Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.

So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.

Also the product itself is likely to suck.

One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.

I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.

AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!

This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"

In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).

I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.

I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.

But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.

I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.

I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.

For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.

What it also hits on for the average person is the uncanny valley. It just feels bad to talk to something mimicrying a person. It feels like talking to an invader at a deep, survival level.

I think its more that AI is generally really badly implemented. It means we get a less qualitative experience, mainly on support, but also writing etc.

It only takes one attempt to contact a corporation using their new AI system to scar you, it's that dehumanizing.

And millions of people know exactly what I mean.

I’m in constant code switch mode.

Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.

Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.

Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.

I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.

> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job

My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.

They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.

Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.

I think that undersells the real problem.

In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.

So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.

If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.

Outside of frontier model providers, the vast majority of "AI" branded products/features just don't feel high quality.

AI generated media (art, music, etc) is very repulsive to interact with and so many products feel like they have led with AI solutions to problems that don't exist.

It also signals low effort or subpar quality too. Hey look we slapped gpt on our healthcare app. Is it useful? Not really but the ceo is excited about it

Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.

I've talked to doctors, drivers, lawyers etc. and most white collar and many blue collar jobs feel the threat. Which, based on various news, feel justified even if not immediate. Even if its not the same llm per se, but the word "AI" is already tarnished as scum backstabbing negative entity, I literally don't know a single person who sees it these days positively.

Also translates as “this is going to be enshittified and make your life worse eventually.”

Whatever reasons there were to be excited about tech have been subsumed by the things to be worried about.

Reading the comments in this thread, I think it's difficult for some folks here to accept that many, many people outside their bubble genuinely despise what they're doing, and it's not just a misunderstanding or a matter of branding.