alt Hacker NewsIs anyone else detecting a phase shift in LLM criticism?
Of course you could always find opinion pieces, blogs and nerdy forum comments that disliked AI; but it appears to me that hate for AI gen content is now hitting mainstream contexts, normie contexts. Feels like my grandma may soon have an opinion on this.
No idea what the implications are or even if this is actually something that's happening, but I think it's fascinating
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No, AFAICT, AI hate has been common (but not the majority position, and still not) in normie contexts for a while.
It is fascinating. It's showing of course that AI has gone mainstream.
There was a time that I remember when you could gripe at a party about banner ads showing up on the internet and have a lot of blank stares. Or ask someone for their email address and get a quizzical look.
I pointed my dad to ChatGPT a few days ago and instructed him on how to upload/create an AI image. He was delighted to later show me his AI "American Gothic" version of a photo of him and his current wife. This was all new to him.
The pushback though I think is going to be short-lived in a way other push-backs were short-lived. (I remember the self-checkout kiosk in grocery stores were initially a hard sell as an example.)
It’s the usual “I don’t like it, I’m against, but it’s okay if I use it” thing. People understand the advantage it gives a person over another one, so they will still use it here and there. You’ll have some people who will be vehemently against it, but it will be the same as people who categorically against having smartphones, or avoiding using any Meta products because of tracking and etc.
People were told by other people to dislike LLMs and so they did, then told other people themselves.
It's because amount of AI slop bombarding people from every side increased and created knee-jerk reaction to anything AI, even if it is actually the "remove the boring part of work"
The art bubble is generally considered more "normie" than the tech bubble and they've been strongly anti AI art for longer than even the introduction of the original GitHub copilot
all news is prophesying that everyone is going to lose their jobs to "AI"
along with news about "AI" causing electricity bills to rise
every form of media is overrun and infested with poor quality slop
garbage products (microsoft copilot) forced on them and told by their bosses to use it, or else
gee I wonder why normal people hate it
It feels like a similar trend to the one that NFTs followed: huge initial hype, stoked up by tech bros and swallowed by a general public lacking a deep understanding, tempered over time as that public learns more of the problematic aspects that detractors publicise.
Read the other comments in the thread lol- “Fuck artists, we will replace them”
This is not a winning PR move when most normal people are already pretty pro-artist and anti tech bro
LLMs has had a couple of years by now to show their usefulness, and while hype can drive it for a while, it's now getting to the point where hype alone can't. It needs to provide a tangible result for people.
If that tangible result doesn't occur, then people will begin to criticize everything. Rightfully so.
I.e., the future of LLMs is now wobbly. That doesn't necessarily mean a phase shift in opinion, but wobbly is a prerequisite for a phase shift.
(Personal opinion at the moment: LLMs needs a couple of miracles in the same vein as the discovery/invention of transformers. Otherwise, they won't be able to break through the current fault-barrier which is too low at the moment for anything useful.)