Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation
Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation
This holiday season, hearing my parents rant about AI features unnaturally forced onto their daily gadgets warmed my heart.
Hah, I was listening to a similar conversation that began with family members working in the school system complaining about AI slop that began (relatively) harmlessly in day-to-day email conversations padded with time wasting filler but now has trickled down into "professional" education materials and even textbooks.
Which led to a lot of agreement and rants from others with frustrating stories about their specific workplaces and how it just keeps getting worse by the day. Previously these conversations just popped up among me and the handful of family in tech but clearly now has much broader resonance.
As can be observed in my comment history, I use LLM agentic tools for software dev at work and on my personal projects (really my only AI use case) but cringe whenever I encounter "workslop" as it almost invariably serves to waste my time. My company has been doing a large pilot of 365 Copilot but I have yet to find anything useful, the email writing tools just seems to strip out my personal voice making me sound like I'm writing unsolicited marketing spam.
Every single time I've been using some Microsoft product and think "Hmm, wait maybe the Copilot button could actually be useful here?", it just tells me it can't help or gives me a link to a generic help page. It's like Microsoft deliberately engineered 365 Copilot to be as unhelpful as possible while simultaneously putting a Copilot button on every single visible surface imaginable.
The only tool that actually does something is designed to ruin emails by stripping out personal tone/voice and introducing ambiguity to waste the other person's time. Awesome, thanks for the productivity boost, Microsoft!
Yeah I also like the "And yet other technologies also use water, hmmm, curious" responses
How do you reconcile the sense that there's a vibe shift with the usage numbers: about a billion weekly users of ChatGPT and Gemini and continuing to grow.
That's easy. If I don't use it I won't be competitive; however I and probably many others would prefer a world where NO ONE has it as it would be a better overall outcome. For a lack of a better term I would call these "negative innovations". Most of these inventions:
- Require you to use it (hard to opt out due to network effects and/or competitive/survival pressure) AND
- Are overall negative for most of society (with some of the benefit accruing to the few who push it). There are people that benefit but arguably as a whole we are worse off.
These inventions have one thing in common; overall their impact is negative, but it is MORE negative for the people who don't use it and generally they only benefit an in-crowd of people if any (e.g. inventors). Social media for me on many scales is arguably an obvious example of this where the costs exceed the benefits often, nuclear weapons are another.
It’s a bit cheating though particularly for Gemini. It’s been inserted into something that already had high usage numbers.
I don’t think that’s right, and it’s telling that this is the response every time I mention these numbers. The numbers I’ve seen are Gemini web and mobile app users, which are explicitly distinguished from AI summaries and AI mode in search.
“Google said in October that the Gemini app’s monthly active users swelled to 650 million from 350 million in March. AI Overviews, which uses generative AI to summarize answers to queries, has 2 billion monthly users.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/20/josh-woodward-google-gemini-...
It might help you get there faster, but a billion users is still a billion users. Clearly they all find some value in it.
Again, cheating. There's no off button for the damn things.
how about this one: https://www.levels.fyi/2025/
AI/ML Is Now Core Engineering From niche specialty to one of the largest and highest-paid SWE tracks in 2025
off button or not, money in the bank (pay special attention to highest-paid part… ;) )
Everyone knows there's big money in AI right now, what people are skeptical on is how based in reality that is. Personally, I think there's little plans for profitability and this is all going to come crashing down sooner or later. Same reason I don't care much for MAU.
while you and bunch of other people are waiting for this “reality” and “crash” to come the rest of us are building amazing shit in the present (actual) reality :)
Amazing shit that is currently making negative money, but might someday not.
That's the thing - taking a risky investment isn't free. If you choose wrong, then you're worse than if you did nothing at all. Think about that. Depending on what it is, there's lazy people sitting with their thumb up their ass who will outpace you.
Now, I'm not saying that AI is worthless and everyone building their business on AI is stupid. But I am saying it's a speculative investment, so treat it like that. Diversify, lower the blast radius. You don't want to be one of those suckers who bet it all on red.
No amount of TC is gonna insulate these IC’s that their beloved AI future is promised to bring.
the future is already here
I just assume that at least half of those are bots on social media platforms. You go on Twitter and the quality of posts is so low, yet every post has a bunch of replies. The same is true for YouTube, it’s full of empty, inflammatory responses. And this has become more common with the appearance of ChatGPT. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have no incentive to come clean about it, since they provide both the source and the destination, which is very lucrative.
I can only speculate, but people can feel resentful toward a technology while still using it. "I need this shitty tool for work but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with its social/environmental/economic/etc. implications."
I think that most of the people who react negatively to AI (myself included) aren't claiming that it's simply a useless slop machine that can't accomplish anything, but rather that its "success" in certain problem spaces is going to create problems for our society
What percentage of those billion users that aren't bots are being forced to use it in some way? Does that figure count the AI Summaries at the top of Google search results or the AI review Summaries in Maps that you can't turn off? Or the millions of Gemini integrations that Google added to its products?
It does not count AI summaries; they break that out explicitly. I don’t think it includes other integrations either, though it’s less clear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395744
The very people that whine and bitch that "AI is bad" will enunciate their complaints via their phone's AI-driven speech recognition feature.
It's pure cognitive dissonance.
When have you ever seen this thought process work on someone?
"Wow, you're right, I use programs that make decisions and that means I can't be mad about companies who make LLMs."
Surely a 100% failure rate would change your strategy.
Frrl. These people are insufferable
Maybe for the people who know the technology. But average joes don't allways know if they are using GenAI. So your statement is a bit misleading.
Different kind of AI
AI Speech Recognition isn’t a plagiarism and spam machine
N of 1, I use Gemini a lot for research and find it very helpful, but I still loathe the creep of GenAI slop and the consolidation of power in tech conglomerates (which own the models and infrastructure).
Not all of these things are equivalent.
You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word.
When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster.
But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
Look, I'm an introvert. I spend a lot of my time wanting people to go away and leave me alone. But I love little, short moments of human connection - when you connect with someone not as someone checking your groceries, but as someone. I may get that with the checker, depending on how tired they are, but I'm guaranteed not to get it with the self-checkout machine.
An email from an AI is the same. Yeah, it put words on the paper. But there's nobody there, and it comes through somehow. There's no heart in in.
AI may be a useful technology. I still don't want to talk to it.
If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff:
https://rushkoff.com/
https://teamhuman.fm
When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.
So, the benefit of GenAI is that it creates human connection by everyone collectively bitching about it?
I've observed on many occasions that complaining seems to be the primary go-to ad-hoc subject in spontaneous human interactions in the past decade.
I mean, there is a lot to complain about.
>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.
Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.
There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.
Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.
OMG are you this out of touch with reality? Do you think they have a choice?
[flagged]
Its not that hard to have discernment and feelings either.
> It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence.
You're right, they should unionize for better working conditions.
You think those people won't need to enslave themselves somewhere else if the checkout line is automated? Asking for your job to be automated in a capitalist economy is putting the cart before the horse.
You sound obsessed with being miserable. Touch grass.
Nothing wrong with being a luddite. In time more people will be proud to be luddites, and I can see AI simps becoming the recipients of all the scorn.
I'm seeing the opposite in the gaming community. People seem tired of the anti AI witch hunts and accusations after the recent Larian and Clair Obscur debacles. A lot more "if the end result is good I don't care", "the cat is out of the bag", "all devs are using AI" and "there's a difference between AI and AI" than just a couple of months ago.
Strange, I feel anti ai sentiment is kicking up like crazy due to ram prices.
That's part of the already established anti AI sentiment that has been dominating gaming. "Another thing AI destroys". It's the status quo, so not a vibe shift.
Seems to be mostly teenagers.
Working adults probably have better things to do than rant online about AI all day because of a $300 surcharge on 64 GB DDR5 right now.
I think your head would have to be extremely deeply in the sand to think that. Gamer's Nexus has been doing extensive and well researched videos on the results of ram prices skyrocketing and other computing parts becoming inaccessibly expensive
And it isn't a $300 surcharge on DDR5. The ram I bought in August (2x16gb DDR5) cost me $90. That same product crept up to around 200+ when I last checked a month or two ago, and is now either out of stock or $400+.
Most online "gamers" are teens or college students, just by nature of demographics. I feel like people who pay for their own RAM (likely 18 or older) would be more likely to feel this
You're confusing the final stage of grief with actually liking it.
I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.
> Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included.
From the "What are the criteria for eligibility and nomination?" section of the "Game Eligibility" tab of the Indie Game Awards' FAQ: [0]
> Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
It's not about a "teeny tiny usage of AI", it's about the fact that the organizer of the awards ceremony excluded games that used any generative AI. The Clair Obscur used generative AI in their game. That disqualifies their game from consideration.
You could argue that generative AI usage shouldn't be disqualifying... but the folks who made the rules decided that it was. So, the folks who broke those rules were disqualified. Simple as.
[0] <https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq>
Yeah sure they're free to set the rule for their award show however they like, but I think going with a name like the "Indie Awards", kinda signals to the outside, that they wanna be taken seriously and like an authority on indie games. In my opinion, by adding clearly ideologically motivated rules (because let's be honest, something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI), they'll just achieve, that they won't be taken seriously in the future. I know I won't take their award seriously, and I don't think I'm the only one.
They're free to define their rules however they want, I'm free to disagree on the validity of those rules, and the broader community sentiment will decide whether these awards are worth anything.
> something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI
A gorgeous otherwise-monochrome painting that happens to use a little bit of mauve isn't a worse painting because of the mauve. If that painting is nominated for inclusion to a contest that requires the use of only one color, it is correct to reject that painting from consideration. This rejection would only be a problem if the requirement wasn't clearly disclosed up-front.
As for the rest of your commentary; you're free to gather likeminded buddies and start the "Robot-Generated-Art-Inclusive Indie Awards". As a bonus, I expect the fuckoff-huge studios would be quite excited to quietly help fund the project through cutouts.
Yea as I said, the award can reject them, I still think that this award doesn't actually represent the best indie games then, and therefore it will fade into obscurity. Funnily enough, this year's game Awards (the actual game Awards), were basically swept by small studios with tiny budgets compared to AAA studios. That's because these Studios had a coherent vision for their game, people that really cared about making it good, corporate AAA games are bad not because of usage of AI, but because monetization is more important than the gameplay.
To play devil's advocate, AI helps small studios with a limited budget actually way more, because they can bring a game to market, that maybe would've needed 10 people before, but needs only 3 people now. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that that's the new reality, whether we like it or not. As I said, I'm against GenAI in many fields, e.g. I absolutely despise AI generated "Music", cancelled my Spotify subscription because of it (they insist on putting it into playlists and you can't disable it), but that doesn't mean, anything which was produced with 0.1% AI is bad, unethical, etc.
Yeah that's laughable. There is a huge movement of gamers that want this shit to stop. stopkillinggames is one.
Fortunately, the PR situation will handle itself. Someone will create a superhuman persuasion engine, AGI will handle it itself, and/or those who don't adapt will fade away into irrelevance.
You either surf this wave or get drowned by it, and a whole lot of people seem to think throwing tantrums is the appropriate response.
Figure out how to surf, and fast. You don't even need to be good, you just have to stay on the board.
This is a perfect example of cognitive dissidence on the subject. You wont even see the retribution coming.
This backlash isn't going to die. Its going to create a divide so large, you are going to look back on this moment and wish you listened to the concern people are having.
This doesn't even make sense even if you believe it. Why wouldn't both sides of any argument use "a superhuman persuasion engine"?
Inevitably is such a tired argument. Everything is a choice, belief in inevitability is for the weak.
> You either surf this wave or get drowned by it
I don't think so. Handcrafted everything and organic everything continue to exist; there is demand for them.
"Being relegated to a niche" is entirely possible, and that's fine with me.
This is cope.
Why not just quit work and wait for AGI to lead to UBI? Obviously, right after chatGPT solves climate change, it will put all humans out of work as next step, and then the superintelligence will solve that problem one way or another.
People read too much sci-fi, I hope you just forgot your /s.