An AI Hate Wave Is Here

I think that the creepiness of the tech CEOs that show up in media has a ton to do with this too, as they seem like cartoonish villians.

Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.

Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.

I remember reading about superstitious behavior in pigeons.

You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.

In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.

Right. It's not AI. It's the corporations behavior in relation to AI. But most people have no experience or interaction with AI outside of corporate services or AI features in things that shouldn't have AI or make it worse (like phone support). So in their lived experience all AI sucks and you can't blame 'em for that perception.

But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.

As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.

So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.

The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.

People also hard slop images

This seems to be a problem limited to specific metros. On the whole, Gen Z is more likely than millennials to be a homeowner at their age. Millennials in turn were more likely than Gen-X to own a home when Boomers were at that age. The idea that living standards and financial milestones have gone down for more recent generations doesn't seem to bear out, this Economist piece digs into detail: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...

Hopefully non-logged in users can at lease see the income-by-age graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=480,quality=10...

Fortunately the complaints about the economy and homeownership are also just folk wisdom that doesn't really reflect reality https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-gene...

The economy, real wages, etc are basically higher than ever (despite idiot Trump's best efforts).

People are mad because being mad is fun and we're all on being mad machines 24/7.

I have to wonder sometimes if the people of the US will ever realize that their housing shortages are self-inflicted. It seems like a massive number of people have somehow been hypnotized into thinking that building more homes increases home prices.

The idea of "all the public works ever created" is easily contested. Not every work has been "published", let alone scanned, digitised or published to the internet

The marketing for "AI" uses phrases like "the sum of all human knowledge" to refer to what has been used to create "models". The assumed irrelevance of non-published, "private" works is dubious if not absurd

The internet now allows potentially anyone to publish anything, e.g., via personal websites, social media pages, etc. But that doesnt mean everyone partakes. How much of the unfiltered garbage published by those who do has been used to create these "models"

"AI" companies will not reveal exactly what "works" were used to create the "models"

Have you caught these models violating copyright in responses?

Or are you saying that learning is a violation of copyright?

I actually completely disagree, and think that AI hate is just going to grow. My take is:

1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).

2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).

3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.

4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.

Luddite would imply people are burning data centers down to fight back. I don't think we're quite there yet.

I agree partly with your comment, but I want to add this perspective:

The dot-com era treatened and killed many jobs in banking (bank tellers and such). AI is now doing the same, but now it is threatening the jobs of consultants.

The tech industry is just eating itself. Other fields seem nowhere near as impacted.

> a luddite I am not

I have to bring this up every time someone brings up luddites. I'm a Luddite.

The Luddite movement was not "people scared of new technology". That's propaganda that's stuck around for far too long. Luddites were skilled craftspeople that saw businesses gleefully eliminating their jobs without any sort of plan or thought for what it'd do to their lives. They were weavers seeing industrial looms doing the job of 1000 weavers being managed by one child with 2 fewer fingers.

It's pretty directly analogous to AI. We see all the major property owners licking their lips at the notion that they can simply fire a huge portion of the workforce with no thought of "what will these people do now"? Most of them are happy for us to just go away and work for uber/doordash.

If AI reaches it's promises, we do not have the infrastructure to handle an economy where only a few wealthy owners rake in everything and the rest fight for pennies (which are sapped away from the current rent seeking economy).

Axios = Company

Madison Mills = reporter (no control over Axios)

AI wave timeline:

Investors throw money at AI and companies using AI

Company X sees investors throwing $$$ and starts dancing too

Axios (monkey see monkey do)

Future:

Investors stop throwing money then dancing stop.

That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.

Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.

> Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag.

Why would AI providers benefit from anti-AI propaganda?

> The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich

Are you seriously mulling that as a question?

It's always been this way, the branding changed.

Same happened in the dot-com boom. There was a bunch of folks who were in it because they were genuinely interested in building cool stuff. And then the money got interested, and suddenly there was a wave of scam artists and grifters. That receded (but never entirely went away) when the money bubble burst.