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I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

>They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.

Company goes under and they just start something else.

There's no real consequences. This is a club, not a market.

> The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.

It's a cute thought that big tech wants our help to shape artificial intelligence.

There's no evidence to suggest that poisoning impacts generative model training in 2026. Frontier labs spend billions on tightly focused training plans, developing assessments and pursuing the long tail of assessment failures.

> it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI

I think it was partly also PR. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for mindshare and Dalle-E, Sora, Nano banana, etc generated a lot of media buzz for Google and OpenAI at various points in time.

Let’s not forget about the total surveillance we’re heading into thanks to AI. I wouldn’t say the technology is the problem per say but everything around it is. AI could be used for good, if we only didn’t have psychopaths serving their own interests at the detriment of the rest of us

AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.

To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay.

Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.

It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage.

What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.

I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it".

You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating.

I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot.

I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same.

/I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice

That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.

I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is.

https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

True

AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight.

We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)

We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired.

This is what we keep being told.

So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.

To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping.

If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)

Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…

> AI is here to stay

I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.

How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.

If you can't fight them, join them.

That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.

> join them

Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.

I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.

The eschaton will devour the people who “join them” just as fast as the people who fight it.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

Meth is here to stay, too, and--damn--is it great for productivity.

This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes.

AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement.

When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.

It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.

> These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.

If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."

I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.

> If you can't fight them, join them.

This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you.

And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.

You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?

You don’t get to choose whether they allow you to join them.

Cool, fighting it is then.

Imagine making "AI Hater" as your personality

Doubt.

How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools?

Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming.

I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.

It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency.

Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".

If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution.

The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.

Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here.

Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.

Everybody will. You will not be spared. If you think you are a senior prompt whisperer and that will save you, that is going away in a year too.

If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?

Bingo

Not everyone is empty enough to be okay with participating in the expansion of something they strongly believe will be a net negative for the world.

This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?

That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.

Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.

I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on.

What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest.

- Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship"

- Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities

- The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general

- Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match

What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.

The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.

Everything is fundamentally energy. If you hate something you're just hating energy.

"AI" is a marketing term, LLMs and Difusion Models are math.

I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital.

People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.

> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.

Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.

Humans will not flourish if you remove their jobs, they will become violent criminals because they will have nothing else to fill their days and no purpose in their community.

People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.

Its fine to hate work, whatever. But you wouldn't quit your job today, so why would you want to be replaced by an AI today?

I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism.

Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.

Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.

Work sucks, but try paying bills without working. Try buying food.

Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.

Historians. Well, one. Well, he's not a historian. He's a biochemist and physiologist who has studied some anthropology.

It's Jared Diamond. That's who says agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

Ishmael is a good read.

I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way.

I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.

I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.

All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Saying that shunning the machine that is usurping human creativity and intelligence "anti intellectual" is pretty funny

I'm not an AI hater but the implication of your comment is that being on the AI train is the intellectual position, which is wild, given the AI hype is almost entirely from CEOs, who are the furthest thing from.

“anti-intellectual” judgment aside, I believe it’s just a meme (in the original definition of the word).

I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly.

It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable.

I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the same passion, but won't tell because the time isn't ripe yet.

I think social media is a big factor. Anti-AI posts and comments are very popular on mainstream Reddit subs at least. Not sure if its a cause or an effect or even external manipulation

> What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation

It's repeatedly stated that while it's still improving, AI is coming for the entry level positions and the juniors first. How many times have you seen AI described as "like an eager junior"?

> What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.

Why would that surprise you? They aren't stupid. They can see that people are trying to position AI as a way to replace them.

> But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.

What should be done then?

It is called 'jagged intelligence'. A lot progress was made in the last 2 years. Most notably reasoning models, tools use, harness progress. It takes time to build the skill to make those models useful, but they do provide a lot of value.

That is indeed the problem. And when you have to meticulously check everything that the LLM does (because you can't know where the hallucinations will be), it completely destroys any productivity benefits you would gain from having it write the code in the first place. Thus you wind up going no faster (if not slower) than you did in the first place. The only way to go super fast (the way some people claim they are) is to discard quality.

As has been pointed out over and over: the time consuming part of programming was never typing code into the computer, it was understanding the problem and the logic behind the code. Using an LLM only addresses the fast and easy part of programming, not the hard parts.

Or, maybe it's beginning of the end of social media. Might not be the worst idea.

The low-effort presentation perfectly matches the low-effort argument. Not a single second of human brainpower went into making this an it shows.

It's a new disruptive technology that has been around for 3 years, people will just stop caring about this as a topic with time. Right now it's just trendy and zeitgeisty to shit on AI, eventually people will get bored and move on to something else.

No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.

It will take a few years for the multigenerational dark age to set in, but eventually you too will realize that they had a point.

I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.

Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.

My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.

The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.

The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.

I think the most challenging part about these people is that it makes it so much harder to address real concerns with AI. I use it, but even I recognize that it needs to be considered carefully. I've been lucky in that most people who use AI that I've encountered have been willing to have great conversations on the pros and cons, the concerns, etc.

However, the moment som anti-AI person comes in, they immediately want to go scorched earth. I just wished they'd use even half this energy for something more impactful.

Being upset about blocked traffic for a protest but not upset that the rich are trying to kill off the labor market is the exact hilariously short sighted issue.

You don't need to have a "good knowledge" of a misused technology to hate it when it's used by malevolent people. In the same way I don't need to be a virologist to know that is better to avoid the flu, I don't need to be a ML/AI expert to see its direct detrimental effects on people, communities, and the internet as a whole.

I'm not sure what you mean because you didn't actually say it, but AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.

Source: https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...

Yeah, that figure of a billion comes from OpenAI directly, I wouldn't put too much stock in its validity or relevance.

Even just in my family, the attitude has shifted significantly over the last year. Most of my family members are now critical of it and its effects.

Add to this that if ~6B people are using the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage), and ChatGPT only has almost a billion users (and is the largest player in the space), then I’d argue that LLM-users are in fact the minority.

I'm not so sure the silent majority is positive on AI, I think the opposite is more likely. Let's not forget that national poll where it was less popular than ICE -- I think it was 26% positive vs 46% negative.

My view is AI is becoming a poster-child for the increasing wealth disparity. When people are negative on AI it's not just the technology but the entire idea around it. It's simply cool to hate AI and that's going to be a hard hill to overcome, I think.

People are much less binary.

A lot of people can hate the existence and most of the consequences of something yet use it, sparingly or addictively

People can hate impact of the car centric societies and its impact on the climate yet use a car and find it convenient when not overused.

Social medias is another example. A lot of people agree for the most part it didn't make our society better yet they are addicted to doomscroll on instagram or tiktok.

People can use chatgpt to get a picture of them in Myasaki style yet hate that AI can be used to get rid of jobs. Even at developers level, some people might find AI useful in some areas but hate vibecoding and AI slop.

I think the vast majority of people just "don't care" for all possible topics.

One can use it even while hating it.

There’s only a billion people on earth? You’re right that is the vast majority of people.

This is the old "why do protesters against capitalism have iPhones" defense.

it is very amusing to read delusional takes like "everyone hates AI" when everyone I know who uses a computer for work is increasingly reliant on chatbots.

I don't know how many times do these people need to be taught that their little bubble of terminally online folx is not "everyone". twice is not enough, apparently.