The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Public Patience with Tech Giants Is Running Out
60 comments
·December 5, 2025ceroxylon
ianferrel
This kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.
0_____0
It's ad copy style. Humans have been writing like that for decades but it's not naturalistic construction.
Not sure who you talk to, but the 'It's Not Just X, It's Y' format doesn't show up in everyday speech (caveat, in my experience).
cess11
I find it kind of common, used as a riff off of patterns in advertising and post-politics.
ratelimitsteve
this. marketing speak appears much more frequently in online text, which is what AI is trained on, than it does in normal everyday human speech that AI isn't able to capture and train on en masse yet.
NewsaHackO
The thing is he used both the em dash and the "It's not just X it's Y" form in the same sentence.
everdrive
It's a very sad reflection that people can no longer reliably identify real vs. LLM-generated text.
wavemode
I love how you tried to intentionally demonstrate that it's a normal speech pattern, but then your own sentence didn't even match the speech pattern.
This AI speech pattern is not just an em dash—it's a trite and tonally awkward pairing of statements following the phrase "not just".
donmcronald
I hate this. Writing skills used to be a way to show you're paying attention to detail and making an effort. Now everyone thinks I'm cheesing it out with AI.
I also have a tougher time judging the reliability of others because you can get grammatically perfect, well organized emails from people that are incompetent. AI has significantly increased the signal to noise ratio for me.
jibal
It's simply how literate people write.
gdulli
The population has been handed a shortcut machine and will give in to taking the path of least resistance in their tasks. It may be ironic but it's not surprising to see it used here.
mrob
I'd give this the benefit of the doubt because the y section is more complex than I'd expect from AI. If it said "it's about the ubiquity of these tools", I'd agree it feels like AI slop, but "it's about what the ubiquity of these tools signals" has a deeper parse tree than I usually see in that negative parallelism structure.
bgwalter
It's an age old rhetorical construct, the Antithesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis
"AI" surely overuses it but this article didn't seem suspect to me. I agree that "AI" speak rubs off on heavy users though.
tensor
On the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash.
ghaff
The em-dash has been standard at jobs I had over the past 20 years. Not necessarily a fan of lack of separation on both sides of the punctuation but it's the normal style.
NewsaHackO
>The em-dash has been standard at jobs I had over the past 20 years.
What does this statement even mean?
dreamcompiler
First they extracted oil and water and gold from the ground and sold them back to us.
Then they extracted our privacy and sold it to advertisers.
Now with AI they're extracting our souls. Who do they expect to sell them to?
echelon
We're too early.
This is AI's "dialup era" (pre-56k, maybe even the 2400 baud era).
We've got a bunch of models, but they don't fit into many products.
Companies and leadership were told to "adopt AI" and given crude tools with no instructions. Of course it failed.
Chat is an interesting UX, but it's primitive. We need better ways to connect domains, especially multi-dimensional ones.
Most products are "bolting on" AI. There are few products that really "get it". Adobe is one of the only companies I've seen with actually compelling AI + interface results, and even their experiments are just early demos [1-4]. (I've built open source versions of most of these.)
We're in for another 5 years of figuring this out. And we don't need monolithic AI models via APIs. We need access to the AI building blocks and sub networks so we can adapt and fine tune models to the actual control surfaces. That's when the real take off will happen.
[1] Relighting scenes: https://youtu.be/YqAAFX1XXY8?si=DG6ODYZXInb0Ckvc&t=211
[2] Image -> 3D editing: https://youtu.be/BLxFn_BFB5c?si=GJg12gU5gFU9ZpVc&t=185 (payoff is at 3:54)
[3] Image -> Gaussian -> Gaussian editing: https://youtu.be/z3lHAahgpRk?si=XwSouqEJUFhC44TP&t=285
[4] 3D -> image with semantic tags: https://youtu.be/z275i_6jDPc?si=2HaatjXOEk3lHeW-&t=443
wavemode
This is AI's Segway era. Perfectly functional device, but the early-2000s notion that it was going to become the primary mode of transportation was just an investor-fueled pipe dream.
cmiles8
Tech customers are massively AI hype fatigued at this point.
The tech isn’t going away, but a hard reset is overdue to bring things back down for a cold hard reality check. Article yesterday about MSFT slashing quotas on AI sales as customers aren’t buying is in line with this broader theme.
Morgan Stanley also quietly trying to offload its exposure to data center financing in a move that smells very summer of 2008-ish. CNBC now talks about the AI bubble multiple times a day. OpenAI looks incredibly vulnerable and financially over-extended.
I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.
Sevii
The annoying part is that every tech company made an internal mandate for every team to stuff AI into every product. There are some great products that use AI (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Nano-banana, etc). But we simply haven't had time to come up with good ways of integrating AI into every software product. So instead every big tech company spent two years forcing AI into everything with minimal thought. Obviously people are not happy with this.
bluefirebrand
Yup. The tech giants surely know the correction is coming by now. They are just trying to milk it just a tiny bit longer before it all comes crashing down.
Keep your eyes out on the skies, I forecast executives in golden parachutes in the near future
cmiles8
Yes. IPO talks suggests there will be rushed attempts to cash out before this all implodes, but all signs are pointing to that ship having sailed.
I don’t see any big AI company having a successful IPO anytime soon which is going to leave some folks stuck holding the financial equivalent of nuclear waste.
throwaway743
A lot of this AI backlash feels less about the tech itself and more about people feeling economically exposed. When you think your job or livelihood is on thin ice, it is easier to direct that fear at AI than at the fact that our elected reps have not offered any real plan for how workers are supposed to survive the transition.
AI becomes a stand-in for a bigger problem. We keep arguing about models and chatbots, but the real issue is that the economic safety net has not been updated in decades. Until that changes, people will keep treating AI as the thing to be angry at instead of the system that leaves them vulnerable.
jandrewrogers
A major factor in the backlash is that the AI is obnoxiously intrusive because companies are forcefully injecting it into everything. It pops up everywhere trying to be "helpful" when it is neither needed nor helpful. People often experience AI as an idiot constantly jabbering next to them while they are trying to get work done.
AI would be much more pleasant if it only showed up when summoned for a specific task.
the_snooze
Eh, it's way simpler than that. AI doesn't know when to STFU. When I write an email or document, I don't need modern-day Clippy constantly guessing (and second-guessing) my thoughts. I don't need an AI sparkle button plastered everywhere to summarize articles for me. It's infantilizing and reeks of desperation. If AI is a truly useful tool, then I'll integrate it into my workflow on my own terms and my own timeline.
lawlessone
Part of this the behavior around it too from some users. Like that guy spamming FOSS projects on github with 13k LOC of code nobody asked for and then acting forwarding the criticism from people forced to review it to the Claude and copy pasting the response back to .
Triumphant Posts on linkedin from former seo/cryptoscam people telling everyone they'll be left behind if they don't adopt the latest flavor text/image generator.
All these resources being spent too on huge data centres for text generators when things like protein folding would be far more useful, billion dollar salaries for "AI Gurus" that are just throwing sh*t at the wall and hoping their particular mix of models and training works, while laying people off.
inglor_cz
At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them.
It looks like the "car problem" in yet another form. Many people will agree that our cities have become too car-centric and that cars take way too much public space, but few will give up their own personal car.
dentemple
> At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them.
As Newsweek points out*, the people most unhappy about AI are the ones who CAN'T use ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments because they NO LONGER have access to those jobs. There are many of us who believe that the backlash against AI would never have gotten so strong if it hadn't come at the expense of the creators, the engineers, and the unskilled laborers first.
AI agents are the new scabs, and the people haven't been fooled into believing that AI will be an improvement in their lives.
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*and goes deeper on in this article: https://www.newsweek.com/clanker-ai-slur-customer-service-jo...
lisper
> who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them
Me. I never use AI to write content that I put my name to. I use AI in the same way that I use a search engine. In fact, that is pretty much what AI is -- a search engine on steroids.
inglor_cz
Good. I can believe that a few people are principled enough, but principled people tend to be in a minority, regardless of the topic.
I am also a bit afraid of a future where the workload will be adjusted to heavy AI use, to the degree that a human working with his own head won't be able to satisfy the demands.
This happened around the 'car problem' too: how many jobs are in a walkable / bikeable distance now vs. 1925?
lisper
I don't think AI is comparable to cars. The problem with cars is that they necessarily use the commons. The more roads you build, the less space you have for trains, parks, housing, etc. AI isn't like that. I can continue to think for myself and look for ways to add value as a human even if everyone around me is using AI. And if that fails, if I can't find a way to compete with AI, if AI really is capable of doing everything that I can do as well as I can do it, why would I not want to use it?
ronsor
> how many jobs are in a walkable / bikeable distance now vs. 1925?
Probably the same amount. The only difference is that people are willing to commute farther for a job than someone would've in 1925.
everdrive
I never use AI to write an email, and if I ever found out a coworker was using AI to sent emails to me I would never read those emails. It would be a tacit admission that the coworker in question did not have anything worth actually reading.
QuercusMax
I started at a new job a few months back and I got an obviously AI-written reply to my manager's "welcome" email from some contractor type person who got CC'd on it. Fortunately I don't have to interact with the bozo in question, but it was really offputting.
edu
I actually think that AI is a great use case for writing emails, starting from a draft or list of what you want to say and getting it polished to a professional tone. You need to prompt it correctly, review and iterate so it doesn’t become slop, but very useful.
OTOH, I’d never use it to write emails to friends and family, but then I don’t need to sound professional.
inglor_cz
I am a fairly prolific writer, having published ten books since 2018 and averaging some three articles per week, all of that next to my programming work.
But I understood quite early that I am a fluke of nature and many other people, including smart ones, really struggle when putting their words on paper or into Word/LibreWriter. A cardiologist who saved my wife's life is one of them. He is a great surgeon, but calling his writing mediocre would be charitable.
Such people will resort to AI if only to save time and energy.
everdrive
I want to hear their real words. People don't need to be perfect writers. I just want to know what they really think.
bryanlarsen
I think you have a good point, but are getting a lot of pushback because of your example. Most AI-hostile people won't use ChatGPT directly but are still happy to use a lot of modern AI features/products such as speech-to-text, recommendation engines, translation services, et cetera.
inglor_cz
This is a good correction, thank you.
agentultra
That’s largely because the built environment is designed for cars and there are no sufficient alternatives.
When you design the built environment for humans people drive less and own fewer personal vehicles.
gdulli
The comment explicitly mentioned "cities". Of course rural and suburban areas don't make it practical to be without a car, but many people in cities could use public transportation but handwave it as beneath them or dangerous or unreliable. When in reality it works just fine. Car travel has its own tradeoffs that can be just as easily exaggerated.
lisper
It's much worse than "designed for cars." It's more like "not survivable without a car." It's the same with apps on my phone. I don't want to use them, but sometimes there simply is no alternative in today's world.
We may end up building a world where AI is similarly necessary. The AI companies would certainly like that. But at the moment we still have a choice. The more people exercise their agency now the more likely we are to retain that agency in the future.
inglor_cz
I lived in Prague, whose center is medieval and the neighbourhoods around it pre-1900, and even though what you say is true (fewer people drove everywhere), the streets were still saturated to their capacity.
It seemed to me that regardless of the city, many people will drive until the point where traffic jams and parking become a nightmare, and only then consider the alternatives. This point of pain is much lower in old European cities that weren't built as car-centric and much higher in the US, but the pattern seems to repeat itself.
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eesmith
Isn't that observation akin to the "We should improve society somewhat" ... "Yet you participate in society! Curious!" meme?
We know from Paris that systemic change is required - it isn't simply individual choice.
inglor_cz
OK, what sort of systemic change you propose? Note that bans on anything digital are really hard to enforce without giving law enforcement draconian powers.
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shevy-java
The recent increase of hardware prices (the example I gave yesterday of the same RAM I purchased about 2 years ago for a cheap computer, suddenly costing 2.5x as much as it did ~2 years ago) changed my opinion completely. I was already skeptical of AI, but I could see a few possible use cases, such as generating images for use in free-to-play browser games, and so forth. But I also saw a lot of crap - fake-videos on youtube that just wastes my time. And now that the prices are going up, I have enough indeed.
The big tech bro AI mega-corporations need to pay us - aka mankind - for the damage they cause here. The AI bubble is already subsiding, we see that, despite Trump trying to protect the mafiosi here. They owe us billions now in damage. Microsoft also recently announced it will milk everyone by increasing the prices due to "new AI features in MS office". Granted, I don't use Microsoft products as such (I do have a computer running Win10 though, so my statement is not 100% correct; I just don't use a Microsoft paid-for office suite or any other milk-for-money service), but I think it is time to turn the odds.
These corporations should pay us, for the damage they are causing here in general. I no longer accept the AI mafia method, even less so as the prices of hardware went up because of this. This mafia owes us money.
ronsor
Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like.
yallneedtoget
[dead]
zkmon
>> There is a lack of deep value
There is nothing called deep value. Stock market rises on speculation of other people's buying patterns, not company fundamentals.
Where are deep values? Politics? media? academia? human relations? business? What do you mean by deep values? We can't even look beyond one year ahead.
Modern human behavior is highly optimized, to bother only about immediate goals. The other day, I was reviewing a software architecture and asked the architect who the audience/consumer for this document is. She said it is the reviewers. I asked again hoping to identify the downstream process that uses this document, and got the same answer, a bit sternly this time.
cess11
Perhaps they mean that it does not satisfy some deep need, perhaps as opposed to a shallow want or desire.
> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals.
Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice.
It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.