Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into learned helplessness on those things. Nothing can be done. Both parties are bad. The right promotes corrupt oligarchy and regressively transfers wealth upward, the left prevents new home construction (driving real estate costs) and regulates away everything but service industries and white collar jobs that AI is now replacing.

The worst AI hate I've seen comes from artists and creatives. I've found the AI hate in those communities to be white hot bordering on people talking about violence.

My early take, which I think is still valid, is that actual art is very unlikely to be replaced by AI. AI generated visual stuff looks bland, cliche, or has this weird "plastic" look. AI generated prose is boring. AI generated stories are hilarious barrages of tropes played exactly straight, cliche characters, basically just like paint by numbers bad TV writing or even worse. If real artists find ways to use AI, it won't be this way. It'll be as an assistant or they'll get in and hack it and make it do exactly what they want, much like artistic experimental photography.

But I'm only half right, and when I realized this I understood the hate.

AI is not replacing "true art," and it won't even if true artists end up finding ways to use it (like artistic photography etc.). But what it is replacing is what a lot of artists make their money doing: commercial art, making "content," ghostwriting, first-pass editing, graphic design, web design, that kind of thing.

That's not pour-your-soul-into-it capital-A Art, but it's what pays the bills. AI is absolutely decimating the market for that.

So back to my first point: it's all economic.

  - Everyone says it's going to take my job. Are they correct? I don't know, but I'm not excited to roll the dice.

  - It's pricing out consumer computing.

  - It's the final nail in the coffin for the free internet in multiple ways:

    - Websites are blocking anyone with a non-standard browser to attempt to clamp down on bot scraping.
    
    - The web is moving towards denonymization, in part to combat bot traffic.
    
    - Websites and forums themselves are being assaulted by bot traffic, much of it divisive propaganda.

  - It represents an aggressive centralization of power and resources in the hands of people with money and power.

That seems more likely your own sentiments, rather than an plausible explanation as to why most people have feelings on this issue.

I'm not saying that this isn't the main reason for some people (for example artists fearful about the technology) or that it doesn't come up in conversation in some niches--young educated people from the West who are terminally online.

But is it really likely to be a true root cause of broad concern across society?

Which of course it is for a lot of us.

Definitely, the tech industry has earned this skepticism, it didn't come out of nowhere. Decades of dark patterns, ads crammed down our throats, and now everyone has to use AI for everything? Features nobody asked for or wanted, which their bosses are tracking their usage of?

Aside from the obvious reasons, I am also convinced there's a state-sponsored astroturfing campaign against AI and datacenters on social media. I see dozens of accounts (some of individuals inactive for years before they starting going crazy with anti-AI/datacenter posts) posting the same things with similar or identical wording - not resharing, but creating new images with similar or identical wording.