Reads like a rant against the industrial revolution. "The industry is only concerned about replacing workers with steam engines!"

It's either broken and not capable or takes jobs.

You can't be both useless and destroying jobs at the same time

The industrial revolution called, they want their argument against the use of automated looms back.

Have you never had a corporate job? A technology can be very much useless while incompetent 'managers' who believe it can do better than humans WILL buy the former to get rid of the latter, even though that's a stupid thing to do, in order to meet their yearly targets and other similar idiotic measures of division/team 'productivity'

Seems like this is a good argument for specialization. Have AI make bad but fast code, pay specialty people to improve and make it secure when needed. My 2026 Furby with no connection to the outside world doesn't need secure code, it just needs to make kids smile.

And yet AI pulls through and somehow does manage to do both

They're called programmers, and it's faster and less expensive all around to just have humans do it better the first time.

and also chatbot-generated bug reports (like curl) and entire open source projects (i guess for some stupid crypto scheme)

it's not ai taking your job, it's your boss. all they need to believe is that language-shaped noise generator can make it work, doesn't matter if it does (it doesn't). then business either suffers greatly or hires people back (like klarna)

It's a massive new disruptive technology and people are scared of what changes it will bring. AI companies are putting out tons of propaganda both claiming AI can do anything and fear mongering that AI is going to surpass and subjugate us to back up that same narrative.

Also, there is so much focus on democratizing content creation, which is at best a very mixed bag, and little attention is given to collaborative uses (which I think is where AI shines) because it's so much harder to demonstrate, and it demands critical thinking skills and underlying knowledge.

In short, everything AI is hyped as is a lie, and that's all most people see. When you're poking around with it, you're most likely to just ask it to do something for you: write a paper, create a picture, whatever, and the results won't impress anyone actually good at those things, and impress the fuck out of people who don't know any better.

This simultaneously reinforces two things to two different groups: AI is utter garbage and AI is smarter than half the people you know and is going to take all the jobs.

But but, now idea man can vibecode. this shit destroys separation between management and codebase making it perfect antiproductivity tool

The capitalists owning the AI thanking you for fighting on their side.

You're probably not wrong. It's definitely along the same lines... although the repercussions of this particular one will be infinitely greater than those of the industrial revolution.

Also, industrialization made for better products because of better manufacturing processes. I'm by no means sure we can say the same about AI. Maybe some day, but today it's just "an advanced dumbass" considering most real world scenarios.

Have you talked to any programmers about this? I know several who, in the past 6 months alone, have completely changed their view on exactly how effective AI is in automating parts of their coding. Not only are they using it, they are paying to use it because it gives them a personal return on investment...but you know, you can keep using that push lawnmower, just don't complain when the kids next door run circles around you at a quarter the cost.

Its not particularly accurate and then there's the privacy concerns

• Useless fake spam content.
• Posting AI slop ruins the "social" part of social media. You're not reading real human thoughts anymore, just statistically plausible words.
• Same with machine-generated "art". What's the point?
• AI companies are leeches; they steal work for the purpose of undercutting the original creators with derivative content.
• Vibe coders produce utter garbage that nobody, especially not themselves understands, and somehow are smug about it.
• A lot of AI stuff is a useless waste of resources.

Most of the hate is justified IMO, but a couple weeks ago I died on the hill arguing that an LLM can be useful as a code documentation search engine. Once the train started, even a reply that thought software libraries contain books got upvotes.

It can absolutely be both. Expensive competent people are replaced with inexpensive morons all the time.

Not to mention the environmental cost is literally astronomical. I would be very interested if AI code is functional x times out of 10 because it's success statistic for every other type of generation is much lower.

Lots of assumptions there. In case you actually care, I don't think any one company should be allowed to own the base system that allows AI to function, especially if it's trained off of public content or content owned by other groups, but that's kind of immaterial here. It seems insane to villainize a technology because of who might make money off of it. These are two separate arguments (and frankly, they historically have the opposite benefactors from what you would expect).

Prior to the industrial revolution, weaving was done by hand, making all cloth expensive or the result of sweatshops (and it was still comparatively expensive as opposed to today). Case in point, you can find many pieces of historical worker clothing that was specifically made using every piece of a rectangular piece of fabric because you did not want to waste any little bit (today it's common for people to throw any scraps away because they don't like the section of pattern).

With the advent of automated looms several things happened:

• the skilled workers who could operate the looms quickly were put out of a job because the machine could do things much faster, although it required a few specialized operators to set up and repair the equipment.
• the owners of the fabric mills that couldn't afford to upgrade either died out or specialized in fabrics that could not be made by the machines (which set up an arms race of sorts where the machine builders kept improving things)
• the quality of fabric went down: when it was previously possible to have different structures of fabric with just a simple order to the worker, it took a while for machines to do something other than a simple weave (actually it took the work of Ada Lovelace, and see above mentioned arms race), and looms even today require a different range of threads than what can be hand woven, but...
• the cost went down so much that the accessibility went through the roof. Suddenly the average pauper COULD afford to clothe their entire family with a weeks worth of clothes. New industries cropped up. Health and economic mobility soared.

This is a huge oversimplification, but history is well known to repeat itself due to human nature. Follow the bullets above with today's arguments against AI and you will see an often ignored end result: humanity can grow to have more time and resources to improve the health and wellness of our population IF we use the tools. You can choose to complain that the contract worker isn't going to get paid his equivalent of $5/hr for spending 2 weeks arguing back and forth about a dog logo for a new pet store, but I am going to celebrate the person who realizes they can automate a system to find new business filings and approach every new business in their area with a package of 20 logos each that were AI generated using unique prompts from their experience in logo design all while reducing their workload and making more money.

At that point just let me ditch the formality and send over the summary in the first place.

A tangent a little bit but so much this. Why haven't we normalized using fewer words already?
Why do we keep writing (some blogs and all of content marketing) whole screens of text to convey just a sentence of real content?
Why do we keep the useless hello and regards instead of just directly getting to the points already?