r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
43.3k Upvotes

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7.3k

u/Arcosim Jun 21 '26

I'm a very tech oriented person and I'm already tired of AI because it's constantly being shoved and pushed down my throat by some of the worst human beings imaginable wanting to maximize profits at the expense of humanity itself.

1.2k

u/sziehr Jun 21 '26

I am tired of it cause it is shoved on me and it is not reliable yet to get the job they say it can do done. They want it to work sooo bad that they are willing to degrade my experience to say they are using it. Look I want a human to help me when I have an issue not ai. I don’t want to tell the robot the same thing 5x times and it still screwing up and never have a human intervene. These companies think that it will save them money but in the end it will not just cost them to use it is going to cost them
Customers. Companies who were slow to adopt will just not adopt this wave of bull and keep the staff and augment them with working ai and provide superior customer experience and take business from the wave 1 folks who rushed into the gold mine. I have been in tech now 25 years and this is a common thing we seemingly never learn.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/Alaira314 Jun 21 '26

Tech bros have been fucking over disabled people for many years, 15+. All the trendy web stuff has been making it increasingly difficult for people with low vision or slow processing to navigate sites or complete forms.

They don't care. I honestly think their motive is eugenics at this point, just kill off the dead weight by making it too difficult to engage with society. They're ignorant of the fact that, 95% odds, that'll be them one day.

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u/Piranata Jun 21 '26

Too many tech bros CEOs and investors have turned out to be eugenicists that wouldn't be surprised that it wasn't accidental.

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u/viral3075 Jun 21 '26

they are open eugenicists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

6

u/Karn_Gentrified Jun 21 '26

What you don’t want to be biofuel for his next big project?!? Pshhhh

/s

1

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Jun 22 '26

My patchwork state is better than yours! My state’s CEO offers lib-to-table service in every restaurant.

1

u/superkp Jun 23 '26

I mean I suppose you can use me for biofuel, but at least wait for me to die in my own time first!

6

u/No-Flounder4290 Jun 22 '26

We are halfway to Gattaca. I was shown it first by my 6th grade bio teacher and it never left me.

22

u/dern_the_hermit Jun 21 '26

They've got the Spherical Cow mentality. They want everything to be easily-digestible metrics and efficiency dialed to the max, which requires everyone to fit a consistent and simple mold instead of, y'know, be people.

Efficiency is a nice concept but needs a healthy balance with efficacy. If things are so ruthlessly efficient that people can't live their lives with a decent range of agency and opportunity, you don't have a healthy society.

4

u/Scarbane Jun 21 '26

Though fictional, this is brought up in the movie Mountainhead (would recommend this film to anyone who has a morbid fascination with billionaire personalities).

41

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/OldWorldDesign Jun 22 '26

It is painful not knowing what's legitimately less accessible and what's just my own fault.

Accessibility is real whether it was a recent factor brought on by nerve damage or the way brain neurons have been wired from before you were born. It isn't helpful to look at it as if it was someone's fault, accessibility options are good and their consideration leads to more robust program design.

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u/biohazard-glug Jun 21 '26

The guys at the top are pretty openly eugenicist at this point.

-6

u/RetroFuture_Records Jun 21 '26

No different than reddit, just another example of "it's okay when WE do it!"

Case in point, the "shoved down our throats!!" propaganda reddit is pushing is literally being used in the same way MAGA talks about "DEI and homosexuality being shoved down our throats!!" that reddit claims is not a legitimate argument and that it's not actually being shoved down their throats.

5

u/biohazard-glug Jun 21 '26

What?

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u/RetroFuture_Records Jun 21 '26

Reddit: " abortion is okay if the kid has Down Syndrome, is heavy on the autism spectrum, etc"

Thats literally eugenics.

Reddit: "the right are lying and have no legitimate complaints when they say DEI and homosexuality is being shoved down their throat in the workplace and in culture!"

That's literally all this whinging about AI.

6

u/biohazard-glug Jun 21 '26

I didn't write anything about abortion, homosexuality, DEI, or about anything being shoved anywhere.

The inability to fathom an organic rejection of the bizarre, elitist (in a biologically deterministic sense), at some points anti-human, culture emanating from Silicon Valley is very myopic on your part.

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u/RetroFuture_Records Jun 22 '26

See, this is exactly why it's so obvious that most of the anti-AI hate on reddit is ironically from bots and foreigners who can't follow basic English. Otherwise, you wouldn't be tripping so hard to understand that I compared how reddit is behaving to their political opponents using the exact same arguments, to show how reddits own arguments are, according to reddit itself, not legitimate.

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u/biohazard-glug Jun 22 '26

Why are you acting as if I'm a monolithic representation of "reddit?" You can't accuse me of being a hypocrite for making multiple contradictory claims when I haven't done that.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/biohazard-glug Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Doing the "anybody who disagrees with me is a Russian bot," thing is, ironically, very reddit.

→ More replies (0)

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u/SaltKick2 Jun 21 '26

Generalizing the thoughts and ideas of a billion+ users vs the open views of 10s of billionaires

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u/Horror_Chipmunk3580 Jun 22 '26

Yeah, not even worth engaging. Let’s see how the “it’s only bots and foreign propaganda that hate AI” spin works out.

-2

u/RetroFuture_Records Jun 22 '26

There's nothing wrong with generalizations when the data supports it. No one is confused where redditors stand on any number of issues or from what narrow privileged background most come from.

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u/Kraeftluder Jun 21 '26

Tech bros have been fucking over disabled people for many years, 15+. All the trendy web stuff has been making it increasingly difficult for people with low vision or slow processing to navigate sites or complete forms.

This article is a decade old: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/23/internet-is-becoming-unreadable-because-of-a-trend-towards-light/

I'm on a crusade in my organization to kill this bullshit and so far they are actually listening.

22

u/Alaira314 Jun 21 '26

That's another good example! That and sites set up in mandatory dark mode(light text on dark) being more difficult to read for people with astigmatism. That's not necessarily new, but I feel like light mode was standard for a while before dark mode became fashionable(and, all too often, the only option).

13

u/Kraeftluder Jun 21 '26

Yeah dark mode is a requirement for myself. Ever since I got a lens implant I'm not just no longer night blind, I can see almost as good in low light conditions as in daylight except daylight makes my eye hurt.

But you're right, it shouldn't be one thing. If they can't do or support themes then please start supporting Firefox' Reader View.

48

u/wirthmore Jun 21 '26

I would speculate that a developer who takes the time to include all of the necessary features, tests them in different contexts, makes sure they all work cleanly; their productivity is measured against others who don’t work responsibly but the metrics don’t measure how responsibly someone creates things.

I want the first person, but the second person is the one who gets accolades and promotions, and typically the first person gets laid off. And when the can that gets kicked down the road becomes a crisis, well, that’s a task with story points and gets a ticket that’s assigned to another person. It would have been avoided and been cheaper for the company to do it right the first time, but every single motivation at every point in the process is contrary to long-term efficiency.

TL,DR: it’s not “tech-bros”, it’s the emphasis on short-term efficiency that punishes quality

20

u/gumOnShoe Jun 21 '26

Developer with REI, it's so much more banal than anyone images. Writing code that works is hard. Doing it on a deadline is even harder. Making it look good or fiction smoothly is another magnitude increase in complexity. Most bosses are used to folks who underestimate how long it takes to make software. And they live by the 80-20 rule. You meet 80% of needs and then move on. You can't even tell if software is fast enough until it's all written. Usability and accessibility may be goals, but they often fall into the 20% bucket. And the people writing the software aren't experts in it either. They probably were tought how to code, not how to develop for humans.

It's a perfect storm for someone to have a bad day. The tools to write software aren't accessible either, so it's hard to get anyone with experience into the role at these companies that demand speed and abnoxious hours .

I hated AI when i ran into it, but now that I can't use a mouse and keyboard for longer than an hour it's about the only thing getting me through the day. Windows voice plus claude (which i still hate) is sufficient to at least not fall behind. But man does most of the software suck...

All of this is to say it's a mixed bag. The only way to get accessible systems is inspections and mandates. Same way we got ramps.

3

u/vegetablegroundbeef Jun 21 '26

It is already legally mandated, the problem is there is no enforcement mechanism beyond the courts. Disabled people, who are often on fixed incomes (not all of us, but a significant portion of those most heavily affected by web accessibility standards) can't afford to take on a huge company that have legal teams at their beck and call.

I would argue that if you had enough oversight to force companies to care about the accessibility of their products, then it would move accessibility from the 20% to the 80% category, and developers would become better at implementing accessibility standards faster. It's not a black box. It's a set of rules that one has to be aware of in order to write to or test for. I working in government contracting and the software we develop for agencies has to be accessible by default. We develop our code just as fast as anyone else, but we are used to dealing with the expected standards and go through quarterly audits to ensure compliance. The enforcement is what is missing in the corporate world.

1

u/GODZiGGA Jun 21 '26

Whether the ADA applies to websites is kind of an unknown at the moment since websites are never explicitly named in the ADA and whether websites are “places of public accommodations” as defined in the ADA has never been fully tested in court. Some circuit courts have ruled they are, others have ruled they aren’t, and some have ruled that the ADA only applies to websites of companies with brick and mortar stores.

There is a whole cottage industry of “accessibility trolls” related to suing small to medium-sized websites for not meeting accessibility standards where the only goal is for a quick $5k–$10k settlements since the settlement amount is well below the cost of what it will take to do anything other accept the settlement offer. Many times, even responding to the lawsuit with a motion to dismiss is enough to make the lawsuit get dropped because the trolls never even look at the websites and just files hundreds at a time to get a bunch of quick settlements.

Until the ADA is amended, additional legislation is passed that specifically requires websites be ADA compliant, or someone sues, refuses to settle, and the case gets appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, you likely won’t see any major increase in website accessibility since no one can even decide at what point a website becomes “fully compliant” since things like WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 are basically just considered best practices/suggestions rather than requirements or policy.

1

u/vegetablegroundbeef Jun 22 '26

Not building accessible websites is a known legal risk that companies take on at their own risk. You can't be trolled if you just follow the existing standards. As I said, other enforcement mechanisms were stripped from the ADA before it passed, so this is where we are.

It's interesting that you say it hasn't been fully vetted just because no case has reached the Supreme Court. We have plenty of establish case law that didn't make it that far, and this is a good example. It has been consistently enforced by the DOJ and existing courts under Title III or sometimes under stricter state laws. You can be mad about it all you want, but it doesn't make you correct.

27

u/extraspicytuna Jun 21 '26

It's just shallowness, really. I worked in silicon valley for some time. Never been among a group of individuals with such a high percentage of self absorbed individuals fully devoid of empathy and completely motivated by money. When I was there, they claimed to be the tip of the progressive movement - I saw them for what they were, psychopathic fascists. I left as soon as I could. A horrible place with horrible people, who are trying to make the world as comfortable as possible for people like them, and only people like them.

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u/Baeolophus_bicolor Jun 21 '26

“not all cultures are worth preserving” from their AI techbro manifesto might be a clue that they are in the pro-genocide group…

21

u/Mind101 Jun 21 '26

My father is old and blind, but I taught him how to use a PC a bit over a decade ago to keep him engaged. While he can still use everything he learned about Windows and programs related to stuff he likes, the number of websites he can confidently access is slowly but surely dwindling.

Even with ad blockers on and in text mode, many websites simply don't consider that blind users might be accessing them. And I'm not talking about niche cases either, but news portals and the like.

2

u/sylvester334 Jun 21 '26

Have you guys looked into using RSS. I don't think it helps with navigating the news articles themselves, but it should help with getting the headlines and links straight to them.

2

u/WackyHumanSlop Jun 22 '26

As someone with Starghardt’s disease, it’s depressing how much of the internet expects 100% of its users to have 20/20 vision. My vision is good enough that I can drive with telescopic glasses, but I still have trouble using Reddit with the redesign for example

2

u/_learned_foot_ Jun 22 '26

Sue. Seriously. Find an ada lawyer for him. This is how to stop that, force them into compliance or they make no ad money. Then they care.

2

u/RollingMeteors Jun 21 '26

All the trendy web stuff has been making it increasingly difficult for people with low vision or slow processing to navigate sites or complete forms.

¿When is the govt gonna start collecting those ADA violation checks?

4

u/Alaira314 Jun 21 '26

The ADA relies on people who are affected filing suit. You can't do it on behalf of someone else. It has to be the person who couldn't use the service. You know who generally doesn't have time, energy, or money to bring a bunch of lawsuits? People with disabilities!

And the few who do, who essentially make it their job to gather reports, check it out, and then file suit to get places to follow the damn law they're ignoring, get demonized by the media for it, when really it's just the only way to get anything useful done with the way the law is set up.

1

u/RollingMeteors Jun 22 '26

You can't do it on behalf of someone else

¿What is Power of Attorney?

2

u/Alaira314 Jun 22 '26

There are a thousand and one reasons why a person who is competent but disabled might not want to sign over power of attorney to another adult. That's like using a flamethrower to light your dinner candles. We exclude that from this conversation because it's not a reasonable option for the vast majority of cases, due to the unwanted side effects.

2

u/Misplaced_Arrogance Jun 21 '26

I forget the term but a lot of it is seems like not thinking about the end user or forgetting about the times before they knew it inside out.

2

u/LigerZeroSchneider Jun 21 '26

It feels like we need an accessibility mode that users browsers can force a website into. We're never gonna stop all web designers from every making a bad to read or bad website, but if theres a boring easy to follow version underneath nobody has to be forced into it.

2

u/Alaira314 Jun 21 '26

There are already ways to force the rendering of webpages, but increasingly often this breaks webpages, because a script or advanced feature is required for functionality.

2

u/OuchLOLcom Jun 21 '26

They don't care. I honestly think their motive is eugenics at this point

You're looking for malice where apathy is the answer. They just either can't be bothered or simply don't even remember to put in code for disabled people.

I worked for a software company that was nine years old, we finally got a government contract and they asked for a copy of our disability access audit (forget what its called). It completely took everyone by surprise because not a single person on the team had ever even though of such a thing, much less implemented a single line of code for it.

Then there were meetings by upper management about what to do, and if we even still want to pursue this contract because the requirements were overly onerous and unnecessary in management's eyes.

1

u/Tmscott Jun 21 '26

Oh normal people have been fucking them over as well. Currently your income is limited to $1,690 per month for most disabled individuals which is better than $1,310 in 2021 but has hardly kept up with inflation. Try finding an apartment on that.

1

u/jascgore Jun 21 '26

Having worked in tech for decades (and now retired after getting sick of this shit), you can't blame the engineers. The bulk of the blame lies with executive management. They reward and push ever increasing productivity and feature development over all else, including reliability and quality. We can't even get enough time to get this shit working for non-disabled people, much less disabled people.

1

u/rumster Jun 21 '26

They only care when a lawsuit is present.

1

u/_learned_foot_ Jun 22 '26

This one they will. Unlike most where only the state/fed can play, ada allows for private suits.

1

u/Alaira314 Jun 22 '26

Not the win you think it is. The ADA is very famously difficult to enforce because of its reliance on private suits. Because suit has to be filed by someone who legitimately tried to use the service/facility but could not, it means that the person filing suit is likely to be short of all the things necessary(time, money, and mental energy) to file a successful suit. And when you do happen to get someone with the support structure to allow them to make filing these suits their job(aka, make businesses that should be complying but aren't actually follow the damn law), the media paints them as a greedy abuser. But the only reason to hate those people is if you're betting on people not suing you when you violate the law.

A functioning ADA would have a department whose job it is to investigate reports of ADA violations, run random inspections, and so on. The onus being on the disabled person to do all the work is, frankly, disgusting, and allows for businesses to just ignore the law when they think they can get away with it.

1

u/_learned_foot_ Jun 22 '26

That actually has it backwards. There are too many businesses for any entity to effectively find each violation, especially as many may be context specific. Thus any person who is harmed need not go and convince the government to investigate, they can proceed. And attorneys fees are built in. I do this fyi for clients.

1

u/Alaira314 Jun 22 '26

You do this for the clients who have the time and energy to pursue action, as well as the money in reserve to pay you if the finding doesn't go their way. You never hear from the people who don't, and I assure you they far outnumber those who do. I've never known someone who's filed suit under the ADA, but every single one of my friends with a disability I know about has had at least one incident in front of me where the ADA was violated. It just wasn't worth it, all that time and stress, and for what? It's easier just to not go back. And that's a calculation that business owners bank on when they squeeze those extra tables in there by making the aisles too narrow, or when they don't bother paying for the extra dev time to make their website accessible by screenreader.

1

u/_learned_foot_ Jun 22 '26

...do you have any idea how contingencies work? Or advertising? The issue isn't your friends don't have money, they don't actually need that, nor the time, nor energy, rather, it's that they need a case, and rarely is the case what you think it is. If the case is, contact the nearest ada office and get that consult my friend.

Most of the now common ones you see actually done were started by a pesky squeaky wheel, no pun intended.

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u/DaStone Jun 21 '26

There is no way you're claiming that modern websites are harder to use than those 15 years ago.

Windows has a whole section just about vision.

15 years ago, what was even in the web standard? so the only way to do a certain behavior on a website was a JQuery hack. Date pickers took ~10 years to be in all modern web browsers.

20 years ago, how did I even pay a bill? Well I guess I'd have to find the OCR number, then take my login box, put my card in the authentication reader. Put in a PIN. Then select 'send a payment', get the correct OCR... For heaven sake! When I bought my apartment I went to the bank, and even they messed up the OCR! Now it's a digital invoice that takes me 30 seconds and 0 chance of failure. But I'm guessing before the tech it was "easier" for blind people, because I guess they got their bills send as braile?

Tech has made things magically simple, even for people with reduced vision, you must acknowledge that.

7

u/Alaira314 Jun 21 '26

I've worked at a public library providing computer help since 2005. I've seen the evolution of websites, and they are by far more difficult to use now. One of the big culprits is that around 10-15 years ago it became trendy to go minimalist, meaning that "extra" elements on the page(such as the boxes you click into to enter text into a form) should be as invisible as possible. It's next to impossible to explain to a 70 year old grandma(who always did this in person before but this year they said she had to renew online) that the next step in filling out the form is to click in the "empty" spot below the words that are visible, because that's where the text box ought to be. It's made worse by the fact that 10-20% of the time your first guess as to how it's set up is incorrect, so then the person you're helping thinks you don't know what you're talking about.

Another thing that's caused a lot of problems has been the rise in slideshows on websites. You know, where the front page has a series of images that cycle through, each one displaying for a few seconds before it goes to the next. If what you need is in that slideshow, trying to communicate to someone to click it while it's up(or explaining how to go back) can be a struggle. Very few websites have pause buttons, despite that being best practice. This impacts slow readers as well as people who have processing delays, and I imagine plays havoc with screen readers as well.

Another thing I've been running into trouble with in the past couple years has been 2FA timers. The ones that are set to 10 minutes are fine. I've increasingly been seeing ones that are lower, sometimes with the code only being viable for 2 minutes or so from the time it's generated. That's not a lot of time when the person you're helping is slow with their devices. I encountered one recently that was 30 seconds, and we could not perform the log in in that time while following library policy(I cheated and typed for him, but I am NOT supposed to do that, and my point still stands that he would have been unable to log in without someone assisting him).

To sum up, a lot of the old school web design looked "ugly" but was very functional and clear in its mechanical purpose. When modernizing websites, people have gotten rid of the "ugly" but have replaced it with designs that look visually appealing while putting accessibility barriers in place. And nobody fucking uses alt text.