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

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

#61

Post by rescripting » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

The AI CEOs have been screaming for years now about how AI is scary, you should be afraid of it and it’s going to take your job.

“Mythos is too dangerous to release.”

“OpenAI offers a bounty if you can get ChatGPT to teach you how to do a bioterroism.”

“Agentic agents will replace entire categories of jobs. They’ll just be like, gone”

This is all signaling to their customers; no not you on their $20/month plan, the governments and corporations of the world who have deep pockets, fat to trim, and borders to defend and expand.

It’s no surprise that people don’t like AI. It’s not for people.

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

#62

Post by devindotcom » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

certainly people are finding everyday uses... but a lot of those uses are necessitated by enshittification of search and other commonplace tools. so although I think many see the usefulness of the technology here and there, their experience of it is one of being forced to adopt a thing they never asked for by companies with few or no sincere or articulable values.

billions use windows and gmail but have a poor opinion of microsoft and google both for obvious reasons. I expect the same will be true of AI platforms and the usual suspects behind them.

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

#63

Post by sofixa » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

There are a few other issues.

Like copyright. All modern LLMs are built on troves of copyrighted material that was used in their training. AI companies are claiming this is fair use, while pretty much all of the copyright holders would strongly disagree. This is going to get litigated for years, but regardless of what various legal systems decide, morally, people can be against this.

And people are already sick and tired of AI-generated content being used to replace human made content, be it on Spotify or TikTok. This is part "AI replacing humans", part "I'm being scammed by lower quality content".

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

#64

Post by aifactory5 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

[dead]

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

#65

Post by keybored » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

Weird to have these threads and then fifteen minutes later there will be a 350+ comment, 500+ votes thread about some 200 USD/month AI subscription service which is now the I Have Seen The Light moment and My Beautiful Side Projects Are Finally Materializing.

This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending near the cluster of Anthropic/AWS nuclear power plants. And people pay for the pleasure.

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

#66

Post by Devasta » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

It has destroyed art, it has destroyed public trust with fabricated videos, it has caused skyrocketing prices in components so stuff like Valves console cannot get made, and its enriched freaks like Sam Altman.

The fact that AI acolytes are positively giddy about the above is just icing on the cake.

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

#67

Post by schoen » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

The concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one (that an AI may be created that drastically exceeds human intelligence, and that it may accidentally be incentivized to take actions that destroy most or all of human civilization).

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

#68

Post by nayroclade » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

Bear in mind, in the same survey this article is talking about, nothing and nobody had an overall positive rating amongst those polled. So yeah, AI is unpopular, but it's just one more thing that people hate amongst a broader cultural movement of generalised hate.

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

#69

Post by jiggawatts » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

> mislead and commit fraud at scale

This is the "safety" messaging that OpenAI and Anthropic keep harping on and on, and on about, while whistling a merry tune as they turn around and sell AI to the US military and worse, to the tune of $billions/year already.

The "and worse" needs elaboration, because fundamentally the single biggest cash cow for AI vendors will be (and maybe already is) implementing a dystopian future where everything we say, type, or do will not just be recorded but also: read, analysed, and cross-correlated by unfeeling heartless machines tasked with keeping us in line.

I'm not being paranoid, President Biden said as much, but only in reference to China. If you think only China has motivation to use AI to keep a lid on dissent, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think the Land Of The Free(tm) will never abuse AI in this manner, well... I have some bad news. You may want to sit down.

Here in Australia, the cyberpunk dystopia is already starting to be rolled out. A customer of ours asked their IT team to hook up a variety of HR-related information sources to their new AI system tasked with making recommendations for hiring, promotion, and demotion.

Welcome to 1984, citizen.

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

#70

Post by DocTomoe » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

Some perspective ... I really do not see 'the public hating AI' outside of a very specific demographic (17-30 year old artsy types, generally left-leaning). Average everyday people in my area either don't care about AI at all, or like it, using it as a better search engine.

The situation might be different in the States, but I'd wager Joe Sixpack, brass fisher in Montana, couldn't care less about GPT-5.5 or whatever Musk is up to these days.