Comment by _fat_santa
2 days ago
The biggest issue I see with discourse around AI is you have two voices: one is of the tech CEO's and other elites that talk about it largely in the abstract and how it's going to take everyone's jobs, and then you have folks on Twitter/X that talk about things that they are actually using it for.
Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group.
I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense.
The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.
I just don't think that "I use AI to help plan a vacation or make a funny picture to share with my friends or create a study plan" outweighs the very obvious challenges that AI is creating for new graduates as they enter the job market. I'm sure even that a lot of these students used AI to cheat.
But the stuff from the rich bosses isn't just rhetoric. These students are graduating into an extremely messy job market and AI is directly to blame. That affects students in a huge way.
And how about the group of kids who are just graduating college, and entering a job market where it's non-abstractly harder to to land a junior role as it's been in decades? It's the elites who have their finger on that scale, not the twitter folks.