[somekyle2]

Anecdotally, lots of people in SF tech hate AI too. _Most_ people out of tech do. But, enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters.

[tptacek]

It is not at all my experience working in local government (that is, in close contact with everybody else paying attention to local government) that non-tech people hate AI. It seems rather the opposite.

[wk_end]

Managers everywhere love the idea of AI because it means they can replace expensive and inefficient human workers with cheap automation.

Among actual people (i.e. not managers) there seems to be a bit of a generation gap - my younger friends (Gen Z) are almost disturbingly enthusiastic about entrusting their every thought and action to ChatGPT; my older friends (young millennials and up) find it odious.

[exasperaited]

I live in a medium-sized British town of 100,000 people or so. It may be a slightly more creative town than most — lots of arts and music and a really surprisingly cool music scene — but I can tell you that AI pleases (almost) nobody.

I think actually a lot about it is the sort of crass, unthinking, default-American-college-student manner about the way ChatGPT speaks. It's so American and we can feel it. But AI generated art and music is hugely unpopular, AI chatbots replacing real customer service is something we loathe.

Generally speaking I would say that AI feels like something that is being done to us by a handful of powerful Americans we profoundly distrust (and for good reason: they are untrustworthy and we can see through their bullshit).

I can tell you that this is so different to the way the internet was initially received even by older people. But again, perhaps this is in part due to our changing perspectives on America. It felt like an exciting thing to be part of, and it helped in the media that the Web was the brainchild of a British person (even if twenty years later that same media would have liked to pretend he wasn't at a European research institution when he did it).

The feeling about AI is more like the feeling we have about what the internet eventually did to our culture: destroying our high streets. We know what is coming will not be good for what makes us us.

[somekyle2]

I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a biased sample of people who don't really try to make productive use of AI.

[majormajor]

Non-technical people that I know have rapidly embraced it as "better google where i don't have to do as much work to answer questions." This is in a non-work context so i don't know how much those people are using it to do their day job writing emails or whatever. A lot of these people are tech-using boomers - they already adjusted to Google/the internet, they don't know how it works, they just are like "oh, the internet got even better."

There's maybe a slow trend towards "that's not true, you should know better than to trust AI for that sort of question" in discussions when someone says something like "I asked AI how [xyz was done]" but it's definitely not enough yet to keep anyone from going to it as their first option for answering a question.

[neutronicus]

Anyone involved in government procurement loves AI, irrespective of what it even is, for the simple fact that they get to pointedly ask every single tech vendor for evidence that they have "leveraged efficiency gains from AI" in the form of a lower bid.

At least, that's my wife's experience working on a contract with a state government at a big tech vendor.

[kg]

EDIT: Removed part of my post that pissed people off for some reason. shrug

It makes a lot of sense that someone casually coming in to use chatgpt for 30 minutes a week doesn't have any reason to think more deeply about what using that tool 'means' or where it came from. Honestly, they shouldn't have to think about it.

[tokioyoyo]

It’s one of those “people hate noticing AI-generated stuff, but everyone and their mom is using ChatGPT to make their works easier”. There are a lot of vocal boosters and vocal anti-boosters, but the general population is using it in a Google fashion and move on. Not everyone is thinking about AI-apocalypse every day.

Personally, I’m in-between the opinions. I hate when I’m consuming AI-generated stuff, but can see the use for myself for work or asking bunch of not-so-important questions to get general idea of stuff.

[IAmBroom]

Most of my FB contacts are not in tech. It is overwhelming viewed as a negative by them. To be clearer: I'm counting anyone who posts AI-generated pictures on FB as implicitly being pro-AI; if we neglect this portion the only non-negative posts about AI would be highly qualified "in some special cases it is useful" statements.

[themafia]

> enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters

That's the presumption. There's no data on whether this is actually true or not. Most rational examinations show that it most likely isn't. The progress of the technology is simply too slow and no exponential growth is on the horizon.

[Forgeties79]

What’s so striking to me is these “vocal boosters” almost preach like televangelists the moment the subject comes up. It’s very crypto-esque (not a hot take at all I know). I’m just tired of watching these people shout down folks asking legitimate questions pertaining to matters like health and safety.

[lambchoppers]

Health and safety seems irrelevant to me. I complain about cars, I point out "obscure" facts like that they are a major cause of lung related health problems for innocent bystanders, I don't actually ride in cars on any regular basis, I use them less in fact than I use AI. There were people at the car's introduction who made all the points I would make today.

The world is not at all about fairness of benefits and impacts to all people it is about a populist mass and what amuses them and makes their life convenient, hopefully without attending the relevant funerals themselves.

[slashdave]

You mean "_Most_ people out of tech that write social media posts I read".

[mips_avatar]

That’s fair. The bad behavior in the name of AI definitely isn’t limited to Seattle. I think the difference in SF is that there are people doing legitimately useful stuff with AI

[_keats]

I think this comment (and TFA) is really just painting with too broad of strokes. Of course there are going to be people in tech hubs that are very pro-AI, either because they are working with it directly and have had legitimately positive experiences or because they work with it and they begrudgingly see the writing on that wall for what it means for software professionals.

I can assure you, living in Seattle I still encounter a lot a AI boosters just as much as I encounter AI haters/skeptics

[65]

Strangely I've found the only people who are super excited about AI are executive level boomers. My mom loves AI and uses it to do her job, which of course has poor results. All the younger people I know hate AI. Perhaps it's also a generational dofference.