I dunno, I think in the past year “AI” has gone from meaningless buzzword to having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.
“That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”
“That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”
The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.
* My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about
* My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about
* The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about
The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.
If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth.
It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure.
Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers.
The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet.
Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.
The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.
Without going into details, I have used AI to find genuine, provably effective solutions to multiple real world problems that would either have been impossible without AI or would have taken a very, very long time.
And it would have been a boon if it had been around while I was getting my degree, because it's been excellent at clarifying foundational concepts.
It's not perfectly reliable, but neither are human professionals.
AI is very, very good at spitting out language. It's very, very bad at ascertaining the quality or correctness of the language it spits out.
And the problem with plausibly correct output is that sometimes it's good enough until it isn't, which is the pattern of behavior I've seen with heavy AI driven research.
I'm not going to discount that it's better than google searches. But it's hardly good enough to equate to undergraduate understanding. The act of reading and writing from primary/secondary sources crafted by humans is in itself the way to acquire and retain knowledge. Having it hallucinated at you in a plausibly correct way is dangerous to equate to that.
a) it seems likely to me that in the end, few normal people know what to do with the ability to create their own software for their private use,
b) getting bespoke software working on the platforms that the majority of people actually use (Android and iOS) is somewhere between hard and impossible, and
c) large corporations have a de facto grip on AI as well, local models require you to have the knowhow and beefy hardware to run them, and they’re not magic software machines like Claude.
All in all, it seems rathet optimistic that AIs could do much if anything to help consumers against corporations. But I concede that it is a viewpoint that’s at least less selfish than most.
A peculiar way to call VC vultures with neck deep vested interests.
It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.
It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.