I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

I’m not the first human to have anxiety about technological development. Change is scary, and technology changes a lot of stuff. In my opinion, these changes are mostly for the better—but that’s not an opinion everybody shares.

The classical cultural example is the Luddites, a social movement that failed so utterly that its name because a common metaphor for stubborn morons who are terrified of technological innovation that helps everybody.

every invention from fire to mRNA vaccines has wound up generally increasing human welfare

I remember arguing with people who would link GCP Gray’s “Humans need not apply” video (which has apparently been retitled “humans are becoming horses”) about how wrong they were about AI

Before I get into concerns I’ve found on my own, let me get the most blatantly obvious and infuriating reason that people might hate AI out of the way: the people inventing it are telling me I should hate it.

Henry Ford did not market the Model T as “a machine that will eventually cause environmental destruction, social isolation via car dependency, and health issues from pollution.”

I liked Anthropic’s superbowl ad for Claude, and not just because it used “ALL CAPS” by MF DOOM as the backing track.

But if we’re actually two years out from every office worker being automated, which is 57.8% of the workforce, we need to start legislating right now to have any hope of this not being a total disaster.

I’ve not seen a single AI CEO propose anything like this. Various people have speculated that we might need laws, eventually, after AI takes over everybody’s jobs.

I can only think of three reasons why nobody is proposing this: They are actually far, far less confident than they say that AI will actually get that good. They lack the imagination to think of the idea of passing a law with a trigger condition. Such laws do exist but aren’t super well-publicized. So this is actually a possibility. They don’t actually care about what their products may do to society—they just want to be sure they win the AI race, damn the consequences.

AI, however, currently occupies a zone where it’s sometimes very helpful for doing high quality work, but always helpful for doing bullshit slop.

AI has lowered the barrier to entry for all of these things to the point where they’re effectively free. Garbage, but free to produce. And that does make some people’s primary interaction with the technology profoundly negative.

In some cases they’re even actively dangerous—considering how often companies leak information, giving your ID to a website to verify you’re not a slop-bot severely increases your data privacy risks.

Technology is supposed to save you from working. For many, AI isn’t doing that. It’s doing the opposite.

think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless

But, at times, it feels like the AI companies want me to.

They could form an alliance to make it easy for platforms to automatically disclose when a video has AI video or audio content

YouTube could be substantially more aggressive about banning AI-generated misinformation.

If I can somehow hate a machine that has basically stopped me from having to write boring boilerplate code, of course others are going to hate it!

And that is completely crazy to me, because AI is really useful to me! AI has allowed me to eliminate the most annoying, manual, inelegant, and soul-crushing parts of my profession