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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

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Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#51

Post by pepperoni_pizza »

Ekaros wrote: post #25
MBCook wrote: post #16

Are they? I heard a presentation from some pro-AI people on Friday to the large company I work at. They said they surveyed people at an AI conference and 93% of people were excited about it. This was said with a straight face like “people love puppies!”. No self awareness at all.

I wonder what result you would get if you run survey about do people love dogs at dog show... Also, looking at current market situation how many people would be willing to say to their bosses or even publicly that they think AI is quite a lot of bullshit.

Exactly.

My new favorite game at work is "guess if this person is really into AI or they just have to be because their boss is and if they weren't they would get replaced by someone who is" and it's quite hard to say.

And since the "boss" of CEOs are the investors in the stock market, and the stock market is automated to ridiculous degree, is this AI pushing for itself?

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#52

Post by jrflowers »

MBCook wrote: post #16

Are they? I heard a presentation from some pro-AI people on Friday to the large company I work at. They said they surveyed people at an AI conference and 93% of people were excited about it. This was said with a straight face like “people love puppies!”. No self awareness at all.

> they surveyed people at an AI conference

You can tell that everyone loves chain buffet restaurants by going to Golden Corral and asking everybody if they are enjoying their meals

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#53

Post by Rekindle8090 »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

[dead]

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#54

Post by SJMG »

I think the truth is in fact asymmetric on this front.

People, esp. many SWEs, like generating with AI, or more telling, wouldn't want to give it up in their work.

On the other hand, people generally hate consuming the product of gen AI.

Consumer experience = mostly negative

Producer experience = mostly positive

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#55

Post by giancarlostoro »

Its really unwarranted some peoples reactions to someone using AI, and in other cases theres no AI used and people blindly assume something is AI and then proceed to write it off as slop, but it wasnt even AI it was just slightly low quality authentic content that you maybe would not have even commented about, we all have seen low quality videos on youtube we didnt freak out about.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#56

Post by masijo »

AI has automated my favorite part of the job: coding.

Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec.

It’s disgusting. And the worst part is that you can’t opt-out. If you give even the slightest hint that you don’t like AI you’re seen as a Luddite and you’ll be put next in line for the upcoming layoff.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#58

Post by retired »

badc0ffee wrote: post #49
retired wrote: post #11

Downsides of AI: Massive increase in RAM prices, housing crisis worsens as datacenters are build, massive energy usage, children are having trouble learning at school, spreading misinformation is easier than ever. Upsides of AI: I can ask it if my farts are caused by the celery I ate earlier

> housing crisis worsens as datacenters are build I take your other points, but I can't see the connection there. I've heard that they increase electricity rates in many cases (poorly managed electric utilities that can't build out grid capacity without raising rates for everyone), but not that they're affecting housing.

For The Netherlands, construction work causes emissions. There are limits to these emissions. Building a data center means you can't simultaneously build a house anywhere nearby the construction site as that would cause the local emissions to go over the set limits.

Next to that there is net congestion. The energy grid is currently critical, if you add a data center that means you will not be able to connect 20 to 30 newly build homes to power. There are currently new homes that are waiting for a connection to the grid before people can live there.

Space. In the densest country of Europe (non-microstate), a hyper scale data center could have been a neighborhood.

Latest point, maybe not the strongest, is construction workers. While construction workers building a data center are different from construction workers building homes, it doesn't really help with the labor shortages in construction if electricians are all busy building data centers.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#59

Post by clipsy »

jmclnx wrote: post #50

All people see is job losses and increased costs based upon articles and tweet type things. If due to AI or not, that is what they are seeing. It is like MAGA news, all they see "AI eliminates jobs and AI increases your electric bill". Nothing at this point will make people believe AI is good for the masses. What will need to happen for people to like AI ? I say they will get real $ month after month to cover more th…

Since the 1970’s, actually.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#60

Post by troosevelt »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't.

People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.

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