Comment by dannyobrien

This is also where I am, and I guess it has been a source of mild and growing consternation since I first blagged an OpenAI GPT account when they were private, in an attempt to get ahead of what was coming -- both the positive and negative sides of the advances. Most people either ignored the advances, or quickly identified and connected to the negative side, and effectively filtered out the rest.

As somebody who comes from a politically left family, and was also around in the early days of the Web, let me tentatively note that this issue has a particular political slant, too. The left has strong roots in being able to effectively critique new developments, economic and social, that don't come from its own engines of innovation which have revolved around those critiques, plus solidarity, organization, and sociopolitical action.

The movement's theorists work far more slowly on how to integrate the effect of those changes into its vision. That means when something like this comes along, the left's cultural norms err on the side of critique. Which is fine, but it makes any other expression both hard to convey, and instantly suspect in those communities. I saw this in the early Web, where from a small group of early adopters of all political slants, it was the independents, heterodox leftists, and the right, -- and most vocally, the libertarians -- who were able to most quickly adapt to and adopt the new technology. Academic leftists, and those who were inspired by them took a lot longer to accomodate the Net into their theses (beyond disregarding or rejecting it) and even longer to devise practical uses for it.

It wasn't that long, I should say -- a matter of months or years, and any latent objections were quickly swamped by younger voices who were familiar with the power of the Net; but from my point of view it seriously set back that movement in practicality and popularity during the 80s and 90s.

I see the same with AI: the left has attracted a large generational of support across the world from providing an emotionally resonant and practical alternative to the status quo many people face. But you quickly lose the mandate of heaven if you fail to do more than just simplistically critique or reject a thing that the average person in the world feels they know better, or feels differently toward, than you do. This is something to consider, even if you still strongly believe yourselves to be correct in the critiques.