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[–] 109 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Three years ago, as OpenAI's ChatGPT was making its splashy debut, a Pew Research center survey found that nearly one in five Americans saw AI as a benefit rather than a threat. But by 2025, 43 percent of U.S. adults now believe AI is more likely to harm them than help them in the future, according to Pew.

1 in 5 people seeing something as positive is not a high approval rating in the beginning.

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  • [–] 29 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    If you begin a large change management project in a company, having 20% of the employees think it's positive before you hardly start is like starting halfway to the finish line.

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago

    Well yes, technology improvements that mean humans can work less are only a good thing if you have an economic system that actually prioritises general wellbeing over enriching a tiny percentage of the population.

    Americans are the most fucked because the majority of the public view socialism and adjacent philosophy as being bad, despite really being the only ideologies with any real answers for what happens to people that can't work for a living, that isn't just them dying.

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    [–] 67 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    It’s good to see the sentiment growing. Anecdotally, there are non-technical people in my circle that use LLMs frequently as search engine replacements or to do stupid shit like generate pictures and emojis. I hope that begins to decline with the general sentiment called out in this article.

    The sheer number of useless LLM integrations in every website, every mobile app, and hell, even smart TVs is insane. I feel like it’s causing people very real feature fatigue. And all of the Internet content and advertising slop is making the takeover seem so much worse.

    Edit: Grammar, formatting

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  • [–] 25 points 7 months ago

    I react with either neutral apathy, disgust or surprise when somebody tries to show me their latest AI generated blob. Repeat twice and they stop using it. Our fear of social embarassment is higher than our desire to use AI.

    "Look at this picture of me in a Ghibli style I generated"

    "Oh... It's kinda bad isn't it? I'd avoid sharing it"

    "Oh remember what we were debating earlier? Gemini said that..."

    "Oh I know what you're going to say, it said something totally dumb, right? I know, one must be very stupid to trust it haha so anyway what were you saying?"

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Search engine replacement is probably the only use case of AI for me - for the times when I don't know exactly what I'm searching for so the conversation style is helpful.

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  • [–] 28 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Is it the conversational style? or that search engines have been designed to be actively worse to keep your eyeballs spending more time looking at advertisements now?

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I used to be good at googling information I needed. Then Google changed what googling does.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Try to find a big rig truck wash near your location on Google maps. I cannot. Only 57 million car washes and no way to filter them out.

    Edit: lo and behold: “big rig truck wash” is the magic phrase it turns out. “Truck wash”, “Semi truck wash”, “semi truck wash -car” don’t work but “big rig truck wash” does.

    Fuck you Google, you waste my time.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Don't use Google. DDG works with keyword searches and you get exactly what you expect.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I do use DDG as my default. I was using "googling" for the sake of making a witty remark. Even so, the results are usually comparable - the first couple dozen results are mostly AI/SEO slop.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    There's times when I want to find "exact matches and nothing but" - searching for error messages, for instance - and that's made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don't want you to switch off their "helpful" features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

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    [–] 61 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    What began in 2022 as broad optimism about the power of generative AI to make peoples' lives easier has instead shifted toward a sense of deep cynicism that the technology being heralded as a game changer is, in fact, only changing the game for the richest technologists in Silicon Valley who are benefiting from what appears to be an almost endless supply of money to build their various AI projects — many of which don't appear to solve any actual problems.

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  • [–] 57 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    many of which don’t appear to solve any actual problems.

    That's putting it lightly. If only the issue was merely not having sufficient use cases, rather than actively making lives worse through environmental strains, supply chain hoarding, and misinformation.

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  • [–] 57 points 7 months ago

    Slop is terrible obviously, but at least in exchange for the slop we get… higher energy costs and acceleration of climate change

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  • [–] 56 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It likely doesn't help that the kids use "AI" as slang for "bullshit".

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  • [–] 52 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    The crazy thing is, none of these articles seem to want to admit that AI is bad. They keep making articles like this. Keep saying that approval is falling among the general populace. But when touching on why that is, there's always some wiggle words. Always some spin.

    It's never "people being forced to use it are seeing it as a detriment to them" people using it are seeing a decrease in efficacy of the results it gives for the amount of prompting required. Or people don't like it because it's going to have significant detrimental affects on the environment and their utilities.

    All of those are solid reasons for the decline in both the use of AI LLM'S and the approval of them.

    The cost of goods and services relating even tangentially to AI are going through the roof. The amount of slop is increasing at a furious pace, directly contributing to things like enshittification and dead Internet theory. The effect on the economy is looking to be extremely catastrophic.

    But oh no. It's lack of authenticity on social media spaces that people are worried about. Sure.

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  • [–] 22 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Also, "AI could be used to to replace my job. Not that it'd do a good job at it, but it'd be a great excuse to lay me off."

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah. I often forget this one because AI isn't replacing my job any time soon. At best maybe it could potentially be used to streamline some processes to do with tech data and work flow management (what tests and protocols get done when, and combining tests/troubleshooting steps to prevent rework). But that would have to be a very targeted and very very regulated and tested thing before it could be viable.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago

    The crazy thing is, none of these articles seem to want to admit that AI is bad.

    As the old quote goes- "A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, "You are mad, you are not like us.""

    In such an environment, nobody wants to admit they are not mad, lest they be attacked.

    Or as someone else said- I want a future where machines cook and clean and do menial work, so us humans can focus on art and poetry and writing. Instead we have a world where machines create art and poetry and books, so the humans can focus on cleaning and menial work. I don't like this timeline.

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    [–] 37 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    When I read this crap, all I can think is that yeah backlash is growing because the forced implementation is growing. Another useless sentiment-based article.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    Lets use LLMs for things LLMs are useful for. It is not a panacea, and it is not appropriate for every use case

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago

    Yeah, LLMs are interesting tech products to play with and find some niche uses for.

    But for the love of god they are not "prop up the entire stock market and numerous multi-trillion-dollar companies indefinitely" good!

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    I just got the notification today when opening Office programs that copilot was there

    all the help threads about how to turn it off have out of date info. seems like you can no longer disable it in Excel/Word/PowerPoint

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  • [–] 27 points 7 months ago

    Sorry, what part of "Let the Broligarchy do anything it wants!" didn't y'all understand? /s

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