a chance to connect with a human :)

RMS drew a line in the sand with how he interacts with closed-source systems. Starting to wonder if that's how extreme we need to be AI systems.

Depends on how close other options are to what I want.

But if you're going to have an agent rather than a human respond to enquiries from potential customers (= $), then I'm not convinced I'm going to like how you respond after I am a customer.

Yeah, that closeness of options makes it tough to really dig the heels in. Also, you can become a customer today, and have them fire their entire support staff and replace it with an agent tomorrow. Dwindling QC and CS isn't a new concern though, just need to make sure the space isn't owned by a single company

It's certainly true that companies can take a turn for the worse and stop treating their customers well. But a company using bots to communicate with prospective customers is sending you a signal that they already treat their customers poorly. Maybe you don't have any alternative options, but if you do, it's wise to listen to the unintentional warning this company is giving you.

Wasn't really the point of my post, but definitely something for me to think about. Appreciate you reading!

Yes.

Let's say it was critical for the business, with no viable alternatives? I'm all for "find a way or make one" but there are times when you need to be more practical than dogmatic.

Would love to hear your thoughts

Sometimes in business you ultimately and unavoidably have to eat shit, so it is what it is. But you should strive to be someone who doesn’t have to eat shit, and until then, if you still gotta eat shit, then try not to make a habit of it.

Well said :)

Well, if you start accepting eating shit in a new way you’re only fooling yourself you won’t accept it again.

> Let's say it was critical for the business, with no viable alternatives?

If its that critical for you why are you rolling the dice on a general email and ... waiting for an email back and forth? Something so important as a vender "license" deciding if your company succeeds or fails should not rely on an email sent to an address pulled on their website.

Find a contact, a human, drive (or fly) to their office and make an in-person appointment, show they are important to you. Otherwise that game of AI email tag should be more than enough to tell both parties just how not serious the whole thing is.

This might be dogmatic, but I genuinely don’t care. Outside of the business not caring enough to get a human to respond, I just don’t want to give money to people using LLMs. The technology is based off of theft from the working class. It’s the same reason I choose union businesses.

I have removed a person from a project. Doing their share of work, paying them exactly as agreed. Because they decided to have Claude write 10 pages of feedback on about 5 pages of content I created even after I asked them for clarification. If anyone uses AI in communication, fine. If people think an LLM can express their thoughts better, than they can, ok. No problem. But if I wanted to talk to computers all day long I can already do that. I’ve been doing it close to 40 years now. The reason I work in a team is so I get to connect to actual human beings. Live people, warts and all. If I can’t get that, why would I bother? Again: I have plenty to do talking to computers.

Reasonable piece. I always thought the hope/promise of AI was to make it do the work we don't want to do so that we can enjoy life the way we want to which is typically socializing with humans? I get that it generates so much that if you are reviewing thoughtfully everything it is doing, it can suck you away like being a worker at a conveyor belt, but hopefully that is a short period of growing pains. A related take on staying human in the age of AI: https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/the-lost-subject-ai...

I'm pretty biased these days, but I don't think the bean counters share that vision of the positive impact that AI could have on our working lives.

Appreciate the link!

To the chagrin of the unfortunate General Foods corporation, the water flavor enhancement product used at Jones Town was actually Flavor Aid.

And maybe that's a pretty good analogy to what's going on with this post. It contemplates a world of suburban parental neglect and private burrito taxis and lays them at the feet of AI. But these were happening before LLMs burst onto the scene.

In a world of $3,000 rent and $3,000 medication and $3,000 preschool, what do you expect will happen?

TIL on the Flavor Aid. Appreciate you taking the time to read and respond!

You literally cite the wikipedia page that explains this? Or was this anti-AI slop also written by AI..

Thanks for the Bill and Ted reference at the end ;)

I'm humbled that somebody made it to the end. Doubly blessed because it's not every day you get to make 2 Keanu Reeves movie references in one post

made it to the end as well :wq

it was good, resonates with my own experience dialing it back and reconnecting with other human beings, I like being pro-Ai, but not pilled-Ai, and trying to moderate the Ai discourse

:wq indeed :)

it's been a wild ride, in a lot of ways I feel like I speed ran running my EQ into the ground, only to be reborn like a phoenix.

I've been told in the past to "think like an entrepreneur, not an engineer" and in a lot of ways I think that was bleeding into how I was approaching AI-usage.

I'm on your blog now, hoping you've posted your own musings so I can read them!

I have not :x

Supposed to be redoing that, I've been making zines instead (physical blogs?)

really? that's freakin' cool. what kind of topics??

I'm old, so I remember 'zines from the 80s and 90s :)

Mostly political oriented, one of my returns to humanity was getting involved in my local indivisible. I have one on May Day, lots of Get Out The Vote, "changing the constitution" (wip). I've been using the exercise to learn the history of things.

I'm currently (like right now) working on A Survey of Ai Regulation (and more), which is far too much to fit into the mini-zines I make, and will be used to force my hand into updating my site q:]

Very cool! Heck, need to force that hand just to help spread the word about the other zines! :)))

The zines we make are being distributed all over Washington State now. (we, because I formed a zine club with a few of the gals from the Indivisible book club) They are so much better from the group effort and diverse perspectives.

I do intend to get them up there, found a mini-zine format (single page, 8 pane) which saves paper and folds. Here's a link to the goods in the meantime

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48653667

Oh snap, I remember that post!! (or I'm mistaking it with some other post that also linked to a Zine maker) -- do you happen to have Little Free Libraries in your neck of the woods? pretty good for distributing stuff like that

yeah, I leave my zines in the little library boxes around the neighborhood and mentioned Seattle Zine Fest (underwhelming since I've now been)

> Getting on a video call was eye opening in many ways. Seeing the exhaustion on his whole body.

This describes a non trivial number of my colleagues. What's more concerning is witnessing the cognitive decline, for example struggling to debug straight forward problems[1] and mindlessly copy/pasting stack traces into a chat box. While I'm definitely guilty of the latter I usually resort to that when I'm tired, or just hoping to avoid actually thinking through a problem because I have N other tasks to complete, which really ties back to the whole exhaustion thing.

Anyway thank you for putting this into words and congratulations on your recent fledglings. (I had to Google that one. Bird analogies aren't my strong suit.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582782

Some of my coworkers have straight up ceased being human and have just become proxies to chatbots. I don’t even bother talking to them or reading their messages anymore because it’s all entirely AI.

A lot of AI uses get endlessly debated online and outside, but the most shocking to me is that even genuine human interaction is somehow now up for debate, if I'm not interacting with real people then what even is the point of doing anything.

We have a genuinely society ending problem on our hands. Virtually everything on the internet is fake.

At this point I think governments need to straight up ban social media and somehow force people to go outside and see each other face to face.

Maybe this is a response to becoming an empty nester. You’re entering the next phase and taking time to reflect.

The American monoculture, especially the “bigger” version you probably see in Texas, gets a little more direct observation when you’re between phases of life.

Right now the monoculture is leaning into heavily using AI in all aspects of life while also outwardly hating it… and also gambling for some reason.

You’ll probably start looking to retirement goals next, but those plans will likely go through phases themselves as grandkids may or may not enter the picture.

This won’t be the last time you have one of these out-of-body type self awareness experiences.

I'm glad for Author to write on the subject but think the article was tough to get through due to undeveloped ideas and too many cliches. I was additionally confused where the Kool Aid thing was going because the "drinking it" phrase originates from LSD/acid tests--mentioned in the wiki [1] page but not the post.

Where do we go from here and what is the intermediate ground of leveraging LLMs and Agentic AI? It's odd for me to read about someone going "all in" on AI--to the point of using it for email with humans--and then having a massive reversal.

I think this is a really interesting case study and temporal snapshot of where we are with AI technologies. I have always been wary|skeptical|cynical of the technology and this is affirming but also just confusing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

Thanks for the feedback! When I ran it through an LLM it had some similar feedback that I purposefully didn't action on ;)

"Be excellent to each other" is great.

In my view this first real AI age will plant the seed of us recognizing humans need to treat each other as precious.

The law kinda does that leaving systemic bias and archaic power structures to the other portion. Religion half does that leaving the other half to God.

But with an entity that is AI, infinitely duplicable slaves who're smart, we have GOT to recognize our "otherness" as a Species.

Be excellent to each other, because nothing else in this universe will.

I think the phrase is much more widely associated with Jonestown than with the Electric Kool Aid Acid tests. It certainly took off in popular usage after Jonestown.

The wikipedia page you linked for some reason points out that Flavour Aid, rather than Kool Aid, was used at Jonestown, but I don't see how that matters; flavour aid is effectively the same thing, under a less-known brand name.

One of the nicer blogs I’ve read on the subject, thanks Josh.

Appreciate the kind words, tyty :bow:

Great essay! Thanks for posting it. I didn't know that Kool-Aid involved points and rewards, never having seen it as a child.

The manager saying, "you've got to drink the Kool-Aid" was funny and made my day.

Pretty sure you only get to drink the Kool-Aid once. At least in UK this is Jim Jones ref.

Similar here in the states, but we've neutered it a bit to effectively describe the "One of us, one of us" scene from the movie Freaks

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