I use AI, what I'm tired of is shills and post-apocalyptic prophets
People would do much better if they just stopped listening so much and started thinking and doing a bit more. But as a lazy person, I definitely understand why it's hard, it requires effort.
I am still concerned with how it's going to impact society going forward. The idea of what this is being used for by those with a monopoly on the use of violence is terrifying: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/aip/
Am I a shill or a post-apocalyptic prophet?
Copyright issues (related to training data and inference), openness (OSS, model parameters, training data), sovereignty (geopolitically, individually), privacy, deskilling, manipulation (with or without human intent), AGI doom. I have a list but not in front of me right now.
Did you read Mr. Bushell's policy [0], which is linked to by TFA? Here's a very relevant pair of sentences from the document:
Whilst I abstain from AI usage, I will continue to work with clients and colleagues who choose to use AI themselves. Where necessary I will integrate AI output given by others on the agreement that I am not held accountable for the combined work.
I’d say [Declan] Chidlow verges towards AI apologism in places but overall writes a rational piece. [2] My key takeaway is to avoid hostility towards individuals†. I don’t believe I’ve ever crossed that line, except the time I attacked you [3] for ruining the web.
† I reserve the right to “punch up” and call individuals like Sam Altman a grifter in clown’s garb.
Or are you talking in generalities? If you are, then I find the unending stream of hype articles from folks using this quarter's hottest tool to be extremely disinteresting. It's important for folks who object to the LLM hype train to publish and publicize articles as a counterpoint to the prevailing discussion.
As an aside, the LLM hype reminds me of the hype for Kubernetes (which I was personally enmeshed in for a great many years), as well as the Metaverse and various varieties of Blockchain hype (which I was merely a bystander for).
[0] <https://dbushell.com/ai/>
[1] <https://dbushell.com/2025/05/30/ensloppification/>
[2] link in the pull quote being discussed to: <https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-criticism>
[3] inline link to: <https://dbushell.com/2025/05/15/slopaganda/>
Nah. Consider the context:
Aren't we all tired by this anti-AI stuff?
"Look at how I use this cool new technology" tends to be much more interesting to me than "this new technology has changed my job and I refuse to use it because I'm afraid".
[Copyright concerns, openness, sovereignty, privacy, deskilling, manipulation and AGI doom] are interesting topics to discuss. "AI is useless and I refuse to use it and hate you if you do" isn't, yet look at most of the replies here.
Given the opinion on anti-"AI" articles suggested by that trail of complaints, I'd wager he either didn't read, or didn't thoroughly read the article and the supporting materials it links to. That's totally fine; but do folks the courtesy of going back and reading more carefully (or at all) when someone indicates that one's understanding of the material is substantially incorrect.
You're confusing fear with disgust. Nobody is afraid of your slop, we're disgusted by it. You're making a huge sloppy mess everywhere you go and then leaving it for the rest of us to clean up, all while acting like we should be thankful for your contribution.
And for some reason the CxO suite and upper management has completely drunk the cool-aid.
In the past new technology was adopted sparingly, to figure out whether the juice was worth the squeeze.
However with AI it feels like a lot of places are (trying to go|going) all in, both in their work, and integrating it into the products, regardless of whether it makes sense.
But most importantly, I think pushback is needed because if AI succeeds in the way it is currently advertised and sold, it's a lot more people than 'just' the Software Engineers that are going to lose their jobs.
Which is great for all those companies who currently have a lot less people on payroll.
But on the other hand, a lot of the money spent on these companies is discretionary spending. Guess what's the first thing to be cut when you lose your job?
(For me it's been as transformational a change as discovering I could do my high school homework on a word processor in the 90s when what I suspect was undiagnosed dyspraxia made writing large volumes of text by hand very painful).
I'm also interested in understanding if the envisaged transformation of developers into orchestrators, supervisors, tastemakers and curators is realistic, desirable or possible. And if that is even the correct mental model.
* it is basically invalidated by somebody saying “well I find it useful”
* it is easy to believe it’s on a path toward usefulness
OTOH it is worth keeping in mind that we haven’t seen what a profitable AI company looks like. If nothing else this technology has massive potential for enshittification…
I just don't really wanna hear about your pro-AI peddling anymore.
Mastodon ain’t a blockchain and isn’t centralized.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environme...
- Bitcoin mining
- weapons production
- banking infrastructure
- making slop TV shows
- charging preteen phones
- playing Mario cart
- heating empty mansions to 27C in winter
- less pollution
- a more stable grid
there, fixed it for you
You don't have any data to corroborate less AI -> less pollution, especially long term.
Same for grid stability.
In your highly objective opinion, of course.
Many of my coworkers have embraced AI coding and the quality of our product has suffered for it. They deliver bad, hard-to-support software that technically checks some boxes and then rush on to produce more slop. It feels like a regression to the days of measuring LOC as a proxy for productivity.
Low quality (low precision) news, code, marketing, diagnosis, articles, books, food, entertainment (shorts, tik-tok), engineering is in my opinion the biggest problem in XXI century so far.
Low quality AI usage decisions, low quality AI marketing, retraining, placement, investments are accelerating the worst trends even more. It's like Soviet nuclear trains - just because nuclear is powerful and real it doesn't mean most of it's applications made any sense.
So as a pro-AI person and AI-builder in general, I want more anti-AI-slop content, more pro-discipline opinions.
The same person who ignores a crooked door frame or a CSS overflow now has a "mostly right" button to bring mediocrity to scale. We unfortunately aren't invested in teaching craftsmanship as a society.
I think without AI the effort of producing slop code or art that sort of looks like a real thing on the first glance is let's say 5% of the effort needed for the real thing that actually works flawlessly. LLMs and diffusion models bring it down to 0.5%.
They are also really good at faking comprehension and make recognizing real experise from phoney cosplayers harder for busy managers, officials, execs, politicians etc.
So while AI CAN be used for useful things, it very rarely is and it requires more discipline than most people are willing to invest.
Also, the way AI is trained on stolen and random low quality content is deeply disturbing.
So yeah, while I'd like anti-AI rants to be more precise and nuanced, in general AI in 2026 is mostly a missuse of a technology with great potential.
Still so many misconceptions about AI on HN, but I guess it’s just how techies are these days.
Yes, that VERY RARELY would work, but for most (and I mean 98% not 51%) people it doesn't. It's non symmetrical.
> bit sides can make slop, which is true but irrelevant
Idk, to me avoiding slop seems like the most ethical thing a professional can do these days.
Is it so hard to understand why people are reacting against this argument?
There's resistance but on the other hand there was resistance against light bulbs, trains with engines, automatic press, phones, television, a global internet,...
There was also resistance against fascism, slavery, Ponzi schemes, the privatisation of public goods, the devaluation of the Humanities, ...
Let's do a quick analysis of the amount of money put forth to push AI:
> OpenAI has raised a total of $57.9B over 9 funding rounds
> Groq has raised a total of $1.75 billion as of September, 2025
Well, we could go on, but I think that's probably a good enough start.
I looked into it, but I wasn't able to find information on funding rounds that David Bushell had undergone for his anti-AI agenda. So I would assume that he didn't get paid for it, so I guess it's about $0.
Meanwhile:
- My mobile phone keyboard has "AI"
- Gmail has "AI". Google docs has "AI". At one point every app was becoming a chat app, then a TikTok clone. Now every app is a ChatGPT or Gemini frontend.
- I'm using a fork of Firefox that removes most of the junk, and there's still some "AI" in the form of Link Preview summaries.
- Windows has "AI". Notepad has "AI". MS Paint has "AI".
- GitHub stuck an AI button in place of where the notifications button was, then, presumably after being called every single slur imaginable about 50000 times per day, moved it thirty or so pixels over and added about six more AI buttons to the UI. They have a mildly useful AI code review feature, but it's surprisingly half-baked considering how heavily it is marketed. And I'm not even talking about the actual models being limited, the integration itself is lame. I still consider it mildly useful for catching typos, but that is not with several billion dollars of investment.
- Sometimes when I log into Hacker News, more than half of the posts are about AI. Sometimes you get bored of it, so you start trying to look at entries that are not overtly about AI, but find that most of those are actually also about AI, and if not specifically about AI, goes on a 20 minute tangent about AI at some point.
- Every day every chat every TV program every person online has been talking about AI this AI that for literally the past couple of years. Literally.
- I find a new open source project. Looks good at first. Start to get excited. Dig deeper, things start to look "off". It's not as mature or finished as it looks. The README has a "Directory Structure" listing for some odd reason. There's a diagram of the architecture in a fixed width font, but the whitespace is misaligned on some lines. There's comments in the code that reference things like "but the user requested..." as if, the code wasn't written by the user. Because it wasn't, and worse, it wasn't read by them either. They posted it as if they wrote it making no mention at all that it was prompts they didn't read, wasting everyone's time with half-baked crapware.
And you're tired of anti-AI sentiment? Well God damn, allow me to Stable Diffusion generate the world's smallest violin and synthesize a song to play on it using OpenAI Jukebox.
I'm not really strictly against AI entirely, but it is the most overhyped technology in human history.
And I don't ever see it under a fifth, anymore. There is a Hell of a marketing push going on, and it's genuinely hard to tell the difference between the AI true believers and the marketing bots.
My scanner from 2003 has OCR.
Gaming has a very rich history with AI innovations. 1996's Creatures is a standout example.
AI has always been everywhere around you. AI predates me and you. The reason you're hearing about it now is because of the capability increase brought about by the lower cost of greater scale. But it's still in the uncanny valley. It is still flawed. To paraphrase John McCarthy, that's what makes it AI [^1].
I know you're fatigued from hearing about AI for the last three years. But I have been hearing about it for decades with the same magnitude of excitement and dismissal from pro-AI and anti-AI critics. Alan Turing laid the foundations for the technological singularity in 1950. Discourse has accelerated since the early 80's and 90's by writers like Vernor Vinge and computer scientists like Ray Kurzveil.
I encourage you to pay attention. Not to recent hype, but to what is actually happening. Steady innovation as always. That you were blindsided by it is curious.
I could explain the difference but it's beyond my pay grade.
It's fine to be tired of this. What is not fine is pretending your beliefs/feelings represent everybody else's.
No one forcing you to read the article. He is as free to write what he wants as you are to complain about it. Balanced. Like all things should be.
Also when I hear another human suggest using AI for ____, my perception of them is that they are an unserious person.
So in my opinion AI has had a net negative effect on the world so far. Reading through this persons AI policy resonates with me. It tells me they are a thoughtful individual who cares about their work and the broader implications of using AI.
There are entire sites dedicated to car reviews. This is a hackers website. Makes sense that the most evolving tool for the job is most discussed.
What else is really changing? CSS added a couple new properties? C++ new standard still didn't add modules (but the year changed!)?
Everyone else is just busy using it to get work done.
And I don't want to hear about how the world of software engineering has been revolutionized because you always hated programming with a passion, but can now instead pay $200 to have Claude bring your groundbreaking B2B SaaS Todo app idea to life, yet that's basically all I hear about in any tech discussion space.
You should ask your AI assistant to explain to you why people would go out of their way to take a stand against this.