Astro Hacker News - Gen Z Resentment Toward AI Grows as Adoption Stagnates and Workplace Fears Mount

aetherspawn |next [-]

I want the world to go back to the way it was before, so I’m going to boycott it.

Sue me, I have that right.

keyle |root |parent |next [-]

Don't worry, it's a shiny tool at the moment. The electric screwdriver had its wow moment too.

I still haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie. If it wasn't made by a person, there is no 'personal'-ity to it. It's just bland.

Eventually things will slow and slide back to thoughtful first, crapload second.

blitzar |root |parent |next [-]

> haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie

The last 27 marvel movies might as well have been written by ai, plenty of people have been to see those.

dragontamer |root |parent |previous [-]

AI is making some degree of growth in Spotify IIRC.

I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music. It's like a hodgepodge of popular songs with little rhyme or reason. Very 'sloppy' but if they like it....

It's hard for me to confirm if they really are AI or not. But I'm willing to bet that (random Roblox game they're interested in today) == heavily AI made. Maybe there's some real human effort here or there but I have heavy suspicions.

redsocksfan45 |root |parent |previous [-]

Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.

kdheiwns |root |parent |next [-]

You frame this as if all technology is inherently good and anyone who opposes it is just dumb and wasting their time. People used to think Segways were dumb. They used to think 3D TVs were dumb. They used to think lobotomies were dumb. They used to think Xray shoe sizing was dumb. They used to think uranium in household appliances and toys was dumb.

And they were all right.

abc123abc123 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

The amish seem to be quite happy.

lostmsu |root |parent [-]

[delayed]

admissionsguy |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I hear that attitude about AI is much more positive in China. So people like him, in aggregate, could potentially be a danger and cause the US to give up the lead for the rest of century. Takes one bad election..

nkrisc |root |parent [-]

People who reject AI are a danger? Wow. This just sounds like setting up the foundation of narrative for having the government bail out these AI companies when bill finally comes due.

2ndorderthought |root |parent [-]

The narratives around the pressure to blindly accept AI is crazy. They try every angle from "you are a communist", to "you are too stupid".

I speculate it has a lot to do with surveillance capitalism. It's the same type of tactics that have been used for things like the banning of marijuana. Fear mongering so a few robber Barron's can profiteer.

I think AI is useful. I think it was rolled out haphazardly similar to how people used to gargle radioactive isotopes are slather them on as after shave to profit quickly. There are so many issues with the technology that the press won't even cover yet because we all have to play stupid until trends emerge to report on otherwise billionaire defense contractors will send their figurative or possibly literal hit squads after us.

The future of ai is in small local models people pay 0 dollars to upgrade or use. Anything else is meritless exploitation and destruction.

tovlier |root |parent |previous [-]

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xiphias2 |next |previous [-]

Token cost started increasing exponentially for frontier LLMs, and they improved mostly on coding tasks incredibly over the last half year while staying behind in non-verifiable tasks.

The main social problem with automation in general was that less intelligent people have been left behind as only boring physical tasks are left for them to do, and people don't generally want to go back destroying their body from the prospects of an office job.

At some point frontier AI will only getting only worthwile to use for only super highly intelligent and motivated AI researchers which is a tiny part of the population.

twoodfin |root |parent |next [-]

Token cost or token demand?

ekjhgkejhgk |root |parent |previous [-]

> less intelligent people have been left behind

May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence.

I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs.

In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own.

People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.

roenxi |next |previous [-]

> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology...

31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".

marginalia_nu |root |parent |next [-]

I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.

Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.

"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.

But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.

There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.

JumpCrisscross |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"

Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.

ben_w |root |parent [-]

> Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom.

Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill.

Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now.

redsocksfan45 |root |parent |previous [-]

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dauertewigkeit |next |previous [-]

We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario.

I love the cognitive dissonance.

Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?

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bsenftner |next |previous [-]

This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."

rvz |next |previous [-]

This is AGI.

keyle |root |parent [-]

Care to explain?

trolleski |next |previous [-]

No one cares about GenZ or any others, the AI is for the billionaires.

mgh2 |root |parent [-]

Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.

Hamuko |root |parent [-]

But Sam Altman told me that AI is about to replace most of the employees, so the data center GPUs will just be funding themselves.

keyle |next |previous [-]

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aaron695 |next |previous [-]

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black_13 |next |previous [-]

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kristianp |next |previous [-]

> While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment.

Sell NVIDIA!!!

feverzsj |previous [-]

They can still do gig works for training AI until AI replaces all the gig workers.