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.
Same. I noticed that I finally got banned from a few random instances I’d never visited before under my moderation history, and they were all by the same guy who claimed I was an “anti-AI troll” lmao
The most hilarious part to this is I feel so dispassionate about the subject, I can seldom remember what it was I might have commented, and was probably something like “yeah this looks like slop” hahaha
Zoomers and gen x that drank the kool aid. What’s worse is they are saying yes to high paying jobs to fuck us all in the ass.
As a member of GenX (1980)…
Yep, that sounds like my peers. Most of them believe the marketing or are at least convinced enough to indulge. The hold-outs are getting more infrequent.
I used to feed AI anything I wrote that I wanted to sound professional to save me time and brain power. Not only do I have no need for that anymore considering I’ve just accepted that my CS degree was truly a waste of my life, but now I realize I’d encourage the building of data centers so now I’m fully radicalized to never use them
Dude your CS degree is not a waste. AI is just a tool. Anyone who thinks they can replace their staff with it are in for a rude awakening. I understand how much harder it is to get your foot in the door though. Its not permanent though. I remember when “no code” was going to take the jobs. The job just changes a bit.
I’ve been around long enough to have experienced multiple technologies that were the “end” of programmers and yet they still exist.
As you pointed out, the job changes a bit, but we are still here. When I started, the job was a lot more about compilation. You had to remember exact syntaxes (spelling, letter cases, line continuation, ect) and code optimization. You couldn’t just look up a function name or something like a win32 API by typing part of it into your code editor. You couldn’t even just go to Google and search because Google and the Internet didn’t exist. You had a literal shelf of books next to your desk that were heavily worn and you referenced constantly. Books got handed down from senior programmers to junior programmers. The senior got a new book that wasn’t held together by a rubber band and the junior got a stack of pages, often partially glued together by coffee stains, that contained invaluable notes in the margins.
Compilers used to be really dumb. Schooling, blogs, articles, ect, these days are all about “readable code”, but for a long time readability wasn’t even in the top 10 or 20 things that you thought about. Just getting the damn thing to compile was easily half of your job and time spent. Schooling and articles spent a massive amount of time discussing optimizations and memory usage. Things like “if else” vs “switch”, which one was actually better and how you could abuse both. Just in case you were wondering, “switch” was king and the “if else” lovers can get go fuck themselves.
I have seen massive shifts in the industry, and companies will use any excuse to fire everyone useful and eviscerate themselves in the name of short term profits. People used to talk about IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Compaq, ect, like they talk about Amazon and Facebook now. But those are just brands owned by some new titan that didn’t even exist that long ago.
CS will come back, it will be a little different, but new companies will rise from the carcasses of all those that tried to replace developers with ai.
Honestly, given what Facebook is these days, I am more surprised that they still have that many software developers to lay off than I am with the idea that they are laying off people due to AI.
It’s usually bots. Unfortunately it’s not easy to moderate them, but if a bot is reported, doesn’t have a bot flag, and says a bunch of pro-ai stuff in addition to the reported activity it’s usually enough evidence to ban. It’s just one of their current tells, I wouldn’t base a ban only on that though. Report when you suspect them though.
People have different opinions on AI, not everyone is vehemently opposed, and some view it as useful if used on the appropriate configuration.
The big difference for me is that “pro AI” is very different from “recognizing where AI is useful”.
Can my little Intel B70 help me code faster? Yes. Super helpful.
Can a cluster help analyze MRIs to catch things doctors don’t? Also yes.
Can a giant data center replace writing 1MM easy emails while destroying the environment? Yes, but it probably shouldn’t.
You can recognize value and the importance of regulation at the same time.
The problem is that there is a current developing dogma around AI that, because the last example you gave exists, then it must be opposed in all cases. There is a lack of nuance. That is why there may be some “pro-ai” posts, to point out this nuance. The only reason they exist is due to the bias against it as a whole.
I’m 100% sure I haven’t seen all the ‘pro ai’ posts, but the ones I have seen are not nuanced. They’re very likely bots, and all-in on, or argumentative for, AI.
I have seen them not posted by bots, as I have posted them on a Lemmy burner account. So this is somewhat personal for me.
this is a SOCIAL NETWORK not an AI platform
we’re expecting to interact with people
Yes, those articles are for people. Advertising to AI makes no sense.
What part of what I said implies that I want bots to take the place of humans on social networks? What a very strange conclusion to jump to. I just think that AI has some useful applications.
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?
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.
Virtually every event poster, restaurant advert and menu I’ve seen lately has been AI generated
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
Also, 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.
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.
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.
The kind of people who make hating AI part of their identity are pretty rare in the real world. Lemmy just creates the illusion that this loud minority’s views are way more common than they actually are.
And as always, the “pro-AI” people aren’t as much for it as the haters are against it. It’s not a binary thing between the two extremes. Every real person I’ve talked to about AI has had a pretty neutral view on it and is usually well aware of its limitations. Even the ones who lean heavily on it aren’t as passionate about it than the haters are.
I haven’t talked to a lot of people about AI, but I’m extremely skeptical, and my wife, who isn’t usually dialed into this sort of thing, fucking hates it. I’m not sure how that plays out across the general populace, but I’m inclined to think it’s pretty unpopular.
Bots are trying to gaslight to into thinking that slop acceptance is inevitable. It’s just bullshit. Everyone hates slop art. Everyone hates slop music. Everyone hates slop text. Everyone hates forced slop integration.
The only people that like AI are the people that own the chatbots that want to deskill you.
People rarely arrive at these views independently - it’s always influenced by the people and environment around them. Kind of like how cigarette smokers tend to know lots of other smokers, while people who don’t smoke hang out with other non-smokers.
I’m not claiming nobody hates AI or that there’s no valid reasons to oppose it. All I’m saying is that the impression of how widespread that hate is - the one platforms like Lemmy give - isn’t exactly representative of the real world.
Hate is an extreme emotion. Those kinds of emotions are rarely motivated by reason alone, so it often looks more like an ideological stance than a purely rational one. People caught up in strong emotions aren’t exactly known for thinking clearly. There’s a well-known quote about facts not caring about people’s feelings, but I think it’s the other way around: feelings don’t care about facts.
The kind of people who make hating AI part of their identity are pretty rare in the real world. Lemmy just creates the illusion that this loud minority’s views are way more common than they actually are.
Yup, essentially every office worker at my company is pro-ai whereas shop workers have a bit more distain for it.
I got asked to organize shop drawings into categories so that they can feed their LLM data on the different types of products we produce, so long as it’s not someone’s personal information It genuinely doesn’t bother me.
AI hate is such a spoiled white people issue. They just don’t understand the value proposition because they already got their cake and ate it too.
Here in SEA LLMs have been life changing for people yet we should be upset because some corporate logo designer is losing their job?
More so that the widespread use of AI encourages more and more data centers being built, which uses an insane amount of electricity, most of which is not generated with renewables, accelerating the already dire global warming.
In other words, people’s desire to get crappy art or hallucinated code is speeding up the death of our planet and everything on it.
Let’s not delude ourselves that we don’t need more datacenters shall we? We’ll never need less compute, ever so these will have to be built anyway.
There’s an answer to all of these problems that, ironically, isn’t binary do or don’t but rage bait gets the better of everyone and here we are.
Your view is the exact opposite of reality given the number of AI Data centers that are being delayed and just outright stopped by local communities.
I don’t think the people who don’t want AI data centers in their backyards are motivated by hatred toward AI. It tends to be mostly driven by things like environmental worries and energy and water demand.
“I don’t think people that are motivated to catch murderers are motivated by their hatred of murder. It tends to be mostly driven by things like no liking dead bodies or the fact Susan is no longer around.”
That obvious bad faith you demonstrate there is nothing but a confession about your own character.
One could say the same to you. What you described is inexorably linked to AI. Those things will always be a part of it. If AI was useful, or liked, by the general public – if it served a single useful function they appreciated, they would accept the consequences of its existence.
People like driving in the US. It is destroying the environment. It poisons the water and air. It is expensive and raises taxes, hell most property tax that most people pay in the US goes towards road maintenance for cars, and nearly half of all utility expenses are due to the complexities of car-centric urban design. But people accept that.
People are not accepting of AI. Period. It does not provide enough value for its cost.
NIMBYism is a real phenomenon. People just don’t want stuff like that built near them - including schools. It’s not because they’re against education. You’re projecting your own views on AI onto other people while ignoring all the other possible explanations for their actions. You can say it’s inextricably linked to AI, but you saying that doesn’t make it so. I’m sure some of those people think that, but I’ve seen no evidence that it’s the main driver of it.
While NIMBYISM is real, it’s not happening here. The protests in council meetings are not ‘we don’t want it here,’ it’s ‘we don’t want it anywhere in our state.’ Because the effects of AI are state wide reductions in resources.
Trying to equate people who don’t want their environment and their homes destroyed by AI data centers with nimbys is such a brain dead take. Just truly despicable.
If people weren’t fucking stupid, these scams would eventually stop working.
What’s it been, 4 years since NFTs? And AI morons are already falling for this shit.
I lean anti-AI, but comparing generative AI to NFTs is very strange to me. Even if you didn’t intend to imply any similarity beyond both being scams, surely generative AI is at least a much more compelling scam.
LLMs can now understand, to some extent, almost any text humans can. They might not be able to reason about it well, but they can at least translate it, summarize it, etc. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I’d have told you there was a near-zero chance of that happening within our lifetimes. NFTs were just “if we put baseball cards on the blockchain, people might buy them because of that same quirk of psychology.”
Transformers are like blockchain: an interesting use of mathematical principles to solve certain problems in a novel way, where the hype around that core attracts charlatans and scammers and combinations of the two traits who claim that it will go on to solve totally different problems in such a way as to revolutionize the world we live in.
NFTs were the end of that line for blockchain where the machine started to eat itself. I can see a future, stable use of blockchain in some limited contexts, but cryptobros have always overstated the contexts in which that particular type of digital ledger can be more useful than other types of digital ledgers.
We’ll see where the end of the road is for transformers, and what’s left at the end. I believe that computer inference will always be useful in some contexts, and that the advances in huge models with absurdly large numbers of parameters have unlocked some previously impractical tasks, but I could also see that settling into a general background existence as just another technological tool for doing things in a world that still looks pretty similar to the world today.
“You don’t understand, she’s REAL! Especially if you use your left hand.”
You look lonely…
It seems like its usually just one person just posting over and over or making alts (I assume, based on the fact they just reiterate the same arguments), rather than a coordinated effort.
I assume, based on the fact they just reiterate the same arguments
I saw someone else make this same argument. Can’t believe you made an alt to post it again.
It’s a sad state of affairs. Post anything that is going against the grain, you must be a bot or part of a coordinated attack…
Some people are unlearning the fact that different opinions exist :'(
The fuckai crowd has always been a vocal minority, amplified by Lemmy’s small userbase. It was never going to last as the default message being heard.
Personally I think LLMs are pretty useful and run them on my PC occasionally. I’m more of a Fuck Corporate Datacentres kinda person.
Useful for what?
Hallucinating or using drinking water?
Didn’t know my PC used water? Thanks for teaching me something.
Their concerns about drinking water are exaggerated, but technically your computer does use water if go far enough back. But once you do that, everything that uses electricity also uses water.
It’s not nearly as much water as using ethanol gas.
How do you imagine your “local” AI was trained? Let me tell you, in a massive datacenter that used gallons of water.
Running AI is a smaller problem. A ton of power and resources go into training them.
Not to mention all the stolen work they are trained on.
So this water that gets used, what happens to it? Does it vaporized into elementary particles, or… ?
I’ve worked with data centers and super computers. They do use a lot of water! But is used for cooling. It runs through a pipe, absorbs some heat, and then gets pushed back into the original water source. That or it is put into a closed loop system which only keeps the water trapped for the lifetime of the project, and is then recycled back into circulation.
Useful for what?
Checking writing for grammatical errors.
You don’t need AI for that. Grammar checkers existed for decades before AI.
That’s not what the question was about.
Making amazing images incredibly quickly 🤷🏻♂️
Yes.
I’m with ya there. I think a lot of the valid hate towards AI is is actually for Big Tech companies and data centers.
I support folks running less powerful locally hosted models on their own hardware, which I also do myself!
This is nothing new actually, the same thing happend during the crypto boom.
There’s slop users (autoclankers) and then there’s researchers or developers actually doing the same stuff they’ve been doing for 5+ years.
I think it just seems that way because there’s always a clash on practically every post.
Some people don’t see the inherent flaw in outsourcing their physical thoughts to a cloud model, or the massive economic bubble they are helping to create.
But some people are doing some genuinely interesting things that would have otherwise been impossible several years ago just because AI and model training research got a huge boost for everyone the past few years.
My personal favorite is a drone that rapidly identifies and counts produce plant quality, output, issues, etc for large farms with some brand spanking new image models, and it costs about as much as maybe a new toolbox. No one wants to manually weed through hundreds of acres to count buds and try to catch problems before its too late. It’s a great upgrade from doing random samples that misses a lot of data.
On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.
It’s like when you throw world and ml users into one post. They both think the other is louder, and also the big dumb lol.
On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.
This might be a bit of a hot take, but I don’t really see anything inherently wrong with this. The scientists and engineers will continue doing their serious work regardless of public opinion, and while some of them may have tangentially benefited from from increased interest and funding in the field, most of it is going to these corporate LLM models which are taking up all the oxygen in the room.
That’s a bubble that needs to burst. I think it’s more important to keep public sentiment rightfully focused in that direction. Let’s face it, you’re really not going to be able to educate the general public on these nuances. The field at large will persist regardless.
If you don’t differentiate and keep the two in the same pot you won’t be able to fund research into the useful stuff. It’s true that consumer hype and research funding decisions are not the same, but they may be indirectly linked. A public fund may fear public outrage if it continues funding X millions of AI projects even if they’re not LLM related.
So the reputation damage may affects viable, net positive applications.
AI (LLMs) is/are a fantastic tool.
But that’s what it is, a tool that can make some tasks easier.
It’s not world-changing like some tech bros and CEOs think it is because they don’t actually understand the technology.
It’s also not the apocalypse or The Matrix or Skynet coming to end civilization. It’s just a tool.
After the AI bubble bursts, AI will still be there, as a tool for humans to use.
I think it’s possible that some of the people you see on Lemmy may have started using AI a little more in their lives and see it for what it is.
You know what’s crazy is that everyone has begun rebranding things that existed before AI as AI.
The algorithm summary of a common question in Google results? Now it’s AI.
Trello’s automation tasks moving items marked as “Done” to archive? Now it’s AI✨
It’s idiotic lol
Marketing BS. The bad part is all the C-Suites falling for it.
LLMs are neat, and useful for some things - but as with practically everything in modern society, capitalism is ruining it.
It’s also not the apocalypse […] It’s just a tool.
So, the problem with tools is that their existence still affects the systems they’re a part of.
For instance, war between the US and Russia is much more dangerous now (yes, it used to be dangerous before as well) because now we have nuclear bombs. We did a whole cold war thing about it. Nuclear bombs change the world even when they’re not being used.
Similarly, meth is just a tool. It is entirely possible to smoke meth, not become addicted, have a great time, vacuum your entire house I guess, come down, chill, and move on with the rest of your life. But, that’s not what we would say meth’s effect on society is, is it?
I am so happy that you are capable of using AI without becoming a psychopath. I am concerned about the psychopaths.
To be fair, given the power consumption it requires, it definitely leans towards civilization ending.
We also have “the Internet” slurping up massive amounts of energy.
Current Global Electricity Breakdown:
- Total Data Center/Infrastructure Demand: Approximately 2.0% of global electricity.
- AI-Specific Share: Roughly 0.5% of global electricity.
- “Traditional” Internet/Cloud: Roughly 1.5% of global electricity.
The Internet is also a tool that humanity uses. Should we shut that down too? (I would argue yes considering how the “Information Superhighway” somehow made the average person dumber, but that’s a different discussion.)
Except the Internet is actually useful. AI has not shown that it deserves to use that insane amount of energy. It’s actually insane that you think AI isn’t an issue when it’s using 1/3rd as much energy as the ENTIRE INTERNET
Google at some point also was a great tool. Wikipedia also joins the rankings. LLM chatbots are great but certainly not the primary source of information.
What annoys me is that people began to use them to not to do simple things like writing their own posts about their own things. They began to generate content instead of making it. It is obvious that anything what takes time to be produced, will most certainly be automated once tools are given. But this annoys the hell out of me.
Seeing posts, comments, content generated by LLM, I feel that I am being robbed of artistry, curiosity, interactions with real people. I can automate chats with my family, friends, colleagues, children. But that wont be me. That will be perfect grammar sentence generator, not me - real, tons of mistakes, typos, mostly renting about everything, passionate, bored, funny, witty, dull me.
It saddens me that LLMs are exedcuting (almost?) final blow to a society that is sustaining social media terminal damage.
They began to generate content instead of making it. […] [This] annoys the hell out of me.
Seeing posts, comments, content generated by LLM, I feel that I am being robbed of artistry, curiosity, interactions with real people.
That is probably the greatest irritation I have with my wife right now. I don’t wanna start fights over it, but I also don’t make a secret of my disdain that she uses LLMs for her work. I get it, she has to, because her business requires churning out a lot of text quickly to stay competitive and I want her to succeed, but I hate what the internet has come to and I hate that she participates in that race to the bottom.
typos, mostly renting about everything
That is either a wonderful coincidence or a clever joke, but I love it either way.
Unfortunately we will always have problems explaining to people how to use the right tool for the right job.
The old “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” saying still applies.
Using LLMs to automate your social media is dumb as shit and I don’t understand why people are doing that. It is actively destroying social media. Which may be the natural end-state of a social media platform. Isn’t that why most of us are on Lemmy right now? Because of the state of Reddit and Xitter?
Also, generative AI making art and music and literature is dumb as shit too. Why would you make an AI that does the fun stuff that humans actually want to do? I can’t wait to have AI finish playing BioShock for me…
FYI: Anti-AI people are a very small minority of the world.
When more “normies” join in, you’ll see a natural shift into being more “pro AI”
Anecdote: A fucking therapist told me to “just use AI to help you write a resume”… 🧐 (don’t remember how I even got to the topic of resumes)
Yeah… turns out not a good fit, for other reasons… (constantly just be like “go outside” and making me feel so unconfortable and I kinda had an existential crisis on whether or not I belonged in this country)
Yeah… Your opinion isn’t really backed by the data
“Normies” don’t default to pro AI
Tbf they said “the world” not “USA”
"Globally, the share of individuals who see AI products and services as more beneficial than harmful has risen from 52% in 2022 to 55% in 2024.
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion
Here, try this - genuine, well-regarded organization with actual experience at opinion polling far in excess of the clanker wankers at Stanford: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-around-the-world-view-ai/
But many are worried about AI’s effects on daily life. A median of 34% of adults say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI, while 42% are equally concerned and excited. A median of 16% are more excited than concerned.
Those are a different set of questions though. The question shouldn’t be if someone is concerned about AI use. Frankly, everyone should be. It has a huge capacity for harm in a growing number of areas in modern society. The question should be about who is using it. Additionally, what are they using it for? Novel problem solving, new automation, replacing older automation, or just for fun? That is what I’d personally be much more interested in finding out.
clanker wankers at Stanford
Just going to toss out a wild guess here, but any chance you might be emotionally motivated to find a source that backs what you already believe to be true rather than looking at the stats objectively?
I too am concerned about AI, but I’m not against it. Those things aren’t the same.
Interesting how Americans are the most concerned. I wonder what might explain that. In the US, white people are the most worried (IIRC).
Probably because we have the worst mix of low govt regulations and high amounts of AI tech being pushed at us.
Yeah, and you can automatically trust such an independent and neutral source as that 🙄
Is Stanford not neutral or independent? AFAIK the data is from Ipsos and they just made visualizations, though you can correct me if I’m wrong. I was just trying to say that the OP said the world whereas the person I replied to showed data from Americans specifically.
Edit: Ohhh I see it’s from Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) not just Stanford the University, my bad.
I could definitely see how this would be a biased source then:
“Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is an academic entity led by an interdisciplinary steering committee of university researchers and industry experts.”
Luckily they only made visualizations from Ipsos’s data though I think?
Ipsos is a poll-for-hire firm and they just design the surveys their clients want, unlike Pew which is doing actual independent research polling. It’s like the difference between tobacco company-funded specialized research and independent, government funded basic research.
The byline of the article you posted is “Americans see a role for AI in some areas of society” and it clearly states “a majority is open to letting AI assist them with day-to-day tasks and activities”.
Being “afraid” of it isn’t the same as not using it.
“Normies” don’t default to pro AI [emphasis mine]
That’s a pretty significant distinction there. People are using AI even if they’re not “paying” (directly) for pro versions.
A lot of people are using AI in ways they don’t realize as well. Like the click through rate on Google search results is terrible now since people are just reading the AI generated summary and moving on (Study Confirms Google AI Overviews Cut Organic Clicks 38% https://share.google/8gllKLbbC0Onygqvz).
Other people eat up and share AI slop articles, videos and photos without even batting an eye. I ask them if they’ve thought about whether it’s real or not. Nope. I point out its AI slop. “oh, that sucks. But it’s still hilarious/cool/fascinating/etc.”
I know several people who don’t even think twice about using free AI directly. Need to translate something? Copilot. Need to write an email? Copilot. Need to post something to instagram? Copilot (for text, not the photos - as far as I know.)
Will they pay for it? No. Will they say they’re worried about AI? Yup. Do they connect what they’re doing to the issue? Nope.
If you only pay attention to the prevailing winds here on Lemmy, your view of the world will be very skewed.
I think you may be misinterpreting the data set that you posted. The point of that data set wasn’t to find if someone was pro versus anti-AI. It was to find concerns about existing AI structure. Nonetheless, that post shows on a few occasions The majority of the people surveyed were okay with AI as a whole, but were just concerned about how it was functioning and controlled.
if you would like to look into that data yourself, it even says it right on the front page when it asks about what sectors people believe that AI should be in and only about one third of the people who responded said that it should play no role whatsoever in the topics.
The best graph for it though in my opinion is the very last page where they asked the question of how many people would use AI at all even a little bit and the majority of them said they would at least a little bit use AI.
from how I interpreted it, it’s clear at least by that study that the majority of the people are for AI, but they are concerned with how it’s currently being implemented. And there are certain areas that they don’t believe it should be in Such as relationships, health care and creative thinking. (Although these areas still got quite a bit of votes just didn’t hit the 50%)
AI hs already been demonstrated as a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs. It is not a question at this point. At this point, all of the AI-evangelists are either extremwly stupid or fascists themselves.
AI hs already been demonstrated as a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs.
Lmfao, what? The internet is also a tool that largely benefits fascists and oligarchs. Does that make every user of the internet a fascist, or just stupid?
Of course bad actors are going to take advantage of a tool that is very useful in an absurd amount of contexts…
Yeah that is why the worst fascists and oligarchs block access to the Internet. I think you are being pretty disingenuous here whether you realize it or not. The Internet is like a utility at this point and that is not even remotely comparable with how AI is currently being deployed and used by major corporations.
I am glad to hear you accept bad actors will misuse it. I don’t think anyone is actually ready for the level of deception that AI will be able to accomplish once it has access to you and your family/friends information while being used by a nefarious party. For example impersonating loved ones to trick you, epic cat fishing with a persona that has been custom tailored to you, complex financial schemes involving fraud, etc.
Honestly, the problem when talking about “AI” is how many different things that can mean.
- General AI chats
- Coding agents
- Automated pentesting/vulnerability discovery
- Image/video/music generation
- Grammar checking
- Automated support agents (phone or chat)
- Autonomous weaponry
and so many more. Being Pro-AI could mean you like one or two application of the AI, but be against it in the others. I know very few people that like it for the use of media generation. However, there have been a lot of long time vulnerabilities in very popular open source projects that was only just discovered. That seems like a pretty undeniable use case demonstrating its usefulness.
Then of course there’s governments that want to get their greedy blood thirsty hands on it to create autonomous weaponry. So now if you try to defend AI for a use case like defensively finding program vulnerabilities you somehow also have to defend AI weaponry?
For a generic AI model, it is very powerful and can either be used to grow yourself or abused so your brain doesn’t have to work at all. You can use AI to do the hard work for you, or use it as a personal tutor to guide you into what to learn. People will of course mention hallucinations as why it can’t be used to learn, but you don’t have to take AI at its words. If you were to ask it to create a lesson plan on what you should study for a subject, in what order, and resources are available, you can do all of the actual learning using content the AI has no control over. So what you do with that is going to be up to the person, and opinions on it are going to vary wildly.
Some people argue any use case is not okay given the various concerns of energy and water usage, and where those models sourced their training data. Not to mention if you support AI you must be supporting the AI companies. I agree there are concerns for the environmental impact, and the training data discussion is a long one on its own. However, I do think you can support AI as a technology, and not be okay with the way the technology is being done in regards to environmental impact. And given AI can be done on a local machine, I don’t think it has to be tied at all with the big tech at all.
“AI” is such a wide and immense topic. And what we talk about with AI today will not be relevant come next year with how quickly it is developing. We shall see if some form of Moore’s law applied with the growth of AI as far as efficiency and quality of the AI goes.
One of the first things I say when non tech people ask me about ““AI”” is :
“The term AI here is just marketing wank”
I have been expecting there to be some softening and some people who use AI for coding on the DL here. It really has gotten significantly more common to at least try out tools like Claude Code. But those people aren’t writing articles like that and I’m not seeing them.
I’ve been encouraged to use Claude Code for work, and by a lot of genuinely very talented engineers. It’s absolutely overhyped if you look at twitter tech bros, and absolutely under hyped if you only read Lemmy.
Out of curiosity, why have you been expecting a softening? From what I’ve seen AI tools for coding have gotten worse recently, not better. And companies are now jacking up the prices, to be more in line with costs. I’ve heard people irl complaining they went from $10 per month to $1000 if they were to continue using it the same way. Most have capped themselves or stopped altogether, as with that price it isn’t worth it anymore.
So my personal experience is more people complaining, but I’m interested in your view.
You have a good point that I missed about pricing that will keep many hobbyists away who can’t run something like Qwen Code locally. I don’t think the models have gotten worse although I don’t have data to back that up, but what I do know is a lot of devs in the private sector I know have gotten onboard recently and they had positive experiences with using it for coding tasks.
So given that it is more likely to me that opinion would soften even here. Most people just don’t care that much about the ethical or philosophical problems of LLMs and pragmatism for solving problems they care about will win out.
Thanks for responding. It’s good to get different people’s opinion about it.
Running stuff locally is really cool, I’ve messed about with it. I think the tech is super interesting, it’s just a shame about all the downsides in the way it’s used right now. Unfortunately what I can run is very limited, my most powerful machine has a 4070 GPU with 12GB of VRAM. The lack of VRAM really limits it to very small models which are fun to play around with, but not for anything serious.
I would love to get my hands on something with more VRAM or one of those unified memory ARM systems. However AI has pushed prices for anything like that into the stratosphere.
I like to hear opinions of people who find it interesting; myself I’ve tried Claude and did not like the experience and don’t use it. I have a similar gaming GPU that could run small models but not ones powerful enough to be very interesting.
If anything it seems to be the reverse. The two most anti-slop people I know in real life are developers that are now unemployed due to slop. Anecdotes, though.
Which raises 2 questions: Were they anti-slop because they saw the threat to their jobs? Or did they lose their jobs because they wouldn’t match the output of AI users?
Definitely the former. I’m not a professional developer so this may be inaccurate, but I don’t think there are non-AI users in professional development spaces anymore. Claude seems pretty much ubiquitous at this point; I doubt there have been meaningful numbers of non-AI-using developers for a while.
Which makes the risk of deskilling so much more scary to me, personally. At least now we still have developers that can understand, untangle, and troubleshoot AI code output. Will the next generation of AI-first developers have those same skills?
