No Stupid Questions

With my IRL friends? Most hate AI or dislike it, one uses it sanely and one is vibe-coding. I like having conversations with the two, because I am so damn deep in the AI-loathing pit I need to see other perspective too. My family doesn't use it, nor have any opinions or knowledge about it.

At work? Boss is absolutely gone with the AI, using it to everything and telling us to use it to everything as well. If we don't, the boss "helps us by asking for us" and then tell us the, clearly unsafe and wrong, answer. But it's the boss, I am not going to be the one lecturing the boss. With other coworkers, we don't discuss the topic much, except there seems to be surprising amount of "LETS ÄÄÄSK STÄTKEEPEETEE"-jokes when the boss isn't around. So I think most of us is at least cautious or annoyed at AI, but try to avoid the confrontation. Which is fair, we have known the boss for years.

Social media is typically designed to create and strengthen social bubbles, bringing together like-minded people and showing them what they want to see. It is also designed to feed "engagement". Rage is a great way to do that.

Just look at the prevalence of upvoting and downvoting tools in various social media sites. A great way to ensure that opinions that are popular within a particular community become even more prominent, while driving out anything that isn't popular within that community. Little wonder that views inside those bubbles become a bit skewed compared to the outside world as a whole.

people do hate it irl

Idk, are your friends kid of dumb and easy to impress?

Because your question is based on a faulty premise

"I'm lying. Also maybe I'm a bot. I have weird syntax and bad grammer, so maybe I'm a paid troll from India, China, Russia or something?"

• OP

Everybody I know hates AI, fears AI will take their job, and uses AI all the time themselves.

Because you’re in a bubble.

I broke the ice with a lot more of my IRL friends in the last few months and most lean anti-AI with a few exceptions, for example, when your end goal is actually to get slop.

It's probably the friend group you hang with. Based on your lack of capitalization, I'm guessing you are younger than me (Perhaps I'm wrong). A lot of young folks don't see it because the worst AI shit was targeted at them and poisoning their development with AI dependence. They also lack some context for how things were before the tech bros started going hard with web 2.0 and beyond. I see this a lot more with people 18-30 who, on average, use their phones more anyway. At least that's what I see where I live.

I do have someone close to be who loves AI, but I think they'll come around when they see the US start paying for its AI missteps. Taking shortcuts only matters because quality and thoroughness isn't valued. A good email should take at least a few minutes to write and a pro can weave in the appropriate details, requests, confirmations way better than a clanker.

I disagree with the premise. I have frequent discussions irl about how shit AI is and how damaging it has been to society. Perhaps you just aren't talking to the right people?

at a local middle school one of the students threw a container of cream cheese at the math teacher after she used an AI generated image in her lesson. from what we heard the students were mocking the teacher incessantly for that. this is definitely a phenomenon in the real world, at least where we live.

still, demographics vary!!!! the people we know in real life are reasonably technical, and are thus more in the "internet" camp. depending on how you meet the people you know, they may have a higher or lower probably of having one opinion or another. this is certainly an interesting topic, so please do feel free to go more in depth into your own experiences! :)

Get better friends?

Why do you love the slop machine?

AI didn't steal jobs or creative work of most normal IRL people, so same as with what happened to artist years ago, they had to navigate the crisis without them, the same is happening to programmers now, people IRL are not exposed on a personal level to as much of the dark side of AI business, only environmental and educational arguments land with them, and they're not as effective when it gives them access to seemingly free art, info and computer skills they never had

This is how i understood them personally, they don't see it as their war, just as a war, hopefully with free subsidized system going away they'll take a harder stance like the rest of us

I think people are still too unaware. As businesses push to use it, people are afraid to speak up about not using it bc "everyone is using it"and they don't want to be left out.

Most still don't understand its environmental impact either. If you're a muscle car guy, you probably don't understand ballet, or if you're an artsy person you likely won't understand most sports and why people are so into them. It's not that people are dumb, is just not their area of interest outside of (likely) misinformation about how good it is. So because they're repeatedly told "it's good and helpful" they just assume that's how it is, without any real info of behind the scenes.

On most forums or like-minded sites like Lemmy, Reddit, or other similar platforms, it's way more obvious as is constantly brought up and talked about.

most people are too ignorant to understand the problems with AI or that the bill that will be coming due. they just like that the chatbot glazes them. It's addictive.

they don't know that AI consumes shitloads of water and other energy, is driving the cost of computing (ram, GPUs, etc.) up, and is too stupid, that if you just keep pressing it will totally tell you that killing yourself is an insightful and brilliant solution to whatever problem you're trying to solve.

And then there's the people that are making these things- scumbuckets. all of them are scumbuckets and most are fucking nazis.

And then there's the concerns about social manipulation and propaganda.

Most people who know the potential future costs, and how shitty they are in the first place, and how not-actually-useful they are, hate them. the people that like them are some combination of stupid, ignorant or sold on the hype.

I think it’s safe to say that AI hate is indeed popular irl, we just don’t have frequent conversations about it.

Personally, I think AI may have potential (hey, I’m a sci-fi fan), but we are going about it in the least honest, ethical, and sustainable way possible. I DO NOT want the current generation of AI “entrepreneurs” to have ANY influence over real AI, if we ever even develop it at all.

I hope that Bezos and the like are remembered like those carnival hucksters who built absurd flying contraptions that didn’t work. When the Wright brothers came along, everyone promptly forgot their names.

Maybe everyone you know IRL is a doofus.

I can count people who love so-called AI in my circle of friends on one hand. One hand that suffered a near catastrophic accident at the saw mill.

Because it's hard to deal with people that are too in love with it and it's easier to just stay quiet and let them be when you don't have the proper capacity to articulate with people irl. Just like it's near impossible to talk against someone being racist as if it's the most normal thing in the world.

I think you're getting piled on here way too aggressively. This is literally "nostupidquestions".

I'm assuming you asked because you're open to explanations, not to argue. If that's true, here are some reasons to be very skeptical and careful with AI (especially corporate AI; I'm neutral myself on fully local home AI), and a last line how that turns into "hate":

• They are not as good as you think they are, which is devious. They will convince you they are "smart" but they are just statistical models. So they will confidently tell you false things and if you trust them, you will believe false things. They can't do math, they can't actually "think." You are just getting a statistical approximation of grammatically plausible language from the training data.
• They train you to not think for yourself and rely on them. There is some ambiguity whether there may be complex benefits, but it's clear how they're being used now is harmful to learning and development, even used by people who think they're being careful.
• They asymmetrically benefit owners versus workers. Corporate AI is being pushed so hard because owners believe it will further funnel more income to them versus workers, and they benefit from this trade even if it can't do tasks as well as workers. That means less jobs for the workers and worse experiences for the customers.
• Huge environmental costs for all of this.
• Data centers take up huge amounts of water from communities.
• Data centers increase electrical costs to communities.
• Huge increase in consumer hardware prices from corporate AI buying all the graphics cards, CPUs, hard drives, RAM, etc, leading to pricing out many people from home computing or gaming.
• AI tools are privacy nightmares. Everything you say in moments of vulnerability will likely be used to sell you something or against you in the future.

Are there benefits? I think there are. But AI has not been allowed to just grow and to be shown useful over time. It's been shoved down our throats, which, with the above, motivates a lot of legitimate hate.

Probably 1/5 at the most of the people i know actually like llm chatbots and related. Another 2/5 are neutral and the rest loath them for one reason or another. The majority of them are being forced to use it at work for things it sucks at and hate at least that part. Anyway, one theory I have for you is that people in your life that dislike it might just not talk to about it. I actually straight up lost a friend because he was upset that I kept challenging him when he talked about it. The rest I know that like it are not as persistently and enthusiastic about it, but when they do, I just not and smile until it's over, because I am simply out of energy to deal with it. These people have the same energy as the religious zealots out on the street telling people they're going to hell and it is exhausting.

Idk, I hate on Clankers everywhere I go and anytime it comes up.

Because on a vocal minority (which is right in most cases when referring to non-local LLMs) and a large majority of people who use AI without thinking about it, just liking the nice sycophantic chatbot without having to pay the real cost yet. A lot of money is invested to make sure the sheep stay silent.

I see both ends irl and online. Sometimes it feels as much a political issue as it is a technological one. Some models are quite useful. A lot are not. When the bubble implodes, the winners will rise from the ashes of the fallen. Unfortunately, we're all caught in the crossfire of both the explosive speculative growth and the oncoming Great Depression 2.0...

...I just wanted realtime speech recognition and text to speech...

Not sure, my friends hare it online and in real life

The internet is full of diverse opinions, and you tend to go towards communities that fit your morals, ideas, etc. On big tech social media platforms, this is done through algorithms that track your activity, while on the Fediverse, content is more curated (so still a sort of bubble, but one that you choose for yourself I guess). Additionally, negative opinions are more likely to gain traction online, whether they are valid or not. People are more likely to share polarising views online rather than those experienced by everyone.

You will also note that in the real world, there is fewer "tech-savvy" people. Most people don't know about the unethical nature of LLMs and how they are problematic to copyright. The majority of people don't have a strongly negative opinion on LLMs nor do they usually have a strong positive opinion on it. They see it as something that can make paragraphs using only a few words and "art" with a single prompt. They think it's neat, but certainly not the saviour to humanity many business execs think it is.

But I would like to highlight that, in real life, there are a lot of people who hate LLMs, text-to-image models, etc. Most artists don't like that these models are being trained on their creations without their consent or any sort of compensation. Doctors and others in the medical industry don't like that people are turning to LLMs for health advice (that is usually wrong and/or harmful), particularly when it concerns mental health. Software maintainers hate that "vibe coders" are submitting unreviewed LLM-generated code, taking up the time that could be better spent fixing bugs or developing new features. And I'm sure that there are businesspeople who are worried that the "AI bubble" will pop any moment once investors realise that they are losing money, crashing the economy and bankrupting a lot of people.

It's not that everybody online hates LLMs and, in the real world, people feel the opposite. That wouldn't really make sense. It's more that polarising opinions are amplified on the Internet. See the "AI bros" online for some strongly positive opinions, they are quite ridiculous I think, they somehow treat LLMs to a higher degree than most business execs. And on the Internet, there is a higher proportion of tech-savvy individuals who know the ethical, legal, and moral risks of LLMs.

I highlight that they are LLMs, not AI. To say that they are "AI" would mean that they have intelligence. In my opinion, since these models do not actually understand the prompt given. I believe that intelligence requires being able to understand a problem and figure out a solution. There are plenty of intelligent beings on this planet, us humans, corvids, octopi, certain species of whale, a lot of the primates, ant colonies, etc. But LLMs are not one of them.

I mean in my real life Im not ga ga about it. My wife really liked it at first and I was like well it has its limitations. She started seeing them. All the same it has uses but its hard to say if its uses outweigh its cost.

AI industry hate is popular among Gen Z I find

The internet != irl

OP is a bot.

401k

Here's your sign to train and run local models.

It's popular here to hate AI. Everyone wants to be in the club, to feel included. It's a hive mind demonstration.