"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." - Roy Amara.
This is the early overestimation.
This is the early overestimation.
Then came transformers, then came combining transformers with diffusions, an innocent little combination, that now becomes a tsunami in image generation. Artists are launching mass protests online in extreme panic and anguish, tsunami-tide of consumer applications are coming each month, many of them extremely profitable and don't even need VC money. This is the long-term impact phase already.
Really? Do you have some examples?
Each new wave runs into the overestimation/underestimation problem.
Science fiction from the 1960's through about the 1990's was of the opinion that AI would produce intelligence indistinguishable from humans, and would do so extremely quickly (we should have had it by now), and that the most pressing questions would be things like whether those intelligences deserved voting rights and whether they made humanity obsolete.
That was a wild overestimation of what the technology was capable of.
But the widespread application of AI, either in search results, social media moderation, propaganda and disinformation, bots, fake reviews, or just straight up spam, forms an absolute assault on the nature of trust and information in society, overturning heuristics that have been in effect for all of history (that people are usually trustworthy, that information is usually representative, that lying is hard). While I don't think the threat is apocalyptic, I do think no one even remotely saw this coming.
This is just outside of your time range but Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty came out in 2001, and predicted much of this.
The main example of this pertains to the plot and themes of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, released on November 13, 2001, which delved into ideas and concepts that would become culturally significant in the 2010s. Among these themes were post-truth politics, alternative facts, echo-chambers, fake news, AI-curated news feeds, information overload in the Information Age, and political correctness.[140] While the game received universal acclaim upon release for its gameplay and attention to detail, the plot became a divisive topic among critics, with some calling it "absurd" and "stupid".