The Luddites and their sympathizers were often shot. Some labourers displaced by the mechanical looms did find work elsewhere... if you mean workhouses. You see, history is written by the winners and the capital holders won.

The modern perception of Luddites as being "anti-progress," is the myth written by the winners.

The real history was that they were arguing for better working conditions, abolishing child labour, and social safety nets for workers displaced by machines. The problem was that unions hadn't been invented yet and people working in these textile factories had little leverage. So they made leverage by destroying the machines in an attempt to intimidate the capital holders to the negotiating table.

It didn't work in the end.

History might not be repeating today with AI tools being foisted upon us everywhere but it sure does rhyme.

There is a no-AI audience because "AI" is now associated to jumping on the latest bandwagon for no discernible reason (and if there's a reason, it's usually for getting VC money). And price increases as a bonus.

There is a no-AI audience because vendors turn this crap on by default and I don't know where my data (which may not even belong to me but to a customer!) goes.

"AI" is the new Clippy. Except MS didn't charge extra for Clippy.

> [...] a growing number of companies have diminished the concept of opt-in by choice, it is now being turned into opt-in by default.

The term for "opt-in by default" is "opt-out".

I have been working on this idea of a curators only social media. where instead of algorithms delivering you content, you follow people whose taste you appreciate. The original idea came from having your own "tv station". If you think about what cable tv is, it's basically a 24 hour block that the station manager could decide what to put on. Station managers with good taste (and perhaps deep pockets) could put on consistently great content. Like, it was actually nice to watch Comedy Central or Cartoon Network at some point. So I had this idea to build a website where you get a timeline where you can add youtube videos that you think are important and they will play during the day when you set them up to play. So a person could watch your channel and watch whatever you wanted to be on at that time. Everything would be curated instead of algorithmically delivered. I guess it's not a novel idea, but I haven't put it all together yet, i have been just working on this repo: https://github.com/mnky9800n/timeline-tv-studio

I submit the term Nay-I as a movement

I think the right tool for the job eventually emerges victorious. Right now AI is shoe-horned absolutely everywhere because it's trendy and no company wants to be seen as lagging -- eventually, it will only remain in product contexts in which it's useful and represents a step forward. At least that's what I hope.

Right now I think there is an audience for no-AI because it's in a lot of places it doesn't belong. After the great rebalancing, maybe it won't be as big of a segment.

I work in decompiling and reverse engineering. One of the important aspects from a legal liability perspective I that anything I produce and share should be a new creative work and not merely a mechanical transformation. I’ve avoided anything with LLMs related to those projects.

I have asked for help on some other projects where I got stuck and thought I’d give it a try. The LLM hallucinated and answer, but then admitted it was wrong when i pointed out the mistake and didn’t help me get any further.

ok, I do not want AI in every product either, but the slight trouble I have with some otherwise thoughtful anti-AI takes is that they are increasingly out of touch with what is possible today (or what is the standard practice today).

(Regarding the question about code editor. My primary code editor recently is Vim -- no AI features. But larger part of the code is produced by tools like Claude Code that does not even have the feature of manual edits. Traditional IDEs only have niche roles in my process at the moment -- e.g. debugging and stepping over the code.)

To flip that around, is there any data to show that people *want* AI put into the existing products and services they use?

I am a Luddite holding on.

1) solving the problem myself is the fun part of the job 2) writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice, not some bland average of everything slop 3) I can't sppeell big word because auto-correct does that. I don't want to lose logic and thinking to "auto-think ai™" 4) is the output trustworthy?

For four, imagine some malevolent entity (North Korea or insert whomever you hate) procedurally generates thousands of tutorials (with slight cosmetic variations to trick the crc checks) with unique URLs. The tutorials teach some tricky thing like SSO. The tutorials reference some library (or tricky math heavy function) that has been altered by black hat hackers. The LLM reads all the urls and that affects its output. Then low knowledge "vibe coders" just blindly cut and paste their way to victory. voila, security nightmare.

It doesn't have to be code, it could be insults to political leaders (some emphasized, some excepted). Political policies. LLM lose money so start to sell out to advertisers (you pay, we push your product).

When I am procrastinating on other sites, you see it everywhere. Someone posts something the first comment is "grok explain the post." Its worse than orwellian, they had only the 5-minutes of hate monitoring. People are offloading their thinking to a handful of companies. Also, people apparently really open to the pseudo humans, will those personal private thoughts be resold to make up for cash burn?

I pretty sure I will lose, but, its worth a shot.

As more waves of layoffs happen due to AI, there will likely be a growing market for "No AI" products, especially given how nasty some of the C suite are being about that short-sighted "unemploying humanity" objective they are being explicit about.

You see all of those HN posts asking where one can buy a “dumb” non-smart TV? That’s the future of software.

In my opinion the separation isn’t between AI vs. not. It’s between software that is restrained and well reasoned in their development vs. software that sticks unnecessary features in without enough testing that creates bugs and pushes useful UI features into a submenu. Software that updates just so they can sell a new version and get a product manager a promotion almost always sucks.

This is conflated right now with AI because every CEO and PM is pushing AI into their product as a first step to increased monetization once they figure out how. This is not well thought out and it ruins the experience of users who were previously happy with their software. A smart company would wait until the AI actually served a real use case and then roll out a well-tested update, but these companies are exceedingly rare.

I honestly don’t care if you add AI features, but make it so I can ignore them and make sure they don’t get in the way of the actual use of your software.

It’s sad that the best example I can think of such restraint is Apple, who was planning on rolling out AI on everything but realized that a lot of it sucked and halted the rollout partway through. It would have been better if they hadn’t made AI the key selling point of the iPhone 16 before failing to deliver, but at least they realized they should stop.

Microsoft also had a partially self-aware moment with their Recall feature, but it took a massive public outcry and their modifications only partially addressed privacy concerns.

But the volume of shit that gets funding because of AI overwhelms even the partial success stories- agents that don’t do what they claim, self driving cars that have never materialized, Rabbit AI, the Humane AI pin, Meta AI glasses, whatever shit Jonny Ive’s deal with OpenAI will produce- all of that makes people very skeptical because product managers and CEOs can’t hold back and wait until an idea is fully baked.

there's still emacs.

100%. I speak for myself.

Yes :)

Absolutely, many of us don't want AI shoved into every product we use. We know it's because tens of billions have been poured into it and they want their ROI.

I cancelled my very expensive corporate jetbrains ultimate subscription the moment it became infested

(and now just use the free one...)

I will not support any companies attempting to force this dogshit down my throat

if sublime text becomes infested I will no longer pay for those upgrades either

It’s right I don’t want AI in my email client. Gmail now summarises threads, but I didn’t ask for that, and I have no reason to trust it any more than the frequently bullshit AI search results.

It still astounds me that the dominant search company, where people go as a first port of call when looking for information, is willing to put generated answers at the top of its results which are variously sorta-right, subtly wrong or outright fabricated.

Meta has started offering artists I know AI versions of their own work on Facebook. There’s no obvious way to turn it off and … frankly it’s pretty insulting.

So yes, there is a no-AI audience. At the very least a let-me-turn-it-off audience. And not just in tech.

> Well, good luck finding that setting buried several menus deep within their interface.

Howcome noone ever solved this problem? After all these years of UI evolution. It still mostly sucks to find the setting you need to change something that bothers you. There are no suggestions to customize your experience right there when it happens.

How about giving user opportunity to reply with a frowny face (or Thanks, I hate it) and if they do, direct them to a spot where they can partially or completely disable the thing that happened. Give them browsable and searchable history of the things they customized. Give them llm powered search for options in your app so they don't have to search what to click on random forums.

Why nobody figured out how to bake this directly into a default control library for each platform is a disgrace.

notepad.exe? Oh wait.

Emacs? :)

I consider AI in a product a bug until proven otherwise. And it rarely proves otherwise.