>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
And why shouldn't it? There are so many prominent examples of badly implemented AI solutions. It's like how China is associated with cheap copycat products even though they are perfectly capable (and do!) produce many well made, quality things.
Precisely. "We're doing this with AI" reads as "we don't care enough about this to pay a person to do it."
And frustrating automated voice systems, support chat bots that go in circles, etc.
>> It looks like this isn't something I can help you with. Would you like to be connected to a human who can help?
> Sure!
>> Ok, I'm connecting you to a human now.
[5 minutes later]
> Hello?
>> Hi! What can I help you with?
> Are you a human?
>> No, I'm an AI agent programmed to help you with anything you need. What can I do for you?
> You said you were going to connect me to a human.
>> That isn't something I can do. What can I help you with?
Turns out "connecting to a human" is something it knows about in its training data so it'll hallucinate doing so.
At least your example IDs itself as an AI agent. The ones I've come across hide it but it becomes obvious with responses like "I don't have access to that information" or something a human would never say. I had a dealership give me one of those, so I hung up on it and called a different dealership where I was connected to an actual human. Guess which one got my business...
So AI is resurrecting the microsoft clippy problem
Clippy was just ahead of its time. Sadly for the bots of now, they are only slightly better than Clippy
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.
> 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....
VSCodium was better on this front last time I tried it, and since Microsoft seems intent on allowing the Extensions to be a wildly insecure free-for-all, I am seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick with the official version.
My washing machine also has this AI icon. Not a big deal but it makes me roll my eyes everytime I see it.
That's actually a feature that washing machines have had for a while - "generative washing" - it is where the extra odd socks come from.
> extra odd socks
I have the opposite issue, can generative washing recover the lost odd socks somehow?
Common misconception, the socks you think you're losing are being found by other people's washers.
Socks are not getting lost; they are getting compacted to keep the context window small.
My LG one has had smomething like that - a coupkle of years old. Seems quite nifty though - it tumbles the load dry for a while and alledgely uses the patterm of weight shift to determine what kind of load it is - the materials etc - and adjusts the wash accordingly
I'm pissed off that Android took over the power button to activate their AI agent bullshit.
Search your settings for Power Button, Side Button, or whatever. You should be able to change the setting for a long press.
Google, not Android.
I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.
Feeling rather flippant, but what's the difference in practice? Can you point to an AOSP "brand" phone on a store shelf that is "de-Googled" out of the box?
What is AOSP really for other than "open source washing" Google's ecosystem? Is it ever making standards that Google has to follow/comply with or is it always just the tail being wagged by the dog to make it look like the dog is happy about open source (but still isn't majority open source)?
LineageOS, GrapheneOS et al base themselves upon this upstream project.
A good one to familiarize yourself with, and support.
Again, let me know when you see a LineageOS or GrapheneOS phone for sale on a store shelf.
I am certainly familiar with these things. I just don't see them having a practical effect on the average consumer, just fellow HN commenting nerds. I think I have one friend in real life with GrapheneOS at the moment, and it is not an experience they would recommend to any other friend of mine.
I support such things in theory, sure, but in practice, especially in HN comments there seems to be a lot of forgiveness to the very locked in by Google Android ecosystem purely because these alternatives exist, ignoring the practical realities such as marketshare/mindshare/ease of use/ease of access.
I don't have any easy answers on how to fix AOSP because it seems to be a sociopolitical problem, not a technical one, and I am mostly just complaining without skin in that particular game because I can't find myself caring about Android politics, but when my less technical friends and family that prefer Android are upset at something Google does I don't have good answers because "do months of research into LineageOS or GrapheneOS, deal with most of your apps not working most of the time, and it getting harder to buy phones because you have to make sure that they are rootable" isn't a good answer. "Why don't you just switch to an Apple device?" is at least an easier answer.
Graphene recently announced a partnership with Motorola,
and literally your mom could install it via the USB-based walk-through installer, if her life depended on it.
and yes, Apple devices are for your least technical friends and relatives. What’s wrong with that?
I've recently switched to grapheneos. I have a high tolerance for shit not working, but its been fine.
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.
It's somewhat fascinating to me that we are so far out in the weeds of stupidity in the modern era that the only things that were predicted accurately have to come from satire about "Nobody would ever be so stupid as to build or create this"
[dead]
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.
And now it's one of two things keeping me from ever doing so in the future
Not the hitler salute?
Correct
"Nazis are fine, but touchscreens aren't" seems like a weird place to draw the line, but I guess it's good that you have one at all.
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.
It used to be worse: at one point Tesla made the controls for the AC intensity a slider. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried moving your finger in a perfect straight line in a moving vehicle without looking, but I’m pretty sure it’s impossible.
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.
Sorry my friend, but Netflix is not a good product. It has a limited selection and, at least for my account, a lot of commercial ads. I am not pirating but I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.
Netflix was just an example.
> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.
This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.
The selection is still shitty though, even with no ads. Piracy is a superior choice.
Given that Netflix invests heavily in DRM, Piracy is at least the more ethical choice.
> Piracy is a superior choice.
And there it is.
Netflix was just an example. There are other services.
Sorry, my post was not clear. Today piracy is a superior choice. The bedt product Netflix offered me was when they shipped DVDs - their selection was immense (on par with Blockbuster). I could have pirated then (I was going once a year to my home country where DVDs were sold on open air markets) but I did no do that because was too much trouble.
When Netflix started to be online only I tagged along, and it was OK-ish - selection was not that great but but price was not big either and once in a while I would watch a movie. Today ads are very intrusive and the cost for no ads is $20 / month- which is not worth it for me. Compared to this, piracy is clearly a superior choice.
You're arguing an example because it doesn't appeal to you specifically. In other words, you're arguing an example with another example. There's plenty of people who would pay for Netflix and don't because they know they can pirate.
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.
AI has been a culturally radioactive PR disaster of truly epic proportions. Aside from whether or not it works, there are so many established catastrophically negative talking points - steals from creators, destroys the environment, is coming for your job - I'm not sure its reputation can be recovered.
if the internet did AI will as well. after all the internet was (and is) full of scams and p*dos, yet people use it the whole day, for everything.
Does it's reputation even matter? Everyone with money is pushing it, heavily. The government is even stepping in to stop any kind of punishment when it's factually shown that they are stealing water. The people will learn to tolerate it whether they like it or not, eventually.
The data center roll-out is weird, and far beyond anything that can be justified rationally. But this administration is aggressively pro-grift and anti-reality, so I would suspect that's as likely to be about some kind of corruption/grift/Ponzi as about real capability.
I try to distinguish between the actual tech, which spans light and dark, and the financial and economic engineering around it, which is definitely a darker shade of black.
Even describing the tech as light and dark seems a stretch, it exists solely due to the wholesale theft of virtually all copyrighted works in existence. Where would Ai be if they had to aquire every scrap of training data legally and with the informed consent (not legalese buried in esoteric terms of service documents) of everyone who created it?
spotify still pays artists. it's just a shitty deal.
most big ai will never compensate anyone
Is it really much different to how much artists got from radio?
Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.
The overall economics are wildly different.
Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.
Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.
The big difference was radio wasn't on-demand. You couldn't just listen to a complete album. If you wanted to listen to your favorite artist, you couldn't do that on the radio without listening to a lot of other stuff.
Most artists didn't make money from album sales.
They received some money up front in a contract to record the album, and the label make the money from sales.
There is a reason the bands toured and sold teeshirts.
For a lot of artists they’re paid a rounding error. The core question is whether they’re paid enough to make a living from and the answer is no.
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.
outrage lol
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.
> people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist.
> but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.
I think there's a fundamental problem with this line of argument, which is that it's naive elitism that's been historically leveraged since the 20th century at minimum. "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!" with equivalencies for all mediums of digital art.
There's absolutely a reductionism I think that happens with naysaying generative AI, where it's almost a kind of naive agreement with the VC hypetrain. There's a belief that effective usage of AI is just dumping 20 words into a text input and the maximal quality it's capable of gets spit out 5 seconds later. It's the same variety of reductionism as above where ignorance of how wide the domain is precludes the ability to understand where the skill ceiling is (or what is even involved). The idea that this isn't even the tip of the iceberg nets an expectation that "advanced" AI usage extends to random prompt engineering at most.
Problematically, "AI generated" doesn't really say much about the process, intent, or really much of anything beyond a specific computational architecture being involved at some point of the workflow. It could mean they slapped a tweet-length stream of consciousness into a shitty web prompt, or it could mean constructing a complex pipeline, combining processing steps and multiple models like hotpatching synths, using an intuition built upon thousands of hours of learning their tools, using fine-tuning adaptations that they spent even more time building, and carefully analyzing and responding to the end result. In the former case, I don't think there's much artistry involved and it exclusively produces crap. I think it's a massive disservice to the latter however, to suggest it doesn't involve extensive artistry, or that the paradigm of the tools themselves strip the notion of art away.
I understand wholly why the first case gets primacy, but if we're to philosophize about these tools then I think we have to fully account for the second case.
I think the backlash is because there are people claiming "I made this!" for what is about as much involvement as pressing the big meal combo touch button on a fast food ordering kiosk.
Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.
Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.
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.
We’re talking about the consumers, though. They don’t care how the free or cheap thing arrives. They like that they didn’t have to pay as much.
The same argument is used to justify normal piracy: The consumer thinks they’re stealing from the corporation who distributes it, not the artist.
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.
Young people do not care about plagiarism.
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.
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
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.
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.