Comment by dbalatero
11 hours ago
I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many.
What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!"
You might as well market it as "created by child labor".
Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.
So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.
I think AI has also become synonymous with slapdash, low effort, probably steals my data
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And frustrating automated voice systems, support chat bots that go in circles, etc.
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Example #1, Co-pilot in EVERY corner of Microsoft's software.
>In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked.
Just the other day I was trying to fix someone's laptop and reflexively pressed (what I thought was) the context menu key, only to find no context menu opened, and instead a Copilot window right in the middle of the screen.
My washing machine also has this AI icon. Not a big deal but it makes me roll my eyes everytime I see it.
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I'm pissed off that Android took over the power button to activate their AI agent bullshit.
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> Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more
Most egregiously: VSCode.
No, i absolutely never in my life will want Copilot to summarize anything for me and yet guess what button appeared in the UI and i accidentally clicked on last night....
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i blame microslop for poisoning public perception with copilot. god that was so awful.
Also the product itself is likely to suck.
One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.
I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!
This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:
> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.
Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.
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It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.
The touchscreen is the only thing that's kept me from leasing a Tesla the past 8 years.
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can you blame them? nondeterministic products have resulted in some of the most successful businesses of All Time (tiktok, reels, google search, product recommendations)
> I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.
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I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"
In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).
I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.
I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.
But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.
> how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists
Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.
You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.
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Kids of varying ages that I've spoken to often talk about the environmental impact (mind you, I live in a fairly liberal/left leaning part of the country), among other things.
At the risk of over generalising, I mostly hear a lot of shit talk from younger generations, distrust from millennials, and more excitement and interest from Gen-x-ish and older.
As with many things, there's a certain level of hypocrisy to the shit talking, because teachers are at the schools are complaining to parents about the kid's use of AI, and pointing out that they will automatically fail any writing that seems to be using AI.
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spotify still pays artists. it's just a shitty deal.
most big ai will never compensate anyone
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I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.
I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.
For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.
There was a lot of outrage over the use of AI-generated images on the Leaving Cert exam in Ireland recently.
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Hard to agree.
No one cares about plagiarism and artists.
I bet lots of people would even be happy that artists get smacked because they see only high profile and rich artists.
Normal people don’t care about AI and are not afraid that it will take their jobs.
They are pissed off because of they are paying customers they expect some level of respect.
AI bots are slap in the face, they ask basic stuff that human operator should infer from the conversation. But you are hit with a dummy that doesn’t solve any of your issues and have to spend time explaining yourself.
Funny part is that’s exactly the same as low income lvl 1 support.
But there is no comparison study. My idea is people are equally pissed off by lvl 1 support that they have to explain stuff in detail and get no real resolution.
Mostly agreed. Practically speaking, phone support reps just follow a flowchart and scripts, so there's effectively no difference between getting an AI or a person (except in those cases where the STT can't make out what you're saying, but that can happen with a person too). But as you've correctly pointed out, it's about respect, and I suspect most people do find it slightly more disrespectful to be forced to talk to an AI instead of another person.
What it also hits on for the average person is the uncanny valley. It just feels bad to talk to something mimicrying a person. It feels like talking to an invader at a deep, survival level.
I think its more that AI is generally really badly implemented. It means we get a less qualitative experience, mainly on support, but also writing etc.
> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job
My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.
They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.
Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.
Downloading artists' songs is not equivalent to people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist. I really don't have a problem with people using AI to generate sounds/images for their own personal enjoyment, but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.
> artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output
The issue is the notion that an artist gets to control what one does with their personal property that isn't the artist's property. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid. Artists should get paid but setting up a system that surveils everything I hear and see to enforce it is too much.
> Many people just don’t care about this stuff
I agree with this though I don't follow your tie-in to piracy. Most people do not really care about music, and the industry has known this and delivers most music through ad-supported channels and shapes what music production it can to fit this. The ugly truth is that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't mind listening to AI radio, it's probably coming, and it will be good enough that a sizeable percentage of the population will enjoy it and not care.
The real art has always been outside of the industry though, and that won't change in the AI age.
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I think there is some nuance between an individual downloading something (and in many countries it is outright legal or at least, alegal) and building billion-dollar companies on it.
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Outside of frontier model providers, the vast majority of "AI" branded products/features just don't feel high quality.
AI generated media (art, music, etc) is very repulsive to interact with and so many products feel like they have led with AI solutions to problems that don't exist.
I think that undersells the real problem.
In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.
So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.
If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.
It only takes one attempt to contact a corporation using their new AI system to scar you, it's that dehumanizing.
And millions of people know exactly what I mean.
I’m in constant code switch mode.
Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.
Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.
Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.
I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.
You'll get to switch less soon as your tech friends get lost in their codebases, loose skills or jobs altogether and pick the side of your artist ones.
Young people do not care about plagiarism.
Also translates as “this is going to be enshittified and make your life worse eventually.”
Whatever reasons there were to be excited about tech have been subsumed by the things to be worried about.
Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.
I've talked to doctors, drivers, lawyers etc. and most white collar and many blue collar jobs feel the threat. Which, based on various news, feel justified even if not immediate. Even if its not the same llm per se, but the word "AI" is already tarnished as scum backstabbing negative entity, I literally don't know a single person who sees it these days positively.
> Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.
I mean, I haven't seen AI being used to replace even the most menial jobs. Plenty of companies have been trying to use AI to do things, but embarrassing and costly failures and negative customer response has made progress very slow. How can a lawyer or a doctor be worried about AI replacing them when AI can't even replace the 15 year old worker taking orders at the McDonald's drive thru? At this point I'm not fully convinced of even potential job loss from AI.
It also signals low effort or subpar quality too. Hey look we slapped gpt on our healthcare app. Is it useful? Not really but the ceo is excited about it
Reading the comments in this thread, I think it's difficult for some folks here to accept that many, many people outside their bubble genuinely despise what they're doing, and it's not just a misunderstanding or a matter of branding.
That’s why it’s so perplexing as a consumer when AI gets pushed so hard as if it’s a feature. Consumers don’t care what code your devs use, what cloud platform you deploy on, so why should they care about AI in your product? AI is not a feature; features are features tell me about those.
I believe the issue here is that, simply due to how these products came to market, "AI" is extremely vague, and slapping "AI" on every single thing makes it almost a negative signal for quality.
For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use?
The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.
AI in various forms are used all over, but do your point - users don't know it is AI. They also don't care. They care what AI does, and that is the feature that gets advertised, that AI does it they don't care. They are mostly not chatting with the machines and devices that have AI, they are pushing a button and letting the machine work for them while they sit back and relax (or more often go on to do other things)
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Because using AI in a product description is a signal to venture capital if private and investors if public, that your stock price deserves to go up.
We launched an AI feature and there was immediate blowback in the form of negative feedback.
We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much.
The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature.
Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to hate on AI. But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain, even if the discussion in question has zero bearing on their job. There's polling on this and job security is far and away the populace's biggest concern related to AI.
Is it possible that the team collecting the feedback is reporting specific feedback for 'AI' terminology ?
Renaming customer service team to customer success team and claiming customer service issues reduced is like corporate/leadership strategy 101.
> But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain
I think even this view is missing the point.
My opinion is that most people are overcomplicating this whole issue. When people react negatively to the term "AI", it's simply because the vast majority of features branded "AI" in the vast majority of products, are pure garbage. Searching for some deeper cultural or psychological reason is a waste of time - let's just stop pushing garbage AI products, then maybe someday people's perception of the term will change.
Until then, just leave that word out of the marketing material. Nobody really cares how the product is implemented, just focus on what it does.
That sounds a lot like trying to deceive your users.
every shitty feature has someone "writing in to tell you how "incredible" it is. Its not a proof that you think it is.
dont let that fool you into thinking "users were too stupid to undestand our awesome feature so we had to dumb it down for them"
I dunno, I think in the past year “AI” has gone from meaningless buzzword to having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.
“That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”
All people I know hear when they hear AI is - they are automating art, there are layoffs incoming, they want to build a data centre next to me that will make my electricity costs go up, they are automating the consumer help call center.
The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
Honestly, what are the positive viewpoints of generative AI in the end? Are there others major ones than the following?
* My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about
* My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about
The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.
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> The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
A peculiar way to call VC vultures with neck deep vested interests.
who, to put a finer point on it, presumably stand to benefit from the AI
> having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.
It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.
Isn’t that the case for tech outside of AI as well. My friends that work in tech mostly eschew it when at home. They aren’t connecting their light bulbs to the internet nor buying WiFi enabled fridges.
It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.
also, if you haven't heard someone refer to something as _-slop, you don't get out much
I think there’s some truth to that. The reality is most companies are implementing AI badly. It’s not actually solving anything and feels more like a checkbox on a feature matrix. Bolt on a chatbot and the job’s done.
Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it.
Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature.
I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.
AI tech is neutral - some good, some bad, and the bad is oversold compared to other industries. (Most people have no idea how incredibly ecologically destructive paper + print are.)
But the tech was captured and adopted by marketing-think and corporate opportunism. And that's the real problem.
Both were toxic plagues before AI. And as an amplification technology, AI has enabled them to unprecedented levels of fail.
It’s so hard to find usable products when everything is “XYZ for the Agentic era”
Okay… what does that mean?
The funniest one I've noticed lately is a bunch of Capital One ads saying "We built a multi-agentic system for finding a car to buy!"
I'm not saying I 100% wouldn't use AI to help me in product searches, but isn't one of the main selling points of AI that it is general-purpose? Why can't I just boot up ChatGPT and ask it what cars have XYZ things I need? Certainly being informed that Capital One's system is "multi-agentic" doesn't tell me much about what is being offered.
When I talk to people, from school students to middle aged employees, the common story is that they appreciate what AI can do for them when they choose to use it.
They are tired of hearing AI as a buzzword and having it shoehorned into every app and service they use. Most AI features have been rushed to market to check a box to say a company has an AI strategy, but they don’t work well. They’re just changing a familiar UI and popping up annoying notices.
Everyone also really doesn’t like consuming other people’s AI produced content. They associate it with slop on social media, fake headlines that tricked them, and low quality work their coworkers dump on them to waste their time. Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.
But most everyone thinks their own AI output is the exception: They like being able to type a couple sentences into ChatGPT and have it tell them something or produce some output that would have taken more time if they did it manually.
aye. I work with AI every day in an IT role and at this point I am painfully aware of its strengths and limitations. And it does have strengths.
But those strengths come with serious limitations, and huge society-level trade-offs. Annihilating the power grid in exchange for poorly formatted Powerpoint slides is not really a worthwhile exchange.
For most other products, like my cellphone, AI has no benefit except to further degrade my privacy, experience, environement, and battery life. Ditto for many other products with shoehorned AI.
Apple is obsoleting the 8 series and earlier of watches because they can't deliver on the "AI" features that product so wants to push. This is really sad.
> Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.
Sadly for me this was my engineering manager
What's interesting is that all big LLM providers figured out that the revenue comes from coding as it can be trained with RL rewards.
It means that most people will never understand how fast the landscape is moving: non-coding and non-homework use cases didn't change that much since last year.
It’s CEOs who want this because they have seen demos of AI, played with it themselves and have become immediately convinced that if they can make it do something amazing in two minutes, it must be a super weapon in the hands of the developers.
So they go all pointy-haired boss about insisting it gets shoehorned into everything.
Many CEOs, actually including tech CEOs, are in the foothills of the Dunning Kruger journey on much of the operations of their own businesses. They just don’t know what they don’t know, yet.
Like every YC company solving problems experienced by, and selling to, other YC companies
Yes exactly. It’s like advertising a car by saying “it uses gasoline!” Obviously gas helps the car go, but the user of the car just wants to go places cheaply and reliably
I am annoyed by 90% of the AI content. Even good AI content has always two disadvantages, which are so huge, that I consider them flaws: - bloat - selliness
The peak cringe is the mixture of both: convolutes of texts massing buzzwords, links and sales tactics.
This feel like a rip off and a huge time waste.
And lets not talk about LinkedIn: a dumpster for AI generated content, the companies should be ashamed of. Do they actually read what they produce? No, not really.
It is pure insolence and puts them in a bad spot, at least in my book.
Is anyone old enough to remember the switch from customer call centers having a human quickly answer to long long annoying phone menus because that friction, getting the customer to do some work or busy distraction, somehow saved costs for the company?
No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)
"AI" to me means the exact same thing
company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits
it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options
it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse
Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite
If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS
> No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)
They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again.
The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative.
Nobody likes badly designed menus.
LLMs are replacing a lot of the inflexible phone menus, and in leading implementations, can do all of the things a human could do. Or at least, make a recommendation for things it can't do that just require a human to hit an accept button.
I haven't experienced any chatbot or telebot that can do anything for me. The whole reason I'm calling is that the self service wasn't successful.
Yell "HELP HELP" into the chatbot and see if it calls 911 for you.
Exactly. It's less important if customers are turned off by it. It's not signaling for consumers, it's signaling for the market.
For me personally, it’s because “AI-powered” products are the most unreliable, buggy and annoying.
I think you're understating it.
It's blatant marketing to investors, not users. How anyone can still have doubts about "you are the product now, not the customer" is beyond me.
Everyday folk have never cared much about any specific technology, only the experience, and the overwhelming majority of AI retrofits are lazily conceived from a user experience standpoint.
In addition to the wonders of the physical world, national parks, lakefront properties, skiing locations becoming owned by and run for the rich, advertising is moving further from the consumer to investors, their true market. They don't need the poors anymore.
xAI built an unpermitted power plant in a residential area to power Grok [1]. No planning permission, no public comment, no environmental study, etc. Even worse, the gas turbines don't comply with Federal standards for air pollutants because they're "mobile". These kinds of gas turbines have exploded in demand by the way.
What's the government doing about this? They're stripping the EPA os the power to regulate pollution [2] and suing in support of xAI's gas turbines [3].
Anger about AI is in part a reflection of anger about declining material conditions where corporations and the ultra-wealthy can increasingly stomp over regular cities with impunity while getting ever-richer.
The state's response is going to get ever-more violent and extreme. Over-charging in federal courts, over-policing and violence against peaceful protestors as the law enforcement arm of the government increasingly takes off the mask regarding being the security apparatus for the protection of capital.
Automation (including AI) could be a good thing for society as people would have to work less and we could automate away more dangerous, menial and low-paid work, improving the material conditions for everyone. We don't live in that world.
[1]: https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-clima...
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-help...
At best it's seen as an out-of-touch techie buzzword. More commonly it's associated with useless chatbots and ugly pictures. At worst it's associated with destruction of the natural environment, corruption, and small towns hollowed out by horrible living conditions imposed upon them by west coast capitalists.
This should be regarded as a failure of the markets.
This anti consumer crap, that people demonstrably hate, worked! It worked to increase share price. We should all see that as a a fundamental failure of the market to transmit information about what brings the consumer value. Instead, it has been rewarded to the tune of trillions of dollars, a huge segment of society's resources.
There is a sense among level-headed people that the market is irrational "right now," but it's been years of this shit. When do we call a spade a spade?
Also how poorly the understanding of AI has been implemented.
There are real dated gaps that have formed thanks to the non-tech hype people.
AI is the fastest growing consumer product in history. It argues AI is a turn-off because of a survey (methodology not disclosed) and is done by a company that's trying to sell you something.
Sorry but I'm skeptical.
AI is not a product, though
the consumers will get what the oligarchs want
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The explicit and overt messaging from AI companies in the West is directly and loudly claiming their goal is to put people out of work.
In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation", yeah, you're gonna get backlash.
I think you hit the nail on the head. In a winner take most society why would you expect the masses to embrace a technology that makes them losers?
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> In a society where we've normalized "wage slave or death by starvation"
Not just a society - the whole world is like that by default.
Your post implies that these things don't apply outside of the west but I don't see how they don't equally apply everywhere.
Also, is it abnormal that if you don't do work you can't eat? That seems like a pretty fundamental truth of life on earth.
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Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who picks up random tools, unrelated to AI, because AI is advertised.
Usually when I see people see a pop-off for Try our AI assistant I hear "Fuck off" or "leave me alone" while they close it. It's like everything has a modern Clippy.
Personally I do see it as a VC signal, as if they gave up on making a good tool and started working on slopifying it.
60% is lower than I imagined, tbh. Most people aren't doing agentic workflows and AI is likely not a selling point.
> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.
The AI promoters are themselves saying these things because it is the positive case for their business, that other businesses can pay them for AI services that are cheaper and better than keeping existing jobs.
> Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.
> “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sa...
You should've seen what the internal combustion engine did to the horse and cart industry.
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Got any sources for those claims that show how broadly adopted ai is in those countries? I lookes at japan and china and could find a few articles, the anime one cites a single anime made with ai and nothing about its reception and similar results for china
I know there's a lot of blog articles with blogspam ai slop with indian sounding names, so that's anecdotal but i have noticed that in tech.
You think this is the media's fault? The media didn't force Altman and Amodei to tell everyone they were about to lose their jobs. The media didn't force Microsoft and Google to push half-cocked AI features into all of their products. The media didn't concoct secretive deals with municipalities so that residents didn't know data centers were being built in their neighborhoods until it was too late.
The AI industry has caused every single issue that it faces. It's absurd that you can't see this. "The media" barely even means anything anymore as the current landscape is so fractured. Who are you even talking about? Ed Zitron?
A lot of those developing nations use it specifically to produce useless slop. Blog spam from India is also very common.
I do use AI myself and don't believe its worthless, but I believe its only useful when you ask it fairly specific questions, with data it can consume publicly like "whats the rules for XYZ in this standard and if i do this problem like this in this way would that comply with those rules?" Type of thing.
I've also found it useful for programming (but often does miss things or do things a long-handed way) you have to be very careful about the results and not simply accept it because it appears to work, so it still requires a human to have a brain.
I'm not at all surprised that consumers dislike AI in this way because of the way its used, eg to replace help desk support, and create further distance between consumers and the companies they do business with. That's generally 100% how those companies use it because that is how AI companies have marketed it to executives.
Only now are we seeing posts from those people saying "waahh tokens cost too much how long till we can build our own AI". Which is another point in itself business workflows should be resilient and not heavily dependent on the cost of openai or anthropic tokens to be competitive. If these two companies can simply turn up the money knob and make your business have a huge risk then that's bad.
Also 100% we need to have sovereignty. We cannot depend on a single country to provide AI infrastructure. They can just shut it off whenever they feel like it. Maybe this week it's Fable/Mythos, and next week it's an entire country because Donald is unhappy and wouldn't "make a deal" on some thing he wants.
The problem is that many people recognize it for what it is (not real AI), and they are against society paying large cost for its advancement AS IF it is true AI or a path to it.
And rightly so
> The media is actively instilling hate for AI.
> Data centers are evil. Water is being destroyed. Eight whole rivers are drained to make a cat jpeg.
> Rich people are stealing all the jobs.
That would be a rare occurrence of the media doing its job because literally all of those things are true.
One difference between China and the US is that China won't allow data centers to jack up electricity prices, make things more expensive, be an environmental nightmare or create an unemployment crisis. None of those guardrails exist the US and honestly most Western "democracies".
Maybe there wouldn't be this reaction if we didn't have an affordability crisis and our government wasn't just 5 companies in a trench coat doing its best to do the largest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history then maybe, just maybe, we'd have a different attitude to AI.
I read a thing awhile ago that companies are increasingly resentful of having to go through you to get your money and I think about that often because it feels like the most accurate description of living in 2026.
The only one that's not entirely true is the water usage concern. The vast amount of water usage is non-consumptive, and you can even use reclaimed wastewater. To be clear, I'm on your side-- I just want to make sure that we don't give our opponents any ammunition by spouting misinformation. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
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Most of the media is owned by tech billionaires, the Murdochs and other Trump allies, so that's an odd conspiracy theory.
It's crazy how they're the ones with all the power and control at this point and they're still playing victim.
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