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

#51

Post by estetlinus » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

> the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths

The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage?

As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?

I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.

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

#52

Post by juleiie » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

I like that AI sucks

It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.

LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa

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

#53

Post by ronbenton » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

brabel wrote: post #35

ronbenton wrote: post #7

>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it. In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing w…

Humans are complex. I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume there are a lot of people who both rely on and don't like the idea of AI. People can need a car to get around and also be worried about the effects of car emissions. People can dislike cigarettes and be smokers.

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

#54

Post by qsera » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

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…

>I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago...

I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...

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

#55

Post by resident423 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

oulipo2 wrote: post #2

Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows

I don't think that's true, from what I've seen the people on here are pretty consistently anti surveillance

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

#56

Post by johnwheeler » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

> don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now.

This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.

I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.

All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.

Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.

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

#57

Post by cm2012 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

CurtMonash wrote: post #47

Silagi wrote: post #31

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn…

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)

It is the exact same capital that paid all of our salaries for the last 20 years

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

#58

Post by Kattywumpus » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.

I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.

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

#59

Post by skrebbel » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters.

As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.

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

#60

Post by forinti » Sat, May 30, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

noitpmeder wrote: post #18

I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt. Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at th…

Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.