Simon Willison's Weblog: ai-backlash

Quoting Dario Amodei

2026-08-16T15:05:36+00:00

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it. I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.

— Dario Amodei

Tags: ai, anthropic, ai-backlash

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline

2026-05-30T19:39:08+00:00

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline

I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter

I'm retiring from tech. Well, "retiring" is euphemistic. I'm stepping away from tech, and that includes Open Source. [...]

AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indigenous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough to land? They are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday, or at the very least should not want to see completely extinguished. A reminder. Never forget your roots. Here in Pennsylvania we have the Amish performing a similar function. Significantly less hostile, though still set apart, they bear witness to what was normal for all of us a couple short centuries ago: horse and buggy, wood stoves and lanterns. My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I'm fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don't make me into something I hate, which AI and [struck through: social media] [handwritten above: doomscrolling] do.

I'll admit that at first I wasn't entirely sure if this was serious. Then I found this earlier post by Chad from Feb 19 2026, Spitting Out the Agentic Kool-Aid:

I figured I’d better taste the Kool-Aid in order to form an opinion, so I dove into Claude Code with Opus 4.5 on a side project. I spent three 12+ hour days with it. I was intoxicated. My family was weirded out. [...]

It weirded me out too, when I unplugged for a long weekend. Something felt off. It was like I had another “person” in my head, sharing my inner monologue—but the “person” was a computer system owned by a budding megacorp.

[...] I am now also committing myself to disembarking from the titantic of technological accelerationism.

All efforts to address the problems of invasive technology are worthwhile, even those that are only partially effective. For my part, I have started trying to return more fully to a pre-screen, analog life.

It's accompanied by a video version of the essay which I found touching and sincere.

Chad has been trying to solve the open source sustainability problem for years - I talked with him about this at PyCon 2025 in Cleveland. That's a very tough nut to crack, and the disruption caused by AI looks to be making it even harder.

I'm glad that the Open Source Endowment will continue without him. I'm very much going to miss his online voice.

Via Hacker News

Tags: open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, chad-whitacre, ai-ethics, deep-blue, ai-backlash

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

2026-05-11T19:21:27+00:00

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles.

I particularly liked his use of the term "Zombie Internet" to define a different, more insidious alternative to the "Dead Internet" (which is just bots talking to each other):

I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI, and it’s people using AI talking to other people who are using AI. It’s influencer hustlebros who are teaching each other how to make AI influencers and have spun up automated YouTube channels and blogs and social media accounts that are spamming the internet for the sole purpose of making money. It is whatever the fuck “Moltbook” is and whatever the fuck X and LinkedIn have become. It’s AI summaries of real books being sold as the book itself and inspirational Reddit posts and comment threads in which people give heartfelt advice to some account that’s actually being run by a marketing firm. [...]

Via @jasonkoebler.bsky.social

Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, llms, slop, jason-koebler, ai-ethics, ai-backlash

The people do not yearn for automation

2026-04-24T22:38:49+00:00

The people do not yearn for automation

This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket.

It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.

Nilay’s core idea is that people afflicted with “software brain” - who see the world as something to be automated as much as possible, and attempt to model everything in terms of information flows and data - are becoming detached from everyone else.

[…] software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.

But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.

Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. I’m a full-on smart home sicko; the lights and shades and climate controls of my house are automated in dozens of ways. But huge companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t.

Via John Gruber

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, nilay-patel, ai-ethics, ai-backlash

Facebook Is the 'Zombie Internet'

2024-07-15T18:56:54+00:00

Facebook Is the 'Zombie Internet'

Ever since Facebook started to become infested with weird AI-generated images of shrimp Jesus - with thousands of comments and likes - I've been wondering how much of that activity is real humans as opposed to yet more bots.

Jason Koebler has been on the Facebook AI slop beat for a while. In this superb piece of online investigative reporting he dives deep into an attempt to answer that question, using multiple Facebook burner accounts and contacting more than 300 users who have commented on that kind of image.

I endlessly tried to talk to people who commented on these images, but I had no luck at all. Over the course of several months, I messaged 300 people who commented on bizarre AI-generated images, which I could only do 20 or so at a time before Facebook stopped letting me send messages for several hours. I also commented on dozens of images myself, asking for any human who had also commented on the image to respond to me. Across those hundreds of messages, I got four total responses.

Jacob also talked to Khan Schoolcraft, a moderator of the Um, isn’t that AI? group, who said:

In my experience, the supermajority of engagement on viral AI Facebook pages is just as artificially-generated as the content they publish. When exploring their comment sections, one will often see hundreds of bot-like comments interspersed with a few ‘real’ people sounding the alarm to no avail. [...]

Whether it's a child transforming into a water bottle cyborg, a three-armed flight attendant rescuing Tiger Jesus from a muddy plane crash, or a hybrid human-monkey baby being stung to death by giant hornets, all tend to have copy+pasted captions, reactions & comments which usually make no sense in the observed context.

Tags: facebook, ai, generative-ai, slop, jason-koebler, ai-backlash