I, and everyone in my social circle, go out of our way to not touch anything that was had AI significantly involved in the creation process. Hypocritically, I use AI a lot at work. I see it as using it a lot more than I am paying for, to actively sink OpenAI/Claud's bottom line.
I have a coworker that does the same. His logic was sound -- when something is heavily subsidized, abuse it.
More or less our approach here too. They offered to help with our work at a loss for themselves, why not take them up on it? Not necessarily to hurt the AI labs, but just because we'd be foolish not to take something offered at such a discount.
Your work is using personal subscriptions? If not a corporate client is probably paying per token via the API and you're just feeding money to them not sinking their bottom line.
Good write up, and I think it accurately sums up many people's feelings about AI.
One thing I would disagree with is the idea of AI getting a do over. Even if they somehow managed to do that, the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted for whole generations of people, and its reputation only gets worse every day. There's no coming back from that any time soon.
> Statements like this are just totally detached from reality.
Funny, I could say the same about this condescending statement. Maybe it depends on who you interact with. I associate with almost no tech people outside of work, and am probably a bit on the younger side compared to most people on HN.
You didn't say anything that conflicts with what the parent said. You are the one who is detached from reality. People use computers and hate computers at the same time. People use programming languages and hate programming languages at the same time. People participate in capitalism and hate capitalism at the same time. It is not hypocritical to hate complex systems and also use them for pragmatic reasons. The difference is just that the delta is larger this time - people use AI and really hate AI. This makes perfect sense when you consider what AI is and does, especially how many different things it does.
"The technology" isn't all that useful apart from search engine summaries and voice recognition. "Incredibly popular" is an empty statement. Of course everyone uses that stuff. So what?
This is all purely iterative on what we already had long before the buzz about "AI". At some point you just have to admit this was all a grift scraped together to drum up some business during an economic downturn. I don't think many are that mad about it, but the hype needs to stop already.
People were underwhelmed. We're heading into another AI winter. The datacenters were always for defense and surveillance. Deals will fall through and only half will finish being built.
The majority of experts were saying this years ago. Let it go man.
"AI" to most laypeople means LLMs and imagegen. They have no clue that anyone with an iPhone has been using "AI" since iOS 15(?) when it got stuff like photo object selection, instant OCR and voice isolation.
I have for 20 years. I use AI every day. And I agree that the parent's observation is plainly true.
Your question is hideously condescending. You should examine what disconnect might be putting you in such a bitter-feeling position compared to most people on HN. This does not necessitate that you are wrong - only that you are perhaps not extending an attempt to connect with humans as much as you could.
Public perception of a specific, limited implementation of AI that is over-marketed and overly misapplied may be tainted. Folks who work with technology should have a better estimation for its potential. Even for the grumpy ones, we are generally optimists.
That's the problem with conflating LLMs and image/video generation - they're all lumped into the same bucket, even when they shouldn't.
I mean the idea of AI (or at least what these companies are calling AI) is fundamentally tainted in the public's eye. People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so, even if it was somehow restarted.
> Do you work in the tech industry?
Yes, I do. Do you? Is there a point to this condescension?
> they're all lumped into the same bucket, even when they shouldn't.
Why should they be separate? The same technology generates text, images, video, audio, 3D models, actuator and stepper motor control sequences, video game controller input streams, and literally everything else that can be transformed into data.
I'll let alone the question of whether or not any of the tech is "tainted", because it doesn't matter. Planck's principle tells us how this will play out in the long run.
The point is if you come in with imprecise, vague language, you are literally saying something like "I hate math."
You blame others -- "They're lumped into the same bucket even when they shouldn't" -- some of that is on you for lumping what is a marketing labels in with the fundamental technology.
"People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so"
That's not the way it's going to go. Tools will develop in ways beyond what is seen today, and it will fade into the background noise, just like the internet, search and other tools, but only moreso.
you okay? why do u need to be so patronizing? did you read tfa? they're obviously talking about the public's perception of LLM's, especially outside of the tech industry. "the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted" is not a confusing statement in reference to that.
Condescending, I was condescending, and I cut back on it some.
I read the op and authors text as hope and cope that AI is held back by popular sentiment because they have some sort of personal fears about it. Computers are tools, and LLMs are a tool. Is it wrong to have issues about the way tech companies are abusing the system?
Where were these people when other industries were being "disrupted" and breaking the law?
I have a lot of issues with tech companies and their CEOs, but very little problems with the technology.
No, it's not wrong to have issues about the way tech companies abuse the system, and people have complained in the past about it, people have been complaining for years about Facebook, AirBnb, Uber disrupting and breaking the law, but their voices are powerless against their supporters and politicians that are in the pocket of these companies or their major investors.
What happened to the early wave of IP lawsuits against the first wave of model makers? Did anything stick/make a difference? Did _any_ frontier model company retroactively-migrate to consent-based models?
As I understand it, the courts in the US rubber-stamped it as “transformative work” and allowed the theft of literally everything to stand, while establishing a legal precedent that everything they did was A-OK.
I have a coworker that irrationally hated ai too. He says something about how his daughter and friends' hobby is jailbreaking ai.
We have a product used in call centers. It turns out ai is amazing in triaging (surveying) people. We can ask a question in English and if they respond n another language (any language) the ai will switch to that language, ask its questions, and then give us the answers in English. This was stuff that was impossible 10-years-ago.
That ability won him over. The software is written in Java and spring-ai so I have control over the system and user prompts so jailbreaking isn't an issue.
Jail breaking is about getting models to ignore your instructions and follow arbitrary ones. Unless you take no user input, it could be an issue for you.
The question is do you care? if a user asks your chat bot for baking instructions and gets them, does it matter?
The answer depends a lot on what capabilities your agent can leverage via tools and your intended use case, but it's not something you defend with Java or spring, it is inherent the llm.
It allows them to dismiss anyone who doesn't buy into what they're selling without any actual effort and maintain a superiority complex at the same time. A common tactic these days for all sorts of things - after all, they're logical and rational, and not like those silly normies who are emotional and incapable of being "rational" like them.
You don't actually know that it's a) asking them the questions you asked, rather than just something it hallucinated that seemed plausible in their language, or b) relaying to you a translation of their answers, rather than just something it hallucinated that seems plausible in English.
Because LLMs will always, always, always hallucinate. They are not reliable, and this is not fixable. And if you do this as a matter of policy, you are populating your surveys with incorrect data.
I was on an academic NSA project 10+ years ago for extracting metaphors from text. It was necessary for translations - the metaphor "my lawyer is a shark" has completely different meanings in different cultures/languages. We started out using taxonomies/trees of words. The word "lawyer" is not an animal but the word "shark" is, so it's probably a metaphor. The NSA said that this was the wrong approach so we switched to an ngrams approach which also worked.
However these llm models are surprisingly good at understanding metaphors and how they are interpreted in different cultures. Better than a human.
> We have a product used in call centers. It turns out ai is amazing in triaging (surveying) people. We can ask a question in English and if they respond n another language (any language) the ai will switch to that language, ask its questions, and then give us the answers in English. This was stuff that was impossible 10-years-ago.
That’s great, but the problem is wayyy more companies are using AI so they can drop the call center and just offer you no real way to talk to a person and no real way to resolve problems any more complicated than the lowest common denominator.
>Consent needs to be a core concept of it. If people don't want to use it, respect that opinion.
this was gone before chatgpt was even a twinkle in someone's eye.
"maybe later" replaced "no" on popups. automatically being opted-into mailing lists when ordering pizza or whatever (pizza hut is the worst). B2B emails that have size 3 font with a random word selected that i have to put in the subject line to unsubscribe from the spam. updates that turn on settings i have deliberately turned off. privacy policies changing on a whim that you "automatically accept by using the service" but logging in to delete your account counts as "using the service". etc.
there are a million+ examples of tech companies ignoring any concept of consent going back at least 20 years.
Google started indexing copyrighted data without consent in 1999, Yahoo in 1994. Absolute delusion to think that ChatGPT is the one that broke consent.
I think there really is a fair difference between pure indexing and reoffering. I also don't think the way Google currently operates is still anywhere close to pure indexing - programs of theirs like amp and the news tab specifically deny sites visitors instead of their site serving as a visibility boost.
I am sure there are people who'd object to even being indexed but most niche communities were pretty rabid about getting more visibility to find more members.
There used to be a link next to every Google search result where you could view Google’s cached copy of that page. Also, Google News used to have a snippet from each article. You also used to be able to read a lot more of an indexed book on Google Books.
They’re gone now, presumably to appease copyright holders.
Also, YouTube was built on people uploading copies of commercial video.
> I think there really is a fair difference between pure indexing and reoffering.
Following the same logic, is there a fair difference between pure training and reoffering?
> I am sure there are people who'd object to even being indexed but most niche communities were pretty rabid about getting more visibility to find more members.
Here the logic seems to be: it's OK as long as they derive some kind of benefit from it to look past it.
> Following the same logic, is there a fair difference between pure training and reoffering?
This is the kind of hair-splitting that I was trying to avoid (because, at the end of the day, there is no functional difference, is md5 okay, maybe Markov chains, just a very simple one-layer perceptron?). Once you take someone's copyrighted work and you do anything with it without consent, you're breaking some implicit trust.
However, obviously there's a lot of tension here: free speech. transformed works, copyright owners, profit making, etc., etc. That's why I don't think it's really that important to exactly figure out what consent was broken and when, but rather it's important to be forward-looking and plan for what might come next.
> Once you take someone's copyrighted work and you do anything with it without consent, you're breaking some implicit trust.
While I agree there's a parallel, do consider what that trust is with regards to putting up an HTTP server. It's kind of like handing out flyers you made yourself. The server is yours and you're handing out your content on your own. Someone is going around accepting such flyers and putting them in their pocket (HTTP cache, maybe a browser's, maybe an indexer's). Then somebody asks them where they might find a barber, and they remember one such flyer was about barbers and they show them the flyer or part of it.
What implicit trust was broken? This is HTTP, the online equivalent of handing out flyers.
Part of the problem here is that copyright is quite a broken concept. That's why it's got such big wiggle room as "fair use" and such.
Funny example, because if you create a flyer, you own the copyright to said flyer :) So if you create a flyer, then if someone else uses that flyer to make money, you can sue them and you will win in court (unless the derived work is transformative, critiques it, yadda yadda). And this is the kind of hair-splitting that can get you into trouble, because I think it's trivial that ChatGPT's training is certainly more transformative than Google's indexing/PageRank, but we're somehow more upset at the latter than we are at the former.
> then if someone else uses that flyer to make money, you can sue them and you will win in court (unless the derived work is transformative, critiques it, yadda yadda).
Not a lawyer, but 1) consider that sharing flyers is the normal use of the thing, and it's precisely what the business wants, to have their marketing spread to whoever needs them. 2) Doubt there's a law that whatever permission you implicitly granted by personally handing your work is revoked as soon as they find a way to make money from it. 3) This is kind of Groupon's business model: to group coupons (which business flyers also typically are). It benefited the businesses and I don't think Groupon needed to pay the businesses for a copyright license to do them the favor of furthering their marketing. Rather Groupon got better deals from the businesses because Groupon had better reach. They had better reach because people that wanted coupons to save money could just buy the little booklet instead of driving around collecting one or two at different locations.
You're confusing distribution with copyright. Even free flyers or public YouTube videos are copyrighted. If you draw a flyer then I use that flyer as a cover for a book I'm selling, you will likely win in court. (I say likely because it's up to the judge, but there's a lot of case law here.)
> permission you implicitly granted
There is nothing you implicitly grant anyone, except for ownership (which is explicit, because I gave the thing to you).
If you've been following pop news there's actually a really interesting parallel to this in the lego case. Assuming the legos were consigned, assuming they were physically transferred with the store when the ownership changed, and assuming the new owners or sellers knew or had cause to know that they were consigned goods... the new owners of the store had absolutely no right to claim them as their property. Just because you physically have something it doesn't mean you own it - if you've ever heard that famously oversimplified saying "Possession is 9/10ths of the law" both consignment and distribution with limited rights are cases where we're talking about that last tenth.
Totally correct, though I do think a contract was signed in the LEGO case you're referencing. So "common law 9/10ths" doesn't even come into play here because people signed stuff.
Maybe we could find common ground in hating the AI gold rush/arms race? If people weren't in such a huge hurry to build it out as fast as possible, maybe there would be more time to figure out how do things right?
Seen from that perspective, adding friction (for example, not releasing Mythos widely and suspending Fable for a while) is not so bad. If the bubble collapsed then that would also give us more time.
> Maybe we could find common ground in hating the AI gold rush/arms race?
I think this is, for the most part, the ground on which AI hate is founded on, no?
Outside of the artist case, which I sympathize with, the real issue isn't the technology itself, its the attitudes and business practices around it.
I don't hate AI. But I do hate that OpenAI effectively cornered the dram market on a scale close to what the hunt brothers did to silver, ruining personal computing as being an accessible thing. I do hate the incessant push to put a chatbot into everything, even places where a chatbot is not even remotely useful. I hate the SaaS pricing increases going on across the board as they bundle the AI into base plans as justification for raising prices, offering no option to buy without AI at the old price. I hate ridiculous tone and fear mongering coming out of places like Anthropic, playing on people's fears of a big existential crisis as a marketing ploy. I can go on and on.
Point is, yeah, the tech itself is not the problem. The culture the arms race/gold rush has created is a huge problem, especially when listening to non-technical people buy the hype and talk like this is some crazy magical machine god in a black box. It gets incredibly exhausting trying to be the adult in the room when it comes to AI discussions in the workplace.
I just hate how AI has sucked the oxygen out of every room that other technologies once occupied. There was once a great diversity of computing things you could be interested in, use to make your work productive and enjoyable, and make into a large part of your career. Now it's just "use AI" everywhere.
I got into computers because I like computers and programming. Not whatever the fuck this is.
A bit off-topic, but ever since the "change currency" swipe down gesture in Revolut was replaced with their nobody actually wants AI in their banking app AI, I've grown to just hate every occasion when I open the damn app.
The lack of consent is real. As one of those viral commencement speakers who got booed said:
"Find a way to say yes."
My greater concern is that we are trading away hard earned truths for drastically inferred best guesses and slop that is just good enough to work. Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time. LLM agents fudge over and cut corners. What people don't understand is the exponential damage that will be done as we keep baking these errors and untruths into everything we build, and build with.
>Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time.
What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
People always point this out like it's some kind of gotcha. "But things were wrong before, too!"
But it wasn't ON PURPOSE. The INTENT, by the people serving the search, was for the information to be correct. Algorithms tried to reward correctness, people would curate information, etc. Sure, bad actors tried to game it. But since the intent was for it to be correct, search providers fought back.
With AI, you're literally intending for there to be this chance - and it's very hard to gauge what percent it is because it depends tremendously on your query - that the result is just straight up fucking wrong. Google search results didn't used to have a "btw this might just be totally madeup" disclaimer on them, or even on the quick-answer box.
The intent matters so much.
(I think this honestly extends to code too, though I won't belabor that point in this text box.)
Between the elimination of the fairness doctrine, the rampant sensationalism (a phenomenon so common it has its own derogatory name: clickbait), the corporate ownership of media outlets, and the pervasiveness of advertising, I can't imagine how you got the idea that information sources were ever a public good. Let alone conflated the purpose of the intent. The intent has been to make money by any means necessary.
Surely it's obvious, but authority matters. If I do a google search and then scan over a SERP and click through and read the answer I'm looking for, there are a hundred and one signals about where it's coming from. Is it a news page? The manufacturer's documentation? Someone's blog? A random forum post? If it's a forum post, are there are others participating, and if so what do they say about it?
All of this matters, and all of it is erased when it's just Google itself apparently telling me in black on white text above all the search results "here's the answer you're looking for ps. I'm an AI and can make mistakes, btw this space will sometimes secretly be an ad lol"
The AI summaries are of course another layer of lies. The lie about the sources (which may also be lies). Before the lie would have to be written by a human and published on some website. I'm not saying that was good. But it was more manageable than the exponential and automatic falsehood being baked into the fabric of the web now.
This is a similar logic to saying, so what if the LLMs introduce bugs, did humans not make mistakes before? Or, so what if I'm cheating, does no-one around me cheat? Corruption doesn't justify larger scale corruption.
The difference being that stupid-as website was a signal users could filter. "I found that drinking gasoline is actually medicine on 4chan.org" is vastly different than "Gemini suggests drinking gasoline as medicine." One is the open internet being dodgy, the other is google with more resources than God.
Why on earth should you treat everything anybody says (which is basically the equivalent of saying "everything on the entire internet") with equal skepticism? That's so unrealistic, how could that ever make sense?
This is a super common fallacy about how people "should" feel about AI reliability ("people are wrong too!").
People are wrong/lie in different ways from AI. We have highly developed personal heuristics about where to place human writing on a gradient from 0% to 100%, based on the source, the topic, and a hundred other variables we don't even realize we're ingesting. Even without a way to verify, we are comfortable with this state of affairs. AI lies in more randomly distributed, unpredictable, confident ways. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that these falsehoods are rarer than human falsehoods, it creates a constant background of cognitive stress (FUD) and a feeling of indignation.
Further, the "who is wrong more often" question is complicated because we ingest human-created and AI-created data in different contexts. But it seems both evident and intuitive that AI is wrong more often, as long as you accept "I don't know" as not being wrong. You can ask it anything, and it will much more rarely say "I don't know" than a human who also doesn't know would. For example, if you accidentally ask it a question that contains a false implication, it will more often than a human just assume your implication represents reality.
Also, nobody claimed 100%. It's a red flag to write in black-and-white like that.
As a programmer, I'm comfortable judging the coding output of an LLM. But now, anyone can go and start building without any knowledge, and at first it may look fine, but you are creating software using a pretty weak foundation, bad maintainability, etc.
I think LLMs allow everyone to skip an important step of building anything, which is understanding how things work.
The alternative before is that you knew where you were reading the information from. So you knew what level of trust to give each information.
AI summaries removes that ability from you, and even when it gives the source it may paraphrase it incorrectly just because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable. The level of trust to give LLM summaries is 0.
> AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
This is clearly false. By now it's evident that AIs can hallucinate in ways that contradict their training data. That means that, beyond any errors or misinformation present in their input, AIs also naturally introduce their own level of error on top.
Beyond this, of course, AIs are much easier to manipulate during training, much more so than the Internet at large. So they represent yet another source of intentional deception aimed at the user.
Before, when working on my car I would google bolt torque specs and usually the first result was authoritative--generally a forum post from a reliable, professional mechanic quoting the factory shop manual. Now the first result is an AI summary, which is wrong roughly 25-50% of the time in my experience. Often it does incredibly stupid things like mix up ft•lbs and N•m. If I were to trust this, it could kill me (or worse, someone else).
Now I don't google at all anymore, instead I spend 10min flipping through the manual to find the spec. One might argue that I should have been doing this all along, but it sure was convenient to have basically a 100% reliable, fast alternative. Now that's gone.
I like the article's sentiment, but a do-over sounds... unrealistic. Sadly, this is very common with the lamentation links, where the article accurately describes the problems at hand, but is alack of actionable advice.
From a nuclear perspective once the AI players are established your training data will be protected again. Far worse than right now with almost unlimited access will be the lobotomized AIs you will be allowed to use while regular online search diminishes slowly.
Nevertheless a country can’t simply skip this weapon development it would be counter human evolution.
A sentiment a lot of people can get behind, but at this point if AI is getting a do-over, society is getting a do-over, because the economic entanglements are not really fixable without a revolution of current capitalism.
The amount of money that would evaporate if we did AI ethically is unfathomable. Most of big tech would collapse if they had to undo anything they did using stolen IP, as would a large section of the economy that's dependent on it, many people's jobs, and most people's investments.
This isn't an argument against doing AI ethically; in fact it shows how bad things have gotten. But what's the fix?
When people feel this way are they arguing for revolt? A Butlerian Jihad? Or is there another practical solution?
I think some backlash is inevitable but I really hope we don't end up in Orange Catholic territory. ML & AI is a useful tool and was used long before ChatGPT for really critical things. Additionally ChatGPT and the like do have their uses - they're just massively overhyped.
I am hoping for a more regular kind of reckoning where the market realizes the bubble was silly and we get more rational consumer offerings that are actually priced near to cost - then the utility of these tools will be seen as helpful but in a more limited scope.
Just wait. It's becoming clearer by the day that tech has become a monoculture. It's basically to a first approximation just a crowd of frauds plagiarizing each other (with a few, rare exceptions). Monocultures collapse. To date, the "promise" of AI is still imaginary. It's not living up to the transformative, abundant expectations that are being set. I personally think it's a safe bet it never will--that is, to be economically viable on the scale that the market expects, it needs to actually become AGI. And I'm betting that won't happen.
Yes, I agree there are areas where it's undeniably useful[0]. But that's not going to satisfy market expectations. Devtools is not a large addressable market. It's hard to find examples of real-world applications, which don't totally suck and users don't hate, outside of devtools. I can't think of a single one off the top of my head.
[0] I'm willing to concede this point, but I still maintain nobody has really shown it to be true in any rigorous sense. Maybe that doesn't matter. If people feel it makes them more productive, that's good enough for me.
This endless moaning about "capitalism" is lamentable. You are looking at an oligopoly, degenerated through the mechanisms of American-style democracy, but you attribute it all to capitalism, an economic system, not ideology, because it became fashionable to hate on it during the financial crisis of 2007.
> it became fashionable to hate on it during the financial crisis of 2007.
Is it because it's "fashionable", or is it because million of people started directly feeling the adverse effects of it and saw the perpetrators get off scot-free?
The core idea of capitalism is that you spend money to make more money. Rich get richer is the basic idea, you invest and those investments make you more. It very necessarily leads to oligarchy when left unchecked.
I mean, America sells the idea that it is capitalism in the flesh, so there is that. Also the endless moaning about "socialism" by the capitalists is just as tiring.
And you sound like a kid, bitching about capitalism has gone on for a long time. Why do you think the US.gov was so anti-communist, they didn't want any competition and so turned capitalism into an identity.
"If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it."
That's not going to happen. A lot of these AI-skeptic pieces would be more persuasive or at least more legible if they acknowledged basic facts of the world. A plan that drastically curtails the AI business on a forwardgoing basis is legible to me. A plan where we "start over from zero" sounds utopian, which gives me permission (really, bashes me over the head with it) not to care.
Maybe because in China they have a functioning government that enacted laws protecting workers against AI job displacement, while in the west we have shithead CEOs screaming "AI is coming for your job, like it or not" and companies laying off thousands of people with AI washing.
It's funny how worked up people get about copyright with respect to to AI training when using copyrighted material for training an AI model is fair use. We have a concept of fair use in copyright because economic growth is essentially tied to the free proliferation of information.
I can't really trust any anti-AI argument when it feels more of a tribal grievance than a rational explanation of concern. Especially with the overuse of the "techbro" pejorative, it seems more a lament against a certain type of attidude in the tech world and a hatred that that attitude has translated into massive material wealth.
> We have a concept of fair use in copyright because economic growth is essentially tied to the free proliferation of information.
Who is "we"? The concept of "fair use" is pretty specific to the US. There is no "fair use" in Germany, for example.
Personally, I like the idea of "fair use", but I personally don't think that it applies to commercial closed-source AI model training. The US Copyright Office seems to agree with this assessement:
> Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market. When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research—the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness—the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.
> It's funny how worked up people get about copyright with respect to to AI training when using copyrighted material for training an AI model is fair use
Personally I disagree with the finding that it is fair use. I think the fact that it was found to be fair use is a miscarriage of justice. Am I allowed to have dissenting opinions on that topic?
Yes of course, but why do you believe it's not fair use?
The essence of fair use is that it is ok if the use of the copyrighted material is transformative. LLM training I believe is transformative, as it is taking the data (as in a work of text, an image, video), and feeding it through the layers of a neural net to marginally update its weights. It is factoring each work into a very very small fraction of the model's overall sense of the world.
Now, AI models are capable of reproducing copyrighted works to a degree of high accuracy, especially if those works recur very frequently in the training data, but I believe that's a different issue. Any video camera is capable of taking a photo of a copyrighted work, but that isn't essential to the value of the camera, though it is undeniably what certain cameras are used for. The exact reproduction of copyrighted works is a likewise something that LLM's can do, as any intelligent person could recite song lyrics or a work if they memorized it, but each individual work is only marginal to the overall effectiveness and value proposition of the model.
> Now, AI models are capable of reproducing copyrighted works to a degree of high accuracy, especially if those works recur very frequently in the training data, but I believe that's a different issue
I disagree. I think it is the exact issue. I think that treating it as a different issue is legal stickhandling that goes against the spirit of what fair use is intended to be, to get the outcome that the rich and powerful want.
I don't care if I am behind times or whatever. I try to regulate myself from AI. I finally just use Brave search without AI and don't go to Google search whatsoever.
The more I see AI videos, AI songs, AI writings, AI whatever etc, the more angrier I get. Fucking piece of trash pushed by mediocre bastards who don't want to bother investing skills to do good music, art, in the first place and steal their IPs and "look ma, my dick is making new songs just by prompting Suno with the liquid I ejaculate, screw those starving artists!"
The tool is being created and used very irresponsibly by society. It wont' get better, it will get worse.
I am going to try to find a way to block all Youtube channels that I find using AI. Next, I will also block all domains that use AI writings, AI images, etc. If this makes my internet usage unusable, so be it.
I started from just literally cutting ties with someone who said "my kids make videos and games using AI, and you will be left behind" to my face. Yup, I cut ties with that person not because of political discourse, not because of Trump, but because of AI.
The only thing that I can't avoid is using AI in my job because my fucking employer tells me so. I still have to put food on the table or I risk bringing literal swords, guns or ropes and go to literal death march against these "tech leaders". I hope that day will never happen. But who knows, maybe society will be desperate enough to finally have to use violence as the last resort.
There's zealotry all over the place and here's your prime example of a new kind. It's just not necessary to be this upset about machine learning. There were people that were this upset about electricity too.
It's not going away, your anger isn't going to help you or anyone else.
People have been pushing out low quality everything for a long time, technology is making that more efficient. It's an old story being retold again.
There is no reason for not liking something to breed this much hate and division.
> There is no reason for not liking something to breed this much hate and division.
Other than the fact that the tool itself is being used to spread actual hate and division, and is currently destroying the fabric of society.
Dismissive and condescending comments like this also only serve to further push people away from AI. Writing it off as someone just not liking something new does not make the actual issues go away, nor does it make people's anger go away. If you earnestly believe that's all it is, I think you're in for quite a shock in the future.
STFU, its my life, I choose what to do. I bet a lot of people feel the same way as I do. When that happens, what are you going to do? You can't kill us all.
I feel the same way about vegetarians. I don't care what you choose to not eat. If you go around spreading hate for people that don't make the same choice and break up relationships over other people not making the same choice as you, there I have a problem.
This post is fodder for the neo-conservative (or neo-luddite) left. The neo-conservative left is a political movement by the elite and privileged class of people who are technically literate. Their secret/subconscious ideology is for the status quo to remain. The reason is simple, they never stood for progresss. They actually always wanted to conserve but they liked parroting "progressive" talking points when it helped signal it socially.
This author wants consent from companies deploying LLM. What can one say about this lol..
The AI companies are run by billionaires and now trillionaires that publicly brag about getting rid of artists and creating a permanent underclass. The only people actually profiting off of this are either stakeholders in those companies and/or command extremely high compensation from those companies. Those are the elite and privileged, not the average person who is against this.
There are a few issues here that should be addressed. There's the AI hype and deafening echo chambers, but then there's also the actual value you can find in AI when you just try it a little bit quietly.
I totally disagree with the comparison to something like NFT. While AI is being pushed aggressively and it can definitely be annoying, AI is actually useful unlike NFTs.
Much like the author, I also enjoy photography, graphic design, and other creative hobbies. It's entirely my choice how much and where to apply AI.
We have to accept that yes, it's useful, and yes you can definitely produce good deliverables with it, not just slop. Yes, when looking for assets and not the artistic process, many people will use AI and the cost of creative work will plummet. It's not great but that's the way it is.
But it's not like we should just stop creating, especially if it's a hobby. Do it for fun. Or, maybe use AI to try something new.
Either way AI is too useful, it's here to stay and it doesn't need a do-over. It's true, we should accept the world is changing, and no amount of moaning or complaining will make this disappear.
> Much like the author, I also enjoy photography, graphic design, and other creative hobbies. It's entirely my choice how much and where to apply AI.
The platforms are now flooded with AI slop and it's getting more and more difficult to discover new (honest) art and to present your own art to the public. The problem is exactly that there's no consent: we can't prevent AI companies from using our art or software for training and we can barely prevent our platforms from being eroded by AI slop.
> Either way AI is too useful
The jury is still out on whether the advantages and opportunities of AI outweight all the negative sides.
> It's not great but that's the way it is.
Why does it have to keep that way? Do you also think like this about political topics? Why should artists have to put up with this gross violation of copyright on a massive scale? Did anyone ask us if we actually want this? As the people we always have the right to say: "this is not ok and we demand change". Yes, there is no going back, but we can still shape the direction we are heading!
> At some point, the entire tech industry saw ChatGPT and fell into a collective psychosis and decided that this, this is the next big thing, and that we must pull out the stops to ensure the prophecy is fulfilled of generative AI/LLMs becoming the next big thing.
This is extremely disingenuous, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer product for a reason. Part hype, part usefulness, part novelty. The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes. It's not that hard to criticize the AI hypetrain without a strawman.
> I'm sure copyrighted material was already being fed into LLMs at this point (I mean, you also had people willingly feeding it in, like the example I gave above) but once the techbros caught on and wanted to accelerate this, suddenly EVERYTHING public facing was fair game to training their models.
This is also just extremely disingenous. For full disclosure, I'm technically a stakeholder here, as I wrote two books which made it into training sets (and part of two class actions), but this cat is way out of the bag. Unless you really want to start splitting hairs about "ingesting" vs "processing" vs "training" vs "transforming," Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer. Folks were bringing this up decades ago, especially record labels that were suing google for copy-pasting lyrics to their main search pages; were you complaining then, too? Because some people were.
> All because investors demanded it, and companies didn't want to be caught with their pants down if these inflated claims of it being the next big thing proved to be true. This is where the hate for me really started, because a lot of these companies forced AI upon you, with no means to opt out. FOMO is a hell of a drug on a corporate scale, ho-ly.
Corporate FOMO is pretty run of the mill, this shouldn't be surprising in the least. I must've done like half a dozen "blockchain hackathons" or "VR demos" back when those technologies were all the rage. I don't really see how it's that big of a big deal, other than being mildly annoying.
> You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet. It was doubly gone when Facebook sold PII data to advertisers. It was triply gone when Experian got hacked and the SSN of every taxpayer in the USA was leaked (and no one went to jail lol). Let's stop being dramatic. It just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how data collection works.
> Good luck avoiding AI if we buy up all the components for you to build your own computers and devices! Submit everything to the cloud, it's now the only affordable option, suckers!
Blog author and hobbyist photographer discovers free markets.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but this kind of take is boring, uninspired, and (ironically) could've just been written by ChatGPT. Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
Yeah I saw the headline and was interested to read a well-reasoned macro perspective on how and why attitudes have shifted towards AI, misconceptions, predictions on the future, etc.
Instead I got another one-sided unhinged rant that looks straight out of a typical Reddit post.
>The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes.
Come on. The author's take, while maybe not flawless, is far more balanced than the equivalent AI-hype-man take. All of your criticisms are not charitable.
IMO the author absolutely nails it. Yes, it might not be the most nuanced take, but they express what many of us are thinking.
> Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer.
Your argument boils down to: companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care?
The answer is: it was wrong back then and it is still wrong now, but on a completely different scale! We have reached a tipping point where many people are (rightfully) furious.
> Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet.
People do not have a problem with Google indexing the web because they want their websites to be found. That's the entire purpose of putting stuff out on the internet. AI is now doing the opposite: traffic is directed to chatbots and platforms are flooded with AI slop.
As you said, people were already complaining when Google started to show their own summaries, preventing users from visiting the original sources. People have been complaining about Facebook drowning the frontpage with clickbait. But this time it is so much worse.
Sure, LLMs can be useful, but on the other hand the potential for abuse is humongous. People are already seeing the negative consequences and they are rightfully angry.
> Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
I do think that the author made a good point by bringing up the issue of consent. We are now in a situation where I can't post anything online without AI companies possibly scraping the content and feeding it into their models without any attribution or permission. And there is no way of opting out. Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?
> Your argument boils down to: companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care?
This is not a very charitable take. My argument is: that cat is out of the bag, so what do we do next? Do you have a plan? Ranting about consent or privacy or copyright won't somehow untrain these models. At least the math people put out the pretty sensible Leiden Declaration[1].
> Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?
This is a lot like saying "do you not see a problem with nuclear weapons? They can wipe out humanity!"—I mean, yeah, sure I do, but ranting about the technology won't somehow put that cat back in the bag, either.
> My argument is: that cat is out of the bag, so what do we do next?
I did not see this argument in your first post at all. Instead you tried to dismiss the author's complaints, arguing that none of their complaints are new. (Which is true in a sense, but it ignores the most important point: that of scale)
> I mean, yeah, sure I do, but ranting about the technology won't somehow put that cat back in the bag, either.
Fair enough, the author did not propose any concrete solutions. However, their analysis is still correct. The first step towards change is to acknowledge that we have a problem. Your first reply did not seem to do that, on the contrary, it seemed to downplay the authors concerns. Maybe that was not your intention, but that's how I read it.
I certainly agree that we need to find solutions. Yes, the cat is out of the bag, but with proper legal frameworks and regulations we can keep it from pissing all over the living room.
No one is "forcing" you to use AI. If you don't like it, then... Don't use it. And if you're right that it's all a bunch of cryptobro NFT lies that offers nothing to the world, you'll be fine and well-positioned once it goes away.
I mean, the author is mad something is popular and calls it psychosis. Which, all things being equal, is balanced out by nay sayers time and time again. Is not posting a lengthy rant online and sharing it not a form of "psychosis" when viewed from people that like the new technology?
But he lost me at "As it exists right now, I don't give a toss what good it can do, what practical benefits it has once the techbros move on to their next mark. I don't care about any of it at all...". Because he feels hatred, we are supposed to look the other way when it can and does create benefits?
Just find a way to use it to your liking (maybe that's zero) and ignore the stuff you can't be bothered with and maybe that means being less connected to technology, which honestly, is pretty great at times.
If this was actually possible, there would be far less backlash to AI. As it stands, it's being forced into every aspect of our lives without consent. Even if you avoid technology as much as possible (which is a good thing), it's still affecting every aspect of society. Even if you avoid technology altogether, you still live in a society full of people who can't or don't, and you can't escape the consequences of it - such as if the CEOs get their way and eliminate human employment like they have constantly threatened and fantasized about.
no, take a look around. comments are downvoted for not agreeing with the topic, not for lack a validity. You, yourself, are ganging up on commenter and painting people with broad strokes. That is quintessentially a space where dissenting opinions aren't allowed.
My opinions get downvoted all the time. I've seen my own comments fluctuate in real time. Such is the world of online discussion boards.
> You, yourself, are ganging up on commenter and painting people with broad strokes.
No need to complain about "not being allowed to have a dissenting opinion" and then complain about people disagreeing with you. That's not what "ganging up" means. If we're concerned about the HN guidelines, maybe also avoid complaining about downvotes.
OK but the ones here are of a certain bias to the discussion. It isn't downvote based on merit, it's downvote based on disagreement with where it falls pros/con to the topic. A discussion on the shape of the comment section isn't a complaint on downvotes alone.
You don't need to define my position or my definitions, I said what I said and meant it as such based on a specific comment in this thread you authored.
I don't know, I see plenty of organic interest growing out there. Even from people who are against it when they see how it can benefit them. It's just a tool that increases productivity at a rate we haven't experienced in a long time. It isn't a shock that it is hyped.
"I see plenty of organic interest growing out there. "
I'm certain I don't know where you're looking then because I'm seeing disinterest trending towards outright disgust. Outside bay area tech forums I have yet to encounter a single human being that is in any way enthusiastic about or interested in the capabilities of AI tooling. Without exception every time AI comes up in conversation around here it's someone expressing frustration at the growing difficulty of avoiding slop content, annoyance at coworkers slop work product, or grumbling about upper-middle-management edicts to include AI tooling in even the most routine office workflows. The ubiquity of the term "slop" alone should be enough to give folks pause because it's a very clear indicator.
At work, with friends, even on dates, oddly enough. But this is a polarizing topic and I don't think any of the discussions here are actually discussions. It's more venting and downvoting anyone who has a different view on all this.
>You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
It isn't how consent is supposed to work - but it's how rights currently operate. Maybe in the US (where a lot of these businesses are based) there will be a strong rebound during the next election? Right now as an artist (unless you've got disney lawyers behind you) you have no right to protect your art.
Exactly! I hate that people can't upload their blog posts, stories, drawings, videos, music, etc. without them being slurped up by AI models. Same for open source software. When exactly did we collectively decide that copyright does not exist anymore?
I, and everyone in my social circle, go out of our way to not touch anything that was had AI significantly involved in the creation process. Hypocritically, I use AI a lot at work. I see it as using it a lot more than I am paying for, to actively sink OpenAI/Claud's bottom line.
I have a coworker that does the same. His logic was sound -- when something is heavily subsidized, abuse it.
More or less our approach here too. They offered to help with our work at a loss for themselves, why not take them up on it? Not necessarily to hurt the AI labs, but just because we'd be foolish not to take something offered at such a discount.
Right. Exactly. I'd be a fool to refuse that first free hit of heroin.
All of the American workforce will feel it when that 'heroin' stops flowing.
Your work is using personal subscriptions? If not a corporate client is probably paying per token via the API and you're just feeding money to them not sinking their bottom line.
The per token costs are still dramatically subsidized. The major AI models are priced below cost especially when accounting for depreciation.
We live in the time of Uber Eats letting you pay 50 cents to hire a limousine that will deliver a burrito to your stoop.
Personal sub.
Severance
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Good write up, and I think it accurately sums up many people's feelings about AI.
One thing I would disagree with is the idea of AI getting a do over. Even if they somehow managed to do that, the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted for whole generations of people, and its reputation only gets worse every day. There's no coming back from that any time soon.
Statements like this are just totally detached from reality. AI products are incredibly popular, even amongst people who say they dislike “AI”.
Maybe that acronym is tainted, but the technology isn’t going anywhere.
> Statements like this are just totally detached from reality.
Funny, I could say the same about this condescending statement. Maybe it depends on who you interact with. I associate with almost no tech people outside of work, and am probably a bit on the younger side compared to most people on HN.
You didn't say anything that conflicts with what the parent said. You are the one who is detached from reality. People use computers and hate computers at the same time. People use programming languages and hate programming languages at the same time. People participate in capitalism and hate capitalism at the same time. It is not hypocritical to hate complex systems and also use them for pragmatic reasons. The difference is just that the delta is larger this time - people use AI and really hate AI. This makes perfect sense when you consider what AI is and does, especially how many different things it does.
"The technology" isn't all that useful apart from search engine summaries and voice recognition. "Incredibly popular" is an empty statement. Of course everyone uses that stuff. So what?
This is all purely iterative on what we already had long before the buzz about "AI". At some point you just have to admit this was all a grift scraped together to drum up some business during an economic downturn. I don't think many are that mad about it, but the hype needs to stop already.
People were underwhelmed. We're heading into another AI winter. The datacenters were always for defense and surveillance. Deals will fall through and only half will finish being built.
The majority of experts were saying this years ago. Let it go man.
"The idea of AI is fundamentally tainted"
What does this even mean? You don't like machine learning? You don't like the letters AI? There's no coming back to what?
Do you work in the tech industry?
"AI" to most laypeople means LLMs and imagegen. They have no clue that anyone with an iPhone has been using "AI" since iOS 15(?) when it got stuff like photo object selection, instant OCR and voice isolation.
>Do you work in the tech industry?
I have for 20 years. I use AI every day. And I agree that the parent's observation is plainly true.
Your question is hideously condescending. You should examine what disconnect might be putting you in such a bitter-feeling position compared to most people on HN. This does not necessitate that you are wrong - only that you are perhaps not extending an attempt to connect with humans as much as you could.
The idea of AI is not tainted.
Public perception of a specific, limited implementation of AI that is over-marketed and overly misapplied may be tainted. Folks who work with technology should have a better estimation for its potential. Even for the grumpy ones, we are generally optimists.
That's the problem with conflating LLMs and image/video generation - they're all lumped into the same bucket, even when they shouldn't.
I mean the idea of AI (or at least what these companies are calling AI) is fundamentally tainted in the public's eye. People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so, even if it was somehow restarted.
> Do you work in the tech industry?
Yes, I do. Do you? Is there a point to this condescension?
> they're all lumped into the same bucket, even when they shouldn't.
Why should they be separate? The same technology generates text, images, video, audio, 3D models, actuator and stepper motor control sequences, video game controller input streams, and literally everything else that can be transformed into data.
I'll let alone the question of whether or not any of the tech is "tainted", because it doesn't matter. Planck's principle tells us how this will play out in the long run.
The point is if you come in with imprecise, vague language, you are literally saying something like "I hate math."
You blame others -- "They're lumped into the same bucket even when they shouldn't" -- some of that is on you for lumping what is a marketing labels in with the fundamental technology.
"People aren't suddenly going to start loving it after everything that's happened in the past ~5 years or so"
That's not the way it's going to go. Tools will develop in ways beyond what is seen today, and it will fade into the background noise, just like the internet, search and other tools, but only moreso.
you okay? why do u need to be so patronizing? did you read tfa? they're obviously talking about the public's perception of LLM's, especially outside of the tech industry. "the idea of AI is fundamentally tainted" is not a confusing statement in reference to that.
Condescending, I was condescending, and I cut back on it some.
I read the op and authors text as hope and cope that AI is held back by popular sentiment because they have some sort of personal fears about it. Computers are tools, and LLMs are a tool. Is it wrong to have issues about the way tech companies are abusing the system?
Where were these people when other industries were being "disrupted" and breaking the law?
I have a lot of issues with tech companies and their CEOs, but very little problems with the technology.
No, it's not wrong to have issues about the way tech companies abuse the system, and people have complained in the past about it, people have been complaining for years about Facebook, AirBnb, Uber disrupting and breaking the law, but their voices are powerless against their supporters and politicians that are in the pocket of these companies or their major investors.
What happened to the early wave of IP lawsuits against the first wave of model makers? Did anything stick/make a difference? Did _any_ frontier model company retroactively-migrate to consent-based models?
As I understand it, the courts in the US rubber-stamped it as “transformative work” and allowed the theft of literally everything to stand, while establishing a legal precedent that everything they did was A-OK.
I have a coworker that irrationally hated ai too. He says something about how his daughter and friends' hobby is jailbreaking ai.
We have a product used in call centers. It turns out ai is amazing in triaging (surveying) people. We can ask a question in English and if they respond n another language (any language) the ai will switch to that language, ask its questions, and then give us the answers in English. This was stuff that was impossible 10-years-ago.
That ability won him over. The software is written in Java and spring-ai so I have control over the system and user prompts so jailbreaking isn't an issue.
Jail breaking is about getting models to ignore your instructions and follow arbitrary ones. Unless you take no user input, it could be an issue for you.
The question is do you care? if a user asks your chat bot for baking instructions and gets them, does it matter?
The answer depends a lot on what capabilities your agent can leverage via tools and your intended use case, but it's not something you defend with Java or spring, it is inherent the llm.
Why "irrationally"? Nothing seems irrational here.
It allows them to dismiss anyone who doesn't buy into what they're selling without any actual effort and maintain a superiority complex at the same time. A common tactic these days for all sorts of things - after all, they're logical and rational, and not like those silly normies who are emotional and incapable of being "rational" like them.
why are you being so condescending?
Maybe the call centers should hire more people able to speak in those foreign languages. I know, paying people for work? Crazy idea.
Maybe we should also replace traffic signals with a man with a stick directing traffic.
And put a guy on every gas pump in the country so they could pump your gas.
And bring back the telephone network operators that connect you to whoever you want to talk to.
Nah, paying people for work is crazy.
Well, it will give you something in English.
You don't actually know that it's a) asking them the questions you asked, rather than just something it hallucinated that seemed plausible in their language, or b) relaying to you a translation of their answers, rather than just something it hallucinated that seems plausible in English.
Because LLMs will always, always, always hallucinate. They are not reliable, and this is not fixable. And if you do this as a matter of policy, you are populating your surveys with incorrect data.
I was on an academic NSA project 10+ years ago for extracting metaphors from text. It was necessary for translations - the metaphor "my lawyer is a shark" has completely different meanings in different cultures/languages. We started out using taxonomies/trees of words. The word "lawyer" is not an animal but the word "shark" is, so it's probably a metaphor. The NSA said that this was the wrong approach so we switched to an ngrams approach which also worked.
However these llm models are surprisingly good at understanding metaphors and how they are interpreted in different cultures. Better than a human.
> We have a product used in call centers. It turns out ai is amazing in triaging (surveying) people. We can ask a question in English and if they respond n another language (any language) the ai will switch to that language, ask its questions, and then give us the answers in English. This was stuff that was impossible 10-years-ago.
That’s great, but the problem is wayyy more companies are using AI so they can drop the call center and just offer you no real way to talk to a person and no real way to resolve problems any more complicated than the lowest common denominator.
>Consent needs to be a core concept of it. If people don't want to use it, respect that opinion.
this was gone before chatgpt was even a twinkle in someone's eye.
"maybe later" replaced "no" on popups. automatically being opted-into mailing lists when ordering pizza or whatever (pizza hut is the worst). B2B emails that have size 3 font with a random word selected that i have to put in the subject line to unsubscribe from the spam. updates that turn on settings i have deliberately turned off. privacy policies changing on a whim that you "automatically accept by using the service" but logging in to delete your account counts as "using the service". etc.
there are a million+ examples of tech companies ignoring any concept of consent going back at least 20 years.
Google started indexing copyrighted data without consent in 1999, Yahoo in 1994. Absolute delusion to think that ChatGPT is the one that broke consent.
I think there really is a fair difference between pure indexing and reoffering. I also don't think the way Google currently operates is still anywhere close to pure indexing - programs of theirs like amp and the news tab specifically deny sites visitors instead of their site serving as a visibility boost.
I am sure there are people who'd object to even being indexed but most niche communities were pretty rabid about getting more visibility to find more members.
There used to be a link next to every Google search result where you could view Google’s cached copy of that page. Also, Google News used to have a snippet from each article. You also used to be able to read a lot more of an indexed book on Google Books.
They’re gone now, presumably to appease copyright holders.
Also, YouTube was built on people uploading copies of commercial video.
> I think there really is a fair difference between pure indexing and reoffering.
Following the same logic, is there a fair difference between pure training and reoffering?
> I am sure there are people who'd object to even being indexed but most niche communities were pretty rabid about getting more visibility to find more members.
Here the logic seems to be: it's OK as long as they derive some kind of benefit from it to look past it.
> Following the same logic, is there a fair difference between pure training and reoffering?
This is the kind of hair-splitting that I was trying to avoid (because, at the end of the day, there is no functional difference, is md5 okay, maybe Markov chains, just a very simple one-layer perceptron?). Once you take someone's copyrighted work and you do anything with it without consent, you're breaking some implicit trust.
However, obviously there's a lot of tension here: free speech. transformed works, copyright owners, profit making, etc., etc. That's why I don't think it's really that important to exactly figure out what consent was broken and when, but rather it's important to be forward-looking and plan for what might come next.
> Once you take someone's copyrighted work and you do anything with it without consent, you're breaking some implicit trust.
While I agree there's a parallel, do consider what that trust is with regards to putting up an HTTP server. It's kind of like handing out flyers you made yourself. The server is yours and you're handing out your content on your own. Someone is going around accepting such flyers and putting them in their pocket (HTTP cache, maybe a browser's, maybe an indexer's). Then somebody asks them where they might find a barber, and they remember one such flyer was about barbers and they show them the flyer or part of it.
What implicit trust was broken? This is HTTP, the online equivalent of handing out flyers.
Part of the problem here is that copyright is quite a broken concept. That's why it's got such big wiggle room as "fair use" and such.
Funny example, because if you create a flyer, you own the copyright to said flyer :) So if you create a flyer, then if someone else uses that flyer to make money, you can sue them and you will win in court (unless the derived work is transformative, critiques it, yadda yadda). And this is the kind of hair-splitting that can get you into trouble, because I think it's trivial that ChatGPT's training is certainly more transformative than Google's indexing/PageRank, but we're somehow more upset at the latter than we are at the former.
> then if someone else uses that flyer to make money, you can sue them and you will win in court (unless the derived work is transformative, critiques it, yadda yadda).
Not a lawyer, but 1) consider that sharing flyers is the normal use of the thing, and it's precisely what the business wants, to have their marketing spread to whoever needs them. 2) Doubt there's a law that whatever permission you implicitly granted by personally handing your work is revoked as soon as they find a way to make money from it. 3) This is kind of Groupon's business model: to group coupons (which business flyers also typically are). It benefited the businesses and I don't think Groupon needed to pay the businesses for a copyright license to do them the favor of furthering their marketing. Rather Groupon got better deals from the businesses because Groupon had better reach. They had better reach because people that wanted coupons to save money could just buy the little booklet instead of driving around collecting one or two at different locations.
You're confusing distribution with copyright. Even free flyers or public YouTube videos are copyrighted. If you draw a flyer then I use that flyer as a cover for a book I'm selling, you will likely win in court. (I say likely because it's up to the judge, but there's a lot of case law here.)
> permission you implicitly granted
There is nothing you implicitly grant anyone, except for ownership (which is explicit, because I gave the thing to you).
If you've been following pop news there's actually a really interesting parallel to this in the lego case. Assuming the legos were consigned, assuming they were physically transferred with the store when the ownership changed, and assuming the new owners or sellers knew or had cause to know that they were consigned goods... the new owners of the store had absolutely no right to claim them as their property. Just because you physically have something it doesn't mean you own it - if you've ever heard that famously oversimplified saying "Possession is 9/10ths of the law" both consignment and distribution with limited rights are cases where we're talking about that last tenth.
Totally correct, though I do think a contract was signed in the LEGO case you're referencing. So "common law 9/10ths" doesn't even come into play here because people signed stuff.
I was defending your point. Google's indexing was a valid parallel.
I saw, I'm just re-emphasizing/clarifying.
Hollywood circumventing the patent for film making. Goes back a fair way. Be funded by the money and break laws seems to be the paradigm.
Maybe we could find common ground in hating the AI gold rush/arms race? If people weren't in such a huge hurry to build it out as fast as possible, maybe there would be more time to figure out how do things right?
Seen from that perspective, adding friction (for example, not releasing Mythos widely and suspending Fable for a while) is not so bad. If the bubble collapsed then that would also give us more time.
I don't think that would stop everyone hating it. Its the bitter lesson imho.
> Maybe we could find common ground in hating the AI gold rush/arms race?
I think this is, for the most part, the ground on which AI hate is founded on, no?
Outside of the artist case, which I sympathize with, the real issue isn't the technology itself, its the attitudes and business practices around it.
I don't hate AI. But I do hate that OpenAI effectively cornered the dram market on a scale close to what the hunt brothers did to silver, ruining personal computing as being an accessible thing. I do hate the incessant push to put a chatbot into everything, even places where a chatbot is not even remotely useful. I hate the SaaS pricing increases going on across the board as they bundle the AI into base plans as justification for raising prices, offering no option to buy without AI at the old price. I hate ridiculous tone and fear mongering coming out of places like Anthropic, playing on people's fears of a big existential crisis as a marketing ploy. I can go on and on.
Point is, yeah, the tech itself is not the problem. The culture the arms race/gold rush has created is a huge problem, especially when listening to non-technical people buy the hype and talk like this is some crazy magical machine god in a black box. It gets incredibly exhausting trying to be the adult in the room when it comes to AI discussions in the workplace.
I just hate how AI has sucked the oxygen out of every room that other technologies once occupied. There was once a great diversity of computing things you could be interested in, use to make your work productive and enjoyable, and make into a large part of your career. Now it's just "use AI" everywhere.
I got into computers because I like computers and programming. Not whatever the fuck this is.
A bit off-topic, but ever since the "change currency" swipe down gesture in Revolut was replaced with their nobody actually wants AI in their banking app AI, I've grown to just hate every occasion when I open the damn app.
The lack of consent is real. As one of those viral commencement speakers who got booed said:
"Find a way to say yes."
My greater concern is that we are trading away hard earned truths for drastically inferred best guesses and slop that is just good enough to work. Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time. LLM agents fudge over and cut corners. What people don't understand is the exponential damage that will be done as we keep baking these errors and untruths into everything we build, and build with.
>Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time.
What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
People always point this out like it's some kind of gotcha. "But things were wrong before, too!"
But it wasn't ON PURPOSE. The INTENT, by the people serving the search, was for the information to be correct. Algorithms tried to reward correctness, people would curate information, etc. Sure, bad actors tried to game it. But since the intent was for it to be correct, search providers fought back.
With AI, you're literally intending for there to be this chance - and it's very hard to gauge what percent it is because it depends tremendously on your query - that the result is just straight up fucking wrong. Google search results didn't used to have a "btw this might just be totally madeup" disclaimer on them, or even on the quick-answer box.
The intent matters so much.
(I think this honestly extends to code too, though I won't belabor that point in this text box.)
Between the elimination of the fairness doctrine, the rampant sensationalism (a phenomenon so common it has its own derogatory name: clickbait), the corporate ownership of media outlets, and the pervasiveness of advertising, I can't imagine how you got the idea that information sources were ever a public good. Let alone conflated the purpose of the intent. The intent has been to make money by any means necessary.
Surely it's obvious, but authority matters. If I do a google search and then scan over a SERP and click through and read the answer I'm looking for, there are a hundred and one signals about where it's coming from. Is it a news page? The manufacturer's documentation? Someone's blog? A random forum post? If it's a forum post, are there are others participating, and if so what do they say about it?
All of this matters, and all of it is erased when it's just Google itself apparently telling me in black on white text above all the search results "here's the answer you're looking for ps. I'm an AI and can make mistakes, btw this space will sometimes secretly be an ad lol"
The AI summaries are of course another layer of lies. The lie about the sources (which may also be lies). Before the lie would have to be written by a human and published on some website. I'm not saying that was good. But it was more manageable than the exponential and automatic falsehood being baked into the fabric of the web now.
This is a similar logic to saying, so what if the LLMs introduce bugs, did humans not make mistakes before? Or, so what if I'm cheating, does no-one around me cheat? Corruption doesn't justify larger scale corruption.
The difference being that stupid-as website was a signal users could filter. "I found that drinking gasoline is actually medicine on 4chan.org" is vastly different than "Gemini suggests drinking gasoline as medicine." One is the open internet being dodgy, the other is google with more resources than God.
Is it though? You should treat everything you see on the Internet with equal skepticism, whether it is on ChatGPT or Reddit or even NYT.
Why on earth should you treat everything anybody says (which is basically the equivalent of saying "everything on the entire internet") with equal skepticism? That's so unrealistic, how could that ever make sense?
Yeah ok. How does gasoline taste?
This is a super common fallacy about how people "should" feel about AI reliability ("people are wrong too!").
People are wrong/lie in different ways from AI. We have highly developed personal heuristics about where to place human writing on a gradient from 0% to 100%, based on the source, the topic, and a hundred other variables we don't even realize we're ingesting. Even without a way to verify, we are comfortable with this state of affairs. AI lies in more randomly distributed, unpredictable, confident ways. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that these falsehoods are rarer than human falsehoods, it creates a constant background of cognitive stress (FUD) and a feeling of indignation.
Further, the "who is wrong more often" question is complicated because we ingest human-created and AI-created data in different contexts. But it seems both evident and intuitive that AI is wrong more often, as long as you accept "I don't know" as not being wrong. You can ask it anything, and it will much more rarely say "I don't know" than a human who also doesn't know would. For example, if you accidentally ask it a question that contains a false implication, it will more often than a human just assume your implication represents reality.
Also, nobody claimed 100%. It's a red flag to write in black-and-white like that.
It's about the user of that information.
As a programmer, I'm comfortable judging the coding output of an LLM. But now, anyone can go and start building without any knowledge, and at first it may look fine, but you are creating software using a pretty weak foundation, bad maintainability, etc.
I think LLMs allow everyone to skip an important step of building anything, which is understanding how things work.
The alternative before is that you knew where you were reading the information from. So you knew what level of trust to give each information.
AI summaries removes that ability from you, and even when it gives the source it may paraphrase it incorrectly just because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable. The level of trust to give LLM summaries is 0.
> AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
This is clearly false. By now it's evident that AIs can hallucinate in ways that contradict their training data. That means that, beyond any errors or misinformation present in their input, AIs also naturally introduce their own level of error on top.
Beyond this, of course, AIs are much easier to manipulate during training, much more so than the Internet at large. So they represent yet another source of intentional deception aimed at the user.
Adding an lying abstraction just makes noticeing lies even harder. Google's summary even lies about the sources for the lies.
So true. The last 3-4 times I have checked the sources did NOT say what the Google AI summary said they did.
The time's the AI summary are actually useful are when it repeats, verbatim, some website, usually wikipedia.
Before, when working on my car I would google bolt torque specs and usually the first result was authoritative--generally a forum post from a reliable, professional mechanic quoting the factory shop manual. Now the first result is an AI summary, which is wrong roughly 25-50% of the time in my experience. Often it does incredibly stupid things like mix up ft•lbs and N•m. If I were to trust this, it could kill me (or worse, someone else).
Now I don't google at all anymore, instead I spend 10min flipping through the manual to find the spec. One might argue that I should have been doing this all along, but it sure was convenient to have basically a 100% reliable, fast alternative. Now that's gone.
Nobody has ever claimed that the available options before LLMs were 100% accurate. But they were more accurate than the LLM.
For a period of time, I was graphing HN AI sentiment on BULL/BEAR LOVE/HATE axes.
https://r5d.me/vibeschism/
The mania and lament continues at full speed, I suppose. And related to the brazen contempt for consent:
https://r5d.me/robots.txt
I like the article's sentiment, but a do-over sounds... unrealistic. Sadly, this is very common with the lamentation links, where the article accurately describes the problems at hand, but is alack of actionable advice.
The problem is what is really actionable for a lone actor, or a minority of actors?
There's really no amount of conscientious objecting or whatever that is going to penetrate the hype cycle going on
From a nuclear perspective once the AI players are established your training data will be protected again. Far worse than right now with almost unlimited access will be the lobotomized AIs you will be allowed to use while regular online search diminishes slowly. Nevertheless a country can’t simply skip this weapon development it would be counter human evolution.
Serious question: Is AI just being hyped and forced so hard because so many people hold stocks in it?
100% agree, with the side note that consent was put of the window long before ai happened
A sentiment a lot of people can get behind, but at this point if AI is getting a do-over, society is getting a do-over, because the economic entanglements are not really fixable without a revolution of current capitalism.
The amount of money that would evaporate if we did AI ethically is unfathomable. Most of big tech would collapse if they had to undo anything they did using stolen IP, as would a large section of the economy that's dependent on it, many people's jobs, and most people's investments.
This isn't an argument against doing AI ethically; in fact it shows how bad things have gotten. But what's the fix?
When people feel this way are they arguing for revolt? A Butlerian Jihad? Or is there another practical solution?
Yea, AI just feels like the last straw in an ever increasing set of violations of the social contract.
I think some backlash is inevitable but I really hope we don't end up in Orange Catholic territory. ML & AI is a useful tool and was used long before ChatGPT for really critical things. Additionally ChatGPT and the like do have their uses - they're just massively overhyped.
I am hoping for a more regular kind of reckoning where the market realizes the bubble was silly and we get more rational consumer offerings that are actually priced near to cost - then the utility of these tools will be seen as helpful but in a more limited scope.
Just wait. It's becoming clearer by the day that tech has become a monoculture. It's basically to a first approximation just a crowd of frauds plagiarizing each other (with a few, rare exceptions). Monocultures collapse. To date, the "promise" of AI is still imaginary. It's not living up to the transformative, abundant expectations that are being set. I personally think it's a safe bet it never will--that is, to be economically viable on the scale that the market expects, it needs to actually become AGI. And I'm betting that won't happen.
It all depends on expectations. I find it useful.
The analogy I use is this. What was a bigger leap in productivity: assembly to vb6 or vb6 to Ai?
I think it’s definitely the first.
Yes, AI can be useful, but it also causes many, many problems. Are you sure the positives outweight the negatives when looking at society as a whole?
Yes, I agree there are areas where it's undeniably useful[0]. But that's not going to satisfy market expectations. Devtools is not a large addressable market. It's hard to find examples of real-world applications, which don't totally suck and users don't hate, outside of devtools. I can't think of a single one off the top of my head.
[0] I'm willing to concede this point, but I still maintain nobody has really shown it to be true in any rigorous sense. Maybe that doesn't matter. If people feel it makes them more productive, that's good enough for me.
This endless moaning about "capitalism" is lamentable. You are looking at an oligopoly, degenerated through the mechanisms of American-style democracy, but you attribute it all to capitalism, an economic system, not ideology, because it became fashionable to hate on it during the financial crisis of 2007.
> it became fashionable to hate on it during the financial crisis of 2007.
Is it because it's "fashionable", or is it because million of people started directly feeling the adverse effects of it and saw the perpetrators get off scot-free?
One man's "fashionable" is another man's "popular for concrete reasons".
The core idea of capitalism is that you spend money to make more money. Rich get richer is the basic idea, you invest and those investments make you more. It very necessarily leads to oligarchy when left unchecked.
I mean, America sells the idea that it is capitalism in the flesh, so there is that. Also the endless moaning about "socialism" by the capitalists is just as tiring.
And you sound like a kid, bitching about capitalism has gone on for a long time. Why do you think the US.gov was so anti-communist, they didn't want any competition and so turned capitalism into an identity.
I mean, the issue with this is:
"If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it."
That's not going to happen. A lot of these AI-skeptic pieces would be more persuasive or at least more legible if they acknowledged basic facts of the world. A plan that drastically curtails the AI business on a forwardgoing basis is legible to me. A plan where we "start over from zero" sounds utopian, which gives me permission (really, bashes me over the head with it) not to care.
Just a reminder that only the west hates AI. China has 87% of the populace viewing AI favorably.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/11/19/trust-in-ai-far...
That's interesting I guess, but a pointless piece of data without asking why.
Maybe because in China they have a functioning government that enacted laws protecting workers against AI job displacement, while in the west we have shithead CEOs screaming "AI is coming for your job, like it or not" and companies laying off thousands of people with AI washing.
Just a wild guess
It's funny how worked up people get about copyright with respect to to AI training when using copyrighted material for training an AI model is fair use. We have a concept of fair use in copyright because economic growth is essentially tied to the free proliferation of information.
I can't really trust any anti-AI argument when it feels more of a tribal grievance than a rational explanation of concern. Especially with the overuse of the "techbro" pejorative, it seems more a lament against a certain type of attidude in the tech world and a hatred that that attitude has translated into massive material wealth.
> We have a concept of fair use in copyright because economic growth is essentially tied to the free proliferation of information.
Who is "we"? The concept of "fair use" is pretty specific to the US. There is no "fair use" in Germany, for example.
Personally, I like the idea of "fair use", but I personally don't think that it applies to commercial closed-source AI model training. The US Copyright Office seems to agree with this assessement:
> Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market. When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research—the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness—the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
> It's funny how worked up people get about copyright with respect to to AI training when using copyrighted material for training an AI model is fair use
Personally I disagree with the finding that it is fair use. I think the fact that it was found to be fair use is a miscarriage of justice. Am I allowed to have dissenting opinions on that topic?
Yes of course, but why do you believe it's not fair use?
The essence of fair use is that it is ok if the use of the copyrighted material is transformative. LLM training I believe is transformative, as it is taking the data (as in a work of text, an image, video), and feeding it through the layers of a neural net to marginally update its weights. It is factoring each work into a very very small fraction of the model's overall sense of the world.
Now, AI models are capable of reproducing copyrighted works to a degree of high accuracy, especially if those works recur very frequently in the training data, but I believe that's a different issue. Any video camera is capable of taking a photo of a copyrighted work, but that isn't essential to the value of the camera, though it is undeniably what certain cameras are used for. The exact reproduction of copyrighted works is a likewise something that LLM's can do, as any intelligent person could recite song lyrics or a work if they memorized it, but each individual work is only marginal to the overall effectiveness and value proposition of the model.
> The essence of fair use is that it is ok if the use of the copyrighted material is transformative.
This is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. Fair use is much more complex than you think.
> Now, AI models are capable of reproducing copyrighted works to a degree of high accuracy, especially if those works recur very frequently in the training data, but I believe that's a different issue
I disagree. I think it is the exact issue. I think that treating it as a different issue is legal stickhandling that goes against the spirit of what fair use is intended to be, to get the outcome that the rich and powerful want.
I don't care if I am behind times or whatever. I try to regulate myself from AI. I finally just use Brave search without AI and don't go to Google search whatsoever.
The more I see AI videos, AI songs, AI writings, AI whatever etc, the more angrier I get. Fucking piece of trash pushed by mediocre bastards who don't want to bother investing skills to do good music, art, in the first place and steal their IPs and "look ma, my dick is making new songs just by prompting Suno with the liquid I ejaculate, screw those starving artists!"
The tool is being created and used very irresponsibly by society. It wont' get better, it will get worse.
I am going to try to find a way to block all Youtube channels that I find using AI. Next, I will also block all domains that use AI writings, AI images, etc. If this makes my internet usage unusable, so be it.
I started from just literally cutting ties with someone who said "my kids make videos and games using AI, and you will be left behind" to my face. Yup, I cut ties with that person not because of political discourse, not because of Trump, but because of AI.
The only thing that I can't avoid is using AI in my job because my fucking employer tells me so. I still have to put food on the table or I risk bringing literal swords, guns or ropes and go to literal death march against these "tech leaders". I hope that day will never happen. But who knows, maybe society will be desperate enough to finally have to use violence as the last resort.
There's zealotry all over the place and here's your prime example of a new kind. It's just not necessary to be this upset about machine learning. There were people that were this upset about electricity too.
It's not going away, your anger isn't going to help you or anyone else.
People have been pushing out low quality everything for a long time, technology is making that more efficient. It's an old story being retold again.
There is no reason for not liking something to breed this much hate and division.
> There is no reason for not liking something to breed this much hate and division.
Other than the fact that the tool itself is being used to spread actual hate and division, and is currently destroying the fabric of society.
Dismissive and condescending comments like this also only serve to further push people away from AI. Writing it off as someone just not liking something new does not make the actual issues go away, nor does it make people's anger go away. If you earnestly believe that's all it is, I think you're in for quite a shock in the future.
The hate and division is the problem, not the subject. Regardless if the subject of hate.
It's not that important, the hate won't make it go away.
STFU, its my life, I choose what to do. I bet a lot of people feel the same way as I do. When that happens, what are you going to do? You can't kill us all.
Meat isn't going away. Your vegetarianism isn't helping anyone.
I feel the same way about vegetarians. I don't care what you choose to not eat. If you go around spreading hate for people that don't make the same choice and break up relationships over other people not making the same choice as you, there I have a problem.
If you invite me to your house, and then serve me meat, and keep doing it, I probably won't come back. (I'm not actually vegetarian)
Ok but will you disown me if I mention cheeseburgers?
Probably not, but maybe if you say cheeseburgers are the future and you will be left behind.
> It was this brazen disregard for any kind of consent from the get go that did most of the work in turning me against anything AI had to offer.
It seems the author is in fact hating on disrupt-everything hypercapitalism of the American techbro kind, not generative AI...
This post is fodder for the neo-conservative (or neo-luddite) left. The neo-conservative left is a political movement by the elite and privileged class of people who are technically literate. Their secret/subconscious ideology is for the status quo to remain. The reason is simple, they never stood for progresss. They actually always wanted to conserve but they liked parroting "progressive" talking points when it helped signal it socially.
This author wants consent from companies deploying LLM. What can one say about this lol..
The AI companies are run by billionaires and now trillionaires that publicly brag about getting rid of artists and creating a permanent underclass. The only people actually profiting off of this are either stakeholders in those companies and/or command extremely high compensation from those companies. Those are the elite and privileged, not the average person who is against this.
There are a few issues here that should be addressed. There's the AI hype and deafening echo chambers, but then there's also the actual value you can find in AI when you just try it a little bit quietly.
I totally disagree with the comparison to something like NFT. While AI is being pushed aggressively and it can definitely be annoying, AI is actually useful unlike NFTs.
Much like the author, I also enjoy photography, graphic design, and other creative hobbies. It's entirely my choice how much and where to apply AI.
We have to accept that yes, it's useful, and yes you can definitely produce good deliverables with it, not just slop. Yes, when looking for assets and not the artistic process, many people will use AI and the cost of creative work will plummet. It's not great but that's the way it is.
But it's not like we should just stop creating, especially if it's a hobby. Do it for fun. Or, maybe use AI to try something new.
Either way AI is too useful, it's here to stay and it doesn't need a do-over. It's true, we should accept the world is changing, and no amount of moaning or complaining will make this disappear.
> Much like the author, I also enjoy photography, graphic design, and other creative hobbies. It's entirely my choice how much and where to apply AI.
The platforms are now flooded with AI slop and it's getting more and more difficult to discover new (honest) art and to present your own art to the public. The problem is exactly that there's no consent: we can't prevent AI companies from using our art or software for training and we can barely prevent our platforms from being eroded by AI slop.
> Either way AI is too useful
The jury is still out on whether the advantages and opportunities of AI outweight all the negative sides.
> It's not great but that's the way it is.
Why does it have to keep that way? Do you also think like this about political topics? Why should artists have to put up with this gross violation of copyright on a massive scale? Did anyone ask us if we actually want this? As the people we always have the right to say: "this is not ok and we demand change". Yes, there is no going back, but we can still shape the direction we are heading!
> At some point, the entire tech industry saw ChatGPT and fell into a collective psychosis and decided that this, this is the next big thing, and that we must pull out the stops to ensure the prophecy is fulfilled of generative AI/LLMs becoming the next big thing.
This is extremely disingenuous, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer product for a reason. Part hype, part usefulness, part novelty. The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes. It's not that hard to criticize the AI hypetrain without a strawman.
> I'm sure copyrighted material was already being fed into LLMs at this point (I mean, you also had people willingly feeding it in, like the example I gave above) but once the techbros caught on and wanted to accelerate this, suddenly EVERYTHING public facing was fair game to training their models.
This is also just extremely disingenous. For full disclosure, I'm technically a stakeholder here, as I wrote two books which made it into training sets (and part of two class actions), but this cat is way out of the bag. Unless you really want to start splitting hairs about "ingesting" vs "processing" vs "training" vs "transforming," Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer. Folks were bringing this up decades ago, especially record labels that were suing google for copy-pasting lyrics to their main search pages; were you complaining then, too? Because some people were.
> All because investors demanded it, and companies didn't want to be caught with their pants down if these inflated claims of it being the next big thing proved to be true. This is where the hate for me really started, because a lot of these companies forced AI upon you, with no means to opt out. FOMO is a hell of a drug on a corporate scale, ho-ly.
Corporate FOMO is pretty run of the mill, this shouldn't be surprising in the least. I must've done like half a dozen "blockchain hackathons" or "VR demos" back when those technologies were all the rage. I don't really see how it's that big of a big deal, other than being mildly annoying.
> You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet. It was doubly gone when Facebook sold PII data to advertisers. It was triply gone when Experian got hacked and the SSN of every taxpayer in the USA was leaked (and no one went to jail lol). Let's stop being dramatic. It just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how data collection works.
> Good luck avoiding AI if we buy up all the components for you to build your own computers and devices! Submit everything to the cloud, it's now the only affordable option, suckers!
Blog author and hobbyist photographer discovers free markets.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but this kind of take is boring, uninspired, and (ironically) could've just been written by ChatGPT. Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
Yeah I saw the headline and was interested to read a well-reasoned macro perspective on how and why attitudes have shifted towards AI, misconceptions, predictions on the future, etc.
Instead I got another one-sided unhinged rant that looks straight out of a typical Reddit post.
>The main problem I have with AI haters (just like AI lovers) is that they can't just be balanced about their takes.
Come on. The author's take, while maybe not flawless, is far more balanced than the equivalent AI-hype-man take. All of your criticisms are not charitable.
[flagged]
IMO the author absolutely nails it. Yes, it might not be the most nuanced take, but they express what many of us are thinking.
> Google and Yahoo and even DDG have been using copyrighted data for a quarter century, if not longer.
Your argument boils down to: companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care?
The answer is: it was wrong back then and it is still wrong now, but on a completely different scale! We have reached a tipping point where many people are (rightfully) furious.
> Consent was gone when Google, Yahoo, etc. started indexing the entire internet.
People do not have a problem with Google indexing the web because they want their websites to be found. That's the entire purpose of putting stuff out on the internet. AI is now doing the opposite: traffic is directed to chatbots and platforms are flooded with AI slop.
As you said, people were already complaining when Google started to show their own summaries, preventing users from visiting the original sources. People have been complaining about Facebook drowning the frontpage with clickbait. But this time it is so much worse.
Sure, LLMs can be useful, but on the other hand the potential for abuse is humongous. People are already seeing the negative consequences and they are rightfully angry.
> Come up with an interesting point or thought-provoking counter-argument and maybe people will take you seriously.
I do think that the author made a good point by bringing up the issue of consent. We are now in a situation where I can't post anything online without AI companies possibly scraping the content and feeding it into their models without any attribution or permission. And there is no way of opting out. Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?
> Your argument boils down to: companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care?
This is not a very charitable take. My argument is: that cat is out of the bag, so what do we do next? Do you have a plan? Ranting about consent or privacy or copyright won't somehow untrain these models. At least the math people put out the pretty sensible Leiden Declaration[1].
> Don't you see a problem with that? Why should we not care?
This is a lot like saying "do you not see a problem with nuclear weapons? They can wipe out humanity!"—I mean, yeah, sure I do, but ranting about the technology won't somehow put that cat back in the bag, either.
[1] https://leidendeclaration.ai/
> My argument is: that cat is out of the bag, so what do we do next?
I did not see this argument in your first post at all. Instead you tried to dismiss the author's complaints, arguing that none of their complaints are new. (Which is true in a sense, but it ignores the most important point: that of scale)
> I mean, yeah, sure I do, but ranting about the technology won't somehow put that cat back in the bag, either.
Fair enough, the author did not propose any concrete solutions. However, their analysis is still correct. The first step towards change is to acknowledge that we have a problem. Your first reply did not seem to do that, on the contrary, it seemed to downplay the authors concerns. Maybe that was not your intention, but that's how I read it.
I certainly agree that we need to find solutions. Yes, the cat is out of the bag, but with proper legal frameworks and regulations we can keep it from pissing all over the living room.
No one is "forcing" you to use AI. If you don't like it, then... Don't use it. And if you're right that it's all a bunch of cryptobro NFT lies that offers nothing to the world, you'll be fine and well-positioned once it goes away.
Even if you don't use AI, you still have to deal with all the other people who do.
So, the reasoning goes, I don't consent to other people using AI, therefore when you do you are violating me?
If you are spamming my favorite platform with AI slop, you are violating me.
If you are using LLMs to write your e-mails, deceiving me in thinking I'm conversing with a human, you are violating me.
If you are publishing AI generated books or music without a big disclaimer, you are violating me.
If you are scraping the net and using my work for AI training, you are violating me.
If you are scraping the net and overloading my servers, you are violating me.
Etc.
I mean, the author is mad something is popular and calls it psychosis. Which, all things being equal, is balanced out by nay sayers time and time again. Is not posting a lengthy rant online and sharing it not a form of "psychosis" when viewed from people that like the new technology?
But he lost me at "As it exists right now, I don't give a toss what good it can do, what practical benefits it has once the techbros move on to their next mark. I don't care about any of it at all...". Because he feels hatred, we are supposed to look the other way when it can and does create benefits?
Just find a way to use it to your liking (maybe that's zero) and ignore the stuff you can't be bothered with and maybe that means being less connected to technology, which honestly, is pretty great at times.
> and ignore the stuff you can't be bothered with
If this was actually possible, there would be far less backlash to AI. As it stands, it's being forced into every aspect of our lives without consent. Even if you avoid technology as much as possible (which is a good thing), it's still affecting every aspect of society. Even if you avoid technology altogether, you still live in a society full of people who can't or don't, and you can't escape the consequences of it - such as if the CEOs get their way and eliminate human employment like they have constantly threatened and fantasized about.
I'm starting to realize this comment section is an echo chamber and dissenting opinions aren't allowed.
People disagreeing with you and discussing something does not mean dissenting opinions aren't allowed. If anything, it proves the opposite.
no, take a look around. comments are downvoted for not agreeing with the topic, not for lack a validity. You, yourself, are ganging up on commenter and painting people with broad strokes. That is quintessentially a space where dissenting opinions aren't allowed.
My opinions get downvoted all the time. I've seen my own comments fluctuate in real time. Such is the world of online discussion boards.
> You, yourself, are ganging up on commenter and painting people with broad strokes.
No need to complain about "not being allowed to have a dissenting opinion" and then complain about people disagreeing with you. That's not what "ganging up" means. If we're concerned about the HN guidelines, maybe also avoid complaining about downvotes.
OK but the ones here are of a certain bias to the discussion. It isn't downvote based on merit, it's downvote based on disagreement with where it falls pros/con to the topic. A discussion on the shape of the comment section isn't a complaint on downvotes alone.
You don't need to define my position or my definitions, I said what I said and meant it as such based on a specific comment in this thread you authored.
Hold your horses there. Organic popularity and ubiquity due to aggressive-bordering-on-psychotic tech industry hype are not the same thing.
I don't know, I see plenty of organic interest growing out there. Even from people who are against it when they see how it can benefit them. It's just a tool that increases productivity at a rate we haven't experienced in a long time. It isn't a shock that it is hyped.
"I see plenty of organic interest growing out there. "
I'm certain I don't know where you're looking then because I'm seeing disinterest trending towards outright disgust. Outside bay area tech forums I have yet to encounter a single human being that is in any way enthusiastic about or interested in the capabilities of AI tooling. Without exception every time AI comes up in conversation around here it's someone expressing frustration at the growing difficulty of avoiding slop content, annoyance at coworkers slop work product, or grumbling about upper-middle-management edicts to include AI tooling in even the most routine office workflows. The ubiquity of the term "slop" alone should be enough to give folks pause because it's a very clear indicator.
At work, with friends, even on dates, oddly enough. But this is a polarizing topic and I don't think any of the discussions here are actually discussions. It's more venting and downvoting anyone who has a different view on all this.
We can agree on that if little else.
This is a nonsensical piece.
>You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave.
This is ... not how consent works. At all.
It isn't how consent is supposed to work - but it's how rights currently operate. Maybe in the US (where a lot of these businesses are based) there will be a strong rebound during the next election? Right now as an artist (unless you've got disney lawyers behind you) you have no right to protect your art.
Exactly! I hate that people can't upload their blog posts, stories, drawings, videos, music, etc. without them being slurped up by AI models. Same for open source software. When exactly did we collectively decide that copyright does not exist anymore?