Posted by mips_avatar 12/3/2025
The cult of AI maximalists aren't helping the situation.
An opposing force is corporate momentum. Its unfortunately true that people are beholden to what companies create. If there are only a few phones available, you will have to pick. If there are only so many shows streaming, you'll probably end up watching the less disgusting of the options.
They are clashing. The ppl's sentiment is AI bad. But if tech keeps making it and pushing it long enough, ppl will get older, corporate initiatives will get sticky, and it will become ingrained. And once its ingrained, its gonna be here forever.
I've also heard complaints about the mandatory use of the tools in the office and the pageantry involved.
I've seen people in love with garbage they produced with AI.
I'm annoyed by the way they are being pushed in my face but hate is really too strong. I've tried using them and gotten total garbage. I think that's because my prompting sucks because I know people that love the tools and have shared great output from them. Those people are a minority in my opinion.
Trying to over simplify the experiences of humanity is a fool's game.
It's not about their careers. It's about the injustice of the whole situation. Can you possibly perceive the injustice? That the thing they're pissed about is the injustice? You're part of the problem because you can't.
That's why it's not about whether the tools are good or bad. Most of them suck, also, but occasionally they don't--but that's not the point. The point is the injustice of having them shoved in your face; of having everything that could be doing good work pivot to AI instead; of everyone shamelessly bandwagoning it and ignoring everything else; etc.
That's the thing, though, it is about their careers.
It's not just that people are annoyed that someone who spends years to decades learning their craft and then someone who put a prompt into a chatbot that spit out an app that mostly works without understanding any of the code that they 'wrote'.
It's that the executives are positively giddy at the prospect that they can get rid of some number their employees and the rest will use AI bots to pick up the slack. Humans need things like a desk and dental insurance and they fall unconscious for several hours every night. AI agents don't have to take lunch breaks or attend funerals or anything.
Most employees that have figured this out resent AI getting shoved into every facet of their jobs because they know exactly what the end goal is: that lots of jobs are going to be going away and nothing is going to replace them. And then what?
I'm one of these people. So is everyone I know. The grievance is moral, not utilitarian. I don't care about executives getting rid of people. I care that they're causing obviously stupid things to happen, based on their stupid delusions, making everyone's lives worse, and they're unaccountable for it. And in doing so they devalue all of the things I consider to be good about tech, like good software that works and solves real problems. Of course they always did that but it's especially bad now.
It doesn't matter how much astroturf I read, I can see what's happening with my own eyes.
> The grievance is moral, not utilitarian.
Nope, it's both.
Businesses have no morals. (Most) people do. Everything that a business does is in service of the bottom line. They aren't pushing AI everywhere out of some desire to help humanity, they're doing it because they sunk a lot of resources into it and are trying to force an ROI.
There are a lot of people who have fully bought in to AI and think that it's more capable than it is. We just had a thread the other day where someone was using AI to vibe code an app, but managed to accidentally tell the LLM to delete the contents of his hard drive.
AI apologists insist that AI agents are a vital tool for doing more faster and handwave any criticism. It doesn't matter that AI agents consume an obscene amount of resources to do it, or that pretend developers are using it to write code they don't understand and can't test that they're shoving into production anyway. That's all fine because a loud fraction of senior developers are using it to bypass the 'boring parts' of writing programs to focus on the interesting bits.
If you are a utilitarian person and you try to parse a scrupulous person according to your utilitarianism of course their actions and opinions will make no sense to you. They are not maximizing for utility, whatsoever, in any sense. They are maximizing for justice. And when injustices are perpetrated by people who are unaccountable, it creates anger and complaining. It's the most you can do. The goal is to get other people to also be mad and perhaps organize enough to do something about it. When you ignore them, when you fail to parse anything they say as about justice, then yes, you are part of the problem.
Yeah, that's weird. Why would anyone think that? /s
iykyk
I hate the entire premise even though some of it has been useful but at worst you're creating code and/or information that's just wrong and "can get someone killed" (metaphorical, but also probably literal), you're creating absolutely unrealistic expectations
Zuck said they'd be able to replace engineers with AI. Well, that tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it? With all of the scandals Facebook properties have had over the years. A real engineer/competent CEO wouldn't say that