Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything

I'm looking at engineering job specs at the moment and it's very wearisome that every company seems to have pivoted from highlighting the unique value they provide to customers to putting AI front and centre in their employer branding. My eyes immediately glaze over at what may have been the result of "Claude, take this HR/marketing/whatever copy and inject some AI".

I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but businesses need to chill. AI seems to amplify existing bottlenecks within organisations, so we should probably tread carefully when it comes to pushing the tech. Fix the organisational problems first and hedge our bets.

I wonder if anyone reading this was around during the dot-com bubble because maybe it felt the same...

For me it’s just become…incredibly boring.

There’s something uninspiring about a machine thats supposed to “do the hard things for you” so to speak. I like using my mind and understanding things deeply.

Sure you could say that “managing the AI” can be deeply understood in a way but it’s just not exciting.

Controversial take:

I would rather spend 2 hours working on a problem, fully thinking through all the approaches and design considerations, than have an LLM write some code and be done in 30 minutes.

That's just a lot more fun for me.

I still use LLMs for faster, focused, searches that cater the results to my specific needs; but I'd still rather build stuff with my own hands.

Yes, a lot of posts on HN are also about AI. Used to have more variety.

I noticed recently that there are new "AI Widget" and "Chat Widget" EasyList filters in the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter lists. I'm not sure when they were added but they weren't checked by default for me. They definitely help clear some of the clutter.

AI has helped me rediscover my love of coding. It helps me write my emails for me, puts together my shopping list, and gives me advice on how to structure my day. AI tells me what to do. I don't have to fear my choices anymore, because AI makes the choices for me.

We need to go back to when the front page of the site was only Rust posts.

Step 1: remove reference to blockchain

Step 2: insert reference to AI

You’re absolutely right!

I think this is just social media content right? Just don't consume it?

Personally I find AI great and where I can , everything is AI enhanced

- Coding / Software dev (obvious one)

- Health ... been super useful as I recently had a thyroidectomy, it's given me a lot of information the drs didn't and also spotted a mistake my dr made in post surgery symptoms. I maintain my own set of .md files documenting all medical things now.

- Shopping. Super useful though still has a way to go, but relative to google I tend to use the AI results more often.

- Random problems... Insanely useful!

- Fact Checking, pretty good for the most. But you have to fact check your fact checking.

- Market Research, surprisingly good

- Philosophy, really good and useful

So basically anything.

One problem is that when people delegate tasks to AI, they don't themselves learn anything from doing the task -- not just in the general sense of personal improvement, but in the very concrete sense of "what is it that was produced".

Before AI, when someone showed you a presentation or an Excel sheet, even if it was complete horseshit that they had made up, they knew what was in it: they knew more about it than you, by definition.

Now, not so much; people output things they know nothing about, and when they show it to you they are discovering it just as you are.

This is novel, and discomforting.

It does feel like a marketing failure. If everyone makes the same claim, it's not differentiating.

I remember being frustrated at every company claiming to be "innovative" in a past job search.

You can use AI, tell AI to read the page first and if it's AI anything to block it. Vibecode an extension.

Start at the OS level, you have maybe another 6-12 month left to find something built without AI.

So, basically: just bear with us a little bit longer and then drop all computer usage (this will include every tech which blinks).

I block YouTube channels if I see they use AI slop as their thumbnail image and certainly if they use AI voices once the video starts playing. (This is only feasible because I already select from a highly curated subset of YouTube that generally doesn't use AI.)

I don't think people are sick of AI as much as they're sick of AI being shoved into places where nobody asked for it. The useful stuff is real, but the marketing layer is getting unbearable.

Tangential: I’m sick of being addicted to this site. The lowering of the signal-to-noise ratio has made the addiction worse, as I still hope to find a nugget of quality posts among a sea of AI discussion, which is not even technical, just comparing what LLM 1 vs 2 said. Any post by Anthropic & co. (twice a week) gets hundreds of points, goes to the top of the frontpage, and the rest of the week are articles testing/benchmarking/complaining about it. During lulls, we have a slew of opinion blogs where everyone and their dog tell a story about how they used AI to do a thing.

At this point I am certain even the most pro AI people on this site would like a bit more variety. The saddest part is that I’ve had to turn to Reddit to get a bit more colour to my media diet.

Bombardement of social media with AI blob could very well lead to a complete abadonment from these platforms.

I'm sure there's some AI to help you out. The skunkworks AI projects at companies are what people should really be worried about. The current AI stuff is just rudimentary to test the waters.

I'm working with AI since early 00's and it was a lot of fan of this with very little community of an artificial neural networks developers. Now AI is widely available and used by people with discussable level of intelligence to generate tons of slop, so all the internet looks like a big trash bin.

The AI fatigue is real. The problem is most AI products are just wrappers that add a chat interface to existing tools and call it AI. The ones that actually stick are the ones where AI is doing something that was genuinely impossible or impractical before — not just faster or cheaper. That bar is higher than most builders think.

My workplace has now blocked Kagi Search because it offers an AI assistant ( only approved AI providers are accessible).

AI is ruining everything.

well this is overdue

Right behind you.

I just wish it did what it said on the tin. Seriously, separating the hype from the reality is so time consuming.

I think we’ll look back on this period as The Great Enshittification where everyone ran out of ideas but capitalism demands growth so everything just got worse. The mass manufacturing of mediocre AI content might be the force that ends the digital era and maybe we’ll all just go outside again.

You're absolutely right!

I think this is a problem unique to facebook / meta. I mean the camera roll has a dedicated "ai images" at the top instead of... your active camera like every other app.

This all started with zucks obsession with virtual avatars and you can really see this in VR.

Unfortunate that it took so long for you to realize social networks are just a river of outrage and slop, because it has literally always been so for a decade before AI even became a thing - it's just that now AI has made the cheapness immediately visible.

Enjoy your newfound freedom and live a real life.

I would be miserable too if my job had to do with anything Internet.

It has gone from this cool inter-human knowledge hub and space for creation to a place where everyone tries to sell you something and make the sales pitch unskippable. It’s miserable.

It started getting weird when the full home invasion of Internet-connected nonsense started. I have eyes, I can see there is no milk in the fridge, I don’t need a push notification or glowing circle that says, “May I have your attention, please? Here are five Bezos offers for milk.”

I put up a wall of cheap 3D-printed waterproof enclosures near the local train station with the one in the middle having a handwritten letter from me and a bunch of blank sheets behind it, that asks people to write down knowledge that they think is useful for the rest of the community.

Only rules, no AI-generated content or printouts from websites. If it’s not handwritten or has ads, everyone passing by is allowed to remove and destroy it.

Everything else stays for exactly one week, then it gets removed to make space for something new.

If every enclosure is full, I put a few more up and watch and remove those who stay empty at the end of the week.

Went through 600 sheets of paper so far but people also started putting little hand-drawn artworks and their own colourful paper sheets in by themselves so the cost is more than manageable, as I just walk into the local town hall and take a bunch of paper from their copy stations from time to time.

Every week I go there to remove the letters from people and collect them in folders to make space for new ones. From live advice to cooking recipes with local ingredients, art, poetry, it’s pretty cool to see how many people are getting off the Internet and rather spending time doing this for their local community.

Often when the news are bad and I feel stressed and the next catastrophe is looming I go there with some coffee and watch people look at everything and talk about the stuff put up.

Soon I am running out of wall and will have to look for an extra space.

I simply do not longer believe in sharing valuable knowledge over the Internet as it gets hammered by AI crawlers and then integrated into models and no longer giving credit to the people who created it. So why bother.

My prediction is, that the more (generative) AI is used on the internet, the smaller the world will become.

Most of you will have a miserable life if your livelihood belongs to slaving away for companies relying on being present on the internet, and local knowledge hubs, which are reserved for human knowledge and creativity only, will be the places you meet real people and enjoy sharing knowledge and culture again.

I think AI having the potential to kill the current iteration of the Internet will probably be the best thing it is capable of doing for humanity.

Adapting is what we humans are best at, and I think most humans will adapt away from an internet mostly free of human-first created knowledge and culture. With a bit of luck I’ll live long enough to see if I am right.

Sounds like you need a cyberdeck

If you can afford it hire a virtual assistant and have them filter things for you and curate stuff. If you are suffering through things to find glimpses of enjoyment it is best you outsource your suffering to someone dedicated. Seriously, I had a $5 dollar an hour assistant who did all sorts random stuff for me. This even included curating things to read, talking to professional acquaintances on behalf of me using a script. It will cost you around 200-300 dollar a month but with the right person you can skip the BS.

I took compliance training today and the "actors" and voices were AI.

After watching the GPT images release video, it reenforced my skepticism that society will adapt. Then I thought about AI analysis of people's movements in public and realized that governments already capture everything, and now will be able to use infinite AI surveillance agents to watch all things all the time.

Any disobedience or crime (but really only against the government and gentry) can be instantly investigated by asking AI to analyze the behavior of all people and vehicles in the days prior to and after the incident. That's if they can't identify you immediately at the time of the crime.

When the time comes that civilian disorder is required to change the behavior of government, it will be impossible.

AI is the destruction of individual freedom. It is the destruction of citizens' ability to rebel against power.

We would be far better off without it.

AI for productivity is something I advocate for! But I hate the AI content spreading all over social media. Many times I see a man or a woman on IG and unlike early Gen AI days where you could tell in a flash if this is real or AI. But now it's very very difficult to tell and I hate that. I'm not sure why social media is not putting a stop to it.

Whole this "GenAI" nonsense just made me appreciate handrafted code more. I really like diving deep into documentation to figure out how things work and actually understand why something does not. YMMW.

K

Hear, hear, friend, you might have missed web 2.0. Oh web 2.0. The designers like myself were so sick of this nonsense.

AI is the same, but amplified and affecting a lot more people.

So I just recall Web 2.0 era and know that this too, shall pass.

Aside some use cases in which the application of machine learning excels - say speech to text, some audio applications, some image editing applications and summarizing a text, I fail to see the utility of other applications like LLMs. Half of the times they hallucinate and 100% of the times I must double check their output so why not searching by myself in the first place...

AI slop everywhere on social is terrible; I grant you that.

But AI tool in the hands of professionals that care about what they produce is becoming revolutionary. We are doing things we would never have done. Projects I never would have even started I am doing with new enthusiasm. I and the people I work with are using agents to learn new topics so fast. AI makes mistakes all the time, I found myself getting gaslit last week that refreshing my auth token would update my permissions (authentication and authorization are not the same thing)

If you are just looking at the output in images and garbage posts. Yes it is an abomination that must be stopped. But I cannot imagine a world without it now. And for the better.

I was sick about this before y'all because I was involved in three efforts to try to commercialize foundation models before the technology was ready.

Most of all I am sick of people being sick of it!

Amen.

I get your frustration.

I do not dislike AI. It has potential to change and improve the human condition. With that being said, it has its downsides with workforce displacement being at the top of the list, for me at least. Unemployment, however, has been prevalent in the US for many decades, mostly due to political maneuvering of previous politicians. AI has just made things a bit more difficult for the workforce, especially the recent generations who were already dealing with unemployment due to unmarketable degrees from colleges. I am not ashamed to say that, though I've been in tech for years, I am one of those statistics, unfortunately.

To fix this, AI companies should refocus their goals to account for the displacement of human roles as they continue to improve AIs. They should start doing that sooner rather than later.

The reality is that AI already does things better than some humans ever could. From what some individuals have been telling me, in education, for example, AI is already disrupting the classrooms. Teachers are feeling the AI-burn in the already declining education sector.

Though, I see a decline in human creativity and influence due to AI, I myself have used it to learn certain OS-related concepts or tweaks that would have normally taken me months to figure out had I focused solely on google searches, reddit threads and similar.

If I could do more, I would but I am limited by the lack of better, powerful hardware with the price being what they are.

Nothing makes me hit that close button faster than those fake voices everywhere now. That overly polished narrator on every other TikTok, half the YouTube videos read by the same auto-tuned robot (that apparently people over 60 can't tell is a robot). And don't get me started on streamers with like a confidence voice filter. Fuck all that noise.

And it's only going to get worse. Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace? I keep waiting for the backlash, for people to get sick of the plastic sheen on everything, but they conveyor belt just keeps moving. Maybe I'm just turning into my parents griping about all the weird music videos on MTV? =P

I keep reading these posts as "I'm sick of Electricity everything".

The parallel is the same. It's a revolutionary technology, and it's being used everywhere because it's NEW. Fast forward 10 years, it'll be everywhere and nobody will complain about "aw shucks, this appliance uses electricity! I miss the good old days of manually cranking it"

I think after the initial euphoria dies down, and the models reach a capability plateau, the use cases will start to come to fore.

I am an experienced developer, and, if I know what I am doing, then AI tools are an average junior programmer that I can beckon.

I have also dabbled in music creation with AI, first generating the lyrics, and then the music with vocals. Is it good. Nope. Is it average, some might say so. Is it a great use of my time, sure. Like a paid video game.

2001: I'm Sick of Internet Everything

Facebook especially is bad because I don't think Zuck cares. His entire personal history is shady. People have been missing posts for YEARS, well beyond the last few years when it got really bad

Oh and messages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712

tell me about it, my client started recently sending me AI generated QA reports, I guess I don't need to mention in 98% reported issues they are false positive just wasting my time

and it's similar with trying to watch Youtube on TV (Smarttube), too much AI slop though try to be picky when choosing suspicious videos

And yet you’re posting on HN. Curious.

I have solution: let AI filter out unwanted AI contents! Subscription starts at $5/mo. /s

I like ai. It's great. You can make your own apps. Hack anything basically. Print money. It's easy to block ai posts on browser level using ai of course. Oh...

I don't mind AI. What I don't like is the complete saturation of communication channels with the same mainstream ideas and products over and over. This started long before AI slop.

What's "AI"?

(I'm going to guess you mean generative AI such as image/video/text generation used to create slop on Facebook, but I really wish posts like this would clarify.)

There is no future for AI doomers. Bye bye dodos.

I love AI and LLMs.

I love all computer technology except printers.

Gimme more - looking forward to further leaps forward in AL and LLMs - the party has just started.

Why though? It is the technology of today's times. 70s had microprocessors, 80s had languages and tools, 90s was about the internet, 00s was about e-commerce and then web2.0 and later iPhone, mobile/local/social, 15s-20s was gig and creator economy, blockchain, metaverse... and now its AI. If you are sick of reading about AI, what would you rather read/talk about?

Unironically the best method to implement that browser feature you're looking for is probably also AI. Which tells a meta-story, AI isn't a new feature it's also a new medium. It can be used to turn cave speak into works of literature just as easily as it can turn voluminous spew into one liners (Ed Zitron just popped into mind for some reason). You can't ignore it once it exists, but it sounds like the problem you have genuinely can be solved by it, and I expect over the next decade we'll see a lot more of exactly that.

Here's to reading HN projected through the lens of manga comic strips sometime after we solve the GPU shortage..

There's incredible opportunity in the stuff that is missing, which is a wonderful thing.

The linear function do not work any more - we'll all deal with AI on some level, handwritten programs would be like assembly programs, there will be some, but not many.

But everyone is currently focused on the second derivative - using AI to further AI stuff - that's a valid goal but not in of itself, AI is just a tool, a tool that gets better is still a tool. It still needs to build something other than itself.

First derivative is where the money is. Let me grab this tool and do something useful/fun with it. Thanks for the fierce competition to build me the best tool in the mean time.

Like adding erosion to this hydrology simulator that I felt too complex a few years ago: https://aperocky.com/hydrosim