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.
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.
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.
Or, drive through Worth and Bridgeview in IL, where all the middle eastern people in Chicago live, and notice all the AI billboards. Not billboards for AI, just, billboards obviously made with GenAI.
I think it's just not true that non-tech people are especially opposed to AI.
That seems more like a canary than anything. This is the demographic that doesn't even know which tech company they're talking to in congress. That's not the demographic in touch with tech. They have gotten more excited about even dumber stuff.
For people under 50, it's a wildly common insult to say something seems AI generated. They are disillusioned with the content slop filling the internet, the fact that 50% of the internet is bots, and their future job prospects.
The only people I've seen liking AI art, like fake cat videos, are people over 50. Not that they don't matter, but they are not the driver of what's popular or sustainable.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-america...
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.
One look at the dystopian billboards bragging about trying to replace humans with AI should make any sane human angry at what tech has done. Or the rising rents due to an influx of people working on mostly useless AI startups, 90% of which won't be around in 5 years. Or even how poorly many in tech behave in public and how poorly they treat service workers. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and just in SF alone.
I say all this as someone living in SF and working in tech. As a whole, we've brought the hate upon ourselves, and we deserve it.
At least, that's my wife's experience working on a contract with a state government at a big tech vendor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly I don’t really know what to say to that, other than it seems rather relevant to me. I don’t really know what to elaborate on given we disagree on such a fundamental level.
It's lovely that you care about health, but I have no idea why you think you are relevant to a society that is very much willing to risk extinction to avoid the slightest upset or delay to consumer convenience measured progress.
I’m not sure what this question is addressing. I didn’t say it needs to “stop” or the industry has to respond to me.
> It's lovely that you care about health,
1) you should care too, 2) drop the patronizing tone if you are actually serious about having a conversation.
The members of HN are actually a pretty strongly biased sample towards people who get the omelet when the eggs get broken.
No not the devil, but years ago I stopped finding it funny or useful when people "played" the part of devil's advocate because we all know that the vast majority of the time it's just a convenient way to be contrarian without ever being held accountable for the opinions espoused in the process. It also tends to distract people from the actual discussion at hand.
To be honest I’m kind of surprised I need to explain what this means so my guess is you’re just baiting/being opaque, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and answer your question taken at face value: There have been plenty of high profile incidents in the news over the past year or two, as well as multiple behavioral health studies showing that we need to think critically about how these systems are deployed. If you are unable to find them I’ll locate them for you and link them, but I don’t want to get bogged down in “source wars.” So please look first (search “AI psychosis” to start) and then hit me up if you really can’t find anything.
I am not against the use of LLM’s, but like social media and other technologies before it, we need to actually think about the societal implications. We make this mistake time and time again.
If your concerns are things like AI psychosis, then I think it is fair to say that the tradeoffs are not yet clear enough to call this. There are benefits and bad consequences for every new technology. Some are a net positive on the balance, others are not. If we outlawed every new technology because someone, somewhere was hurt, nothing would ever be approved for general use.
I do not feel they are but also I was primarily talking about the AI-evangelists who shout people asking these questions down as Luddites.
I think the same thing of the precautionary movements today, including the AI skeptic position you are advocating for here. The comparison is valid, and it is negative and pejorative because history is on the side of advancing technology.
Search for health and safety and see how many results are about work.
If you don't care about that so be it - just say it out loud then. But I do not feel like getting bogged down in justifying why we should even discuss it as we circle what this is really about.
I can assure you, living in Seattle I still encounter a lot a AI boosters just as much as I encounter AI haters/skeptics