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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The public was much more likely to say AI would harm them than benefit them.

There are so many things called "AI" these days, that studies like this are basically meaningless. I think (hope) most people's views can't be reduced to a single binary question.

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There is almost no messaging about how AI will benefit non-business owners/managers. It's not: "it will make your job or life easier", it's "you can be more productive so we'll ask you to do more and hire less". When computers were becoming common, the messaging was more positive and hopeful.

Big companies are diving straight into the mustache-twirling benefits "for the business" and of course people will push back.

I think these studies aren't meaningless at all, but the fact that "AI" is a loosely used term means that many people might view even more simple ML methods with skepticism, as opposed to just, say, chat-like LLM tools.

I'm still waiting for the last ML movement to revolutionize business intelligence. Back when regression models were going to give us all forecasting. Turns out garbage in still equals garbage out and there still aren't any silver bullets. The organizations that couldn't get their act together to collect good data about their businesses for traditional analysis methods to work are shock-faced that model-overfitting writ large isn't saving them from their doofus C-suites.

There's also a difference between using AI as a tool for creation, and as an oracle for truth.

You can't regress to the mean and call it creation. LLMs don't make novel content. This is why all the people using AI-summarizers to understand their boss's AI-expanded micromanaging emails aren't getting anything new done. Anti-compression is going to accelerate climate change.

I am talking about generative AI, not asking LLMs for answers.

I think we have lots of evidence that the single binary question "is this something people like 'us' support or not" is the only deciding factor in a lot of political decisions people make. They don't consider the facts of the particular issue and how it might impact them. They abdicate that role to whomever they believe defines what 'people like us' believe.

Does the fact there are so nany things called fruit these days make "Who likes fruit" a meaningless question?

Yes. If you asked me that question my response would be "what type of fruit?"

So meaningful, then.

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