alt Hacker NewsWhy do you (and lots of other people with your mindset) speak to other humans this way?
I post stuff I make on reddit and the teenagers (or grown men?) say things like, "your mother should have used a coat hanger if she knew you'd use AI". And it's almost a daily occurrence on social media.
I'm having a great time, and you don't have to join the club. Do whatever you want with your life. But stop talking to us like this.
I get that what I posted here is a critical refutation and not simply a neutral art or tech post about AI to a friendly audience. It invites critique and that's fine. But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? To dunk on positive things and experiences people are having?
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I don't make comments like the appalling one you quote, and I'm sorry someone said that to you.
That said, I do hate genAI, and so have decent grounds for guessing why people would say things like that.
In my case, my employers have mandated LLM usage and all but banned actually programming, and I can see it rotting my ability to code and understand things.
That is extremely demoralizing, and I expect others going through it would be very likely to lash out in anger when they see people praising genAI as amazing and wonderful.
Distinct from that, those of us who have at one point supported ourselves in a purely artistic domain we love, such as music or illustration, are deeply saddened to see genAI destroying the opportunity to be paid to do those things we love. We hope that other humans will continue to invest their wealth into art made by humans, but clearly some are not, and that group may grow as the generators get better.
The pain of seeing the opportunities you had destroyed, both for yourself and for others, is made even more acute when you see someone shouting about how wonderful the tools causing the destruction are. Angry aggression is the expected result, we humans being what we are.
Finally, many of us in the anti-genAI camp are both able to see that the tools can be effective force-multipliers, but can also see the manifold negative externalities of genAI: on-demand propaganda, genAI psychosis, anonymous virtual rape (I don't know a better way to describe generating and distributing videos of actual humans doing sex acts they've never done), super-persuader scammers, potential massive job loss, concentration of social / political power into the GPU-holders' hands, accelerated climate change from the massive resource consumption, actual unaligned paperclip optimizers (see e.g. the HuggingFace hack, which is a textbook example of a monkeys-paw / paperclipper scenario), actually-effective mass surveillance, the increasing risk of bioterrorism at massive scale, and the looming possibility that an ASI evolved from these systems will actually bring us to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" or extinction scenarios.
If you see all that, the urge to bully, insult, and denigrate people who are choosing all those consequences by using the things is very strong. Viewed from this angle, it's certainly hard not to conclude that those of us using genAI are being very, very selfish, choosing personal benefit over the collective good.
I feel guilty daily for not having the courage to refuse to use and accept the economic consequences (if I weren't a special-needs family's primary breadwinner, I would just refuse and accept the consequences).
Again, I'm sorry people are responding abusively to you, and I hope I will never react that way.
Have I helped you see why people might react cruelly to your comments?
> But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this?
Because you (and your legion of likeminded folks on pseudosocial media) indeed sound like some washed-up, self-delusional salesman with a loaded gun to his head, desperately trying to land that sales pitch. And that's before we come to address all the usual cheap clichés, false equivalences, or if you wrote that slop yourself in the first place, etc.