alt Hacker NewsShunning AI is the human choice
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These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back.
Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits.
Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.
Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.
I think this is the first article I've seen here which captures my practical concerns with AI, my moral concerns, my economic concerns, and also the emotional "true, profound, and guttural loathing". I hate it so much, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it. It just feels so icky. And the times when I've been fooled into reading AI-generated texts I feel cheated. It's all so cheap and nasty.
Can I ask what the deal is with people saying anti-intellectual things and then finishing it with ", actually"? Where did this originate from from? Is it a shibboleth?
I wish tech companies would stop shoving AI in my face everywhere. F off google i don't want to "ask ai" in maps. Get that ugly ai button off from messenger, meta. At least microslop winblows lets me remove crapilot buttons from apps.
Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.
I think this highlights the dichotomy of AI use and how it's shaping everyone's opinion based on their own experience. It's your AI versus mine. You could be OpenAI with unlimited compute and disprove a conjecture or you could be the people referred in the article who are asking claude if a story is written by a human. Opus 4.7 can generate working code faster than I ever could but I still see it as a dumb word calculator bc of the mistakes it makes.
Why was this title changed? The original was better, and, well, original.
Every waves of automation are naturally creating resistance, as they tend to make the lives of a large number of people miserable during the transition.
Nothing new here.
What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.
I am not sure why or if this is a new pattern.
I understand some of the sentiment, but these folks certainly won't be denying the drug discovered through AI that will save their life or that of their children.
I don't think people truly hate AI. What they hate is how it's used. That's a very different thing and it's a human problem not a technology problem.
Political and economic ramification aside, if we truly create ASI, that severely reduces the value of humanity. We essentially give birth to our enslavers and eventually humanity will be second class on this planet. How is that something to look forward to?
I think that too many people are conflating their hate for AI, which is a technology, with the sick dynamics pushing it to gain profit. It's consumerism and capitalism to blame, AI is just a technology. As such, we want our leaders to be able to properly use such tech. But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.
To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place.
I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.
I don't want to sound fatalistic, but in the end, the machine is too powerful to be stopped. With machine I don't mean AI, but rather the financial machine of the US.
Such fantastic writing. I particularly love the last passage - not only it is reminiscent of how great op-eds used to close, but also for it's clear and un-ambigious call to action - you have the agency and no, you don't have to "deal with it", i.e. deal with lazy morons pasting you LLM-generated walls of text for discussion.
I'd find "hating labour replacement is good" a more compelling title.
> I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI.
Join Mastodon if this is what you're looking for. Your people are here!
That website sucks. My thoughts, https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html.
No need to hate it. Just understand it, know when you're dealing with someone who is viewing it through a rational lens vs. a delusional lens, and just keep doing what you were doing.
Buying into the fear is how you railroad yourself long-term. Using it while maintaining a healthy skepticism around the more radical claims means not being blindsided long-term.
Now as far as hating the turbo-zealots who smugly try to shove it down your throat in an attempt to protect their bags...
It’s my opinion that societal rules should be derived from more fundamental virtues and notions of morality. AI is a capability, and it can be used in moral or immoral ways, but it’s more like a knife than an assault rifle. I don’t want AI forced down my throat by SF bro evangelists, but I also don’t want to see it banned as a useful technology. I wish people didn’t feel the need to adopt extreme positions on this topic and were capable of advancing more nuanced perspectives.
Lots of people here saying “resistance is futile, so don’t resist.” I don’t care if it’s a losing “fight.” It’s not a single game. Truth is at stake, and we have to constantly fight any source of misinformation. There are times when LLMs are just fine, but they are seductive liars at worst, and we should never forget that.
> These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.”
Schmidt, by all means, is welcome to board the Good Ship Bubble-pop, but I think a lot of these grads are happy to instead watch from the viewing stand and wave goodbye.
I think his notion that AI is fait accompli is one of the (many) things being rejected.
The biggest risk I see is the acceleration of homogenization of everything. We are going to be getting the same average (but cheap) slop everywhere even in the space of thought.
Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.
If AI is overblown and permanently flawed, there is nothing to worry about.
If AI becomes as powerful as some fear/hope, productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living. Costs for housing, healthcare, education will collapse, and there is nothing to worry about.
This article somehow tries to straddle both positions, that AI is fundamentally flawed and can never really accomplish useful work yet we should be angry and fearful.
I mean I think hating practices and efforts to exploit people is good. I think hating the adverse consequences of our inventive structures and lack of protections for basic human rights is good. But I think hating AI is pointing at the wrong subject for scorn. If you want positive change you can’t point at something that a lot of people are getting value out of (individuals as well as corporations) and say fuck your experience. It is also wrong for a billionaire to say fuck your future and deal with it, but that should mean hating on that person not the technology.
In the battle of shape rotators vs wordcells, the wordcells have far more to gain with AI. This journo will come around.
> So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect.
What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.
It is what it is. Unless it threatens you. Then it's bad And then you prefer a narrative explaining why it's bad. And then you you propagate that narrative. And then that narrative infects the hive.
I don't hate AI. What I hate is while billionaires are promising us a utopian future where work is optional, the price of food, housing, and healthcare in the USA is through the roof. Many people my age (millennials) cannot afford to buy a house for themselves like prior generations were able to. The supposed riches being produced by AI are not being realized for the majority of Americans.
I kinda get the hate now - all of social media is being awash with AI. I think maybe a better option is to have new social media which is restricted to humans and human produced content. Hard to enforce - but I am sure there are ways out there.
The HN crowd is going to hate this article, but I think it's an important discussion to have.
I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions.
This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should be in the bottom left, if the users want it to be in the top right, you put it there.
So consider this QA feedback for the technology. How do you make people not feel this way about it? Go do that.
Lots of people on this site seem to be of the opinion that "AI is tech, you can't hate tech, only its use". That may be true, but I bet there'd be a whole lot less AI hate in society if:
(1) The proponents would just CHILL THE F OUT. If the technology is so fantastic, and the things you're building with it so amazing, then surely that will speak for itself in due time? Why do you need to sound like a cult leader on cocaine all the time? It reminds me of proponents of cryptocurrencies. My eyes and ears are bleeding – the more you talk, the more I wanna avoid your technology.
(2) The companies involved would respect IP.
(3) Regulators would empower ordinary people to have some redress when their lives are affected by AI-powered decisions. (The flawed EU AI Act is a decent start.)
(4) Regulators would ensure that actors in the AI space pay the cost of the negative externalities they impose on everyone.
(5) See 1. I'm so tired.
As an ex-Googler I'll say this: The problem with Eric Schmidt isn't (always) the particulars of the things he says. It's the smug I-know-best "boomer" tone he delivers it with, and the crass obliviousness to his relative position of privilege and power.
Googlers/Xooglers will recall the "my various houses" quip at TGIF some years ago which memegen had a field day with.
Also his multiple events where he brought in Kissinger to have "fireside chats" for Googlers to watch/attend.
In fact his "father knows best" attitude ties directly in with his Kissinger fixation: this realpolitik "practical" vision of a world of inevitable powerful forces that you just have to learn to ride with .. which is just really a skin over "might makes right" under another name. Kissinger was explicitly so, and Schmidt admired him for it. Who cares about million horrifically killed in Cambodia if America is stronger for it?
It's also not honestly all that far from the "Effective Altruism" stuff, too: some powerful person comes up with a system of "pragmatic" and utilitarian justifications for the forces-that-already-are and makes it sound like a programme-for-betterment when it's really just a method for their own further enrichment and ego satisfaction.
Many of us legitimately boo this. Not because we're naive. Or stupid. But because our own sense of agency in the world and democratic ethics means we see agency for collectives of people which work along broad and participatory lines. And because we "naively" believe in justice and maybe a vague Kantian notion of ethics which tries to treat other humans as ends in themselves.
Y'know. So-called basic enlightenment, modernist values.
The "inevitable AI" stuff is just an icing on an overall cake. Standing in front of a bunch of young people who still have energy and spirit and the ability to shape the world and telling them that the best way to shape the future is to accept the form that it's already taking and ride-along and profit is next level douchebaggery, even from Schmidt.
(I also have to muse out loud that the specific vile form Google has taken in the second decade of its existence relates to this same mentality. The Google of the founder's letter at IPO sounds nothing like the ... thing ... that exists now, and this seems to have everything to do with just yielding to what-is instead of making what-can-be)
I understand it’s trendy to like/dislike things, but the widespread disgust we have seen since day one that has refused to abate should be a clear signal that whether it is the technology or the implementation, this rollout or whatever you want to call it is simply not working and people are not buying in in the way they had hoped.
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Sorry for the irony, but the article is so long, i asked gpt to extract key points.
I think what'd be a stronger point is talking about centralization of the quality models. Modern AI tools are inherently centralized around huge shared infrastructure that gives enormous leverage (== capacity for abuse) to those owning the infrastructure. This is true even if you have strong competition among several players: each of them would converge on some business model and majority of users would not be bothered with long-term consequences if they receive very tangible short-term value.
The tooling is amazing, amount of productivity we unlock is fantastic and it's getting better by the day. But we need to watch out for collateral damage too. The future is somewhere there, but we can steer it towards being more or less hazardous.
The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very expensive bills that will be coming due in the coming months and years. They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.