The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment

Thank you for saying this.

>Then we see posts about AI data centers and electricity use which will lead to higher electric bills for ordinary people if demand is higher than supply.

That hasn't really played out in reality. The correlation between datacenter capacity growth and electricity price growth is poor.

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251101_USC...

A lot of the problem is with the investment bubble aspect of AI rather than the tech itself. If people who wanted to use AI had to pay appropriate server costs the demand would be about ten times less and GPU, RAM and SSD prices no much changed. But instead you have Altman et all trying to burn vast amounts of investor cash to do a land grab.

> I want to use AI to do your job.

> I don't want someone else to use AI to do my job.

This is just hypocrisy quite honestly.

Yea, this is what almost everyone feels about AI, I feel. Talk to graphic designers, they say AI cannot do design but will happily use it to do programming work. Talk to game programmers, they say AI can't program/make games, yet use it to help make art assets. This hypocrisy is why it is always difficult to take AI criticism online seriously, especially when it seems that AI companies have a large number of subscribers that doesn't align with what everyone purported view is on AI.

The usual left/right haven't managed to pick a side and consume this. Maybe they still will. I don't know who would get which side though.

A cynical part of me says it's something everybody can hate. I can see both sides taking that. I can't see either side embracing it as part of the left or right identity.

Maybe more it's a conflict between those with power and those without. Like return to office, or open offices, or cubicles before that, and probably many other things back to the luddites and earlier.

As a millennial, I will be the first to run my brain on my toilet homelab servers.

> I wasn't expecting the next culture war to be about AI.

Why should there be another culture war? Isn't it enough that social media has tuned us against each other on ethnicity, age, political views and a thousand other differences? You want one more? You need another reason to hate your neighbor?

It's not that kind of "AI" though.

On a long line between SQL and Cylons, we're sitting way closer to the SQL end of that line. Like close enough that from across the room you can't tell the two dots of "SQL" and "2026 AI" aren't one dot.

I don't think this link supports your claim. All English speaking countries in the "Opinions about AI by country" chart have 60%+ people who are nervous, in every country but Japan at least 40% of people are nervous, and there's no obvious correlation with the "trust in government regulation" data further down.

There was always content that wastes people's time because people have always confused length and complexity with comprehensiveness and depth.

These were always poor proxy metrics for "good content," but in a lot of environments, especially professional ones, they were how work was evaluated. Naturally others used LLM to generate content that satisfies these metrics.

The slop epidemic is a consequence of what people erroneously valued for so long. Now they have it, and it's meaningless, and even if most of it was always meaningless, they can't easily tell the difference between "fluff with something meaningful" and "fluff with only fluff" anymore.

And the effect is often multiplicative.

Impersonal corporation which has been improving their capability to make you give up in disgust for decades jumping on the AI bandwagon? Check.

Voice recognition system that doesn't? Check.

Dunning-Kruger level responses once you finally get your voice recognized? Check.

I vote that the second biggest problem with LLMs.

#1? They run on an unlimited power source. Human gullibility.

Everyone wants to use AI to create work and no one wants to consume or be downstream of AI created work.

Yeah, I waste more time now because of AI generated slop.

I see a headline on reddit and click on the article. I spend 3 minutes reading it and the article says nothing new and doesn't even have a point.

Then I go to the comments and see people arguing about it but also people calling it AI generated slop.

Then I click on the account that posted the article and their account history is spamming the same article to 10 different subreddits and I subscribe to about 5 of them so I have to see the same dumb post 5 times. Then I realize the account is just an AI bot spamming AI generated articles to generate upvotes or display ads to generate money.

It's all so annoying and a waste of electricity, bandwidth, and my time.

There are also subreddits mainly for photos like nostalgia places where bots just repost popular posts from a year ago or 6 months ago but now they repost stuff from 3 days ago. It's completely out of control and AI has made it this easier to do.

So now I am spending less time on these sites which is maybe a good thing so I can thank AI for making using the Internet so annoying that I stop and find something else to do.

It's basically Dead Internet Theory becoming reality.

Thanks for the reminder, I’ll adjust for future submissions.

I think these studies aren't meaningless at all, but the fact that "AI" is a loosely used term means that many people might view even more simple ML methods with skepticism, as opposed to just, say, chat-like LLM tools.

Does the fact there are so nany things called fruit these days make "Who likes fruit" a meaningless question?

I think we have lots of evidence that the single binary question "is this something people like 'us' support or not" is the only deciding factor in a lot of political decisions people make. They don't consider the facts of the particular issue and how it might impact them. They abdicate that role to whomever they believe defines what 'people like us' believe.

There is almost no messaging about how AI will benefit non-business owners/managers. It's not: "it will make your job or life easier", it's "you can be more productive so we'll ask you to do more and hire less". When computers were becoming common, the messaging was more positive and hopeful.

Big companies are diving straight into the mustache-twirling benefits "for the business" and of course people will push back.

It is AI-generated, which is why it got killed.

If you're looking at the same comment I am, I suspect it just tripped AI-generated-comment heuristics, perhaps people's personal ones and perhaps the site's. It's an unfortunate world for people who like em dashes and have some genuine reason to be creating a new account.

> Both things can be true.

Sure but that has nothing to do with long/short term.

Everything to do with have/have not.

Let's read again.

> 76% of AI experts said AI would benefit them personally, while only 24% of the U.S. public said the same.

Think 76% of financial experts said higher tax on low earners would benefit them, whilst only 24% of the public said the same.

I've been thinking the opposite. It sucks to be in the generation of workers that are displaced by AI. It's going to be great to be in the generation where work just isn't something that humans are expected to do.

The company whos blog it is is "AI-assisted clinical documentation" - I feel this is an attempt to explain anti-AI sentiment as an unreasonable aversion to AI rather than the real reasons for anti-AI sentiment. There's a weird trend in the AI industry to pathologize people who don't like AI.

That has been the case since industrialization. It's not exactly new that capitalists want to replace workers with machines. The question is whether there will be new and different jobs for people or if AI and robots will take over everything this time. If that's the case, capitalism will break (nobody can afford to buy the products anymore) and a new economic system will emerge. This could be a great system for everybody or a dystopian one. My bet is on dystopian until there will possibly be a violent revolution by the peasants.