The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it • Hacker News Board

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#211

Post by the_snooze » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

z3c0 wrote: post #144

Tyrubias wrote: post #41

This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said…

Not to mention, it doesn't actually create the productivity promised at the lower rates promised. The most enthusiastic proponents are middle-management, not actual doers. It's an expensive route to mediocrity, which doesnt offer an edge in a market where everyone is using the same snakeoil.

They got way over their skis on this one. There's a difference between "impressive" tech vs. "operational" tech. That difference usually boils down to prioritizing engineering rigor over marketing.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#212

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #189

ip26 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If companies are faced with the choice between: - employ you at 60k/yr - replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.

The problem is, companies will go for the third route: hire a company in India to launder AI. It has already worked out once with the offshoring wave.

This will still wind up with them paying UBI eventually

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#213

Post by throwatdem12311 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

rtdq wrote: post #29

MBCook wrote: post #16

Are they? I heard a presentation from some pro-AI people on Friday to the large company I work at. They said they surveyed people at an AI conference and 93% of people were excited about it. This was said with a straight face like “people love puppies!”. No self awareness at all.

Ask anyone who is a gamer what they think of AI. I guarantee you'll get a universally negative reaction because of RAMageddon.

Not just that, they go absolutely fucking ballistic if they in so much as find a single AI generated texture in a game.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#214

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

animegolem wrote: post #121

troosevelt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

And even if you did get the 60k and never can find work again are you gonna be happy about the next door neighbor working for 120k and getting his 60k on top?

Your neighbor would get $60K UBI but their tax bill would go up by $80K because the government needs tax revenue to pay the UBI.

For high levels of UBI it’s not possible to get all of the necessary tax revenue from taxing billionaires or corporations or other simplistic ideas that sound good unless you do math.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#215

Post by estimator7292 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

ncouture wrote: post #210

monksy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roy Sutherland has a really good take on AI. Most of the AI companies are targeting a cost cutting proposoition where they should target a value creation one. Targeting and pushing towards a regressive elimination route is tox and destructive to those around it. Then again the CEOs of these companies want to get their company at all cost to society.

The title of the original article feels like click-baiut to me. It's covering an act of violence under the pretext that people hate AI. In fact it's a very sad story about a 20 year old throwing their life away instead of fighting for what he believes is right through non-violent activism and/or regulations. Last year I wrote an article asking the very question "Who will be the next Luddites?", National Geographics f…

Non-violent means don't work and get you killed by cops. This is what the people are left with.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#216

Post by AndrewKemendo » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

bwhiting2356 wrote: post #143

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #75

Welcome to the end of another AI hype cycle Anyone who was in AI before 2022 can tell you about the last cycle that went from 2012-2018 or so when the metaverse failed, but we got tensorflow, pytorch, gpgpus The cool thing is that every hype cycle generates a lot of really good new AI tech and integrations that persist. This time we got GPTs and diffusion sand splatting I think this previous cycle will be seen as the…

This is the first time the general public has cared about any AI industry cycle.

Totally agree

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#217

Post by rvz » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

masijo wrote: post #56

AI has automated my favorite part of the job: coding. Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec. It’s disgusting. And t…

> It’s disgusting. And the worst part is that you can’t opt-out. If you give even the slightest hint that you don’t like AI you’re seen as a Luddite and you’ll be put next in line for the upcoming layoff.

So we found something much worse than crypto.

You can opt-out of crypto, but you cannot opt-out of AI and have no choice but to participate.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#218

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #207

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a likeability problem. Altman and, shockingly, to a lesser degree, Musk have terrible brands. When folks see those people at the top of these companies, folks who have been publicly saying they're going to cause massive job losses and cause human extinction or whatnot, they're going to hate the companies irrespective of the actual risk of job losses or environmental impacts.

Why does Dario get off the hook here? He also comes off like a greasy asshole 99% of the time.

> Why does Dario get off the hook here?

I'm curious for metrics, but Dario strikes me as being less perpetually online. Given equal time, they may each be unlikeable. But they don't put themselves out there equally–Sam and Elon are unable to focus on their work. (I'll admit I've had a soft spot for Dario since he stood up to Hegseth–maybe I'm just not seeing the equal hate he's getting.)

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#219

Post by happytoexplain » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

gavmor wrote: post #205

masijo wrote: post #56

AI has automated my favorite part of the job: coding. Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec. It’s disgusting. And t…

This is surprising to me because I found that I am able to invest even more of my time in considering the good abstractions and idioms that I want to employ for a particular problem, and now most of my day is spent in discussing patterns and architecture rather than what brackets I have left to close. Although, full disclosure: I have quibbled with Gemini quite a bit over the trailing comma, which clutters the diff,…

A programmer thinks and directly engages ("works with their hands") at many abstraction layers at once. You must admit the scope of this has been dramatically reduced. You may personally love one of those abstraction layers so much that you can be happy without the others, and without even the hands-on half of the one layer you love. Many people aren't so lucky.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#220

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

bobsmooth wrote: post #156

troosevelt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

>Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? If we go back to a 60% corporate tax rate, for sure.

You could put a 100% tax on revenues (not profit) of AI companies and it would come out to a low couple hundred dollars per person per year right now.

A 60% corporate tax rate wouldn’t get to the levels needed for UBI proposals either.