Comment by davemp
2 days ago
Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
2 days ago
Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas. They may not actively use LLMs or even know what they are, but they’re satisfied with Google’s AI overview and they love using voice assistants. These aren’t people from any particular sphere I sought out or which self-selected, but neighbors, colleagues, extended family, the chef at a local restaurant etc.
People with disdain for AI are probably largely limited to one “elite” or another. Of course this goes for practically any cause. It’s basically impossible to to get large-scale momentum behind anything that goes against prevailing economic interests.
Of course he was still out of touch with that particular group, and if they all try really hard, maybe they can get some narrative out there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Unless corpos discover how they can use these clashing views for market segmentation or something.
I guess this just shows how divided the world is right now (in a lot of ways), but for me this sounds like one of the creepier episodes of Black Mirror or Twilight Zone.
People are varied.
My grandma can't tell the difference between reality and AI. My parents and older family members either treat AI as a dog ("wow, look at this fun trick") or, worryingly, as Google.
People younger than about 35 I know dislike AI, ranging from mild annoyance up to passionate hatred, except for the people who are all-in on it. Calling something "slop" causes a fun diverse reaction, with some people offended on behalf of an LLM, and with others poking fun at the slop referenced.
The vast majority simply doesn't seem to care outside of annoyance at AI being shoehorned into everything (but that might as well have been the web 3.0/blockchain/web 2.0/whatever term manages to milk investors).
I’ve found love of AI seems to be (with exceptions of course) pretty directly proportional to age and wealth. Older people and wealthier / business-owning people seem to be more excited by it, younger, working people not so much, especially artists and creative types. And it makes sense too, given who stands to gain and lose from it.
> adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas
I'll thank the universe for not knowing anyone that does this.
Virtually every person I talk to on a regular basis either (a) generally hates AI but uses it in specific ways because of the utility they perceive, or (b) hates AI and won't use it at all.
The idea that "distain for AI" is limited to "one 'elite' or another" is most definitely not borne out by any polling data. "Of course this goes for practically any cause" seems to be an opinion based on air. Many, many people across all social strata (except maybe millionaires/billionaires) are deeply invested in a wide variety of causes to make the world a better place.
I use Google's old voice assistant, not Gemini.
It's a lot less annoying to deal with and more consistent. Is it AI (LLM)?
I live in San Francisco, and my personal sample of “normal people” think AI generated imagery looks like shit, abhor the proliferation of slop, and are doing their best to avoid this stuff at all costs.
You can prompt up some really cool commercial-grade art within the limitations of the models.
Getting more precision and consistency in the images requires additional technical configuration and actual artistic skill such that it more resembles using Photoshop and similar software. But what can be done with prompting is a lot more impressive than what can be done with rudimentary Photoshop skills and a big photo library to work from.
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In my experience there's a bit of a generation gap here (particularly outside the SF tech bubble). Parents excitedly gave e.g. giclée prints of AI-generated art of their adult children's pets to them as gifts last Christmas, but were met with muted-to-negative responses.
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Let me guess. Anyone who hasn't been avoiding AI isn't "truly smart"?
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> Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas.
They might not know that those assets are AI-generated. It's easy to not know if you don't have this stuff (somehow) constantly shoved into your face.
I had a sticker on my water bottle from a brewery for several days. Just last night did I realize that it was completely AI-generated. The design was just text. Anyone could've made it with any other application, and yet, they chose to use AI to do it. The font was a typical font used by AI, and the hero text had low-res dots on it, a tell-tale for one-shot AI art. I threw it away.
For the christmas decorations, yes, but the imagery I meant is mostly custom, apart from some shared memes. Images and videos of themselves or their dogs in some style or doing something or being somewhere. Some of these honestly betray some mental unwellness if you ask me, but the point is, people eat this shit up and see it as harmless fun. Which it is, of course, in the same way many things are if you ignore the externalities.
"Normal people" are not that political. They don't automatically change their opinion about a picture they like because they find out it was AI generated. They say, "oh that's interesting, I guess I should keep an eye out for this AI generated stuff. I heard a lot of it is slop, but it seems they can make some really cool stuff now".
Yeah, I mostly agree with you on both points. 1. Tech execs are all in for making money. A small tangent: my wife and I used to enjoy the All In Podcast, but now those four guys mostly lie (my opinion) in ways to profit themselves and their rich friends - really out of touch, and now they are kind-of boring. Used to be a fun podcast. 2. I am a super techie, retired now (I have 55 patents, written many books on AI, many great jobs): I am a little shocked at how most non-tech people I talk with don’t like AI: some because of energy use/data centers forced on unwilling communities, many fear for their or their children's or grandchildren’s jobs, etc.
I find this a weird comment. Isn't this the same kind of out of touch? I could write:
> Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the Hackernews commenter sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality loves LLMs and their touted trajectory.
And it would hold mostly true for me. This goes to show we should all be aware of our respective bubbles.
Imo there's a priority you should have for the generation below you. Just like how you clean up for your next week's self, you clean up for the next generation. Make sure you don't leave the world on fire before you dip. Two generations have failed at this, now's your chance to break the streak.
But maybe I'm just a hippie, who knows.
I don't think you are a hippy. From evolutionary perspective alone, it seems reasonable. However, US society in particular has been.. complicated for the past few generations.
I used to attribute it to the individualism ethos and whatnot, but I no longer think that is a reasonable take in a sense that it is not the whole story. There is a steady flow of push to separate individuals from one another. For example, it is not unusual for parent to offer a sentiment along the lines of 'you are out at 18'. And this is just one tiny example. The funny thing, there may be a merit to letting a bird fly out, but we are talking about concerted efforts to push birds out while outside is set up to be as anti-bird as possible. Not exactly a recipe for success..
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I see AI exactly as what will help future generations, the possibilities it provides in terms of learning, research, analysis are huge.
It confusing to me how people complain about jobs - there is no guarantee that any job will be there forever, there is no guarantee that current social and economic model will be there forever, things always change, you have to adapt, there is no other way.
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I'm starting to think that the most likely solution to this problem is that one or more generations leave things in such bad shape that everyone dies. Problem solved, no future generations to be worse off than prior ones!
As someone gen-z, I think that we are just the ones facing the double it and give it to the next generation problem.
i do not doubt that there were people like you who saw the problems and perhaps even wanted to fix it, but I cant help but wonder where it all went wrong.
also there is no guarantee for anything that gen-z wouldn't try to pass it to the next generation either. It's a ticking time bomb, Tick tock.
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Sure - and people can engage with you on that.
For example, is that true of your experience?
In general HN has been enamored by AI, with the sheen falling off only in the past quarter. This has matched with most people on HN being far more tech aware than the average user.
The issues with GenAI have also been couched to match observed reality.
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The point being, - You can have your experience, and you can talk about it to build a better understanding of reality.
The difference is in whether you believe, by your own heuristics, that your observations are a reasonable sample of whatever broader reality is in question. We all may say anything about our experiences and observations and be told, "No, you're in a bubble" - and we could be wrong, or that other person might be in a bubble!
Point is: Just say it. If you think the parent is in a bubble, just express the opinion. You don't even have to mount an argument or present evidence, but there's really no value in calling somebody's opinion "weird" just because, essentially, "anybody could be wrong".
Everyone is in a bubble
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I mean normal people shun LLM users so it’s no wonder it’s true for you.
So who has driven the 1000x increased usage of AI in the past year or two? My mother is in her 60s and uses Gemini every day. These data centers aren’t being built for no reason.
That's also because traditional google.com has become a product search engine instead of a knowledge search engine. So far at least, the AI results are mostly free of product placement and thus automatically 10x more useful than the first few pages of search engine results (but probably not for long).
I have many times now searched Google for an error message or similar and either gotten no results or been unable to get it to search for what I actually told it to search for instead of some vaguely similar but completely unhelpful phrase. The LLMs will find a link to a bug tracker or stack overflow. It’s crazy how much worse Google search results are now than they used to be.
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If the AI results were so undeniably good, google would let me turn them off and let user preference prove it. I verify those AI results when i fail to avoid reading them, and they're wrong a shockingly high percent of the time.
> My mother is in her 60s and uses Gemini every day.
If your mother is at all like my mother, she isn't burning through nearly as many tokens as developers who are utilizing AI effectively.
Datacenters aren't being built for the handful of people using a hundred or two tokens a month but the fields where each user is utilizing 10k+
> she isn't burning through nearly as many tokens as developers who are utilizing AI effectively
I don't think this takes codex into account, but the 'What they’re using it for' section shows there's definitely a huge demand outside the use case of programming: https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/
At least partially the usage is driven by free plans. I use Gemini and ChatGPT for free. I will not pay for them unless traditional web search will be killed (google quality is subjectively on a downward trajectory for the last few years). My employer pays for AI but IMHO it's driven by a panic level FOMO, not evidence.
Your mother generating cringy AI picutes to post on Facebook is not an industry.
That will never generate the revenue to justify the amount of investment being directed at AI.
curious what does she use it for?
Probably too early for this, but I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. Evil acts made real by the decisions of those at the top, and the rest of us reject the acts. But quitely we accept these acts by being satisfied with verbal protest.
In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a difference when fighting against people's desire to 'take it easy'.
Humans will always compete, there's never any rest. AI is never going away. The crowd is booing but they will never act.
Circus and Bread has become Casino and Colleseum. The competition never stops.
What kind of sacrifice are you imagine the students to do here?
And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.
I have zero opinion about the state of the world. I'm just making an observation.
Awareness of issues only gets you so far. But it factors into daily decisions. And when it's all too much to bear, we just push it out of mind and continue with our little sphere of influence.
Society is built up this way: everyone has their own little sphere of influence.
Money and power have much larger spheres.
So you either protest enough to cope and move on, or you get angry enough to change.
Again, I have no answers, just observation. I'm fine with AI, despite realizing our economy is eating itself. You slowly begin to realize all we ever do is eat each other, or other things.
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Thus Evil speaks.
Evil wins when the Good do nothing.
How hard should we 'try', how much time should a person spend working, learning, versus living?
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> The crowd is booing but they will never act.
The only way to act is to not produce or consume (to the best of your ability) any slop, and be loud about it. We are being absolutely overrun with low-quality art, prose, and software, and making the production of such unprofitable (and even unfashionable) is the only reasonable action you can take.
That's the danger behind economy and society: we all must be useful in some way. We all have to find 'value' in some way. We take on 'roles' so we can contribute.
Roles are necessary because we simply don't have time to be experts in everything.
AI changes the way we contribute.
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TBF Hollywood and the streaming sites were already flooding us with low quality content by importing all those 2nd tier foreign-made reality TV shows. I watch maybe 2-3 hours of TV a week now depending on which series I like is airing its 8-10 episode season (down from 15-24 because the good stuff doesn't come for free!).
Anyone that thinks an LLM won't be up to spewing endless Harlequin Romance level prose is in a state of denial. And the cost of tokens continues to drop. This either means the current generation of content gets cheaper or better content becomes affordable through chain of thought token burning. I don't see a problem with that. The problem IMO is pushing a narrative that AI exists primarily to displace humans and the pushback is finally loud enough that it's getting blasted back into the faces of the billionaires. I see that as a good thing. May their endless hedonistic orgy at everyone else's expensive finally become a living nightmare of inadequacy on the hamster wheel of despair
Interesting, because I find hacker news to have both more adoption but also more disdain (as two overlapping subgroups of IT workers / geeks) for AI, and is more informed and worried about future.
In my non-IT life:
1. Vast majority of people have limited awareness and even less care about AI. In fact, they cheerfully consume AI generated Facebook, tiktok and YouTube videos, let alone articles, websites, reviews and emails - my electrician, factory and plumbing male friends like nothing better than to watch random 25 second reels of scantily clad AI women after a hard day work. Other people are enjoying non-existent huskies howling and kittens mewowing, listen to AI muzak on spotify, are amazed by non-existent weird creatures, etc. They are peripherally aware thay chatgpt can make you a nicer email or tell you about something but honestly cannot be bothered much. And then there's the faction that enjoys consuming manufactured outrage. They fall for AI emails and scams and generally blissfully consume massive amounts of ai daily without being aware of it.
2. There are young passionate anti AI zealots who are not in IT. Their passionate cries all too frequently fall on death ears because they have no actual fundamental thorough correct understanding of what GenAI / LLM is, its failure modes, actual consumption, or socio-political risk. At best, they post under every AI video "won't somebody think of the water!". Which, fair enough.
3. It's really only the technically aware folks that I find have any real sense of understanding or concern about AI dangers (as well as being the ones using / championing it the most). It can even be both in same person - as a parent I'm extremely concerned what will employment and political future be for my kids - so I took a part time role as AI focal for my team to better understand and perhaps shape / guide it).
(Yes, I'm quite aware of the risk this is all a "only those who share exact same concerns I do are legit " perspective. I welcome counter arguments :).
If that's true you're equally out of touch and live in an echo chamber.
The only people who are really correct are the moderates.
The numbers speak for itself. What has had the same level of user growth?
If I use Google Search to do a search and I get an AI answer that I scroll past, do I count an AI user?
The numbers are not reliable.
You could use ChatGPT/anthropic/etc signups as your proxy if you wanted, and those show similarly spectacular trajectories.
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The majority of users will see the convenient answer right in front of them and stop, because their question has been answered. We've seen it again and again across industries, an an accelerating cycle: make it easy, and the users will usually do what you want.
Google search is not typically counted as consumer "AI usage" in the reports I've seen. They're comparing chat implementations.
People can like talking to gemini, but dislike claude taking their programming job.
I was able to avoid talking to Gemini, but only by switching to DuckDuckGo and then also doctoring Chromium to run searches using a 'no-AI' option. At least I think I'm avoiding talking to Gemini, but for all I know I'm talking to it right now.
This is what bugs people.
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Then start using DeepSeek.
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
Be the change you want to see.
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Is that organic growth as people actually want to use it, or it's being foisted upon everyone. I use it everyday willingly, but I'm not sure that's true globally.
I opened a grocery store where anyone can walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to pay for it. No grocery store has ever seen the level of customer growth as mine!
The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.
It's a scam, and it seems to be working.
The dot com bubble?
What has had the same level of money burning.
Covid. Black death. Measles. Cholera. Lots of examples
> Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
Same here, but I honestly think that's largely due to the threat is poses to their (and my) profession.
> Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
The Western media is stoking these fears.
Asia is embracing AI. Japan is using it in anime. India is going wild with large and small business usage. All of my friends in India report how popular it is, and how they're using it to get work done. I don't even have to mention China.
I am sick of how our media is brainwashing people to hate one of the most important technological developments in our lifetime.
They tried doing this during the internet era too. When I was a kid, every newspaper was going on about how awful the internet was. Didn't stop me from jumping on IRC and learning to program.
Every single time disruption happens, there's a cacophony of ire and disdain. Musicians that hated "electronic" music. Digital photography. This one just happens to be broader and even more impacting, so you're hearing it everywhere.
These tools are immensely useful. They can empower individuals with superpowers, like wearing an exoskeleton.
The conversation is never about monopolization or consolidation of power, which is how this should be articulated. Instead, it's always "AI bad" or "think of the water". That is 10000% the wrong framing.
The people running these companies give interviews every few months where they gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs. The people building this technology are the ones creating the hatred you’re seeing.
> The people running these companies give interviews every few months where the gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs.
That was not the original narrative by any company. I was here ten years ago when WaveNet and DeepDream were first published.
The media started shitting on this stuff immediately. DALL-E and Midjourney were not describing themselves as artist destroyers. GPT-3 was not hailed as a white collar job killer. Yet the news media hounded the industry relentlessly.
Labs started co-opting this narrative from the news media to create FOMO for investors and possible customers.
I work in AI. I had a coworker quit a job four years ago because his sister had a long talk with him that "AI destroyed art", which is something she learned from YouTube. Four years ago.
No AI CEO was saying any of this stuff back then. It was all seeded by the news media and certain YouTubers.
I can remember when John Oliver was joking around with Midjourney and DeepDream on his show and laughing about how fun and cool it was. He can't do that now because he'd be crucified for it.
I can go back and do an archeological dig if you like.
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Are you sure it's the just western media and not the bigger western society in it's totality?
India is doing what exactly?
That stood out to me as well. I am curious.
"the media" as an entire without human beings behind.
you live in some alternative reality, then.
> Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer — and was immediately met with boos.
That's a shame.
I assume the reason for the "deep distain" is rooted in fear of change, fear that LLM will make it harder to have a successful career.
That's a pretty negative mindset to have as a college grad just entering the workforce.
I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
This is a tortured line of reasoning. There's nothing confusing about what's happening - people can have every reason to hate something without it meaning that they are "pretending" nothing is happening or not preparing for it (which may mean fighting to protect people in some way, and planning for losing that battle, in equal measures).
It's strange that your comment puts "fear of change" right there next to one of the actual concrete reasons. Usually the people disparaging negative attitudes about AI say "fear of change" to avoid talking about the obvious reasons.
For college graduates, LLM tech is an existential threat to their livelihoods by making it so much harder to start a career without connections or pedigree.
If no one is hiring, connections or pedigree need to get extraordinarily elite before you can leverage them to get an entry-level software developer job.
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Disliking AI for that reason harms you more than helps you.
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Do you think that protesting that X is happening is the same as pretending that X is not happening? Or are you saying that X is happening anyway, so you might just as well learn to like it? That's some highly dubious rhetoric.
> I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
You imply that the change is inevitable. AI isn't inevitable.
It requires governments to allow the construction of datacentres and for companies to be able to spend vast amounts of money they don't have for the hope of future return, which will inevitably result in a too-big-to-fail cascade which gets money dragged out of the middle/lower class via slogans like "we're all in this together".
None of this is required. The idea that humanity is stuck on this future pathway is frankly bunk.
What’s truly astonishing is that all of that money could be spent on bettering real people’s lives, but instead it gets spent on hubris.
You’re wrong to assume that
While I disagree on the assumption, I do agree on the pragmatism of the proposed approach. It is important to see things as they are. The tech is genuinely neat.
However, this is not the issue. The issue is that the tech is being hijacked by corps and already on the verge of being annoying. I my corner of the world, I get high level company message of 'use AI' ( which include goals that say so ), but also -- already -- ridiculous sets of limits on how much I an use it ( our context recently got nearly zeroed ; we no longer can upload unsanctioned files ). And if you want something beyond email summarization machine, you need special approvals. This thing is already being neutered at multiple levels and it barely even started to blossom.
Add to this clear indicators that our dictators have no intention of being benevolent and it is not exactly a surprise why younger generations are not exactly thrilled. I like this tech and I hate the retardation I am subjected to daily resulting directly from its outputs.
> I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
Why not? Most people do. There are still about 10,000 working blacksmiths in America.
Unironically I think we need more lifestyle and technological diversity in the world. End the monopolies that make running your own X harder. More Amish adjacent microcommunities and less monoculture. Federalism for tech / lifestyle creep.
The only reason these things seem inevitable is because our shared delusions make it so. We would have more power if we weren’t all so afraid to exercise it.
It's it fear or anger?
> but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing
I don't think people are pretending the world isn't changing. I think people are right to be deeply skeptical about the direction we're headed in. More powerful tech companies dug in deeper into our lives, more government surveillance, harder times for small companies and more influence from mega-corps.
Lying, cheating and game-rigging at industrial scale powered by machine intelligence. He's lucky all he got were boos.
Why would a bunch of folks studying for white collar work, be happy with a technology that a bunch of capitalists (literally) keep selling as eliminating white collar workers?
notably, I haven’t seen any ACTUAL technical improvements from LLMs, just a massive amount of slop. The ‘improvements’ are in volume of slop, not quality.
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In reality they like LLMs because they're the highest user of them. Pew reported 64% of U.S. teens used AI chatbots, while a Harvard study found 51% of ages 14–22 had used generative AI at some point.
What you answer on a survey is meaningless. Look at their actions.
And no they're not being pressured to use LLMs, standards or expectations have not gone up dramatically.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/09/stu...
Your last sentence is factually not true. Friends across five different companies report that LLM adoption is now a key metric in their performance review.
It’s mostly not students working those sorts of jobs. But I know people taking architecture and design courses that are heavily pushing LLM use. Hopefully that doesn’t exist outside of SF, though.
Yeah, "not being pressured to use them" conveniently sidesteps the fact they are RLHF trained to be as engaging (aka addictive) as possible.
“Revealed preferences” are not the same as actual preferences. Treating them the same is what led us to the current situation we have with everyone addicted to social media and miserable. Also, expectations are not the only thing that could pressure someone to use these tools. If all your peers were using these tools and finishing their work in a fraction of the time it takes you, and getting the same or better grades, you would probably use them too.
What you do says a lot more about you than what you answer in a survey.
The obvious difference between LLM adoption and social media, if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds, is that there is social pressure to use social media. Your friends are organizing and bonding on social media. None of this exists with LLMs. There is no social pressure to have an AI girlfriend, quite the opposite.
Also I preempted the "if all your peers were using these tools..." none of this applies to students. In fact i'm sure most teacher would prefer not getting AI slop. Standards have not increased.
Please read the entire comment next time before replying
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usage != positive opinion
I don’t like driving in traffic yet I do it pretty much every day. Why don’t I simply not drive?
Cars are a great example, because some parts of the world were so excited by the prospect of the automotive age that they bulldozed entire parts of their cities to make way for huge arterials and parking lots without looking closer at what they were throwing away.
That is not a contradiction. Just look at social media use where you can observe the same.
People can hate on AI e.g. because they see it as a symbol of inequality and billionaires deciding important things over our heads and also actively use it.
> In reality they like LLMs because they're the highest user of them
It is possible to be a user of LLMs and to despise them.
they are being pressured to use llm to do their homework.
teens are not using llm for fun.
> had used generative AI at some point
also this is bit of a ridiculous stat to claim "highest user"