Comment by nerdjon
5 hours ago
We can be cynics of AI without ignoring reality, if no one wanted this no one would be chatting with Claude or ChatGPT directly, but people obviously are.
The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.
There is certainly a lot of demand at the current price of free or subsidised subscriptions. It remains to be seen what the demand is at profitable prices.
If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.
It's very, very questionable if people want the situation we have. I have yet to meet anyone in person who is really excited about AI. Of course it's useful, but at this cost?
Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!
I unfortunately have met a few. I have one friend that legit scares me... we saw how people reacted to o4 being discontinued.
Though I do agree that most people probably don't want as much AI as is being shoved on us right now, there is a subset that do want at least some of it.
More my point, yeah I think there is an issue of the actual demand being extremely over estimated due to shady practices (like of course Gemini gets a lot of use when every single google search calls it whether you want it or not). But we also should not be so quick to disregard there being real demand just to hope for the outcome we want.
Talk to more people?
I talk to my Uber driver whenever I'm visiting somewhere, and yes, some of them are actually excited about AI.