I have tried memorisation systems like Anki, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing consolidates my knowledge better than writing the actual concept down with pen and paper.

Yep... pen, paper, books and a good teacher are annoyingly hard to beat because they force the student to actually do the cognitive work

What AI has done to my job as a software developer is make my personal output higher while taking away almost every ounce of enjoyment, interest, and passion I had for the job. Overnight I went from loving my job to hating my job as much as everybody I know outside of tech hates their jobs.

I won't even get into what it has done to the already-awful experience of working with low-quality contractors.

My partner cried the other day because her long-planned PC upgrade is now an order of magnitude more expensive than she budgeted for pre-AI-boom.

> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?

I’m not sure I was go quite as far. But there are certainly

Makes my life better: LLM chat subscription

Makes my life worse: “AI” features that don’t work replacing perfectly good non “AI” features (notably Google Maps and LinkedIn job board). I don’t want fuzzy AI filters, I want concrete filters that let me drill down and browse a result list.

I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of human-generated comments. I hate that many students are now using LLMs to do all of their homework, resulting in a significant part of the next generation being incompetent at basic scholarly tasks and unprepared for more serious work. I hate that lawyers are using LLMs to write legal briefs, not bothering to check that their cited cases say something exactly the opposite of what their briefs say. I hate that government officials are using LLMs to write public statements that get basic facts wrong. I hate that graphic designers are losing their jobs because their bosses would rather "just use AI, it's cheaper". I hate that Google Search results are now overwhelmed with LLM-generated slop which ranges from dubious to outright wrong, and it's now much more difficult than it used to be to find the information I'm looking for on the open web. I hate that researchers are now publishing LLM slop in journal articles, making it significantly harder to tell the difference between careful scholarship and someone lazily phoning it in. I hate that friends and neighbors now ask ChatGPT as their first source of information about any topic and it frequently tells them something completely misleading or wrong, but they don't bother double checking.

Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.

So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience.

Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.

When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop.

It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.

> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?

You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model.

You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say.

You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened.

You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot.

You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder.

Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native.

You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable.

You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing.

You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them.

On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop.

---

Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?"

---

This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.

The "obvious" one: supply chain chaos due to everyone and their dog spending as much as possible for AI boxen

Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...)

I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis)

A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world.

There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war.

And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.

> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?

Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system).

> Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it

Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?

The AI slop that's everywhere is making it worse. Even if someone doesn't care about AI, their feeds (YT, Instagram, LinkedIn) is now filled with AI slop

Can we just flag obvious flame bait comments like this?

Theres clearly no meaningful thought behind a comment like this, and all it does is stir up engagement for laughs.

The comment thread clearly shows this isn't a meaningful discussion, it’s people shouting past each other.

How can AI be bad? I only see good things! :troll face: it must be a woke left thing! :troll face:

Come on.

The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.

If considered a munition, it certainly belongs in the hands of citizens to defend themselves against corporations and governments.

> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.

I do: students who use it to do their thinking for them.

And everyone who uses it to do their thinking for them, for that matter.

> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.

Have you tried using a search engine lately, or visiting a social media platform, or buying a computer/smartphone?

If you say so!

Creatives of any kind, for sure. Artists, illustrators, musicians.

how wide is the variety of people you know? do they understand why they might?

I've hardly met anyone outside the tech elite who likes it. I can think of one doctor who's a counterexample.

Better at what?

The people I know who like it the most are at least aware of a lot of the problems with it. I’m surprised everyone in your friend group is uncritically enamored by it.

I see it ruining interactions at work. There's a lot of meat-proxy-ism going on, where people copy-and-paste back and forth between AI.

It's filling the Internet with trash. Look around anywhere: Reddit, YouTube, individual blogs, it doesn't matter. You'll find generative garbage as far as the eye can see. Not all generative content is bad, but a lot of it is outright crap.

It can be a productive tool though. Still, I don't find it enjoyable to use. If you like the "journey" of programming (tinkering, "figuring things out", problem solving), you won't like AI as much. It removes the fun part. If you like the "destination" (the end result of building a thing), you'll love it.

You must live in a bubble; 16% of Americans think AI is making their lives better, the remainder are evenly split between not knowing and disliking it.

It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass.

It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose.

We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-america...

What country/region of country (if US) do you live in? Everyone I know absolutely hates it and hates the direction things are going. I'm pulling from a wide sample here too -- I have a lot of friends who work blue collar jobs that hate it just as much as my tech worker friends. However I will say I'm in my late 20s and it seems like my age group and younger are more anti-AI than any other age bracket.

Poe's Law win?

> Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.

But that's the core problem of AI fanatics, isn't it. They cannot comprehend how people who saw and used the same thing they did, and came away with "this smells like fancy autocomplete" instead of "this is genuine intelligence!"

No, the communication has been pretty clear. A lot of people just don't like the Torment Nexus.

Imagine them trotting along on a protest march, banners gripped in their teeth, wearing donkey jackets. Jobs for horses.

There are two categories of responses here, yours is all progress is terrible actually, mine is I like advances but slop just offends me.

You should look up the history of what actually happened with the Luddites. They weren't opposed to the machines (many were even machine operators!), they were opposed to the manufacturers circumventing labour rights. Turns out people don't like routinely seeing 12-year-old children getting scalped by a weaving machine!

They targeted the machines because it was the most convenient way to sabotage a factory, not because they hated the machine itself.

> Electric motors empower you, and are available to almost anyone.

AI is much more available to people than motors of any kind. Long-press your Android phone's power button: There's Gemini.

Yes, they did.

Yep! I’ve made so many custom apps for myself and family. I’ve made lots of purchases informed by AI that I would otherwise have been too overwhelmed to research. I’ve indexed all my bookshelves like a library just by taking a video and having AI build the entire analysis and label printing pipeline.

Yes, but unironically. It's a fantastic tool for learning. Better than Wikipedia or Google search.

I've used it as a fabulous tool to learn so many new things. From walking step by step me through rebuilding an electric motor, to reviewing and explaining my child's medical reports.

I’m sorry to hear that. I think AI can be quite dangerous. But their experience is a skill issue.

I find it surprising how many people think we're doomed when it comes to AI, and don't even want to try use this technology in a positive way. I'm not sure if this is a modern american cultural thing or what.

You always have a choice. If my job made me bash puppies on the head with a hammer, I'd quit. All you have to decide is where you draw that line.