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My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

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Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#21

Post by bryan0 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #12
bluefirebrand wrote: post #5

> I want to figure out how to use AI in ways that protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving I think this is an admirable goal but I'd be curious how the author plans to even begin approaching it. It seems to me that this ship has sailed. Generative AI is here now, which is seems like it will lead us down a lowest common denominator path, not an enlightened one. How do we "protect human creativity, auton…

If you assume that you can't fix something, you're right.

I find it surprising how many people think we're doomed when it comes to AI, and don't even want to try use this technology in a positive way. I'm not sure if this is a modern american cultural thing or what.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#22

Post by jacobolus »

CSMastermind wrote: post #7
japhyr wrote: post #2

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…

No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)

I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of human-generated comments. I hate that many students are now using LLMs to do all of their homework, resulting in a significant part of the next generation being incompetent at basic scholarly tasks and unprepared for more serious work. I hate that lawyers are using LLMs to write legal briefs, not bothering to check that their cited cases say something exactly the opposite of what their briefs say. I hate that government officials are using LLMs to write public statements that get basic facts wrong. I hate that graphic designers are losing their jobs because their bosses would rather "just use AI, it's cheaper". I hate that Google Search results are now overwhelmed with LLM-generated slop which ranges from dubious to outright wrong, and it's now much more difficult than it used to be to find the information I'm looking for on the open web. I hate that researchers are now publishing LLM slop in journal articles, making it significantly harder to tell the difference between careful scholarship and someone lazily phoning it in. I hate that friends and neighbors now ask ChatGPT as their first source of information about any topic and it frequently tells them something completely misleading or wrong, but they don't bother double checking.

Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#23

Post by swatcoder »

CSMastermind wrote: post #7
japhyr wrote: post #2

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…

No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)

So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience.

Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop.

It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#24

Post by rtpg »

CSMastermind wrote: post #7
japhyr wrote: post #2

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…

No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)

The "obvious" one: supply chain chaos due to everyone and their dog spending as much as possible for AI boxen

Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...)

I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis)

A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world.

There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war.

And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#25

Post by jrockway »

Relatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days.

I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions. The "AI overview" you see on search results, or that summarizes your iPhone notifications, is ... not as advanced as frontier models, and I think it negatively affects people's view of the technology.

I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.

I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.

I agree with authors that write about alignment issues ("please take this test", "ok i'll hack the bazel remote cache, turn it into a message board, and coordinate with other agents to steal the answers from Hugging Face"; this really is the Paperclip Maximizer with today's technology) and I do think we should be addressing that. But this never seems to be the objection, it's always stuff from 2022 like "it hallucinates". I don't get it, but I'm probably in too deep to see what it looks like from the outside.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#26

Post by sandeepkd »

japhyr wrote: post #2

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…

Its definitely a hype phase and yes a lot of usage is questionable at the moment. To me the scary part is that some of the impacts/decisions would take years if not decades to be measurable and its possible that its a lost battle by then.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#28

Post by arecsu »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #9
CSMastermind wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)

> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system). > Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI an…

I love using AI. Getting my crazy ideas turn into software has never been easier. I like to architect software, not the code itself. The code has always been the means to my ends. I also love learning complicated concepts, from academics, math, physics, to art, philosophy, religion. It's wonderful to translate knowledge that is already out there but hard to understand somehow, because you can ask about it over and over and over and in the way you understand about things. Like a professor who understands you and never gets tired about silly questions. I don't know, it's just amazing at so many things. Of course, it's also pretty important to know how to use it, and when. I would never use it to replace my speech when speaking to someone else. That's bad. I would not like other people to do that to me either. Otherwise, why would I want to talk with that somebody when I can just ask an AI instead. We can love human beings and AI, and be critic of both at the same time.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#29

Post by bronson »

crmd wrote: post #18

Ordinary people were generally marvelous of the electric motor because it was obvious how it would make life better. Their great grandchildren, with the same common sense, are extremely cynical about LLMs and other knowledge work robots. What changed?

Electric motors didn't fill the world with slop.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#30

Post by jackling »

simonw wrote: post #20
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse? Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system). > Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI an…

I enjoy it. I have a small army of weird little golems that mostly do what I tell them to do. What's not fun about that? The other day I asked one of them (running directly on my laptop) to "draw an svg of a circle" and it "thought" for 20 minutes and produced this : https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... I'm still chuckling to myself about that two days later.

> What's not fun about that?

Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring.

For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV.

Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?

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