People are increasingly hostile towards AI because they’re realizing there’s a good chance it turns out to be the most toxic and destructive thing that humanity has ever invented. The creation of modern AI may be looked back on as the worst thing that humanity has ever done — if there’s even enough humanity and enough truth left to reflect.
The public was much more likely to say AI would harm them than benefit them.
There are so many things called "AI" these days, that studies like this are basically meaningless. I think (hope) most people's views can't be reduced to a single binary question.
Any discussion about AI/LLM’s/etc is incredibly complicated. I could go on and on elaborating on this, but I’m just going to leave my preface at that.
There is one thing I found to be true over and over again no matter what the anchor point is for the conversation, no matter the context, no matter someone’s sentiment, etc: nobody likes to have their time wasted.
LLM’s are incredibly useful for cutting corners. It makes it very easy to waste people’s time. No matter how useful they are, no matter the use case you have found, no matter the integration, people keep encountering bad search results and people sending them clearly LLM-generated work that wastes their time.
Unless somebody comes up with a cure for that, there will always be a significant portion of the population that is hostile to LLM’s - and rightfully so! No promise of productivity will overcome that.
TL;DR: the biggest problem with LLM’s is that it enables people to waste other people’s time.
Yeah, I waste more time now because of AI generated slop.
I see a headline on reddit and click on the article. I spend 3 minutes reading it and the article says nothing new and doesn't even have a point.
Then I go to the comments and see people arguing about it but also people calling it AI generated slop.
Then I click on the account that posted the article and their account history is spamming the same article to 10 different subreddits and I subscribe to about 5 of them so I have to see the same dumb post 5 times. Then I realize the account is just an AI bot spamming AI generated articles to generate upvotes or display ads to generate money.
It's all so annoying and a waste of electricity, bandwidth, and my time.
There are also subreddits mainly for photos like nostalgia places where bots just repost popular posts from a year ago or 6 months ago but now they repost stuff from 3 days ago. It's completely out of control and AI has made it this easier to do.
So now I am spending less time on these sites which is maybe a good thing so I can thank AI for making using the Internet so annoying that I stop and find something else to do.
It's basically Dead Internet Theory becoming reality.
> I wasn't expecting the next culture war to be about AI.
Why should there be another culture war?
Isn't it enough that social media has tuned us against each other on ethnicity, age, political views and a thousand other differences? You want one more? You need another reason to hate your neighbor?
On a long line between SQL and Cylons, we're sitting way closer to the SQL end of that line. Like close enough that from across the room you can't tell the two dots of "SQL" and "2026 AI" aren't one dot.
Every PC gamer / hardware tech review forum is full of anti-AI hatred.
People want to buy a new GPU, add RAM, a new SSD, or hard drive. All of these have doubled or quadrupled in price in just a few months.
Then there are reddit threads every day where I think 30% of the original posts and comments are AI generated spam. If I see a post with emdashes or anything that ends by asking for "thoughts?" I just down vote and report as spam. I want to interact with actual humans not AI bots.
Then we see posts about AI data centers and electricity use which will lead to higher electric bills for ordinary people if demand is higher than supply.
This is ignoring all the stuff about people losing jobs.
So why should the video game playing population or even the general population be in support of AI? Of course it has uses but there are so many negatives right now it is easy for me to understand why people are already sick of it.
A lot of the problem is with the investment bubble aspect of AI rather than the tech itself. If people who wanted to use AI had to pay appropriate server costs the demand would be about ten times less and GPU, RAM and SSD prices no much changed. But instead you have Altman et all trying to burn vast amounts of investor cash to do a land grab.
>> Public hostility toward AI now looks stronger than ordinary skepticism toward a new technology. People have reasons for that response, including fraud, misinformation, privacy invasion, concentration of power, and job displacement. Job displacement carries its own emotional weight because it threatens status, livelihood, and social usefulness, which gives the fear an existential edge.
>>This essay explores why anti-AI sentiment may be gaining force.
The article lists off all the obvious and credible reasons why people are opposed to AI in the intro paragraph. It then spends the next 25 paragraphs advancing a very clever pet theory derived psychology about what might be going on here. While interesting in its own right, the article misses the obvious concerns that it raised in the intro paragraph.
AI is a technology with the explicit end-goal of substituting energy for people. It's not intended to benefit the common man, it's intended to benefit the capital owning classes.
I find it offensive that comments that appear to be legitimate additions to the conversation are downvoted into oblivion and then flagged without even a single response to suggest where the author of the comment in question was in error. This is definitely not what I would expect to see on an ostensibly neutral platform that claims to be dedicated to technical discussion of issues on their merits.
Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.[1]
21 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 53.2 ms ] threadPeople are increasingly hostile towards AI because they’re realizing there’s a good chance it turns out to be the most toxic and destructive thing that humanity has ever invented. The creation of modern AI may be looked back on as the worst thing that humanity has ever done — if there’s even enough humanity and enough truth left to reflect.
There are so many things called "AI" these days, that studies like this are basically meaningless. I think (hope) most people's views can't be reduced to a single binary question.
AI can help you in the near term and harm you in the long term.
I think the more people use AI the more their view shifts from the former to the latter.
There is one thing I found to be true over and over again no matter what the anchor point is for the conversation, no matter the context, no matter someone’s sentiment, etc: nobody likes to have their time wasted.
LLM’s are incredibly useful for cutting corners. It makes it very easy to waste people’s time. No matter how useful they are, no matter the use case you have found, no matter the integration, people keep encountering bad search results and people sending them clearly LLM-generated work that wastes their time.
Unless somebody comes up with a cure for that, there will always be a significant portion of the population that is hostile to LLM’s - and rightfully so! No promise of productivity will overcome that.
TL;DR: the biggest problem with LLM’s is that it enables people to waste other people’s time.
I see a headline on reddit and click on the article. I spend 3 minutes reading it and the article says nothing new and doesn't even have a point.
Then I go to the comments and see people arguing about it but also people calling it AI generated slop.
Then I click on the account that posted the article and their account history is spamming the same article to 10 different subreddits and I subscribe to about 5 of them so I have to see the same dumb post 5 times. Then I realize the account is just an AI bot spamming AI generated articles to generate upvotes or display ads to generate money.
It's all so annoying and a waste of electricity, bandwidth, and my time.
There are also subreddits mainly for photos like nostalgia places where bots just repost popular posts from a year ago or 6 months ago but now they repost stuff from 3 days ago. It's completely out of control and AI has made it this easier to do.
So now I am spending less time on these sites which is maybe a good thing so I can thank AI for making using the Internet so annoying that I stop and find something else to do.
It's basically Dead Internet Theory becoming reality.
In 20 years the thanksgiving dinner fights over AI equality are going to be wild.
>I'm not a bigot I support trans rights. But clankers aren't welcome in our share house.
>> OK Millennial. I'm a cyborg with 95% of my brain running in a private server.
Why should there be another culture war? Isn't it enough that social media has tuned us against each other on ethnicity, age, political views and a thousand other differences? You want one more? You need another reason to hate your neighbor?
On a long line between SQL and Cylons, we're sitting way closer to the SQL end of that line. Like close enough that from across the room you can't tell the two dots of "SQL" and "2026 AI" aren't one dot.
I want to use AI to do your job.
I don't want someone else to use AI to do my job.
I don't want to spend my attention on AI content that takes more time to consume than create.
People want to buy a new GPU, add RAM, a new SSD, or hard drive. All of these have doubled or quadrupled in price in just a few months.
Then there are reddit threads every day where I think 30% of the original posts and comments are AI generated spam. If I see a post with emdashes or anything that ends by asking for "thoughts?" I just down vote and report as spam. I want to interact with actual humans not AI bots.
Then we see posts about AI data centers and electricity use which will lead to higher electric bills for ordinary people if demand is higher than supply.
This is ignoring all the stuff about people losing jobs.
So why should the video game playing population or even the general population be in support of AI? Of course it has uses but there are so many negatives right now it is easy for me to understand why people are already sick of it.
The article lists off all the obvious and credible reasons why people are opposed to AI in the intro paragraph. It then spends the next 25 paragraphs advancing a very clever pet theory derived psychology about what might be going on here. While interesting in its own right, the article misses the obvious concerns that it raised in the intro paragraph.
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/publi...
A small group of people are going to acquire immerse wealth and power from this new technology
80% of everyone else will be facing possibility of losing jobs or reduced income, if they still have job
This will be another rust belt decades, but for white collar jobs and costal states
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html