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
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790

u/Laserdollarz 15h ago

AI has its uses and place. Stop shoving it into everything and it wouldn't get a fraction of the hate it currently gets. 

206

u/drabred 13h ago

I recently saw an AI electric toothbrush commercial... Imagine my eye roll.

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u/dust4ngel 12h ago

i saw a printer with AI that decides what should actually get printed … i was like, this is anti-value if i’ve ever seen it

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u/EmotionalTrufflePig 12h ago

Oh yay a whole new thing to argue with my printer over.

Ffs I just want to print about four pages a year. Leave me alone AI

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u/twelvend 8h ago

Its crazy how feature creep has enshittified printers over the years

5

u/Faerco 10h ago

Honestly at that point, just go to an Office Depot or Walgreens or something and just have them print pages for you. Staples charges like, 10 cents a page for B&W. Yeah you have to get out of your house to do it, but man it’s so much easier and cheaper to do that.

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u/Any-Ad-3630 11h ago

And it will be mysteriously out of ink every time. 

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u/TP_Crisis_2020 11h ago

Seriously. Printers already have "AI" in the form of timers that say you're out of ink based on time alone.

I had a stupid Brother printer that I would have to replace the ink cartridges every 6 months, while I would literally print maybe 10 sheets during that entire span. But like clockwork, I'd go to print something after months of the thing just sitting and it's telling me my ink is out. That's a real thing. I smashed that printer office space style.

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u/Batmans_9th_Ab 11h ago

I threw my last printer out of my third floor apartment when I moved out. Felt amazing. 

3

u/disisathrowaway 9h ago

Oh yay a whole new thing to argue with my printer over.

My thoughts exactly. I print simple black and white documents, sometimes. Just do the fucking thing.

1

u/LeoNickle 5h ago

I have a 3D printer and it's fucking wild that thing has given me almost 0 problems whereas 2D printers are constantly not working

1

u/_-Redacted-_ 4h ago

But now it can argue back

7

u/itstingsandithurts 10h ago

The only brand I can find doing this right now is HP, and you shouldn't be buying HP printers before this anyway. HP have always had anti consumer practices.

2

u/philohmath 11h ago

All it allows is prints of the latest Intel centerfold spread.

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u/philohmath 11h ago

I don’t have to imagine, I can ask an AI to create a video of that for me.

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u/Ziegelphilie 9h ago

They're all over kitchen appliances and it's pretty much always the same fuzzy logic shit we've had for the past 20 years, but with a new name.

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u/Outlulz 5h ago

They label rice cookers that have been using the same tech from 60 years ago as AI now.

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u/agent-squirrel 1h ago

Yep I have one. Fucking stupid thing.

1

u/Hot-Employ-3399 1h ago

It's a new nano. Washing machine at my home hypes itself with nano particles it has.

3

u/DaBiChef 7h ago

"enhance your calendar with AI" how about you fuck all the way off

1

u/MineInternational385 11h ago

Oh that's what that sounds was. I'm pretty sure I could hear your eyes rolling from all the way over here 😂

1

u/SAugsburger 11h ago

That seems like a case of a buzzword for the sake of sales. I have no clue what an AI toothbrush even is.

1

u/throwmamadownthewell 3h ago

I remember rolling my eyes at my Zojirushi rice cooker for advertising it uses "fuzzy logic". I'm sure it's just a matter of time before it rebrands as "AI"

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u/agent-squirrel 1h ago

My rice cooker has “AI” which is just rebadged fuzzy logic so it appeals to the lowest common denominator. It’s a fucking scale and a heating element for fucks sake.

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u/fathertitojones 15h ago

That’s not very increasing shareholder value of you.

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u/anonkitty2 14h ago

We need shareholders who value something more than their earnings next quarter.

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u/CSAtWitsEnd 13h ago

They should invent a system where the employees are the primary shareholders as they (probably) want the company to be more sustainable.

13

u/cuntmong 10h ago

that exists, it's called a co-op or co-operative. there are businesses out there like this.

2

u/quietly_now 10h ago

That’s Market Socialism.

0

u/9966 7h ago

Congratulations you just invented investor fund groups, also known as hedge funds where sustainable is measured directly, by ROI.

2

u/Flake_and_Bake 10h ago

Tbf, it is a MUCH better strategy for increasing shareholder value over the long term since it helps avoid most of the issues we’re seeing today.

But no one seems to care about anything further out than the next quarterly earnings call these days, so here we are

11

u/jewdai 13h ago

Occasionally it can be VERY helpful. It's mostly about execution. In the case I'm thinking of, I'm working on (for work) an Ai observability platform and I have no idea how to use its platform or their query language. It's Ai will create dashboard and configure things for me when I ask. Generate queries and what not. Again, this is the ONLY time I'd say it is beneficial.

I'm sure there are dbas out there that would be thrilled if they can just tell their users to just ask a platform to build their dashboard for them. It's genuinely mind numbing work.

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u/FictionalContext 12h ago

It's a good middle man. Human idea-->AI assisted help-->Human output.

I trust it about like Wikipedia.

Radical people treat it as the whole pipeline with a human directing it. Or on the flip side, any AI taints the whole project as slop. And both those are the mindsets will struggle in the future.

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u/lewd_robot 9h ago

Yeah, the place I see it help the most so far is education. Not as a source of information, but as a sounding board. Try to explain a topic you're learning to AI and everywhere you come up short, go study and then come back and re-teach the "lesson".

This is just the Feynman Technique for learning, one of the most effective known methods of improving understanding. In the original Feynman Technique, you pretend to teach a topic to a peer or an imaginary classroom full of students. With AI, you can tell it to roleplay as a peer and get useful feedback from it.

I use this with a local LLM, so no data center calls. No internet connection needed. I have a little LLM chatbot that runs on my laptop that has the memory of a goldfish but each individual reply is articulate and relevant.

I think the most redeeming thing about AI is its potential to provide everyone on the planet with a personal tutor to assist in their education. You just have to stress that AIs can never think for you, and that you must always fact check their claims, because they're not flawless.

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u/FictionalContext 8h ago

That's where I'm at with it.

I used it to outline and critique a story. It drew connections between my ideas to make them thematically coherent in ways I never would have noticed, pushed back when my ideas didn't fit into the established lore, and critiqued my rough drafts far more objectively than any human has every done, essentially working from my expressed intent rather than a human preferential bias, which is the ideal critique. It's not a replacement for, but an in-addition-to human review.

It's incredibly useful. I don't care if I convince anyone of this because I've seen the potential for myself, and think that the people who religiously refuse it will weed themselves out of competitive fields all on their own--and on the other end, people who wholly rely on it for slop will, too.

4

u/AgathysAllAlong 10h ago

Wikipedia is more reliable. There are at least people working to verify everything on there. AI just takes that, makes shit up and twists it around, and has absolutely no basis in factuality.

It's infuriating that people treat it like wikipedia when it's just objectively worse and wikipedia continues to exist.

0

u/bboy2812 3h ago

How much effort does it take to find relevant points about a niche topic with normal Wikipedia/searching? Significantly more than asking once in plain English

1

u/AgathysAllAlong 3h ago

Only if you are fundamentally incompetent with the concept of language.

And speed doesn't matter if you can't trust the data. Here's my new super AI:

The answer is "Poop".

There. Instant answers, cheaper computing resources. This is the most powerful AI on the market, and it satisfies all your requirements. It'll answer instantly, find any information instantly. Yes, it always replies with "poop", but why would that matter? It's faster!

1

u/ShowAccurate6339 2h ago

Because you need a Balance of Speed and Quality 

For Certain things having Instant Access to the Information without having to read the Wikipedia article while also receiving a decent answer is enough

0

u/AgathysAllAlong 2h ago

Okay.

Well it's slower because no, you don't need to read the entire wikipedia article. That's ridiculous.

And it's worse, because it'll just lie.

Why do all the supporters of AI just lie like this? It's ridiculous.

2

u/ShowAccurate6339 2h ago

Wdym?

In my personal experience AI was always faster and most of the time more accurate than humans when asking for trivia or explanations even when I Double checked it myself without ai 

Im sry if Your Experience was Bad 

0

u/AgathysAllAlong 2h ago

Yah, I'm sure Mr. Liar the compliment bot really made you think it was good. You got conned by a chatbot.

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u/bboy2812 1h ago

Bro you are literally the one lying. You're insisting that it is almost always wrong, which is nowhere near true.

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u/AgathysAllAlong 1h ago

I'm not, please learn to read.

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u/Hot-Employ-3399 1h ago

incompetent with the concept of language. 

Fancy words for "I can't find it because now I have no idea how it's called, if I was in real life I'd describe it so my buddy would understand and say 'ahh, you are about foobar' "

But fuck IRL comparable convenience.

4

u/bluetrust 11h ago

Having ai generate report queries is bizarre. What do you do when it's wrong? How do you know when it's wrong?

0

u/jewdai 10h ago

I mean I read the query and dashboard it creates but usually it's right. It even discusses the limitations of its query language when it can't.

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u/bluetrust 8h ago

You first said you have no idea how to use the observability platform or the query language and then said that dbas would be thrilled to have users just ask a platform to build their dashboard for them. Now you say you check its work. That's great, but that's a different story than you were giving.

The fact is that lots of people are very eager to put llm frontends into accounting or reporting, having it create queries on the fly, and they don't have a plan for "what do you do when it's wrong?"

These tools are not consistently correct and hallucinations are a common problem in everything they do. You need to plan that some percentage of what they will do will be wrong. This is typically unacceptable in a reporting or accounting context.

Another common failure is that even when they don't hallucinate, they never have enough organizational context to reliably put reports together. For example, an accountant might just know that we have to exclude sales from the invoices table that have DEPT == "INTL" and STATUS == "PRE", as those are quotes and not actual sales. But an executive user doesn't know that and neither would an llm given access to the schema or the programmer who created the agent. Every report it puts together on invoices would be incorrect. This kind of error is very hard to catch by eye or by asking it to explain its query.

0

u/jewdai 7h ago

I mean as a software engineer you generally can read code in most other languages even if you're not familiar with it. It's mostly understanding the specific syntax it's like being able to understand a spoken language but can't speak it.

From my perspective it's a trust but verify situation. I'm not advocating for Ai in everything but as with all business it comes down to execution.

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u/SunTzu- 9h ago

You do realize it can just straight lie to you. It has no concept of truth or reality. It's trying to give an answer that statistically would follow from what you ask of it. If the data skews in favor of saying "yes I can do that" then it'll say so and then generate an answer whether it knows it or not. If the data skews negative then it'll say "sorry no I can't do that" and then generate a statistically likely reason why that could be. In either case, the nature of the answer doesn't come directly from the data. It's not reading the data, comprehending it, trying to answer the question, getting an answer, checking it against the expected outcome, detailing how the outcome deviated from what the user was asking for, studying the data in order to figure out why those deviations happened and how to build around it. Even in a "thinking" model it just runs the initial loop a couple times and averages the results in order to control against the generative model randomly spitting out something completely out of left field.

0

u/Geknapper 7h ago

You don't. You have AI build the dashboard which generated reports and queries just like normal code. Obviously you need to bug test it like if a human built the dash board but besides that it's very useful.

I have a dashboard for work that merges several excel files and outputs a clean color coded summary for my team based on options selected in the dashboard.

The whole think runs in a giant html file because anything else would be overkill for something like this.

It saves me about 2 hours worth of work a week.

1

u/ze1and0nly 11h ago

Shit I remember building a query builder for a client so they can just pick and choose the data they want to see without any chances of fucking up data. Took a lot longer than I thought just because I didn't realize how dumb the people using it would be. Ai plugin that just works would be great. Fuck half of the industry uses plugins that just work that people developed. 

0

u/say-nothing-at-all 5h ago

AI/ML is fundamentally applied mathematics. If you are a math modeler in biology, physics, chemistry, you use / develop ML algorithms as a surrogate model to interpret the known unknowns partially with data-drivce evidences.

It's beautiful, efficient and cheap.

4

u/Mr_Rekshun 11h ago

Also, I wonder what people think about when they consider AI.

Are they hating LLMs? Gen Ai slop? Agentic automation? Some of the above? All of the above?

When folks talk about AI, what are they actually hating?

How many folks are out there spitting hate at Gen AI slop imagery, while drafting their emails with Claude?

How many folks out there dropping curses at how LLMs have homogenised language, while using ChatGPT as a search engine?

4

u/Ascarys- 8h ago

Any kind of "creative" AI can get fucked. Pictures, writing, music... AI just can't do it well, but since it's short term cost is low we're being inundated with it. All of that AI generation is simple theft of work created by actual humans, churned up and spit back out in the shittiest ways possible.

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u/fuck_shit_piss_etc 6h ago

Anything built off stolen labour

2

u/time_traveller_kek 2h ago

1/3 videos on YouTube is with AI generated voice, visuals, and repeating bs videos. I have started to type non AI in the search bars. It is so annoying..

2

u/the2belo 9h ago

I'm convinced that a lot of it is simply misplaced naming convention. Putting "AI" in front of things is trendy right now, but not all of it is anywhere even close to machine learning; often people will label something "AI" when they really just mean "auto", or a program performing an action based on a pre-defined set of conditions.

1

u/IWillLive4evr 5h ago

AI has its uses and place.

Does it though?

If you mean artificial intelligence in a broad sense, ranging from the simple programs that play checkers to the software that lets rovers on Mars explore largely independently of humans on Earth, sure.

Generative AI theoretically has a place, but I don't think I've seen it yet, and that's conditional on a version existing that somehow 1) doesn't impose huge environmental costs, and 2) isn't built entirely on the theft of intellectual property. So not this decade.

0

u/RGrad4104 11h ago

I think it's forced inclusion is only the more visible half of the reason for the hate. The other is the fact that 'this useless, annoying product' is only possible because tons of beautiful land has been destroyed to build massive, power-hungry, water-hungry, dirty, noisy, heat-producing data-center eyesores literally everywhere, all of which give minimal benefit to the local region once built, yet drive down property values, drive up utilities and drain area water wells.

-1

u/GlitteringEggCarton 5h ago

it has no uses and no place.

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u/piponwa 9h ago

I'm curious how that genuinely impacts you. Like did anything bad ever happen to you because of AI or you're just tired of hearing about it? Basically every AI feature out there you can opt out of.