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Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

paulkrugman.substack.com

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Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#81

Post by queenkjuul »

aeve890 wrote: post #55
danlugo92 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must be using different AI. Ever since Claude Opus 4.7 it's been helping me greatly ship around 3x to 5x faster, and it's good code if I tell it to follow my existing code's structures. Otherwise you have to create .md guideline files and it works. It's not perfect, but again, 3x to 5x (!!!)

> ship around 3x to 5x faster Web apps and CRUDs, if may I ask? Or is AI helping you with something that you couldn't ever do by yourself? I have mixed results across different technologies like frontend, backend, infra and hardware.

Honestly it sucks at Web apps of any meaningful complexity too. On my huge complex app at work, nothing can coax it to do an even average quality job in one pass. It hates following my project conventions even after spelling it out in MDs

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#82

Post by queenkjuul »

voidUpdate wrote: post #59
snootypoot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can use a tool while still hating the villains in openai, anthropic, nvidia, and so on who are ruining our lives and hobbies.

How much do you really hate a company if you're still going to give them money regularly to use their products?

Corporate gives them money. I have no choice in that decision. Corporate expects me to use it. I have no choice there either.

Yes, I'm trying to leave. Guess how fun AI has made that process

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#83

Post by esperent »

msabalau wrote: post #58
esperent wrote: post #4

An alternative theory: people care deeply about art, and the people who make it: artists, musicians, writers. This is a large part of what gives out society meaning, and even for people who don't think deeply about it, we intuitively understand that these artists (outside of a lucky few) get very little back compared to the effort and passion they put in, and the value they add to society. And suddenly, here come all…

The essay lays out a wide range of reasons why normal people reasonably fear that their OWN lives are going to get worse, but your assumption is that what they really care about is the lives of artists, despite the fact that you admit that they understand they have always lived in a world where nearly all artists get very little back compared to their efforts? That seems more likely your own sentiments, rather than a…

No, they don't care about the lives of individual artists. They care about art, passion, creativity and the interplay of these with human culture. They also care about growing inequality, and they fear potential loss of their careers, both financially and in terms of the meaning it gives their lives.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#84

Post by queenkjuul »

verdverm wrote: post #79
voidUpdate wrote: post #3

Given the amount of people on HN happily using LLMs for their everyday work and extolling the virtues of LLMs, "everyone" might be a bit excessive

The same Pew poll had some interesting data points Krugman left out - The first data point Pew presents is ~50% of Americans use Ai chat bots - The second data point shows 25% of those using it is for fun and entertainment (1:8 overall) - 1/4 of Americans use it daily Krugman lost me when he said "Ai is dishonest" as if it has intent. He makes too much rage bait these days.

"regularly gives you a completely bogus answer while loudly and confidently asserting it's true" might be behavior that convinces you a person is dishonest. Is it really that bad of a description if AI does the same?

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#85

Post by TylerE »

esperent wrote: post #4

An alternative theory: people care deeply about art, and the people who make it: artists, musicians, writers. This is a large part of what gives out society meaning, and even for people who don't think deeply about it, we intuitively understand that these artists (outside of a lucky few) get very little back compared to the effort and passion they put in, and the value they add to society. And suddenly, here come all…

Seems mostly like slacktivism to me. The people yelling it the loudest are the ones who won't actually show up at a friends bar gig and pay a $5 cover.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#86

Post by queenkjuul »

dude250711 wrote: post #15
somewhereoutth wrote: post #8

I went to look for a new phone about 6 months ago - everything was AI this, AI that, all the display stands made a big deal about AI (to the extent I considered a 2024 phone because no AI). In the end I didn't buy at that point. Just last week finally I had to buy a new phone, and so I went shopping again - this time no AI was mentioned anywhere . Not online, not on the stands in the shops, nowhere. The silence speak…

Things I had never asked for in a phone: 1) Increasingly more sophisticated cameras. 2) Fake slimness with protruding lenses. 3) Removing headphone jack. 4) Adding AI.

I'm quite chuffed to have a sophisticated camera. The rest? Agreed

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#87

Post by FeloniousHam »

api wrote: post #32
leviliebvin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within software too.

Much like self-driving cars being better than drunk, incompetent, or texting human drivers, AI software is generally better than the garbage churned out by code monkeys who don't care or cheap lowest bidder outsourcers. It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code, but that requires a hand-crafting expert human engineer and takes a long time. I predict that the latter will be reserved for the highe…

> It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code

As of June 25th, 2026. Read your comment in four years, and tell me you believe what you've posted.

Maybe one year? Four months?

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#88

Post by parasubvert »

everyone wrote: post #14

The monied are all dogpiling money, water, electricity, pc hardware into it in their classic stupid tulipomania way (Just like with NFTs and Crypto before) The management class in corporations are obsessed with it, they are delusional and think they can finally use it achieve their dreams of having no workers. They are forcing their workers to use it somehow. The are also foisting it unasked onto consumers in their p…

Except this isn't like tulips or NFTs or Crypto; AI is actually useful (far beyond being a chatbot), and has real supply & demand, vs. a being pure speculative investment.

Yes, there's too much hype, and forcing the use of it does no one any good. And for sure a lot of that demand detached from results, and this means the demand will ebb. But I don't think this is like the dot-com bubble, it's more like the OPEC oil embargoing the 70s where soaring prices detached from results led to a collapse in demand that lasted a long while.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#89

Post by hannasanarion »

orangedog wrote: post #22

This feels pedantic but there was a survey posted on HN very recently across the US which showed that 60% dislike it. This means a whopping 40% of people either want it or don't care. I can tell you from observing high schoolers for a week, everybody there was using it, teachers and students alike. Do they like it? I don't know, but they are using it. The numbers against it aren't as big as the most vocal critics wou…

People use things they dislike and believe to be bad for society all the time.

It has been a majority opinion that social media is a net negative for society since, what, 2016? But Facebook and Twitter didn't vanish that year, or in any of the years since, despite ever increasing shares of people believing they are harming us. Tumblr and Reddit users have been calling their respective forums "this hell-site" since around 2014, but that didn't make them go away. "Doomscrolling" has been in dictionaries since 2020.

This isn't some crazy concept, it has a million names when looked at from different angles:

Addiction, Perverse incentive, Cognitive Dissonance, Ego Depletion, The Tragedy of the Commons, The Prisoner's Dilemma, Pareto Divergence, Externalities, The Multipolar Trap, The Race to the Bottom, The Collective Action Problem, Coordination Failure, Pluralistic Ignorance, Normalization of Deviance.

This is exactly how almost all bad things and behaviors are able to exist. Not because people think bad things are good, even the worst tyrants dislike tyranny, but because the incentives of the environment make them the right choice for the person in the moment.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#90

Post by steve1977 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #71
steve1977 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, art is about emotion and empathy. AI does not feel. It can imitate feelings, it can say "I'm sorry" but it won't feel sorry. And I think this is also reflected in a lot of AI-generated art. Yes, it is fascinating to a degree and it "looks" like art, but it doesn't "feel" like art. It's heartless. It's soulless. And I say that as someone who doesn't even believe in a soul.

Yeah. There's nobody there. I can't hear a human voice when I read it. It talks like a corporation, not like a human.

Like a never-ending LinkedIn fever dream ;)
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