To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#261

Post by queenkjuul » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:10 PM UTC

I'm torn because i genuinely think LLMs absolutely completely suck ass at 99.99% of tasks, i think AI "art" is disgusting, it sucks balls at writing, it sucks at documentation, it sucks at summarizing, it sucks at research, i would never in a million years trust current AI to tell me what medication is safe or how long food is safe to eat or any of that.

However. For _programming_, they actually are shockingly useful. Like I'm actually shocked that models in 2026 do useful programming for me where 2024 models definitely could not. They still need babysitting, definitely. I see with my own eyes people with less programming knowledge accepting awful output without consideration. But in the hands of an expert, there are actually now programming tasks i prefer to do with an LLM, which i genuinely never thought would happen.

Basically if it were me, the societal impacts of the "art" and the chatbots are clearly awful, cheapening creative cultural work, replacing it with hideous slop, and preying on the mentally unwell driving many of them to self harm, and i think these products should be taken off the market. But coding agents, specifically? It's getting harder to imagine life without them. Idk if it's possible to have one without the other, not that it matters, it's not up to me, it's up to sama, and he loves preying on the unwell and destroying culture

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#262

Post by bensyverson » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #194

bensyverson wrote: post #99

This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals. I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior. If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that…

Bit confused - you and me voluntarily reading a blog post linked on HN, doesn't make the author someone who is pushing their morals on us? I read the article, and at worst it could be called whinging, but at its lowest point it never came across as trying to push a view point on the reader. What am I missing?

It’s less about the article pushing a POV (although it does), and more about the attitude of the author, which is basically “I’m angry that taking an absolutist stance will cause discomfort!”

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#263

Post by queenkjuul » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #189

YoukaiCountry wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

>We can have actual conversations with our computers conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect ), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it. The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if…

What's nuts to me is how sycophantic the models are even when I'm just generating code. "What a fantastic project!" "Such an elegant solution!" When all I've done is described the problem and pasted a debug trace or whatever.

It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#264

Post by queenkjuul » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:17 PM UTC

joquarky wrote: post #204

marcosdumay wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades. The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working tow…

As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?

Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#265

Post by queenkjuul » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

skeledrew wrote: post #164

newaccountman2 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really "intelligence" It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.

Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes wh…

I think if you showed me LLM AI twenty years ago, I'd be like "what's the trick, what's the catch, how does it work" and then the statistical nature of it would be explained to me and I'd have the exact same reaction as i had when i learned how it worked in ~2021: oh, that's very clever, and maybe even very useful, but idk if it's "intelligent"

Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#266

Post by queenkjuul » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #186

w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order…

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.

I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#267

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

hrideshmg wrote: post #22

Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information. Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.

[deleted]

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#268

Post by bawolff » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #227

bawolff wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress. On the contrary, i think most moral progress (albeit also many social ills) has been wrought through social pressure.

A minority cannot socially pressure a majority, it will just backfire

I think there is a selection bias here. If it succeedes the minority becomes a majority.

I think a good example are religious movements (obviously i dont want to equate religion with morality, but often they come with certain moral views attached). They start as a minority, and either they die or they take over. Christianity was a minority at one point.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#269

Post by newaccountman2 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

hahahacorn wrote: post #250

newaccountman2 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so, what is this thing they do, that in your view is "extremely beneficial"?

All of their open source work, facebook marketplace, messenger connecting people, low cost distribution for small business, crises and humanitarian tooling, abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc.

Quite a stretch.

The open source stuff is nice and all, but I wouldn't say React, GraphQL, Cassandra, or any of the other stuff is "beneficial to humanity" lol wtf

> facebook marketplace

Craigslist exists, plus other startups were aiming to do that and one would have found its footing if not for Facebook marketplace. Either way, this doesn't make up for any of the negatives people ascribe to Facebook.

> messenger connecting people

This is a fucking joke, as there were and are numerous other instant messaging apps.

> low cost distribution for small business

Yeah, small businesses can have Facebook pages, but this isn't that beneficial. We are talking "extremely beneficial" here, not "some features are useful to some people".

> crises and humanitarian tooling

Yeah I can see it being useful for governments to communicate, but unfortunately outweighed by the misinformation

> abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc

Cool that they try to solve problems their platform is susceptible to? They are doing this for themselves and it's proprietary software, isn't it?

IDK what kind of bubble you exist in where people genuinely believe any of the above would constitute "extremely beneficial". Large quantities of people, including those holding down jobs, in the richest country in the world are barely able to put food on the table, people are getting kidnapped by masked Federal agents who are entering homes without warrants, and there are multiple ongoing wars in the world, but, yeah, Facebook, "extremely beneficial", solving the hard problems xd

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#270

Post by Glawen » Sat, May 30, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #87

derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying…

> I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.

I grew up in a small village, 300 people. There you learn to accept your neighbor political rant, otherwise you're socialy dead and that's a pretty bad place to be. I learned to dissociate the person from its opinions.

I'm living now in the city, where you don't need to listen to your neighbor because you can find a more fitting social circle. People are not able to listen and compromise, they'll just turn around and ignore you once they understand you are not on their side.

I was explaining this to a woman who was going to move in a village, and she said "how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?".

It's a strange situation where the far right rural nut job are more open minded than city dwellers.