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anianz
isoprophlex
I have three (gen A) kids, of which two are of the age to have opinions on this.
They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right). If I try to spin them a bullshit story, they tell me how can that be true and maybe I got brainwashed by AI. Also they hate ads with a passion.
If anything, I'm incredibly hopeful for newer generations. They'll probably mostly be fine, like most of us were.
---
Edit: many responses, and I'll add that in isolation "x is not real work" coming from a kid is maybe equally endearing as it is divisive.
I'll add that of course my kids are a product of their upbringing, and I make no secret of my existential confusion about what it is to program a computer when most of the time i'm just steering the clanker away from obviously dumb mistakes.
My wife is a psychologist working with underprivileged kids, so we always joke that she has the real job and I'm just doing a hobby that pays well. Much of this is them simply parroting that, maybe. We do try to teach them to think beyond dogma and the cultural bias they grow up in, but who can tell. Everyone is in the end to a great extent a product of their environments, and parents.
Finally. They (their generation) will probably be fine, but they might equally well not be. Vapes, tiktok, souped up ebikes, sexting, designer drugs, climate change, refugees, extremism. So many challenges, but you could argue every generation had that. So i choose not to have too much of an opinion and try to stick with gleeful, desperate optimism.
burnte
> They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right).
For most of computing history this has been the case, too!
glhaynes
Can't be doing rEaL woRk unless you're flipping front panel switches to input machine code instructions.
anianz
"Children are never shy to tell the truth." Your comment makes me hopeful as well.
In general those "Generation XYZ is threatened by this, thinks that" tropes often annoy me. I'm born somewhere between Gen-Y and Gen-Z and those boundaries feel totally arbitrary.
chubot
They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right)
Hm interesting
So they are making the distinction between regular "human brain" coding and AI-assisted coding?
Regular coding could be described as "not doing the thing yourself, but telling the computer what to do"
(FWIW I do think there is a huge difference; however I am not sure the general public has a very good idea of what "programming" is. I remember having some code up on my screen and my educated family was confused, even at the concept)
hirvi74
Most actions can be viewed in highly reductionist manner.
Even J.S. Bach was aware of the same concept:
> "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
~ Johann Sebastian Bach
downbad_
Hey, I sent you an email just now.
rickydroll
This smells to me an awful lot like the
"You're not a real ham if you don't use Morse code", "You're not a real machinist if you use CNC", "Your mechanical drawing skills are going to atrophy if you use CAD CAM. "You should manually tape PCB layouts, so you have more control.
And another grandfather's favorite, "Why do you want to use the forklift? You won't always have one, and a pry bar and rollers are good enough, and you learn the value of real work."
bccdee
I think there's a big difference between "your drawing skills will atrophy if you use CAD to draw for you" and "your brain will atrophy if you ask an LLM to think for you." Personally I don't judge people for being unable to draw, but I do judge them for being unable to think for themselves.
halestock
I'd say it's more like you're not a real driver if you use Waymo to get around everywhere.
conartist6
You have smart kids.
Once you use AI for all your work you won't be growing anymore, just fading away
bombcar
AI is turning all of us into managers and we’ve KNOW forever that managers don’t know anything ;)
hirvi74
The No True Scotsman fallacy strikes again.
Ask them for me, what is a "real" job? If anything, your children, as well as many others, are just exemplifying Effort Justification.
Why is suffering a requirement for something to be meritorious? While I agree that succeeding generations will be mostly fine, I also believe they will perpetuate much of the same regressive thinking as generations before them.
Also, please do not mistake my words. I do not believe LLMs are the be-all and end-all they are hyped up to be nor do I find them to be useless either. In a pragmatic sense, the entire purpose of programming is to provide a solution to a problem. Whatever else the human mind attributes to programming is merely fantasy that the ego ascribes to actions.
I say this all as someone that still mainly writes USDA certified organic code.
nprateem
Well the point is you tell it what to do isn't it? Unless your job is so replaceable and generic there's little actual direction needed?
I still can barely have a convo with it where it doesn't just make up total unworkable bollocks.
It can manage some coding though tbf, but again, not sure how far a completely non-tech user would find it.
dinfinity
> If anything, I'm incredibly hopeful for newer generations. They'll probably mostly be fine, like most of us were.
The current state of the world begs to differ with "most of us being mostly fine". Critical thinking skills and the ability to make wise decisions among the various electorates seem to be in a incredibly shitty state.
Anecdotally, Gen Z-ers as a whole are definitely not better at this; they're easily swayed by flashy memes, TikToks and other forms of disinformation. Where younger people used to have a more society minded, leftist lean (before ultimately becoming jaded), they more than ever side with right wing populists from a young age. Not all of them, but a much larger chunk than before.
bombcar
Maybe requiring large swaths of people to “make the right decisions” as the electorate was a problem from the start.
Lyngbakr
> They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind.
° https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...
pocksuppet
Because history is written by the victors, the Luddites were painted as idiots who just hated machines for no reason or dumb reasons. This couldn't be further from the truth.
elmomle
The sad thing that I haven't been able to resolve in my mind is that this is a cultural multi-party prisoners' dilemma among sovereign entities.
From a power-centric point of view, if my neighbors intentionally cast off modern technology, they are ripe for domination, economic exploitation, etc. The history of human civilization from the age of city-states onward is about navigating the need for protection from hostile, arrogating outside forces (and/or being one of those hostile forces).
aj_hackman
This doesn't account for the potential instability of modern technology. If you have an efficient electric range and your neighbors are still burning wood when the power goes out, you're in dutch. This is relevant to the AI discussion, as there is still a class of people doing things "the old way", and their skills might come in clutch for a society that's let itself atrophy in convenience.
smitty1e
For example, the post-demise advent of Val Kilmer in "As Deep as the Grave" https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/filmmakers-de... could prove a turning point.
If the "societal we" don't care to drown in AI-driven slop, the capitalist argument would seem to be a rebirth of local theater, written by no-kidding playwrights and performed by local actors in neighborhood venues.
The "societal we" will have the humanity and art that it demands in the marketplace as consumers, pure and simple.
NoGravitas
If only Ed Wood had had access to this technology. Bela Lugosi's character in Plan 9 from Outer Space could have appeared without covering his face with his cape.
1vuio0pswjnm7
What is the difference between someone who (a) dislikes some machinery and (b) someone who (i) refuses to use some machinery and (ii) _actively opposes_ the use of some machinery by _anyone_, for example, through sabotage or violence
This submission mentions certain incidents arguably representative of (b) but is squarely focused on (a). It discusses polling young people on what they think of "AI"
The greatest "threat" to "AI" IMHO is (a), where this results in stagnant or decreased usage of "AI"
"AI" is relentlessly hyped because the usage numbers are paramount
IMHO (b) is not a serious threat to usage
For some reason, commenters invested in "AI" seek to characterise (a) as (b)
I'm not sure why
To me, it seems inappropriate to compare (a) a group of people today, i.e., Gen Z, who use some "machinery" but dislike it, according to polling, with (b) a group of people in the 17th century that refused to use some machinery, sabotaged it and violently attacked their employers, some of who threatened they would violently attack their employees
jameslk
The nuance that’s talked less about is that both statements can be and likely will be true, but which way will the balance swing:
1. Many jobs will be eliminated (will they be offset by new jobs?)
2. The new technology will need to be adopted if you don’t want to fall behind (will there be less of these jobs or more?)
In past circumstances like the one you mentioned, there were more jobs than before. Ultimately we all just want to consume endlessly. That pressure creates more demand when prices lower, which causes businesses to compete via differentiation, which creates more jobs. I don’t think this situation will be any different
weikju
> In past circumstances like the one you mentioned, there were more jobs than before.
Were the jobs better or worse though?
wduquette
My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions.
If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.
tmp10423288442
I’m surprised to hear that she’s only now learning the lesson of group presentations - if you’re even slightly more competent than your group, you’ll be doing all the work and the rest of the group will freeload off of you. It’s not like the freeloaders would have been able to answer follow-ups questions before AI.
Gagarin1917
Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.
goalieca
It might seem they are lazy and not willing to put in the hard work to learn for themselves. The follow up questions confirmed this.
gdulli
Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it.
The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.
array_key_first
You can use something and simultaneously hate it. For example, smoking.
That's not to say AI is addictive. It's probably not.
But, if all your classmates are using AI then maybe the workload increases to compensate. Then, you have no choice but to use AI. We see this pattern with companies all the time. They often don't want to advertise aggressively or employ dark patterns. But their competitors do, and then eventually the only way to stay competitive is to join them.
minikomi
Or that they hate the project more than using AI
wduquette
Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.
adampunk
I mean…that’s essentially identical to group presentations in general. The other students didn’t do the work; what they don’t do the work with is irrelevant.
wduquette
Except that in this case, the other students thought they had done the work. They put the time in, but in a different way than my daughter.
adampunk
You don’t know that to be true. It doesn’t sound believable to me. It sounds like someone saying they thought they studied because they brought the book home and it was heavy in their backpack.
What I know is true is that neither of us has any insight into the interior life of those students. Even you have it secondhand from your daughter. You don’t know if they said that sheepishly, embarrassed at having been in exposed.
If we wanna argue that these tools made it a little bit easier to get away with not doing work then I’m in agreement. But so did PowerPoint. I had a lot of group presentations where it was somebody’s job to do the PowerPoint slides—often one of the easier jobs.
I guess I don’t know man. I’ve taught in college before the AI takeover and had lots of people that were bad at doing group projects. It’s pretty easy to get high and not do the work in college. With or without robots.
kald145
Gen-Z is pretty cool. The problem is a small subset of Gen-X and Millenials who have too much money and power and treat AI as if it is the Dianetics bible from SciFi author Ron L. Hubbard (who according to James Randi knew exactly what he was doing).
There are truly mentally unwell people in charge who would like get out the E-meter and audit everyone who does not follow their new Scientology knockoff. Yes, the advertising methods and suppression of opposition are the same.
jdw64
The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks.
The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use is felt by the lower classes, while the upper classes still have the freedom not to use it. AI may be able to make decisions based on more data than executives do, and perhaps even make better decisions than management. Yet the people being replaced are the lower-level workers.
This is the problem. The upper classes, who claim that AI is an essential tool, still have the freedom not to use it. But the lower classes cannot survive unless they use it. It becomes a tool required for survival, while at the same time being treated as something wrong, inferior, or low-status if you use it.
To get a job, AI becomes an essential survival tool. But culturally, it is also treated as a tool that damages creativity. I see this in open-source communities as well, in the class discourse around open source.
The same culture appears on Hacker News. Among the upper layer of open-source communities, there is often hostility toward AI-generated code, based on ideas of human purity: AI code is said to have no meaning, no responsibility, no real authorship. So even within open source, this takes on a class character.
But as a freelance developer, I have to trade against my own code-writing ability in order to survive and deliver. Because of AI, the floor price of software delivery has collapsed. If I do not use AI, I cannot meet the new requirements.
In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000. Without AI, that volume of work is impossible to handle.
This kind of discourse always makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it, but I have to use it.
AI lowers the barrier to creation and learning, but the way it lowers that barrier can also bypass the training of thought itself. It turns young people into both beneficiaries and damaged subjects at the same time.
And we live under this loop of coercion. Sometimes I think I do not want to use AI.
But if I want to survive, I have to use it. I feel the abilities I once took pride in beginning to decay, and I feel myself becoming increasingly bound to AI companies. At the same time, I also feel another kind of ability beginning to emerge.
Perhaps growing older means learning how to live inside irony.
undefined
htx80nerd
>The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
AI just repeats whatever the prevailing opinion is at that time. I am a very heavy AI user (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) and have queried it on a variety of topics. AI is not thinking, it is repeating.
jdw64
I agree with the view that AI does not truly think and cannot produce genuinely original opinions. It is difficult for AI to give answers that lie far outside the average distribution of its training data. In that sense, it is not very good at producing truly novel business insights.
But that is not what most “work” usually means. Work is mostly repetitive. The actual moment of decision is brief.
So what do I mean by work here? I mean the collection, organization, and synthesis of the materials needed before reaching that decision.
For that part of the process, AI is extremely effective.
curio_Pol_curio
LLM platforms are not fundamentally collaborative (think chatGPT vs stack overflow, or google DeepMind vs Bell Labs)
Otherwise they would
1. force humans to spend much more time on these decisions, and
2. Teach humans that the only way to save time on decision-making is to collaborate with other humans
I had a reply to your Asian take https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970518
ben_w
> AI just repeats whatever the prevailing opinion is at that time.
That would be an improvement. They are generally far too sychophantic to just repeat the prevailing opinion, and instead synthesise the opinion that they think wants to be heard by the user.
goalieca
> AI is not thinking, it is repeating.
This^. We aren’t talking about general intelligence. We are mostly using a large language model. It’s a model of languages and not the universe. Language encodes a lot, enough to be “unreasonably effective”.
banannaise
Thus replacing the work of the upper classes.
naravara
> The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
It’s really not though. A lot of sort of incidental communication that people don’t really read carefully it’s fine at. But the actual hard stuff it’s just not that great. It’s basically average by design so it almost definitionally incapable of being great.
I’ve been trying to use AI for putting together job applications, tailor my resume and cover letter and stuff. But it’s just not good. It’s decent if I want a sanity-check analysis as in “how does this come across generically.” But if I ask it to write anything it sound like LinkedIn slop. I expect if everyone starts using this to write their basic communication you’ll be in a world where nobody is reading anything anyone says because it’s so BORING. Everyone sounds the same, everything is phrased in this sort of mushy and generic way. At that point the intended communication isn’t happening! We will have sanded away all the rough edges to the point where you can’t actually get a grip on anything anymore.
At another point I tried to test it out and asked it to wireframe a very basic application for me. Something that should have been a very lightweight thing that runs on device to do a basic background process it architected as some crazy overcomplicated enterprise-scaled thing as if I’m trying to build a unicorn startup out of this rather than just a toy app to organize my shopping list. If I wasn’t technically savvy enough to recognize it was way overcomplicating things I’d have just run with this. And what’s worse is, it burns through all your token budget to figure out a bunch of problems you don’t need to have!
Obviously I’m using it and find it useful, but I’ve started to develop serious doubts about how useful it will ever be without an informed and accountable attendant overseeing it.
alephnerd
> The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes
This is why the harshest critics of AI tend to be white collar workers of this social class. The same kinds that told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code" and called them deplorables for voting nativist in 2016.
Any chance to build mutual trust was squandered. The jobs worst impacted by AI are jobs where most of the workers are Democrats and live in blue states that don't swing.
Meanwhile, those manufacturing, construction, and healthcare jobs that are becoming a bigger part of the economy tend to be in the purple part of the country so their needs are heard.
Eric_WVGG
and why the people most prone to praising it are ones who mostly write emails all day.
“Wow, this is very, very good at my job, which must be a difficult job because it pays well and I'm a smart guy. Imagine how well it will work for the dum-dums.”
techno303
gonna push back on this
i don't see a relationship betwern criticism and the chance of automation/replacement
the harshest critics that i see tend to be, almost ubiquitously, creatives
perhaps just my walk of life
alephnerd
There's a reason the "creatives" are called the "chattering class"
ModernMech
> told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code" and called them deplorables for voting nativist in 2016.
The actual pitch was to bring educational and alternative energy opportunities to an area that is impoverished and facing harsh economic realities. It's worth pointing out that the people WV did end up electing did not improve the region and did nothing for coal miners' ecnonomic wellbeing, as many of those coal plants shut down anyway and no one of their elected officials did anything to stop it, nor did they provide any economic alternatives to the region:
"coal production has declined 31% since Trump took office [first term], and by some estimates, more than five dozen coal-fired power plants have closed."
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/14/donald-tru...
> called them deplorables for voting nativist in 2016.
She called a spade a spade. As mad as they were in 2016 for being called that, they proved her 100% right when they sacked the capitol in a violent insurrection in 2021 waving KKK and Nazi flags. That's deplorable behavior.
Izkata
> when they sacked the capitol in a violent insurrection in 2021 waving KKK and Nazi flags.
The narrative gets more extreme with each repetition. None of that actually happened.
mzi
> In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000.
So you have quadrupled your income? That seems like the opposite of a collapse.
jdw64
Because of the nature of freelance work, jobs are not always steady. Most freelancers constantly worry that the work may disappear tomorrow.
In my case, unlike contract freelancers who are hired for a fixed period, I usually work on a project-delivery basis. Of course, well-known programmers may be able to negotiate salary-like contracts, but that is not my situation.
I think my earlier example may have been unclear. What I meant was not that the price increased. I meant that a project that used to take two months for $5,000 is now expected to be delivered in two weeks for the same $5,000.
That point probably needed more explanation. In the current freelance market, prices have collapsed more than many people realize.
My English is not perfect, since I am not from the English-speaking world, so I may have caused some confusion. Please understand my point as: work that used to reasonably take two months is now expected to be completed within two weeks.
undefined
bombcar
I think they’re saying there’s another stepdown coming, the job in two weeks for $1,000 is right around the corner.
catcowcostume
But because of AI demand also fell. You can quandruple income without customers
pllbnk
I think a lot of people have already experienced that LLMs are useless by themselves. Ultimately what can make them useful are humans who are directing them, who understand their work and have concrete goals, who know how to verify LLM outputs which always contain at least a few hallucinations that can steer entire session off the cliff. And the hatred comes from the fact that their bosses whose AI usage is for the most part is limited to writing and summarizing emails are rubbing their hands together when they can lay off everyone and have their businesses run by AI.
Insanity
Paywalled so I can't read the article.
However, is this exclusive to young people? I'm a millenial (early 90s) and I share their sentiment. I might not share it for the same reason though. Personally, I'm concerned about what AI usage would do to my cognitive ability, and as such I try to limit my use. I can't avoid using it at work (we're being tracked on "AI Adoption") and it does genuinely speed up some of my tasks. And I do play around with AI coding tools, mostly because I think I _should_ know them in this day and age.
But apart from that, I'm not using it. I'm using DDG searches rather than asking ChatGPT for solutions, I still go around reading websites and papers instead of AI summaries, and I don't outsource my writing to it. (i.e, I write my own emails, my own blogs, my own poorly worded HN comments, etc).
coldpie
I don't think it's exclusive to young people, no. I'm a couple years older than you. All of my friends also hate it and make fun of it. Like some of the people in the article, I'm also looking to get out of the tech industry and find something else to do other than be forced to talk to shitty robots. If they want to fire me for not using their crappy tech enough, fine. I don't care anymore.
spacechild1
Fellow millenial here. I rarely use AI, for similar reasons. Not only am I worried about cognitive decline, I also have plenty of ethical concerns and I don't want to become even more dependent on US megacorps. Fortunately, I'm writing my own software and nobody can tell me which tools to use :)
tarr11
The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.
paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis.
Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.
sonofhans
The cool thing about critical reasoning is how easy it is to uncover bias or agenda in an article like this.
I suspect that as you rely more on a robot for this your own skills will atrophy.
tarr11
This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts.
Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.
There are also too many things to read. My default before llms would have been to ignore this article.
At least now I learned some things (mostly about the Gallup poll which had source data)
I do think some people will outsource critical thinking to llms - but it also helps amplify critical thinking by doing a lot of the filtering and organizing and let me focus on the things i think are important.
nozzlegear
> This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts.
> Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.
This argument reminds me of one of Ted Chiang's short stories about "lookism," which (iirc) was a natural preference for people to prefer people who are attractive. In the story, a new technology was developed that could interact with a person's brain to "turn off" their lookism and instead just consider what a person brings to the table without your brain factoring in your own attraction to them.
I won't spoil the story, but a little arms race develops in the technology to "turn off" natural human reactions to things like attraction, emotion in speech, etc., so that users won't be swayed by them in advertising, political campaigns, anything that could possibly have an agenda. By the end, people using the technology are described as highly autistic – unable to perceive any human emotional context, triggers or attraction – so that they're able to interpret just a person's intent and not be manipulated by the underlying motivations.
It's an interesting story, your use of LLMs to cut out the "emotional triggers" from an article and get just the "objective facts" reminds me of that.
goalieca
> Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.
This used to be a very important skill taught in high school and perfected in university. We have lost something if people cannot focus even for short reads.
bccdee
And then how do you uncover bias in your chatbot? Do you ask it to analyze its own analysis? For that matter, what about the bias in your prompt, which LLMs tend to accept uncritically? Do your own preconceived opinions bias you against the argument made in the article? Are you using a chatbot to think critically about the article, or to avoid thinking critically about your own beliefs?
> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.
Perhaps you should take a cue from these surveyees and do your own thinking.
not_wyoming
I actually did this - I plugged The Verge article into Claude and got the following critique of what biases are there:
> The article accurately cites real Gallup data but selectively omits findings that complicate its "backlash" narrative — most notably that curiosity is Gen Z's single most common emotion toward AI, and that daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest. The 79% "laziness" concern and declining hope figures are presented as evidence of generational rejection, when the researchers themselves describe what they found as "deep ambivalence." *In short, the article uses real numbers to tell a cleaner, more oppositional story than the underlying polling actually supports.*
Then I then put that Claude critique back into Claude and asked it to analyze the critique for bias and agendas and got this:
> The critique accurately catches real flaws in The Verge article — particularly the omission of "curiosity" as Gen Z's top emotion and the failure to distinguish between heavy users (who are more positive) and non-users (who drive most of the negativity). However, *the critique has its own directional bias, consistently framing every correction in ways that soften the negative trend, while ignoring data that cuts the other way — like the sharp positivity decline even among daily users, and the near-majority of Gen Z workers who see AI as a net negative in the workplace. *Both pieces are selectively using the same real data to tell opposite stories; the Gallup findings themselves are more nuanced and more negative than the critique allows.*
So according to Claude, Claude is biased in how it describes The Verge as biased.
LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.
sailfast
> LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.
THIS. ALL. DAY.
catcowcostume
So basically sycophantic LLM behavior. Nothing new then
bccdee
I'm honestly very impressed. You read these passages multiple times across composing two HN replies and did not, at any point, realize that curiosity is not an inherently positive emotion.
Curiosity is a "desire to know." We badly want to know about things that threaten us. People in 2020 were extremely curious about COVID-19, but that doesn't mean they liked it.
You might say, "well it's open for interpretation. It could be positive curiosity." But why stop there? Interpret: Anxiety is more common than anger, and anger is more common than excitement. Given a sample member who is anxious, angry, not excited, and not hopeful, do you think their curiosity is positively or negatively inflected?
Additionally, I don't know where Claude got the idea that "daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest." That's not in the data set, and a different data set will need to be interpreted separately.
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but you've completely failed to engage critically with either the article or with Claude. Claude misread the article and then affirmed its own misreading, and you took that all at face value.
ericjmorey
Would this show bias of Gallup or of Verge or of the Ai training data? How would you determine which?
not_wyoming
> The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.
This is only true if you assume that an AI tool is itself unbiased. I'm not sure how anyone can earnestly believe AI tools are unbiased after Grok's MechaHitler episode [0], unless they just aren't giving it much critical thought.
0 - https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
catcowcostume
So are you outsourcing your thinking? You just prove the article's point
cedws
We know that AI will ultimately just end up enriching a very small group of people with no change in prosperity for working and middle classes. CEOs are openly saying as much. For the past number of decades the rise in productivity has been completely detached from wages, it'll be no different this time.
We're also no strangers to enshittification, we have first hand experience of technology causing negative societal effects when in the hands of for-profit entities.
fny
> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.
I don't see how these and other sentiments are unique to Gen Z at all.
The difference I've seen is that many zoomers have given up on learning in the first place. "What's the point?"
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> Freystaetter and Gottlieb both say that instead of their own generation, they are more worried about Gen Alpha and other young people that come after them, who lose their chance to develop healthy relationships with technologies when they become mandatory and ubiquitous.
I remember similar concerns from Millennials about Gen-Z with the Internet and social media. In the end the Internet and Social Media Gen-Z grew up with was quite different from the one Gen-Y was worried about and the reaction of the new generation to it of course not uniform. Similar developments might happen with Gen Alpha and AI, which seems even more polarizing to me.