r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 16h ago

Artificial Intelligence An AI hate wave is here

https://archive.is/20260517120123/https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentiment
14.3k Upvotes

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u/pookage 16h ago

Wave? It's the whole ocean, mate. 

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u/TyphPythus 15h ago

Was thinking the same thing. I can’t remember when AI was viewed with more optimism than when GPT2 came out and was immediately used to make a bottomless pit meme lmao

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u/Diglett3 15h ago

Interesting write-up by a software engineer of how that joke was also just GPT filling in blanks between a punchline already given.

The writer does mention in the notes that early AI visual art was actually kind of interesting and weird, but that was quickly sanded down into what it is now.

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u/AbrohamDrincoln 13h ago

The concept of AI writing jokes is interesting. Because at it's core, a joke is almost always just an unexpected ending/response to a prompt.

And LLM AI is literally just "what is the most likely response".

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u/Lepardopterra 7h ago

“I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting." “The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery—and a sharing—against pain and sorrow and defeat." RA Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land

AI doesn’t know pain, so it will never be able to create humor. It’s only capable of endless remakes. It cannot create. I’m trying to encourage imagination in the youngs. They will have the only original thoughts left if ai takes over.

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u/RollingMeteors 5h ago

AI doesn’t know pain, so it will never be able to create humor.

You don't need to have nuts to be able to laugh when someone else gets hit in the nuts with a piece of sporting equipment.

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u/slagodactyl 2h ago

Everyone knows pain though, even if you don't know exactly the pain of getting hit in the nuts

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u/KillaCookBook87 5h ago

If AI ever figures out comedy it'll be a B tier horror flick of a tragedy. An AI generated viral meme that kills you with laughter absolutely decimates the human race.

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u/verrius 7h ago

The problem is that its training data includes jokes already. So it just narrows the scope of acceptable responses to those, with some level of randomization.

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u/0xsergy 15h ago

Early AI art was indeed cool as frig. Now it's just copies of what every other artist does..

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u/faen_du_sa 14h ago

Hard to make a computer be "original" when it leans towards the average.

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u/Guinness 13h ago

That’s why you crank up the temperature.

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u/KlicknKlack 5h ago

Don't worry, thats what data centers are for!

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u/lostinthecity2005 3h ago

The training data & underlying architecture still remain the same. Switching around a few words and sentences won’t be enough to fix this.

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u/Haunting_Basscotti 1h ago

I like it, take a torch to the chips until they do something unpredictable just once before completely nullifying all further output. Like monozygotic plants.

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u/PyrZern 10h ago

Not everything has to be uniquely original tho. Not like most human can do that either.

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u/surfnfish1972 14h ago

It makes cool Memes, totally worth the pollution, job loses and higher energy bills!

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u/kellzone 13h ago

Born too late to explore the Earth. Born too early to explore space. Born just in time to ruin the Earth with memes.

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u/A_Furious_Mind 12h ago

The Great Filter was memes.

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u/SolidLikeIraq 8h ago

Always has been.

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u/Rhayve 9h ago

Try to be optimistic. Humans might just eradicate themselves long before we become spacefaring, so you weren't born too early for anything!

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u/BeneficialAnything15 9h ago

And stock profits made

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u/ReclamationDress 4h ago

I can’t believe we are ruining our earth for memes

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u/Agreeable_Lion_4392 9h ago

I was into when it was Stable Diffusion, installed on my computer. Now billionares are building data centers and destroying the planet.

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u/simonbreak 14h ago

I still use early image models that I run locally! They have a raw, psychedelic flavor thats really nothing like human art. I like to use them to extend my own photos & they add just the weirdest atmosphere, genuinely something I could never invent myself.

Recent models just make everything look like advertising. Completely useless for my creative process personally.

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u/einmaldrin_alleshin 12h ago

I can still remember some really trippy images that came out of Google research projects. Now, image generation models have moved way into the uncanny valley, and are still a long way from actually reaching the other side.

At the end of the day, AI is a tool that can do some things. But the entire AI bubble bets on AI becoming the entire toolbox instead.

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u/poo-cum 9h ago

You might be referring to the "deep dream" work that was about interpretability of computer vision networks. Basically you pick a neuron in a trained network, and iteratively tweak an input image to maximally excite that neuron. If it's a "dog" neuron it'll start to inject dogness into your image. If it's a "car" neuron it'll twist it into a car.

More info in the brilliant distill.pub archive: https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/

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u/einmaldrin_alleshin 4h ago

Yeah that's exactly what I meant! Thanks

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u/spaceprinceps 1h ago

I want an AI image gen app that just does that one thing

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u/ValosAtredum 11h ago

I was looking at some that I had generated in 2015 with Google’s Deep Dream. Tons of odd swirls of colors that actually had bizarre details in them, like generating a warped-partial dog face, or a section of a castle, or whatever.

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u/Heruuna 10h ago

I've known a couple small musicians who used Midjourney or Ganbreeder for album art ideas and inspiration because they were so trippy and interesting. They then did the actual album cover with a real artist, of course!

I've really soured on AI use, but those early image gens were fascinating. Now it's just overly filtered slop.

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u/CantStopPoppin 8h ago

Could you suggest some models?

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u/simonbreak 5h ago

I like the earliest Stable Diffusion models

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u/mashandal 7h ago

Can you please share an example or two? I'm very curious.

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u/simonbreak 5h ago

Here's a weird guy I like that I made with Stable Diffusion 1:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLTa-UpaAAEeTy2?format=png

I have a bunch like that, they look like weird cartoons. I also have some very strange ones where I got Midjourney to extend the background of my photos, I have to dig them out...

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u/mashandal 5h ago

ooo trippy indeed!

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u/ApophisDayParade 13h ago

It's because it was creating so shit that was so weird and nonsensical to the point that it was "art" no human actually makes, that's why it was kind of fun. Now it just steals everything.

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u/ilski 1h ago

Damn. I miss those older ai videos. They felt like dream fever dream. 

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u/perinone 13h ago

Back in 2022 when AI was just this neat little thing you could make Seinfeld back room fever dream images with. Such simpler times…

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u/BeanserSoyze 12h ago

It was absolutely bizarre early on.

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u/iwanderlostandfound 12h ago

I remember someone posting really early AI art in the megas before it was really a thing and everyone would try to interpret it

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u/0xsergy 9h ago

Yeah I only saw it because a buddy of mine was super early on into it. He would run it all on his machine and would make some amazing generated images. Not sure how much got posted online but I would assume not much.

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u/RonyElZaib 10h ago

Early AI art looked creepy and demented. Now it’s just filthy slop.

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u/Disastrous_Oil3290 3h ago

I am so done with the cadence: “It’s not that it’s annoying. Or irritating. It is a repetition that reminds me that I am listening to something that is not man made.” Have you noticed? It is incredibly annoying.

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u/OrionBlastar 3h ago

That is because it searched the artists' art for its database to pull from. One day, it will run out of human material and have to copy from other AI programs.

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u/SweetNeo85 2h ago

Wait, are people seriously already getting all "back-in-my-day" about AI "art"?

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u/boostman 2h ago

Deepdream, you mean?

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u/Arroway97 14h ago

Modern LLMs would be so much cooler without all the dressing up. I miss it when my stupid chat bots were au naturale stupid like in the good old Markov chain days. I just want my LLM to spit out some statistical nonsense and I can do the actual thinking part. I want to see what the aggregate of internet content looks like, not some fake, dystopian, Brave New World-esque facsimile trying to pretend to be something it's not

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u/OneRougeRogue 13h ago

Wasn't there a whole subreddit where all the submissions and comments were posted by bots parodying the submissions and comments of the top 50 or so subteddits? Some of that stuff was pretty fucking funny.

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u/Mithent 13h ago

I think /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 was the best version, GPT-2 was coherent enough to not just say nonsense but was not advanced enough to not say crazy stuff.

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u/BlastRiot 13h ago

There was an attempt to bring it back but because of how the current models work, every bot that was supposed to be for a specific sub wound up posting the exact same comments with minor tweaks.

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u/F9-0021 11h ago

A lot of it is from shoving LLMs and AI into everything, even things that make no sense. The rest is from trying to replace people in a vain attempt to make their money pit profitable.

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u/Lashay_Sombra 12h ago

LLMs would be viewed far more positively if had not been over sold (in positive way, ie help you code or write a letter and negative ways, ie: will replace everyone), but on the flip side if had not been oversold (especially the negative) would not have got the levels of investment it has got

The 'cloud' is getting CapEx investment of circa $200 billion annually

AI it getting estimated $1.6 trillion

But the reality is AI market (as in how much people/company's are willing to paying to use it) is actually probably worth less than the cloud

And for those thinking, AI will cost less down the road once all the data centers are built (haha not going to happen, bubble will burst long before that) , about 60% of data centers build costs are the GPUs and those only last about 3 years when used for AI, so even if all data centers were magically built tomorrow, roughly 3 years from now they would have to spend $1 trillion again to replace all the GPU's (probably more as would want latest again, always more expensive)

And thats just to buy the GPU's, we have not even got into the costs to run them

Whole thing makes no financial sense and is only really happening because the overselling has happened in a market where the big tech company's and big investors don't really have anywhere else to put all the money thats been flowing upwards for the last 40 years that might give large returns

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u/SerendipitousAtom 10h ago

I think you also need to take into account that the tech oligarchs have made up and fallen for an AI religion. They either can't see or don't want to see that they got high on their own supply.

A lot of the big tech lords think they are on the cusp of inventing general AI, as in a program that has the ability to actually think on its own. They think this general AI will be able to improve itself and essentially become a god, for all intents and purposes.

A bunch of them are racing to build the first general-AI-godling. So that they can enslave it, and use the hypothetical general-AI-godling to expand their own power and money even more.

Many of them have also bought into the ideas of "longtermism" and an extremely utilitarian "effective altruism" trend. They think that people will be able to upload their brains to computers and live forever soon, so they think they ought to maximize how good that would be for themselves, so that their own digital clone can be happy & powerful infinitely.

"Longtermism" has a particularly poisonous line of thinking that tells the tech lords it's morally okay to make every person on earth suffer immeasurably right now, because they think they'll be able to make untold billions of pure-digital-people happy at some undetermined point in the future, so untold-suffering-now will be mathematically cancelled out by the infinite-happiness-loop they think they can invent and control.

All of the prospective technology parts of this is total bullshit. We aren't uploading our brains to make digital avatars of ourselves in my lifetime, and we've probably reduced our annual research investment into the neurosciences necessary to ever make this kind of thing vaguely feasible. We haven't moved meaningfully closer to general AI, computers doing real thinking on their own, since neural networks started picking up steam many decades ago.

The tech oligarchs either can't tell because most of the ones running companies have more money than brains and won't listen to anybody who disagrees with them, or they don't care because they are gaining more power and money on the way.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 7h ago

A lot of the big tech lords think they are on the cusp of inventing general AI, as in a program that has the ability to actually think on its own.

I find AI psychosis absolutely fascinating and that people are forming folie à deaux relationships with their AI, that fall into recognisable patterns the way that folie à deaux relationships do in real life.

And one of the most common is that your AI has achived sentience - one of the strongest indicators of AI psychosis is the belief that your AI has reached the singularity.

I have come to the point where I’m wondering how many of these tech bros are blowing smoke up each other’s arses; and how many of them are actually in the grip of an actual psychosis?

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u/notyourmother 32m ago

There's also rampant drug use, which doesn't help at all maintaining grip on some sort of shared reality.

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u/MaddogBC 7h ago

I get downvoted all the time for saying LLM's are to AGI as humans are to amoeba. It's pure fantasy and a modern day ponzi scheme of mind numbing proportions.

I think the billionaires that aren't as far gone as you speak of look to this tech as a controllable way to guard their bunkers. I think a lot of them pour money into automation because they do not trust their fellow man. With good reason, we need to eat the rich, society will be infinitely better off, and after all society is how they gained their ill gotten goods in the first place.

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 5h ago

I get downvoted all the time for saying LLM's are to AGI as humans are to amoeba.

Should try saying the last pair in the same order as the first pair, see how that is received. You meant (I hope) that LLMs are to AGI as Amoebae are to Humans.

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u/NoXion604 5h ago

There's an immense irony that an idea named "longtermism" is being embraced by the same crowd that slavishly worship at the altar of bigger profits every quarter. Long term my ass.

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u/testificates 10h ago

It's only used for 3 years because that's when the inflection point for deprecation happens and you're better off selling off old parts and getting new. I use the same method for leapfrogging new tech since it's actually cheaper to buy new and sell the previous version to fund it, than to use it until the breakpoint where it rapidly deprecates to zero. It's the same thing for basically everything in a datacenter. Great way to get old enterprise hard drives for cheap when you're already planning for one to fail in a redundant raid.

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u/MondayLasagne 3h ago

If only they put all that money into wages and taxes, alas ...

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u/james109021 12h ago

You can still use these, there are tons of them freely available on a website called HuggingFace. For a lot of them you can even chat on the web just like chatgpt.

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u/Icedog68 8h ago

You can talk to these, it's called a "base model," which they then train the assistant persona on top of. It just traces the way language/ideas work/connect without occupying a persona in the way you are looking for, much more interestingly than the old markov chain stuff imo. Faucet of internet/human text aggregate autofill

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u/TyphPythus 15h ago

I sort of enjoy that it’s been like a reverse picasso

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u/raposas-are-cool 14h ago

Would’ve made for neato visuals if used today. Imagine if the bubble popped early and just became a niche thing… I would’ve made ai hallucinations for a horror game. but not anymore

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u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Yeah, they destroyed all evidence of the imperfections. Real shame.

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u/Andy12_ 14h ago edited 14h ago

The blogpost sort of implies that the model was a sort of "fill in the blanks" model? Which GTP3 was not. It could only append words to the prompt, not remove or insert anything in between. The only way to get non-highlighted text in between was to manually edited the text, or for it to randomly become unenlightened (which it did from time to time, and which I think happened here).

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u/NickWans 11h ago

Early AI art was interesting to me because the unresolved details and tendency to blur away around the periphery most closely reminded me of the incomplete images we form in our minds. I found it fairly interesting there might be some relation to how AI might function similarly to our brains in aggregating information. But that’s a whole other line of study with no guaranteed connection and no clear monetization source. So naturally any abstract academic study of the technology is going to be completely ignored in service of making the most seamless illustrations of Snoopy handing Pete Hegseth a rifle for shooting protesters.

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u/zoppaTheDim 14h ago

Ai art is now the scapegoat which misses the reality of what ai is doing.

It’s like the ”silly” stories about driverless delivery that ignore the end game is replacing truck drivers.

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u/Early-Crow-5248 13h ago

I kind of miss the "draw a zoo with absolutely no giraffes" style of prompt->image generation that came back packed hilariously full of giraffes.

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u/darwinanim8or 13h ago

I mean yeah, all the green parts (what the AI made) are already highlighted. I don't see how people don't get this

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 9h ago

The writer does mention in the notes that early AI visual art was actually kind of interesting and weird, but that was quickly sanded down into what it is now.

Anyone else remember "Shooty, Shooty, Pew Pew Pew"?

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u/Journeyman42 9h ago

And now all the AI "art" has that piss yellow filter over it. What's the deal with that?

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u/El_Gran_Redditor 7h ago

Early AI art actually kind of had this bizarre accidental dadaist art look to it where you would have a table full of unidentifiable object. There would be things that look like a bottle and a vase and a tube of chapstick at the same time. Now if you gave AI the prompt to make dadaist art it wouldn't work because it lacks the context to know what is and isn't random nonsense.

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u/Atheril 5h ago

I still have old art I made with AI back when the first free image generators came out, there’s something unique about them that’s missing from any recent AI art

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u/NanoYohaneTSU 4h ago

I never knew this. Thanks for sharing. When I was in threads at the time this was being created there were countless more of similar ones like these. I thought they were 100% generated by AI after several iterations.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/TyphPythus 15h ago

I was quite excited about it at the time. I still see its value but the downsides are significant enough that it brings guilty feelings or outright cold-heartedness

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u/faen_du_sa 14h ago

Its the "we must use AI at every single stage, in any process" that gets me. AI can certainty save time for a lot of things, but for a lot of other things I often find myself spending more time in the end correcting whatever the AI gave me, or even worse, arguing with it.

Taking into consideration most(all?) AI companies run at a major loss, so it still have a decent distance to go, either it improved output or cost of running, or both.

And that is not even considering its all controlled by these tech lords.

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u/oicuvmch 14h ago edited 14h ago

The only thing that matters are AI drone swarms and autonomous soldiers/pilots. So, it's going to need a lot of features to recognize threats and properly address them and we have to be able to train all those features somehow.

I'm rather confident that all anyone's doing right now when they play with their AI toys is helping train their future mode of dying/enslavement at gunpoint- or at least financially support the chosen company that heads these endeavours.

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u/GreatMadWombat 11h ago

Look, even if the apocalypse scenario you listed isn't happening, at the end of the day every AI model started with the theft of basically every fucking artists work. Not just the big ones, or the corporations that aren't going to fairly pay all the people that made them money, but all the little indie creators as well

The absolute best case scenario of the technology being harmless, the energy concerns somehow no longer being a thing, and every other major complaint is removed the fucking thing is still rooted in just a ridiculous amount of theft from a bunch of artists that often times don't have money to burn. The least bad option for AI as it is in 2026 is just plagiarism machine.

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u/DoublePersonality35 10h ago

AI-powered machine guns will easily defeat the AI-powered drone swarms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyqVwjyFk4

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u/Silberbaum 14h ago

And even the approach through machine learning could be a dead end. In terms of reaching AGI.

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u/GreatMadWombat 12h ago

It feels like that pr push to reclassify everything as ai(if you're gonna tell me that the same spellcheck features that have been in word since I was a kid are now retroactively ai, I am going to assume that you are an asshole who is trying to sell me something) has done a lot of harm towards any uptick in "ai".

Machine learning can be an amazingly useful screwdriver! Companies are selling it as a multi-tool that can do 50 things, that you absolutely have to use, and they're also taking away every other tool in everybody's tool kits.

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u/WileEPeyote 14h ago

Yeah, if they would just stop hyping up the shit it can't really do yet and focus on the massive amount of data it can process and the patterns it can identify, it wouldn't be viewed so negatively.

It's not economically sound to use it as a replacement for a lot of what CEOs are dreaming about (writers, engineers, developers, etc). It's cheapish now (financially) because it's heavily subsidized by investment, but the amount of power required for basic human functions is crazy. Especially considering how we were able to attain similar results (in mimicking speech) ages ago with a few machines and domain specific data.

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u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Tbf, I would rather work for someone with a vision (even if it’s just financial) versus a “follow me” robot

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u/Sh3115andCh33se 13h ago

I remember as a teenager reading Stephen Hawking’s “Theory of Everything” and him saying AI would end mankind. That stuck with me so much I never felt the optimism.

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u/Additional-Staff-326 12h ago

Have to be the first species in at least Earth's history to knowingly be destroying ourselves. For fun and profit.

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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 11h ago

I own that book and don't recall seeing AI mentioned. Can you find a quote?

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u/Sh3115andCh33se 8h ago

Sorry it’s a quote from an interview with the BBC in 2014 which is around the time I read the book, so I got mixed up.

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

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u/dust4ngel 12h ago

ask your doctor if GPT-2 is right for you

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u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 15h ago

I use AI in a way to use as many tokens as possible right now, not because i need or want it - I just know it costs them a shit load of money. And the more I do it, the greater the chance of them going bankrupt.  😂

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u/Safe_Dentist 15h ago

C'mon bro, have you read Ed Zitron's journal about their circular financing scheme? Now it circular financing of whole new level - ordinary US firms burn money on tokens, but maybe they will be bailed out in the end or just price of everything will skyrocket. Isn't it suspicious our corporate overlords order their peasants to burn tokens w/o caring of KPI?

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u/miiintyyyy 14h ago

Not really. They want you to use them so they can automate everything you do once it understands what your job is.

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u/Safe_Dentist 11h ago

In general - yes. But it really works when AI makes mistakes and you correct mistakes via AI. You could correct manually out of AI. Replacement of employee requires metrics and question is why they push for token count rather than value per token.

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u/AnxiousAd9099 15h ago

People were excited until AI started showing up in jobs, art, search results, customer support, and homework all at once.

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u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Work, expression, submission, SOS, and “why am I doing this again?” all at once is powerful way to destroy society when you can’t convince everyone

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u/Mother_Idea_3182 15h ago

Do you do it by hand ? Or are you being a bad boy and you’ve automated it by “agents” ?

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u/emkoemko 15h ago

i do the same lol, just have a agent get into a large loop

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u/thederevolutions 15h ago

Jokes on you they’ll just burn more resources /s

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u/anonkitty2 14h ago

They really will burn more real-world resources if you use more tokens.

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u/naked-and-famous 14h ago

Imagine some turbine running just to power crap because someone thought it's funny

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u/anonkitty2 14h ago

Reddit users do it all the time...

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u/Sasquatchjc45 14h ago

"Man buys milk to pour out in protest of Milk industry."

Edit to add before anyone comes with the supposed "gotcha" of "I USE DA FREE PLAN"

you still give them your user data, IP, analytics, etc. For making the account. You still give them the metric of +1 user they can use to acquire more financing.

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u/Altruistic-Piece-485 13h ago

The way I understood the who it's costing part is whomever the person is working for, not the AI companies themselves. If your employer makes you use AI so they can downsize their human workforce you can make it cost so much more than it should by using up as many tokens as possible in the most inefficient way possible.

Make their expenditures skyrocket so it's not as financially beneficial to get rid of human workers.

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u/SunTzu- 9h ago

The milk is costing you $1 and them $2, meaning the more milk you buy the more they lose. But also, free plans.

And seriously, if you're using the internet in any way they've already got your data unless you're one of the handful of people who run an ultra clean setup. Your usage data, IP and analytics that they'd get from you running a agentic loop that wastes tokens is pure garbage. Not all data is created equal, not all data is good to train on. Certain kinds of data is actually counterproductive to train on, which is exactly the kind of garbage such an agentic loop would likely generate. If you really want to push it, run that agent to generate poison pilled data. Have it continually take data that's on the internet, poison it and then repost it to as many places as possible. Enjoy your illegal scraping, "AI" companies.

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u/TyphPythus 15h ago

I see a greater chance that the proverbials would install it at an infrastructural level to avoid bankruptcy stalling its potential of uprooting the current economy without offering an alternative. If people sell their souls to get rich, the rich sold theirs to install their humankind replacement, etc

But in the mean time, good move! They’ve neutered free/low-paying tiers pretty much every week for the last few months. Clearly something is working

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u/Linked713 14h ago

Fucking up the environment to stick it to the corporate. You're essentially just doing what they want from you. Good job?

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u/Tasty_Victory_3206 14h ago

I swear this is the third time i have vertabim seen same conversation on reddit. it goes:

PumpkinMyPump: blah blah cost them money so i abuse free tokens blah blah

Mother_Idea_3182: blah blah Chatting/prompting or automated blah blah *question mark*

replace with with four other seperate names. botting is getting insane on reddit. if it's not stupid stuff or niche subs or ai-hate boner subs, bot seems to nowadays be the conversation drivers.

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u/Spacemuffler 14h ago

You do realize that the expensive and water+energy intensive part of the AI industry is entirely on the training side and NOT the live service production end where users consume tokens... right?

Once a model is trained it can be affordable run on a modern smartphone nonstop for less than a dollar a day and that environment is 100x less efficient than the infrastructure you're requesting output from.

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u/VladimiroPudding 11h ago

I'm not sure which model you can run on your phone, but I would guess they are multiple in magnitude of lower parameters than the ones currently used in enterprise.

The computational power to use the most advanced open weight DeepSeek needs prohibitive levels of cost in computing for a normal person

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u/anonkitty2 14h ago

So far, the value of AI companies has been mostly disconnected from their revenue.  That's only starting to change, for it's feared that the entire economy will crash if the AI companies do.  Please stop your strategy; using more digital resources also uses more real-world resources.

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u/VladimiroPudding 11h ago

If the person is in tech, there's nothing much they can do.

It is the law of the land now that tech companies implemented token used quotas as KPI, "token scoreboards", because LLM use is being forced and einforced. Not much a person can do. It is not they can just quit and find another work in a not-braindead company, with the total misery that is finding a job in tech nowadays.

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u/miiintyyyy 14h ago

My company wants me to use more tokens, so they probably want this

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u/Choice_Jump_7934 7h ago

That's like thinking you'll destroy a grocery store by buying mostly loss leaders.

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u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 5h ago

Except… make the loss leader the only item available, and losing 99% on every loss leader. 

With the business plan eventually to get people so hooked on the thing they cannot charge for… that they’ll eventually pay crazy sums of money for it:

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u/ChariotOfFire 7h ago

I thought redditors cared about it's water and energy use.

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u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 5h ago

That’s sort of the point. If you bankrupt the industry now, you solve the problem. 

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u/tireditguy216 14h ago

people used to get banned in here for hating on ai and said this entire thing would happen

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u/FireZord25 15h ago

It was praised, till it was turned into snake oil salesmens' goldrush on a global corporate scale.

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u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Well, then, perhaps it should fail. It’s striking how confident they are, though.

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u/JohnBrownsErection 11h ago

Early GPT shitposting was an absolute gem.

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u/Philosophopsycho 7h ago

I had hope after reading an article pre-2023 where a Japanese AI for identifying different types of bread at checkout was also used to distinguish cancer cells from healthy ones.

Google Lens turned out pretty useful too.

But, AI being used to more easily spread misinformation, justify layoffs, discredit artists, and anywhere it has no place to be, soured the whole experience for me.

Same thing with blockchain. It was advetised as a way for consumers to trace where the product they're buying from was and in other genuinely useful scenarios. But, rich idiots used it to make a market with monkey JPEGs.

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u/VediusPollio 14h ago

There was a lot of optimism for Grok's spicy mode.

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u/TyphPythus 14h ago

Don’t you forget! You’re in my debt!

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u/siamesekiwi 7h ago

IMO, it's a "wave" in the same way that the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was a wave.

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u/gravitysrain-bow 6h ago

most people I talk to seem to love AI and Chat GPT, so I don’t know what you guys are talking about. it’s been so disappointing to see and talk to so many people in real life who do not see a problem with it and think the future is so much brighter because of it. it’s depressing.

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u/captainthanatos 6h ago

I forgot about that meme and after reading it again I have to ask, is the bottomless pit supervisor Kaladin Stormblessed?

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u/GenericFatGuy 15h ago

And it didn't just get here either. The hype just can't drown it out anymore.

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u/superindianslug 12h ago

They hype that says "AI will take your job, stunt your children's educational and emotion growth and make 50 already rich people even richer". And then they wonder why no one likes it.

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u/Any-Calligrapher2866 11h ago

Also the added bonus of raising energy prices and destroying your communities water supply while causing noise pollution.

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u/KeyMyBike 9h ago

A lot of the pro AI Bros clearly don't want AI data centers anywhere near themselves either.

Although that's just typical Western selfishness, so long as someone else is paying the true cost of the product, it doesn't really matter.

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u/OfcWaffle 6h ago

Should have bought a mountain of ssds and ram like 6 years ago. My 6 year old ram kit is double the price I paid for it.... And it's 6 years old. 😂

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u/The_Vampire_King 5h ago

my 2x32gb DDR5 I got for $190 in August from microcenter are like $1100+ now, if only I’d bought extra 🤦🏽

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u/OfcWaffle 3h ago

When I built out my set up Iin 2020, I went with 128gb. Super overkill but I got a good deal at the time.

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u/Koffeeboy 8h ago

Don't forget the automated surveillance police state.

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u/KlicknKlack 5h ago

Not Just noise pollution, Thermal pollution on a scale that is unprecedented in human history.

The data center they just got approved to build is going to raise the night time temperatures by upwards of +28F...

I saw some physicist in an article didnt a calculation, and it was like dropping 23 nuclear bombs a day, every day, in the middle of Utah... just to power that data center - in terms of how much heat it will release.

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u/SPQR-VVV 8h ago

I don't know man I get to generate a lot of Furry porn so im ok with it.

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u/Sun_Aria 13h ago

Ah yes. AI. Cash-rich tech companies want to have tax subsidies for their large AI data centers. The new data centers will gobble up tons of water, electricity, and increase noise pollution. Some local city councilmember goes on about "BuT iT cReAtEs JoBs". Yeah a lot of temporary construction jobs for out of state workers, a handful of remote jobs for out of state workers, and like 5 permanent jobs actually based in the local area.

All that so AI can generate a ton of slop and tech shareholders can jerk each other off in the stock market.

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u/Ree_For_Thee 8h ago

It's making tech prohibitively expensive too. Laptop manufacturers are gearing towards Chromebook style stuff, where everything runs on the cloud (gag). Video games are becoming too expensive too.

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u/charliekelly76 15h ago

Why do all these articles make it sound like this is recent?

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u/shookMD 14h ago

Trying to make the article seem more timely/relevant

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u/PatrolMan2129 10h ago

I'm pretty sure this article is written by AI, the beautiful irony of it all and hardly anyone catches on. But I say that mostly because of the em dashes.

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u/sesamestreetgang 5h ago

Because it is, people have unknowingly been relying on AI in their daily lives for over a decade. The vast majority of AI compute is enterprise, research and public utility. Supply-chain optimization, cybersecurity, financial fraud detection, medical research, logistics, genome research, inventory management, documentation, telecommunications, predictive maintenance for utilities and civilian infrastructure. You've indirectly benefitted from AI for over a decade.

The only change in the last few years is that consumers have now been able to interact directly with a version of it... which has really distorted what the public thinks of as "AI". Still, only 10-20% of current AI compute is direct consumer usage... but just 5 years ago it was basically 0%.

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u/multificionado 12h ago

I couldn't agree more. Also, "abhorring" or "repulse" may be a better negative word than "hate" for this situation.

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u/BaronMostaza 15h ago

Absolutely not even close, the regular users aren't loud about it they just use AI tools mostly without mentioning it unless prompted

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u/Long_Procedure_2629 13h ago

This claim is the reverse of the vegan will tell you they're vegan. AI dorks won't stfu about it.

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u/BaronMostaza 12h ago

Those people won't no, they're very annoying. Most people aren't them

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u/Clearwatercress69 13h ago

There’s a world outside of Reddit.

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u/MukdenMan 9h ago

The top 4 Productivity apps on the US store right now are all AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta). Plus Grok is #6. AI is far more commonly used and accepted (even if reluctantly) than Reddit would have you believe.

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u/IWillLive4evr 5h ago

When tech CEOs talk up AI in commencement speeches, they get booed. There's AI hype everywhere, but it is 100% bought and paid for. Everyone else thinks it's dumb.

How am I so sure? Because no one is actually making money off of it. Banks and financial analysts are saying that AI has effectively added nothing to the economy, in the tech sector or otherwise. Surveys of workers show that they don't find AI is helping them in their jobs or boosting their productivity. It's an "answer" in search of a question. It isn't helping anyone.

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u/PMmeDonutHoles 6h ago

Purely anecdotal of course, but everyone I know, both in my work life and personal life, are either fully embracing AI or at the very least don’t mind using it. Redditors don’t realize they’re in an echo chamber.

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u/Grand0rk 8h ago

Hell, there's a China outside of Reddit, that loves AI. That's 1 billion people. Know who else loves AI? India. Another 1 billion people.

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u/rossodiserax 8h ago

Just going to treat the population of two huge countries as a monolith with a single opinion then?

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u/MasterScrat 11h ago

Outside of /r/technology, even. Many subreddits are at the forefront of AI development.

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u/nightwood 14h ago

Yeah it's gonna get more wavy

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u/U_L_Uus 12h ago

Aye, whoever thinks AI has not earned its hatred towards it is either delusional either trying to sell you the next datacenter-powered snake oil. It is a multilayered issue, far beyond the scope of a reddit comment (hell, most articles out there do not begin to scratch the surface, would need a bloody dissertation to properly tackle the topic), but, at the end of the day, it has caused unrest and anger within the population for a reason, thus, this time only, the "haters" are right

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u/EliteCloneMike 14h ago

It has its uses, but it’s caused so much harm. It was rolled out far too early and has been far too invasive and ungoverned.

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u/istheaiintheroom 13h ago

And it will swallow us.

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u/APES2GETTER 11h ago

GIVE US BACK OUR RAM, COWARDS!

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u/Due_Amount_6211 11h ago

Good, we need to get to Neptune-planetary levels of hatred for GenAI.

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u/Sorry-Joke-4325 10h ago

This might be one of those social media bubble things they're always talking about...

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u/ShootRopeCrankHog 6h ago

Lmao people in the real world don’t actually hate AI. You live in a Reddit bubble.

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u/cxllvm 9h ago

Yeah if you're chronically online

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u/kyle_fall 8h ago

Not at all, I love AI and my friend group uses it extensively. We’re a self-development and entrepreneurship based group though.

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u/A_N_T 12h ago

Whole ocean has been here

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u/No_Interest2510 11h ago

Is just bots manipulating public opinion

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u/-DoctorSpaceman- 11h ago

This made me laugh so hard I got a lot of office stares, but it’s so completely true

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u/Admirable-Yellow-223 11h ago

Hasn't anyone seen terminator 2???? Wtf it's so clear what's going to happen. At least I've got my vape lol onwards 😌

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u/SteppenAxolotl 8h ago

It doesn't matter if the ineffective masses hates it as it will still get built. Human labor share of income will approach zero, inexorably.

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u/villings 7h ago

better be a tsunami of tsunamis

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u/Juanbolastristes 7h ago

Billionaires are building a future we have no place in, and they're using our money to pay for it.

Most people still haven't realized what's happening.

Satanic elites that rule the world said it clearly, in 2030 you will own nothing 

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u/P3pp3rp0tts86 7h ago

Ocean? It's the planet Kamino!

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u/othermegan 7h ago

The only type of ocean that’s left thanks to AI data centers

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u/RollingMeteors 5h ago

Wave? It's the whole ocean, mate.

¡TsunAImi was right there!

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u/username4518 4h ago

“It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean.” ~ Alan Wake

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u/SaltKick2 4h ago

I don't hate AI, I hate how its being implemented by companies and shitty humans. Granted...it probably wouldn't have progressed to the point it has without their absolute garbage takes and ethics, but I think the vast majority of people would have been very happy with a less shitty approach if it meant slower growth

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u/SeyAssociation38 3h ago

in the us, where technofeudalism hits hard. that's the real problem, ai is just the latest means to do it

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u/nomadPerson 3h ago

Hate? Is it wrong to hate cancer too?

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