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Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

paulkrugman.substack.com

141–150 of 156 posts

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#141
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I strongly agree with these points, but particularly the second half. "Real art" is not at all under threat by AI, which has effectively no ability to even touch, let alone dilute the supposed magnitude and breadth of the human spirit in expression. The existence/proliferation of AI is not going to infringe upon the abilities or opportunities of a bus driver who comes home every day after work to work covertly o…

I think "AI is replacing art" is a category error. If I read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music, the whole point is to receive the thoughts, feelings, and lived experience of a human being. But yes, AI is supplanting the mundane "art" that artists use as potboiler work, and that is the economic threat. The bitter horrible irony of art as a career is that the best art is often the hardest to sell, and…

This reminds me of the decline of the news industry. The best thing that traditional news publishers offered was in-depth investigative reporting. For example, 50 years ago:

https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1976

You can pick just about any year and find great work.

The best newspaper work is hard to sell. Pure investigative reporting is too expensive and slow to keep a newspaper in business by itself. Newspapers relied on geographically limited oligopoly to sell a lot of other cheap page-filler at good margins: weather forecasts, sports scores, political opinions, comics, classified ads, movie schedules...

People who just wanted to read the latest Calvin and Hobbes strip were inadvertently, benevolently financing the investigative reporting that their area's newspapers used to support, even if they never actually read those stories. When the Web un-bundled it all, everything but the investigative reporting could be done better and/or less expensively by non-news organizations. News junkies who really care about hard hitting news aren't numerous enough to keep funding the investigative reporting. (And even if they were, most metro areas don't have enough latent scandals to keep newspapers printing regular editions of investigative exposés alone.)

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s time for people who understand how to use AI to stop trying to convince people who don’t. This reeks of self flattery. Using AI isn't "hard". Any experienced developer can simply pull in a skill into your harness and have it writing code at a similar level to others with the same harness.

[flagged]

>if you think it sucks and people like Linus Torvalds, Andrej Karpathy, and Martin Fowler are saying it can be used well, it’s probably a skill issue.

If you read my comment and came away with "AI programming sucks" you have a skill issue with reading.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#143
post #41

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 can use something and still not like it.

exactly. id be quite surprised if 60% of the US doesn't prefer days off to work days but we still gotta go to our jobs to pay rent

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#144
it isnt so much the AI itself as its the proctodigital assault.

its being rammed into places where it has no business being, at no ones request, and despite admonitions.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#145
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "AI is replacing art" is a category error. If I read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music, the whole point is to receive the thoughts, feelings, and lived experience of a human being. But yes, AI is supplanting the mundane "art" that artists use as potboiler work, and that is the economic threat. The bitter horrible irony of art as a career is that the best art is often the hardest to sell, and…

This reminds me of the decline of the news industry. The best thing that traditional news publishers offered was in-depth investigative reporting. For example, 50 years ago: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1976 You can pick just about any year and find great work. The best newspaper work is hard to sell. Pure investigative reporting is too expensive and slow to keep a newspaper in business by itself. N…

Media seems like one of the domains where capitalism and the profit motive works the least, the other being a lot of health care.

In media it seems to be an immediate race to the bottom that converges on dopamine generating chum and slop. A bottomless TikTok-style infinite scroll feed of mindless shit is the ideal form of profitable media.

Good art, in depth investigative reporting done in a disciplined fact based way, those kinds of things are expensive and time consuming to make and don’t tend to sell broadly. It’s not because people don’t want them. It’s because people don’t like paying for something intangible. People will spend $25 in Starbucks for a coffee and a snack but dissolve into rage at paying that for an album, book, or movie, even though those deliver a lot more and cost a lot more to make.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#146
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a backend dev, and building a mobile app for the first time, It is a toy sized project right now and it works, would have indeed taken me 5x the time to get to that point on my own. I know from experience that to make it a non-toy project I am probably going to need to spend some, if not most of that saved time cleaning up in the future due to technical debt. For backend, it is mildly useful at best, helpful wit…

AI is an extremely powerful weapon against a blank page. It's much easier to take "well now I have an app, which after using for a bit I find it sucks in " and then fix them, than it is to start from absolutely nothing.

its a great solve for the cold start problem +1

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#147

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

I think AI optimism is an easier jump for those already immersed in computer culture, or at least the subset of that culture who view automation as a virtue. For those either outside computer culture, or those within who might view "craft" as virtue, automating that craft is an affront. Right now, the "automators" (pro-AI) folks seem to be pushing that culture onto the "crafters" and naturally getting pushback.

> the subset of that culture who view automation as a virtue.

Correction: Shitty automation. You have to do an unreal amount of micromanagement to force the output quality of LLMs up.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are drawing a line in the sand that is close to you, but very far away from where Krugman stands, for it to be a fair distance to cross.

I've seen plenty of Krugman to recognize he's part of the political bipolariztion media ecosystem replacing trad news. I used to consume a lot of that group until I realized they are as much a part of the problem as the right wingers. Both sides are about winning at all costs and dominating others. Politics should be about compromise, give and take. The real fight is against the oligarchs and Trump-Epstein class.

Eh, if you are really interested in the phenomenon of the current media ecosystem, I would point you to the work by Faris, Roberts, and Benkler.

I do agree that wealth concentration is an issue, and that needs to be addressed.

I push back on the idea that it’s political bipolarization, since that implies the same process is occurring on the left and the right.

Re: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

#150
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't. That doesn't give you good taste , but .. for yer basic line of business or enterprise app, expectations were already low, and most websites have user-hostile design written into the requirements, so the damage isn't too bad. I do think we've yet to see what the worst case for government contractor software project + vibe co…

> Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't. A lot of companies are creating AI assistants which take otherwise deterministic processes and makes them nondeterministic. For example, I work in financial services and deal with a lot of data vendors. One of the big ones very recently added a chatbot to their UI, which on the second question I asked, provided entirely in…

re: determinism

https://github.com/EricaCoppolillo/LLASP

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