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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

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261–270 of 399 posts

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

#261
It's unbelievable and frustrating that _we basically built our own demise._

We built the most meritocratic and accessible career path possible. If you knew how to code, and you invested in your craft (or didn't!), you were more-or-less guaranteed multiple amazing, well-paying career paths anywhere in the world.

Yet, a cohort of us decided "what if we built this thing that literally does our job? what could possibly go wrong?"

Yeah, this is gatekeeping, but the medical and legal industries have perfected that, and our industry doesn't even require advanced degrees to climb the ladder! (John Ternus only has a B.Eng in MEng!)

Why did we Eric-Andre-meme ourselves?

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't expect anything else and aren't surprised. "The X industry is discovering..." is one of those stock phrases that people just kinda deploy willy-nilly; the article contains no argument that anyone in the AI industry didn't know or didn't expect this.

Presumably these companies on the verge of an IPO don’t want the public to hate them or their product. It wasn’t exactly a calculated maneuver - they made a decision to leverage fear-based marketing and it backfired.

It wasn't any sort of maneuver! It's what they genuinely believe! Both OpenAI and Anthropic have been telling people about the existential risk of powerful AI since the very day they were founded; OpenAI has been at it since 2015, 8 years before they had any meaningful product to market.

Sam Altman still says, after being the victim of anti-AI violence, that "the fear and anxiety about AI is justified" and "it will not all go well".

People simply refuse to believe that AI companies are serious about this, and get twisted into knots trying to understand why AI companies would choose this messaging under the premise that they can't be serious.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a likeability problem. Altman and, shockingly, to a lesser degree, Musk have terrible brands. When folks see those people at the top of these companies, folks who have been publicly saying they're going to cause massive job losses and cause human extinction or whatnot, they're going to hate the companies irrespective of the actual risk of job losses or environmental impacts.

Why does Dario get off the hook here? He also comes off like a greasy asshole 99% of the time.

Virtually no "normal people" know who he is. I don't think most programmers I know even know who he is. They just know "Altman" and "Anthropic".

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title of the original article feels like click-baiut to me. It's covering an act of violence under the pretext that people hate AI. In fact it's a very sad story about a 20 year old throwing their life away instead of fighting for what he believes is right through non-violent activism and/or regulations. Last year I wrote an article asking the very question "Who will be the next Luddites?", National Geographics f…

Non-violent means don't work and get you killed by cops. This is what the people are left with.

If you get killed by cops that does not necessarily mean the means are not working. All good things in life come at a sacrifice.

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

#265

This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said…

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The public also hates the lies and the threats about the tech

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the works of society. This is straightforward? This is a colossal task. Monumental. Billionaires own it. That’s the political status quo. You could build som…

'Straightfoward' as in there is a clear way to solve the issue, not that it will be easy to enact it.

But it's not a clear way to solve the issue. UBI, even if enacted tomorrow, doesn't stop the enormous crash of the middle-class, and the fallout of that. Maybe it will stop some people from literally dying - that's "solved"? It's a small buffer at the very worst end of a gigantic problem. The word "solve" is totally ridiculous.

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-violent means don't work and get you killed by cops. This is what the people are left with.

If you get killed by cops that does not necessarily mean the means are not working. All good things in life come at a sacrifice.

It doesn't necessarily mean it is working either though.

Not all sacrifice needs to be all or nothing.

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

#269
> If Altman, Amodei, and their Big Tech peers want to rebuild public trust and create a genuine technology that benefits the public, then the path forward isn’t another white paper or postulating about the existential risks of their technology. It’s sustained, verifiable action: genuine transparency about what their products can do, a willingness to accept meaningful regulation and responsibility even at financial cost, and real democratic input from communities on the growth of data centers.

They need to accept far more than that. They need to accept that they may not be able to "create a genuine technology that benefits the public" at all, and that they therefore may be required to stop completely and totally dissolve all their operations if it turns out that is what is best.

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

#270
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but violence doesnt work either, even if you conquer a whole nation (or social class or insert w/e here), you didnt really win and oneday they will get their revenge, so you're better off trying the non-violent way

Does anyone else see the disconnect between how Americans talk about our history compared to how we talk about political violence of today? How can we glorify Thomas Jefferson and teach kids about him saying "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" only to then condemn the spilling of any modern blood? Truly what is the difference between torching a warehouse of…

Propaganda and "history is written by the victors"

Propaganda is the difference between rebels and freedom fighters.

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