[simonw]

Because "I really wish posts like this would clarify".

I was making a point that saying "I hate AI" is intellectually lazy. The discourse here can be a whole lot better if people put more effort into clarity.

I want Hacker News to be a better place for technically sophisticated conversations than most of Reddit.

[hackable_sand]

But you know exactly which form of AI is exhausting everyone through mediocre application. You know exactly which form of AI requires constant propaganda and astroturfing to get a thimble of adoption.

Fugazi as fuck

[emp17344]

I’ve never heard this guy say anything negative about an AI product. Makes it impossible to trust him.

[simonw]

I think generative AI for slop posts and images on Facebook is a different issue from generative AI for coding agents, even when they share the same underlying models.

Or generative AI that was used to find 272 vulnerabilities that were fixed in Firefox 150 this week: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer...

[customguy]

They also share many underlying issues, e.g. the grand scale stealing of what humans wrote for other humans without ever consenting to a shred of this, who will make more things to steal from, or how the people who wield these things make them annoying.

Fixing 272 FF vulnerabilities, compared to the nuking of the web and everything, what someone here called invasion of the body snatchers, is like a bottle of water in exchange for boiling all oceans and making rain fall stop forever. It's that meaningless and trivial in my eyes. We would have had bug fixes anyway, we could have coded anyway. The destruction, and "just" of society and communication and thought, not even talking about the goons who make bank with this stuff, is on a whole new level, and I'd say of a new quality compared to previous iterations of mass society ratcheting up to make people smaller and more alienated. This isn't the newspaper or the radio or TV or the internet, it's all of those and then some, and the worst parts mostly it seems.

We don't need anyone with half an idea to be able to make an "indie" game (not very independent when you first need to suck up everything any human created and put on the web, honestly, this makes the greediest AAA companies look like honest workers) or a "Hollywood level movie" in 5 minutes. Nobody has time to play/watch any of that crap.

The product isn't interesting. That a human made it is, because then I can think what of it I can or can't do. If it's just some artifact shat out by the collective human creativity mushed around until the output is nice, it's just in the way. The web is on the path to become a park full of turds, and you can search for a blade of grass all day.

AI companies may have no moats, but humans will make moats. Just some areas and communities where no "AI" stuff, regardless of hair splitting, is allowed. And then we'll see how pushy the proponents get, if it's really just about some cool new tool or rather some sort of harness everybody gets herded into, with some trinkets like all the slop and yet another "app" not even the maker actually uses.