> Whenever I find a use for AI, it so drastically cuts the time to accomplish tasks that I’m left wanting to do more with my (finally copious) free time!

I get what the author is trying to say but this does not match my experience nor does it match the employee productivity findings from AI adoption in enterprises.

It will just make it so only the privileged can benefit - and that list will not include you.

> The barrier to entry for a creative person to benefit from AI is nothing.

The barrier is low, but the benefit is negligible or even negative. You're outsourcing your creative process to some mega-corporation. What you get back from it might be interesting to you, but it won't be to a lot of other people except maybe as a novelty, because it's from the same megacorp that sells its services to everyone else. I know some people seem to genuinely enjoy the outputs of the AI models now, but the novelty hasn't worn off yet.

Also, congratulations, you get to live with the stigma of being an AI slop pusher. And if you try to pass the work off as your own, good luck hiding the truth for the rest of your life, because you'll never regain trust if people find out.

Bad take, if you ask me, on several points:

- I think we’ve all learned with social media that sometimes tech companies create products with good intentions that are later weaponized against their users.

- The foundation of agentic LLMs is fully precipitated on creative and knowledge theft. They stole our bread and now want to sell it back to us, one token at a time.

- Banning AI has an intention to slow down its adoption while society weighs in on its projected consequences. When did we as a society collectively agree tech entrepreneurs get to release anything they want without any oversight?

This “just accept it” attitude is democratically lazy and so very ignorant of history of what rich people in power tend to do to the working class when they don’t need their labor anymore. There’s blood in the machine, friends.

Some people want to fully ban AI and put the genie back in the bottle[1] but I'd much rather it simply be demystified and genuinely costed.

I think most people would prefer to find a useful application of a tool compared to being compelled by corporate overlords to clock in at a certain level of token spend. It isn't magic or a cure-all - it's something that's very useful sometimes and insanely expensive (in dollar cost and wasted effort of real humans) other times. Right now we seem to be in a weird honeymoon phase where it gets used for everything disregarding how much utility or cost it will have in that setting.

1. It's impossible because for decades we've had plenty of neural network applications and other ML uses that are quite useful.

Of course conformity is the easiest choice. But don’t lie to yourself that it’s the best choice.

Banning smoking from indoor spaces did in fact make it go away [from indoor spaces].

Actually, the analogy is compelling - an addictive habit that is pleasurable to the user, profitable for the supplier, but others around them must suffer the effluent with consequent deleterious effects on [mental] health. And similarly, the worst [mental] health effect is of course on the user themselves.

As with smoking, probably we can't/shouldn't stop individuals from indulging in this habit, but surely we can protect the rest of society.

AI is very useful in the right hands. But this is a great example of a destructive attitude from which I earnestly pray most engineers escape. This is, in my opinion, the kind of person who is destroying the world I love so much.

Frankly, as much as I would prefer an in-between solution, it might not be feasible. If I could press a button that made AI disappear forever, I would, despite the sacrifice. The downsides as compared to the upsides, in practice, are just so overwhelming.

I’m impressed with how vapid a post can be and still find success on Hacker News.