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Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

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Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#61

Post by dgellow »

baron816 wrote: post #12
cryo32 wrote: post #2

The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.

I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad. The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.

> writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.

I honestly don't think writers have much of a say regarding what they write. The tone is set top down.

But given that most people hate AI it's a polarizing topic to write about, they have incentives to poor some oil, for sure.

Fine by me, AI is an anti-human technology.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#62

Post by operatingthetan »

aspenmartin wrote: post #17
operatingthetan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?

Does it need to?

nope!

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#64

Post by bitmasher9 »

K0nserv wrote: post #18

I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.

The empirical data doesn’t support this view.

Capitalism approval rates in the US is much more favorable than 16%.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#65

Post by amalcon »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #26
khalic wrote: post #9

People don’t even know what it is, they think it’s chat bots. Useless statistic. In the meantime, AI has given scientists 20 years of incredible tools, from which we now reap the fruits in our daily lives

it’s not been useful anywhere else - no self driving cars, no laundry helpers - just some idiotic animatronic carcasses that are barely able to walk around, and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.

The most lucrative uses of deep neural networks today are ad targeting and recommendation algorithms. Those are other places.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#66

Post by munk-a »

K0nserv wrote: post #31
silisili wrote: post #10

Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs. People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.

I don't like AI customer service either, but having seen the other side it cuts down huge amounts of inbound queries (where the answer can usually be found in knowledge bases) and provides an answer faster than a human would. As long as the escalation path to talk to a human isn't too arduous it's not too bad.

I think the key issue here is that the people deciding how long the escalation path is isn't the humans (a fair few people do opt into search company FAQs for their answer before dialing a hotline - you're robbing those people in particular of their time by forcing them back through the same FAQ steps and discouraging the usage of those opt-in low cost resources) and, right now, consumer protection and rights are at an all time low so a fair number of AI rollouts have been downright customer malicious.

It absolutely has a place in the system - but that place (in the companies that do it well) starts by giving call center employees access to the AI as a fallback when they don't know an answer and reduces the amount of information and product specialization needed. Assuming it is ranked highly by internal teams then you can consider shifting it from being an internal tool to one exposed externally - instead, in a lot of cases, companies have just switched off the ability to dial in without going through the AI hoops and, in the worst cases, if there's a tech issue where the call center disconnects from the customer, the customer is forced to go through all those hoops again.

I like to emphasize that AI is a tool - it can be applied well in a considered and thoughtful manner - or it can be rolled out to every conceivable usage with reckless abandon... we're in a place where number two is the dominant approach.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#67

Post by dgellow »

cyanydeez wrote: post #60
aspenmartin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.

~~economy~~fascism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism#Techno-feudalism

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#68

Post by kraquepype »

K0nserv wrote: post #18

I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.

This is an accurate take. From a tech perspective, AI and ML are great. It's a neat and successful experiment that has a lot to offer.

The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.

Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#69

Post by Filligree »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #46
simonw wrote: post #4

> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023. > The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind. Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok? No wonder the general publ…

Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?

Yes. There’s not really any doubt about it.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#70

Post by logicchains »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #46
simonw wrote: post #4

> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023. > The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind. Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok? No wonder the general publ…

Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?

It's not that Claude is better, it's that Gemini and Copilot are so overwhelmingly bad.
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