The Public Is Rapidly Turning Against AI, Polling Shows
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It’s become a dog whistle such that if a company or person uses AI, you have to question how much they actually care about or value the actual service they are providing. It’s very quickly becoming associated with spammy and scammy entities. Just look at the recent Willie Wonka event that used generative AI in its marketing to trick people into thinking what they were buying was a higher value than what it actually was. The bar on creative work, which once served as a proxy to actual value, has been eroded and reduced so low and people are catching on. The net affect on society is not good and causing less trust, not more and will likely lead to greatly reduced valuations of AI as a whole, no matter what it creates and at what quality —- people may just stop consuming altogether or be less likely to consume.
It's all AI. I know there's recent hype but it feels like we've all lost perspective a bit.
As a public we’ve had years of cultural warnings that this tech especially needs to be navigated with wisdom and ethical consideration.
Trust can initially be quickly gained, but once lost, very hard to regain.
I’m not sure about anyone else but I’m already cautious which questions I ask Chat GPT and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
The answer is no. Unequivocally, unambiguously, undoubtedly, no. Not a one. But even more so, distrust the people fated to own it.
And now we have a tech that can do that trivially. I love that it does that. And I look forward to the world and all the uncertainty it brings.
I haven't seen a positive article on AI from mainstream press in at least a year.
Yeah, under those conditions public sentiment is going to be influenced in a given direction.
Sam Altman, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton all think AGI is coming soon and could be an existential threat to all of humanity.
So I agree, I don't expect people (tech startups) to understand something (AGI x-Risk) when their job (developing AGI and making $) depends on them not understanding it.
Think back to the last time you got frustrated with a computer system that wouldn't do the right thing as you see it, but there was nobody to actually complain to. Now imagine that same wretched program has control over your biosphere or somehow controls your off switch.
Granted, there are very limited positive aspects of nuclear weapons, while positive potential aspects of AI could arguably outweigh the risks.
Even with something like nukes, while yes dangerous and terrible weapons, it's arguably quite likely that without them existing we'd have had WWIII by now but for the threat of mutually assured destruction.
How 'bad' and 'good' things in narrow scopes actually play out across exponentially larger scopes is almost impossible to predict or qualify.
(Also, a lot of the classic threat modeling for AI was extrapolating obsolete anthropological models of past intelligence emergence on precursor species. We just sort of continue carrying forward a number of assumptions we should arguably be much more critical of.)
Yeah there’s no such thing as the alignment problem. Shrug.
What do you mean there's no such thing as the alignment problem? People like Rob Miles talk about it all the time. Corrigibility will be a problem, I guarantee it.
This means that the creators of a given AI will necessarily pick and choose which "reality" it is going to convey.
1) Deeply integrated into the product. This is what we've mostly seen to date. Google Search, Facebook's feed, Amazon results, etc. I can see how people are getting tired of these applications of AI. My wife asked me how she can search for something without it following her around the Internet. I said, "you can't really".
2) AI as the product. This new set of AI use cases feel quite different (for now, read on). Users intentionally interact knowing and wanting the AI related value they receive. As all novel products, this type of AI will also get so commercialized that it's not in the business of solving the user's needs. At least not as it's first priority. And people will grow tired of it too.
Rinse, repeat.
AI generated slop used to create SEO spam, adverts, and usually incorrect answers is what I and many have become tired of.
AI tech is best when it’s invisible. No one cares if their AirPods are using AI tech for advanced audio processing, they just care that the product seems to work better than the others. What people are sick of is AI support chatbots that are useless, AI generated spam, fake political images, and tech companies trying to tell you that their useless AI product is going to change the world.
I wonder if, and how, the analogy would play out with AI.
Free software, even if not open sourced, is putting the means (and memes) of production into the hands of the workers.
is never “free software” is all.
They're fundamentally different. I'm in IT and don't think there is much to be done about it "taking my job", but certainly we need to keep it out of the path of important society-defining decisions. It's important to separate these two things, and AFAICT the public debate about this -- such as it is -- is not.
The rise of AI is going to cause real human suffering. Sure, we will probably be better off in 100 years. But that's little comfort the those that lose their jobs or the ones that get crushed under the new AI powered Noble class.
Yes, washing machines caused suffering for women who made a living manually washing clothes. But they alleviated far, far more suffering by automating a physically difficult task.
My guess is that widespread adoption of new technology almost always reduces net suffering in the long term. Prioritizing the reduction of suffering today at the cost of more suffering in the future seems short-sighted.
For one thing, there is little evidence of similar vast productivity increases. And there is similarly little evidence of what happens when you replace one set of workers with an equivalent or even slightly worse artificial set, and invest all the money in that instead...without a similar increase in productivity or the accessibility of natural resources.
In other words, it seems obvious to me that AI is far less defensible than the industrial revolution, and also obvious that the bulk of the issues the Luddites took with technology have been vindicated by history and sometimes in much more severe terms than what the Luddites thought.
More discussion on the axios post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39616302
Wait, what?
If it needs to be "shortened for readability" for the report, how do we know it wasn't confusing to the respondents in its original form?
I mean, maybe it's fine, but push polling is totally a thing.
I don't trust polls unless the writeup prominently features details about a) exactly how the subjects were selected, b) the exact text of the questions that were asked, and c) exactly how the data was collected.
A U.S.-based example: a stranger calls someone on the phone and asks them whether they own a firearm, or, alternatively, whether they've ever had an abortion. In either case, it's not a safe bet that the answer is going to be honest.
Another example: I see that they've collected data for this poll in China. I can't believe that strangers cold-calling people in China and asking them whether they trust the government is going to produce data of any value at all.
Ye. A lot of these kind of questions people just answer the correct answer. You can see that in regard to education level, where less education seems correlated with more honest amswers, since they don't know the correct one.
I hope AI replaces all of education so that’s my level of comfort with it. Which is to say not comfortable at all, so let it do education.