An essay says 'start AI over from zero.' The thread flipped it apart

An essay draws a line; the thread redraws it

The blog post "The AI Hate Progression" is a first-person account of turning against AI in stages: first as companies forced it into products with no opt-out, then as training data was scraped from artists, then as FOMO drove corporate adoption and hardware buy-ups squeezed out alternatives. The load-bearing claim is about consent.

"You'll notice a trend here: Consent is just gone. It does not exist when AI enters the room in 90% of cases. Companies just foist it on you and tell you to shut up and like it, or leave."

The author's demand follows from it: "If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it." The 162-comment thread broadly shared the underlying anger and then spent itself arguing the essay had the wrong target and an impossible fix.

"That's not how consent works" vs "it was wrong then too"

The most-cited objection hit the historical premise. AI didn't break consent; the web did, decades ago.

"Google started indexing copyrighted data without consent in 1999, Yahoo in 1994. Absolute delusion to think that ChatGPT is the one that broke consent." — dvt, a data engineer and former CTO

A counter held that scale changes the moral math:

"companies haven't respected copyright or user consent for a long time, so why should we now care? The answer is: it was wrong back then and it is still wrong now, but on a completely different scale!" — a digital artist who works in audio software

On the law itself, one reader corrected the record on where the lawsuits actually landed: "NYT vs openAI is still on going. Anthropic had to pay $1.5 billion for pirating books but I don't think that case had anything about training."

The strongest pushback came from the AI-skeptic side of the room

The sharpest reframe wasn't from a defender of the industry. It came from people who dislike the hype and still found the essay self-defeating.

"A plan that drastically curtails the AI business on a forwardgoing basis is legible to me. A plan where we 'start over from zero' sounds utopian, which gives me permission (really, bashes me over the head with it) not to care." — tptacek

Another located the real grievance somewhere other than the technology:

"It seems the author is in fact hating on disrupt-everything hypercapitalism of the American techbro kind, not generative AI…" — another reader in the thread

An engineer who dislikes the business practices but not the tool drew the same boundary in detail: he doesn't hate AI, he hates that one lab "cornered the dram market on a scale close to what the hunt brothers did to silver," and the reflexive push to wedge a chatbot into every product.

A geography of the anger

One datapoint reframed the whole fight as Western, not universal: a survey showing 87% of people in China view AI favorably, against deep Western suspicion. The why, several argued, is policy, not temperament: China legislated some worker protections against displacement while Western CEOs publicly brag about cutting jobs. And a recurring confession showed the contradiction lived: people who refuse AI in their personal lives use it heavily at work, some explicitly to "abuse" subsidized pricing and dent the labs' bottom line, a strategy others noted mostly inflates the labs' active-user count instead.

What the thread actually settled

The split is real but narrower than the essay frames it. Almost nobody in the thread defended forced adoption, endless chatbot insertion, or scraping artists without recourse. What collapsed under scrutiny was the remedy. "Start over from zero" reads as moral clarity in the post and as an unactionable wish in the replies, the kind of demand that lets the people it targets off the hook. The legible version, the one even AI skeptics signed onto, is narrower and duller: curb the practices going forward, price the tools near cost, stop pretending consent is a switch you can retrofit onto a corpus already in the weights.