Not really surprising. I would guess this goes beyond just the AI and jobs issue. Your average person sees AI all over the place in contexts they didn’t ask for it but can’t escape. Social media is covered with AI garbage (e.g., AI generated videos). Podcasts are being flooded with AI garbage that are pretty overt grabs for ad impressions where quality is … not important. Appliances and consumer devices are getting AI that nobody asked for. And of course, our world of tech stuff where the selling point is more or less leaning hard into FOMO (“Everybody’s doing it - don’t you want to be an 100x developer and not get left behind?”).

It’s easy to fixate on the OpenAI and Anthropic-level companies, but the real inescapable flood of AI garbage is coming from the downstream companies building on the core AI providers. Communities like HN have some role to play here. Maybe some peer pressure on AI founders to, maybe, not make the world a worse place?

Yes. If my only AI experiences were the ones you list, along with Google’s search summary, and the modern Clippy, I’d hate it too.

My wife was shocked to learn how much she liked Claude after these forced experiences with AI.