I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of pro-AI posts on this platform.
Various posts with titles similar to “When will people stop being afraid of AI” or “Can we please acknowledge AI was very needed for X”
Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.
Pro-AI people are a small minority in my experience, but are generally overrepresented in the tech geek communities that make up the majority of users on the fediverse. Anecdotally, I think that the vast majority of people are indifferent about AI, some of them may find it to be a novel replacement for web searching, but almost nobody is interested in paying for generative AI (as evidenced by the AI companies hemorrhaging cash). If you were to ask on a more creativity-centric community, you would find that anti-AI sentiment is near ubiquitous amongst the working creative class.
Sadly, there is a significant number of untalented and brainless fools who use unethical corporate AI models as a crutch to compensate for their lack of real-world skills and relationships.
But for as many people as there that claim to be pro-AI, you simply don’t see people actively seek out AI-generated art, music, videos, or stories. I would argue that most of the consumers of AI content are people who have been unwittingly duped into reading/watching/listening to it
For reasons I can’t quite understand, some AI fans are also deluded into believing that AI will somehow usher in a post-capitalist utopia, despite the obvious fact it is only further empowering and enriching the most wealthy tech companies and the oligarchs that control them.
AI psychosis is a documented problem.
Finally, pro-AI people are infinitely more likely to use AI to generate spam and proganda in support of their worldview than people who are against it. Are we supposed to believe people that have AI girlfriends are above using AI to write bogus posts and comments?
Elon Musk is making his typical wild promises again, this time about AI leading to UBI and abundance for everyone … as he makes money from xAI, of course.
They are all saying that since someone threatened to molotov Altman’s house, but at the same time they’re doing everything in their power to make sure nothing resembling ubi ever happens.
I think the majority of people are pro AI and don’t give it a single thought. Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated and people don’t understand why you would point out that the guitarist had three arms.
I think it’s more accurate to say that the majority of people are indifferent to AI and that businesses are caught up in the hype of cheap genAI being good enough to replace specialized workers for specific fields like graphic design.
People use it for certain things that they lack skills in or don’t want to spend effort on but seem to generally see a lot of it as a solution looking for a problem and resent how it’s being forced into everything. Similar to the resentment towards cars moving to put everything on giant touchscreens. The last time I bought a car I was talking to the salesman about how I had no interest in the newer cars with the giant screens and he said that practically everybody that came in said the same thing and that car manufacturers are pivoting back to physical controls because nobody wants the touchscreens. Enough people would rather buy 10+ year old cars than newer models because of the lack of physical controls that it’s forcing car companies to reconsider their push for touchscreens for everything.
Cell phone companies were quaking in their boots (okay, not really, but you know what I mean) over the fact that even in their own polling they were finding that 50% of users either didn’t use AI features or didn’t find them useful in their day to day phone usage and 30% found it actively made their user experience worse. 20% positive feedback is not a good sign for a healthy market with potential for growth.
Add in that kids are conflating AI with low-quality and false information. Literally using the term AI when they don’t believe something like the way we used to use Photoshopped or “fake news,” and using “slop” liberally and frequently.
Even experts in various industries seem to have a weird paradoxical opinion on AI despite being pro AI. There’s been consistent polling that has shown that experts say that AI is good enough to replace people in any given field except for their field of expertise, where it’s too unreliable to ever be able to do the job. It doesn’t matter what the field is, the opinion is the same.
It’s probably safe to say that people don’t really care one way or another about AI, but dislike the companies involved in the AI bubble.
I agree. It’s lazy and makes me hate it more. I don’t trust a content user doing it.
But why do you care? I don’t get it, when was the last time you cared about how a restaurant advert looked? It either has good food or doesn’t, who cares about their marketing? It has always been fake anyway
My husband works with it, at an ai company, in an ai data center. He gushes about it 24/7. It’s even getting hard for him to defend.