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watching the tide turn (or, more accurately, the undercurrent bubble up) on AI has been interesting

    "I strongly feel that AI is an insult to life itself." - Hayao Miyazaki
I'm going to start using this quote.
I love the high citation per sentence ratio and couldn't agree more with the sentiment. It seems that, finally, people are starting to verbalize sufficiently direct responses to the AI slop being flung at us from all angles.
Me too. I bounce off of any product landing page that has "AI" slapped on it, which lately is ~99% of them.

On the other hand, if I saw a product labelled "No AI bullshit" then I'd immediately be more interested.

But that's just me, the AI buzz among non-techies is enormous and net-positive.

I appreciate seeing this point of view represented. It's not one I personally hold, but it is one a LOT of my friends hold, and I think it's important that it be given a voice, even if -- perhaps especially if -- a lot of people disagree with it.

One of my friends sent me a delightful bastardization of the famous IBM quote:

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER FEEL SPITEFUL OR [PASSIONATE†]. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER CREATE ART.

Hate is an emotional word, and I suspect many people (myself included) may leap to take logical issue with an emotional position. But emotions are real, and human, and people absolutely have them about AI, and I think that's important to talk about and respect that fact.

† replaced with a slightly less salacious word than the original in consideration for politeness.

I love to employ AI but completely understand the criticism. It does increase my productivity as a software dev.

I also think the 10 hours of random electro swing or other genres of generated music is of extremely high quality. It isn't bland music, on the contrary it is playful and varied. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmUSK1IjoQg&list=RDLmUSK1Ijo...

It is entertaining and a viewing experience. And yet, I still doesn't feel the same if you know it is just generated by some carefully selected prompts. Sure, that itself is a creative endeavor, but I would have preferred for AI to clean my room for me instead of slowly replacing every creative venue from writing to art to music.

I continue to play music myself, but I will never reach a level AI is able to achieve in a few minutes. Sure, this example certainly took a while to create and the result is awesome. So what do we do with all the superfluous artists now?

did you link the right video?

it was extremely bland... dry as an oat in a flash freezer...

> A COMPUTER CAN NEVER FEEL SPITEFUL OR ...

Can other humans (aka NPCs)? They seem like they do so I treat them as such, but as far as I know other humans and a sufficiently emoting AI both act equally like they feel emotions.

A marvelous article that gave voice to things I can't articulate appropriately (although, I guess, now I can).
Yet it is here to stay, won't go away and even if it won't get any better at the useful things it does, it is useful. The externalities are real, some can be removed, some mitigated. If you're a hater and a human, then you don't have to mitigate anything, of course.

Me, I hate the externalities, but I love the thing. I want to use my own AI, hyper optimized and efficient and private. It would mitigate a lot. Maybe some day.

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> Yet it is here to stay, won't go away and even if it won't get any better at the useful things it does, it is useful.

"Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings." — Ursula K. Le Guin

> I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context;

With this the article lost all seriousness for me. I may be on board with a lot of what you are saying, but pretending you know the answer to these questions just makes you look as idiotic as anyone who says the opposite.

>Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms, the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output, the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides, the problems with consent and copyright,

I just can't take anything the author has to say seriously after the intro.

Amusingly things are going with AI like with any complex topics nowadays. It’s easier to hold a strong position than a nuanced one. So you see a lot of vapid articles either for or against, even - or especially actually - if you don’t really know for or against what exactly, and very few insightful ones.

Plague of our ages I guess. Ironically AI might even make it worse.

I feel like this level of opprobrium is disproportionate. At least Claude has enabled me to live a more full life, spending extra time with those I love more while being able to rubberducky my random thoughts(who are they to judge what fleeting thoughts I allow myself?). I've been burned by AI falsehoods and read the same slop, sure, but I also went through the same with search engines and even books before that. This tool would have unlocked so much more of my potential had it existed 30 years ago and I'm excited(maybe a lot of dread too) to see what the next 30 years will bring.
This is great. I'm not going to make any argument. Because I am an AI hater.Genius.
At least he’s honest.
"Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave."

That seems like a succinct way to describe the goal to create conscious AGI.

A lot of valid arguments. But the conclusion (hate) is not constructive. LLMs are here, and they are going to stay. Like cars, internet or smartphones.
Extremism and division aren’t a path to wisdom or to healthy cultures, but you do you.
I hate social media and what it's done to the internet, but I accept that it is now a part of the fabric of society. You can't unring the bell. (In fact, here I am, saying I hate social media on a social media site.)

In the end, it doesn't matter what you or I think. You can hate AI, but it's not going away. The industry needs more skeptical, level-headed people to help figure out how best to leverage the technology in a responsible way.

Is Ed Zitron's newsletter banned here? I haven't seen a single article of his on HN and he's been ranting about AI for years now.
Tend to get flagged; there's a minority here who react to any open criticism of our benevolent future robot overlords badly.