1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers.

2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people.

3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: (https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...)

The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.

• heavyset_go

  today at 4:35 AM

  > The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.

  The goal was to raise as much money as possible as fast as possible before the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard's empire of lies.

• asdfasgasdgasdg

  today at 5:08 AM

  > 1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers.

  Counterpoint: AI's displacement of culture workers is to this point negligible. Nobody is consuming AI-generated media, except maybe in the trashiest tier of tiktok scrolling. Culture workers feel screwed, but they have not in fact been screwed.

• samrus

  today at 4:48 AM

  This is a genuinely great point. It articulates something i could feel happening but couldnt fully recognize. And i guess the AI compananies couldnt wither because they thought screwing over culture workers was free

  Also love the term culture workers. Everyone keeps talking about knowledge workers but culture workers play a huge part in society that no one in the AI space mentioned

• somesortofthing

  today at 4:45 AM

  I think AI companies have actually broadly adopted the right strategy. There's no way to sugarcoat or hide that your company's pitch is "your salary is our TAM, btw our product is so powerful it might cause human extinction". Deploying as widely as possible while steamrolling opposition before it can get its bearings is the only viable option for the technology as they describe it.

  • samrus

    today at 4:53 AM

    I call bullshit. They got greedy. The right way would have been to work with both knowledge and culture workers instead of making it an antagonistic relationship. These are the people ai companies need to operate their agents. Its stupid to threaten them and foment resentment

    Also dont be ridiculous. We didnt go extinct from the nuke, we wont go extinct from a next token predictor

  • warumdarum

    today at 4:58 AM

    [dead]

• senectus1

  today at 4:07 AM

  yeah, completely agree. Made worse by the fact that the boomer and gen X generations are really well known for the whole "fuck you I've got mine, i deserve to stay rich and comfortable" attitude....

  I get the feeling that shits coming to a head.

  • otterley

    today at 4:56 AM

    Please don’t lump GenX in with boomers. We are the first generation not to have lifetime employment and pensions, the first generation to pay through the nose for higher education, and many of our peers are just barely scraping by at 50 alongside our Millenial and GenZ friends.

I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.

• rob74

  today at 3:18 AM

  The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, but because you're not making as much profit as the stock market thinks you should, and therefore your shares are "underperforming".

  • Sparkyte

    today at 4:12 AM

    This tactic is wearing thin on investors. All companies doing layoffs as of recent have started to lose share value. AI or not.

    I think investors are starting to see stress on the market for fewer working people contributing back as customers and investors themselves. This creates depreciation in share value as no one is willing to invest.

    • gofreddygo

      today at 4:45 AM

      It helps to think of investors in tiers. The lower tiers mimic higher ups. Each tier has two orders of magnitude deeper pockets than the lower tier.

      At the very top are the big investment banks and fund houses, berkshire. Second are smaller institutions and third retail/individual.

      The top two layers demand a steady return, never losing money on average in any 36 month window. Otherwise it triggers a selloff top down to cover for it.

      The bottom follows the top so the selloff or buy just gets mimicked, with the top tier never losing (the bottom layers make sure of it by following blindly)

      With wild indicators already set a massive selloff should have already been in motion, but its not. The top tier is getting more greedy.

      No one is betting on AI long term. Everyone's in for the ride. As always the bottom will feed the top.

  • librasteve

    today at 4:46 AM

    this “square wave” effect is driven by interest rates … when the bank rate is very low investors will tolerate high level of gambling on growth (ponzi-like). as soon as money will grow anyway in the bank, then investors demand actual RoI

• tptacek

  today at 2:53 AM

  I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.

  • linkregister

    today at 3:20 AM

    The public statements of frontier labs' CEOs that generative models will replace human workers have been front page news for months.

  • moregrist

    today at 3:27 AM

    It’s not about that.

    It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.”

    It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.”

    It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore.

    It’s knowing that, in the US, UBI will never come.

    It’s the feeling that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are getting rich and there isn’t even a “learn to code” path to wealth anymore.

    It’s knowing that data centers will create problems in your neighborhood: the price of power and water will go up, the amount of undeveloped land down, and you don’t even get jobs out of it.

    For fuck’s sake, it’s not about the thousands of Mag7 tech workers losing their jobs. That’s just a symptom, like all the other symptoms, of this weirdly dystopian future that the AI companies keep telling us is inevitable.

    • Danox

      today at 3:40 AM

      You left out the computer gamers crowd are mad about the high price of memory, a group that is a very vocal crowd in all the tech circles.

    • kiba

      today at 3:45 AM

      This is assuming AI will take our jobs as opposed to making more mess for us to clean up.

      • pa7ch

        today at 3:49 AM

        I'm worried many companies no longer care much if they make a mess or a way to hold them accountable.

        • pabs3

          today at 4:15 AM

          Thats the entire history of companies right there though? They have always socialised costs, privatised profits.

  • throwaway27448

    today at 3:08 AM

    Mag7?

    • JaakkoP

      today at 3:15 AM

      Magnificent 7, the new FAANG where Netflix got swapped to NVIDIA and Tesla got added.

    • today at 3:17 AM

• heavyset_go

  today at 4:29 AM

  No one wants to be the one to ring the "we're in a recession" bell first

• ivantop

  today at 3:11 AM

  The pandemic over hiring that ended 4 years ago?

  • tom_

    today at 3:51 AM

    Things take time to play out!

  • MattDamonSpace

    today at 3:13 AM

    Yes

    • bdangubic

      today at 3:45 AM

      industrial revolution also played a part too? :)

• mgh2

  today at 4:00 AM

  The best people can do is to "vote with the wallets" aka attention: like social media, avoid using AI altogether no matter how "pervasive" they become, they will soon realize they won't need it as much as they think- overcome the addiction and brainwashing...

  • sapphicsnail

    today at 4:10 AM

    Maybe in a normal world where a company's valuation is based in some sort of material reality.

• Sparkyte

  today at 4:11 AM

  They are opportunistic. They are using it as a scapegoat to lay off people they over-hired for for the growth they had during COVID. They are also using it as a scapegoat to offshore more and more labor.

• wvenable

  today at 3:26 AM

  The only way AI recoups the investment is if it replaces all our jobs.

  It might be literally impossible but that's what the numbers are.

• themafia

  today at 4:15 AM

  You take a non working technology and threaten workers with it as part of a global scheme to depress wages, and hey, bonus, the technology probably appears smart because it just wantonly steals everyone else's work and then passes it off as it's own.

  How different would AI sentiment be if this never happened?

  It wouldn't exist.

  Who would buy this?

  Show me any "little guy" suddenly competing with the "big guys" due to "AI." Any single examples? Remember the dawn of the internet? Where this very thing was happening every day?

  The writing is on the wall. People imagine they're going to turn their $2500 computer into a butler and never work again so their brains are just shut off to the obvious.

• clumsysmurf

  today at 3:10 AM

  Another part of the problem is our lax regulatory "anything goes" environment which puts no guardrails on how AI can be used / abused. For example, eventually nearly everyone needs healthcare, and the idea you might be denied by AI or fighting AI to get a claim accepted is unpopular.

  • jacobn

    today at 3:19 AM

    So far it seems like AI is helping the little guy fight the bills more?

    (That can of course change very quickly, yes)

• today at 4:06 AM

AI is fine, AI eating up jobs and taking away autonomy of people's lives. Not okay. It is a tool, it is expensive to run if it isn't more efficient or better.

It is a very fun tool when used correctly. I think there is a point where our current technology will wall before we achieve genuinely good AI. We're starting to see that now.

We are also over invested in it which also leaves us vulnerable for a crash in the market.

We truly need to put a stop to leaving our citizens defenseless against nation-state propaganda campaigns coming out of China and Russia.

• nozzlegear

  today at 3:47 AM

  Are you implying this story is Chinese or Russian propaganda?

  • postsantum

    today at 3:55 AM

    Everything is Chinese/Russian propaganda unless it comes from a respectable source like BBC

It's funny how easily you can differentiate people in the tech industry who spend all their time with others in the tech industry from those who don't.

The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on).

Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!").

Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.

• rTX5CMRXIfFG

  today at 4:02 AM

  Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.

  I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.

  • gensym

    today at 4:10 AM

    > We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against.

    I'm right there with you. I think AI will be bad as a whole for the world, but I use it for work every day and am pushing my team to use it more. I think it's a really effective tool for my company even if it's going to be bad for the world overall.

    > I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.

    I see nuclear as an example of where public opinion did stop development. In the US at least, we've basically given up on nuclear power, much to our detriment.

    Another example of this is human cloning, which seemed inevitable back when Dolly the sheep was first cloned.

  • today at 4:41 AM

Nothing against AI in particular, but Schmidt's commencement speech sounded boring, and I would've tuned it out.

There's a lot to like about AI, but there's so much slop and everthing is getting so shitty, if I had to choose a side, it would be "against it."

I had to suffer through taling to Sutter Heath's AI three times today before I could get through to a person to tell them about a billing mistake. I finally decided to send a formal demand letter via FedEx (written with the help of AI) rather than deal with all this AI slop they've put between me and customer service.

Non-paywalled link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-american-rebellion...

• chasil

  today at 3:56 AM

  Thanks for that post.

  Checking MSN is a good alternative to archive.ph, or otherwise searching for the author and title?

Related:

Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419

Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674

Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107

An AI Hate Wave Is Here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318

If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift.

Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.

• today at 3:44 AM

All that's going to happen is people will "voluntarily" take it away from themselves.

The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI.

The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI.

People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI.

So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly.

Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!".

The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement.

Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money.

If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.

• linkregister

  today at 3:26 AM

  There are many cheap, open models available on the vLLM engine: https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm. This includes gpt-oss, LLaMa, and Gemma. This is in addition to Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, and Poolside.

  • xscott

    today at 4:40 AM

    Yes, and I keep copies of the ones I like[0]. I can't run the huge ones, but the ones I can run aren't as good the "frontier" models. Regardless, I expect they will be considered contraband someday.

    [0] - I've been using llama.ccp and Ollama. I should checkout vLLM.

• peyton

  today at 3:54 AM

  Is there any precedent you’re referencing? Many things that are expensive, slow, scarce, or bad are going to become cheap, fast, abundant, and awesome. Historically people like that a lot.

  I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?

Americans aren’t in favor of being driven into unemployment and poverty? How dare they!

Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with?

No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime.

I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…

• WillPostForFood

  today at 3:19 AM

  Why would you only rollback to the 90s. Pretty sure TV was evil and destroying culture. And Rock and roll that was devastating, so we gotta roll back at least to the 1930's. That would be a fitting era to recreate.

  • gensym

    today at 3:56 AM

    Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then, at least in the US. It wasn't perfect, but it really did feel like things were getting better. The Clinton administration had to start doing studies about whether paying off the national debt would be globally destabilizing! We really were talking about the "end of history". We thought the Internet would bring people together and end bigotry.

  • regularization

    today at 3:46 AM

    If we roll back 10,000 years, people often worked less hours per week. No class society where we have to serve the rich. Drinking alcohol, painting caves. Sounds pretty good.

• gdulli

  today at 2:59 AM

  All of these companies and their products and services are getting worse and more expensive. If their hostility to customers has not been punished so far then what reason is there to believe it ever will be?

  The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.

• dotcoma

  today at 2:14 AM

  It would be nice, but is it likely to happen?

  • onetokeoverthe

    today at 2:26 AM

    [dead]

• lofaszvanitt

  today at 3:30 AM

  As Musk said, they were the bootloaders of AI. Finally we get gargantuan monster battles akin to Godzilla vs. King Kong.

• Daz912

  today at 3:24 AM

  [flagged]

It's going to get worse, way worse, before it gets better. You know that right?

• today at 3:07 AM

• hsuduebc2

  today at 3:06 AM

  I mean, people are semi developed selfish tribal monkeys. It must hurt us significantly before we are willing to solve the issue. Not a best way to so virtually anything.

[flagged]

I'll just keep repeating this:

There are three options:

1. AI owned by everyone

2. No AI

3. AI owned by billionaires

If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI.

Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires.

Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.

• heddycrow

  today at 3:04 AM

  I wish that those who support #2 looked a lot less like #3.

  For that matter, I wish those who were pro-AI were more strictly supportive of #1.

• mycall

  today at 3:16 AM

  #2 is impossible now that oss models are readily available and nobody would know you are using them.

• xscott

  today at 3:15 AM

  I agree with your logic, but you should replace 2 with "AI used by governments only". The haters would have more luck getting rid of nuclear weapons than putting the AI cat back in the bag. Governments will use it for surveillance. Think "sentiment analysis" to make sure you're not a terrorist.

• prettyblocks

  today at 3:14 AM

  #2 is not really an option though. It's more like #1 or #3.

• wvenable

  today at 3:29 AM

  What does #1 actually mean in practical terms? Collective ownership of a giant data center and all the CPUs, GPUs, and DRAM needed to do AI?

• today at 4:21 AM

• jaredcwhite

  today at 3:20 AM

  Yeah I'll pick two, thanks.

• throwawa14223

  today at 3:24 AM

  #1 seems like the worst possible dystopia. We should shoot for #2 and have #3 as a fallback. The Culture is the worst dystopia I am capable of imagining.

• lofaszvanitt

  today at 3:33 AM

  4. regulation... well, that's a no go in the US. So what is the 5th option?

While the west clutches their pearls, China roars ahead on manufacturing, energy, and AI. Unqualified military supremacy will soon follow. I weep for my children.

...while at the same time the pro-AI supporters are also growing steadily, as countless people discover how generative AI has lowered the bar to creating content beyond what they could before.

• Ifkaluva

  today at 4:53 AM

  “Content”

  • userbinator

    today at 5:12 AM

    Yes, memes and the like. Lots more than before.

Bunch of idiots. We’re all going to lose our jobs but you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. This idiot populous has a total inability to see past the extremely short term. What exactly is going to happen you’re going to block the data centers. You’re going to make it hard to make technical progress and then someone else will eat your lunch and now you’re just poor.

• nozzlegear

  today at 3:55 AM

  Personally I'm not convinced by pro-accelerationism arguments. Why shouldn't technical progress be hard? Why shouldn't the inevitable be held back as long as possible? What does it mean to have someone else eat our lunch in terms of AI?

  • dyauspitr

    today at 4:01 AM

    It’s because you live in a world with competitors now this isn’t the 60s and the 70s anymore. There are legitimately quite a few countries that can effectively compete. Someone else eating your lunch in this case means you’re poor, have no global power and life for all of us will be worse than what we currently enjoy.

• add-sub-mul-div

  today at 4:28 AM

  Seeing the future is hard for everyone, but what I have a hard time understanding is people who act ignorant of the recent past. Because that's what tells us how AI is going to be used against us.

People don't see the safety net, that's the problem. Big tech hopes that bigdiks gonna bring in UBI and the like to ease the pepl, but it's nowhere near on the horizon. And it will be hard to persuade the ruling psychos to let the millions of their slaves running amok.

So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck.

Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD.

Niice future.