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Comment by boothby | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just the tech industry. Friends of mine in non-technical fields are seeing more and more of this. If it’s in your workplace, it’s probably in most workplaces that you’re qualified to work in. You don’t "just" walk away from your community and your career.

If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.

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The conversation here is around online communities, so that's what my comment was about. LLMs destroy every aspect of life they touch, and I agree many of those problems aren't really solvable. But online communities at least can be preserved with strong moderation & ejecting users who post LLM-generated content.

What if I told you that there are Amish communities now that are avid users of ChatGPT in their shops? My brother-in-law is a cellphone vendor to such communities. For business purposes, is the excuse for all such technology.

> If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.

The funny thing is that as soon as communities do this and take an anti-LLM stance they get mocked, called luddites, they get told they're living in a word that doesn't exist anymore and that AI is here to stay, stop going against the current.

What a time to be online...

The Luddites weren't against technology, they were against the inhumane exploitation of workers and dangerous child labor, made that much worse through technology. All Ludd supposedly did was smash a couple frames after being criticized for his output, but the Luddites' grievances were really just the foremost among those that had been simmering among textile workers for as long as there has ever been a textile industry, long before industrial automation was a thing.

As for myself, I certainly don't want a community based on reactionary dogma, but I would certainly prefer to be around people who at least have their eyes open, and are aware of the corrosive effects that AI can have or already does.

The Luddites were about protecting their privileged hereditary position against competition from women and other outsiders. Not unlike the privilege of contemporary software engineers like myself.

A lot of labor unions were about racism and xenophobia too, but they did agitate for better working conditions nonetheless. For sure it's not black and white.

...against competition from women, who of course infamously had never been part of the textile industry? Who knew the Molyneux sisters were the Molyneux brothers all along?

Maybe try to inform yourself about the historical context before popping off? The Luddites were part of a medieval craft guild that was largely hereditary and had never admitted women. They even roughed up female weavers to deter them from employment in the trade.

Of course weaving has largely been a female-dominated craft from time immemorial. That doesn't mean you can just apply stereotypes to a historical situation you apparently know nothing about and pretend you're being both witty and insightful.

> Maybe try to inform yourself about the historical context before popping off?

Who exactly do you think the Molyneux sisters I referred to were?

The only correct answer is to give those people the middle finger.

And to work to pass legislation to give them the middle finger.

AI may be one of the most harmful technologies we have created. It's time to treat it as toxic.

I still think social media has done more damage, but we don't think of it that way right now because of shifting baseline syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

Then block those people. Either they're stupid and don't understand the bad incentives that LLMs create in forums, or they do understand and they're malicious.

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