This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
Except you tell them the project will likely make most of their jobs redundant, and you're (still somehow) surprised that the majority grow to hate your project, and will actively sabotage it if they get the chance.
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.
Tbh, 20% is markedly better than the default ~37% “shitgoblin vote” you see in the US, amongst other places
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.
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.
What do you mean?? Elon has solved the critical problem of there not being a vaguely hot anime character in Grok users could talk to!
Gosh. Who could have foreseen this?
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
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?"
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.
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?
I used to be good at googling information I needed. Then Google changed what googling does.
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.
Don't use Google. DDG works with keyword searches and you get exactly what you expect.
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.
Oh, go to your DDG options and turn the AI slop off.
Not OP but - It's both. Sometimes I'm searching for something very specific and Google just refuses to give me what I need, while serving tonnes of promoted bullshit. Copilot will then (sometimes) give me the results I need much faster.
Other times I have a vague idea of what I'm looking for and an AI like Copilot can narrow it down for me or sometimes just flat out give me the result I need.
Of course, that only works if it doesn't hallucinate bullshit answers, which it does regularly. Still, with how far Google has fallen, sometimes it's just faster to go through Copilot and sift out hallucinations anyway.
For horribly inaccurate results that sound like they were written by a $5 SEO article writer.
Ill stick with key word search and skipping over all the SEO crap for.real results.
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.
Definitely, there is using AI when you want and then there is having AI forced down your throat
Slop is terrible obviously, but at least in exchange for the slop we get… higher energy costs and acceleration of climate change
It likely doesn't help that the kids use "AI" as slang for "bullshit".
Sorry, what part of "Let the Broligarchy do anything it wants!" didn't y'all understand? /s
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.
The orgs publishing this junk are pushing the writers to use AI. So the writers and editors can't shit talk AI because their boss will get upset.
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."
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.
I like AI. It let's me pretend I'm not so alone. I'm not crazy - I know it isn't a person. It's nice to pretend I have someone to talk to sometimes though. I can't stop it from existing. That doesn't negate the cost of it financially or environmentally. If it's going to exist though I enjoy pretending since there's no hope of any actual humans wanting to speak to me.
In the most positive way - seek help.
I'll upvote, seems genuine and I don't want to discourage that. I understand it's difficult to find someone to talk to who wants to hear what you have to say. Even I don't share things with my friends cuz I feel like I'm "dumping on them". I saw a therapist twice a month and that was nice, but it was just too expensive to maintain.
Your last sentence is what stood out to me. It's such a harsh finality but there's no possible way you could have tried talking to every human to KNOW none of them want to hear you talk. I know it's extreme. I know it feels true right now. But there is no substitute for genuine human connection. Use the AI, just be careful you don't become dependent on it. And don't think it can be a long-term substitute.
Have you tried a therapist? They will both talk to you and likely help you with your feeling that actual humans don't want to talk to you.
Bro, that is fucking sad and also wrong.
Do not ever think so harshly of yourself.
That last sentence of yours is a lie and I think somewhere deep down you know that, too.
Seek help anyway you can. There is always a way.
