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Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

346 points by jonthepirate ↗ HN
A while back, I stopped using Facebook because I just couldn't take it anymore. Just totally sick of it. I'm honestly getting there with AI. At this point, I would prefer to have anything AI related just be blocked at the browser level.

79 comments

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PaulHoule
I was sick about this before y'all because I was involved in three efforts to try to commercialize foundation models before the technology was ready.

Most of all I am sick of people being sick of it!

dartharva
Unfortunate that it took so long for you to realize social networks are just a river of outrage and slop, because it has literally always been so for a decade before AI even became a thing - it's just that now AI has made the cheapness immediately visible.

Enjoy your newfound freedom and live a real life.

socketcluster
I don't mind AI. What I don't like is the complete saturation of communication channels with the same mainstream ideas and products over and over. This started long before AI slop.
simonw
What's "AI"?

(I'm going to guess you mean generative AI such as image/video/text generation used to create slop on Facebook, but I really wish posts like this would clarify.)

wewewedxfgdf
I love AI and LLMs.

I love all computer technology except printers.

Gimme more - looking forward to further leaps forward in AL and LLMs - the party has just started.

bambax
One problem is that when people delegate tasks to AI, they don't themselves learn anything from doing the task -- not just in the general sense of personal improvement, but in the very concrete sense of "what is it that was produced".

Before AI, when someone showed you a presentation or an Excel sheet, even if it was complete horseshit that they had made up, they knew what was in it: they knew more about it than you, by definition.

Now, not so much; people output things they know nothing about, and when they show it to you they are discovering it just as you are.

This is novel, and discomforting.

andrei_says_
The equivalent of a student copying their homework.

Schools are not publishing houses for homework assignments. Struggling with the homework is the process training the student.

Was

unethical_ban
I took compliance training today and the "actors" and voices were AI.

After watching the GPT images release video, it reenforced my skepticism that society will adapt. Then I thought about AI analysis of people's movements in public and realized that governments already capture everything, and now will be able to use infinite AI surveillance agents to watch all things all the time.

Any disobedience or crime (but really only against the government and gentry) can be instantly investigated by asking AI to analyze the behavior of all people and vehicles in the days prior to and after the incident. That's if they can't identify you immediately at the time of the crime.

When the time comes that civilian disorder is required to change the behavior of government, it will be impossible.

AI is the destruction of individual freedom. It is the destruction of citizens' ability to rebel against power.

We would be far better off without it.

kumarvvr
I think after the initial euphoria dies down, and the models reach a capability plateau, the use cases will start to come to fore.

I am an experienced developer, and, if I know what I am doing, then AI tools are an average junior programmer that I can beckon.

I have also dabbled in music creation with AI, first generating the lyrics, and then the music with vocals. Is it good. Nope. Is it average, some might say so. Is it a great use of my time, sure. Like a paid video game.

himata4113
I think this is a problem unique to facebook / meta. I mean the camera roll has a dedicated "ai images" at the top instead of... your active camera like every other app.

This all started with zucks obsession with virtual avatars and you can really see this in VR.

OutOfHere
There is no future for AI doomers. Bye bye dodos.
an0malous
I think we’ll look back on this period as The Great Enshittification where everyone ran out of ideas but capitalism demands growth so everything just got worse. The mass manufacturing of mediocre AI content might be the force that ends the digital era and maybe we’ll all just go outside again.
SilentM68
I get your frustration.

I do not dislike AI. It has potential to change and improve the human condition. With that being said, it has its downsides with workforce displacement being at the top of the list, for me at least. Unemployment, however, has been prevalent in the US for many decades, mostly due to political maneuvering of previous politicians. AI has just made things a bit more difficult for the workforce, especially the recent generations who were already dealing with unemployment due to unmarketable degrees from colleges. I am not ashamed to say that, though I've been in tech for years, I am one of those statistics, unfortunately.

To fix this, AI companies should refocus their goals to account for the displacement of human roles as they continue to improve AIs. They should start doing that sooner rather than later.

The reality is that AI already does things better than some humans ever could. From what some individuals have been telling me, in education, for example, AI is already disrupting the classrooms. Teachers are feeling the AI-burn in the already declining education sector.

Though, I see a decline in human creativity and influence due to AI, I myself have used it to learn certain OS-related concepts or tweaks that would have normally taken me months to figure out had I focused solely on google searches, reddit threads and similar.

If I could do more, I would but I am limited by the lack of better, powerful hardware with the price being what they are.

slappywhite
I block YouTube channels if I see they use AI slop as their thumbnail image and certainly if they use AI voices once the video starts playing. (This is only feasible because I already select from a highly curated subset of YouTube that generally doesn't use AI.)
corvus-cornix
I'm looking at engineering job specs at the moment and it's very wearisome that every company seems to have pivoted from highlighting the unique value they provide to customers to putting AI front and centre in their employer branding. My eyes immediately glaze over at what may have been the result of "Claude, take this HR/marketing/whatever copy and inject some AI".

I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but businesses need to chill. AI seems to amplify existing bottlenecks within organisations, so we should probably tread carefully when it comes to pushing the tech. Fix the organisational problems first and hedge our bets.

I wonder if anyone reading this was around during the dot-com bubble because maybe it felt the same...

pojzon
Fixing organisational issues is hard and expensive.

Slapping AI on everything is easy in comparison. And mentioning AI to investors makes them drop pants.

jlaternman
I was also around then, and actually it did feel exactly the same now that you say. Sense of sailing towards an unknown destination that seemed very exciting, but was clear we didn't quite get what it was yet and were working out the destination mid-flight.
acdha
I was around then. This feels similar from the perspective of stock prices just going up for absolutely absurd reasons—Allbirds would have fit right in—but AI in some ways seems even worse because much of what was being hawked in the dotcom era was at least something that real people would want to buy: usually poorly executed and unsustainably priced but e.g. Kozmo.com wasn't wrong that a ton of people would love to order stuff and have it brought to your home or office. I had some business meetings with pets.com and they were unbelievably bloated—think a room full of people openly admitting that they were just killing time waiting for the IPO so they could cash out their options—but tons of people buy pet food, toys, and medicine online today.

In contrast, a lot of companies are just wedging AI into things where ordinary people don't want or benefit from it anywhere near the level needed to actually pay for it, especially with unreliability being an unsolved problem—the amount you'd pay for something to, say, summarize boring business documents goes down considerably when you have to closely read the original looking for errors and omissions and scrutinize any response to make sure it's not critically flawed.

There's also a weird difference in enthusiasm based on the societal impacts: the web let you do things you couldn't do before, but a lot of AI tools and services are really oriented at your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss saying they can layoff half of your department and still get more work out of the survivors. There's some cool stuff, yes, but unlike the mood during the dotcom era we now have a prominent tone of dread about deprofessionalization and larger concerns about how businesses will even work if a significant chunk of customers are pushed out of stable employment.

thelastgallon
Yes, a lot of posts on HN are also about AI. Used to have more variety.
shantnutiwari
Reddit's /r/programming banned all AI related posts temporarily. And I must admit, it made the place more interesting.

Maybe have AI Tuesdays, where you only post AI crap every Tuesday?

merryocha
I noticed recently that there are new "AI Widget" and "Chat Widget" EasyList filters in the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter lists. I'm not sure when they were added but they weren't checked by default for me. They definitely help clear some of the clutter.
alex1138
Facebook especially is bad because I don't think Zuck cares. His entire personal history is shady. People have been missing posts for YEARS, well beyond the last few years when it got really bad

Oh and messages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712

keyle
Hear, hear, friend, you might have missed web 2.0. Oh web 2.0. The designers like myself were so sick of this nonsense.

AI is the same, but amplified and affecting a lot more people.

So I just recall Web 2.0 era and know that this too, shall pass.

Sibexico
I'm working with AI since early 00's and it was a lot of fan of this with very little community of an artificial neural networks developers. Now AI is widely available and used by people with discussable level of intelligence to generate tons of slop, so all the internet looks like a big trash bin.