alt Hacker NewsBig vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation
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Yeah I also like the "And yet other technologies also use water, hmmm, curious" responses
How do you reconcile the sense that there's a vibe shift with the usage numbers: about a billion weekly users of ChatGPT and Gemini and continuing to grow.
Nothing wrong with being a luddite. In time more people will be proud to be luddites, and I can see AI simps becoming the recipients of all the scorn.
You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word.
When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster.
But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
Look, I'm an introvert. I spend a lot of my time wanting people to go away and leave me alone. But I love little, short moments of human connection - when you connect with someone not as someone checking your groceries, but as someone. I may get that with the checker, depending on how tired they are, but I'm guaranteed not to get it with the self-checkout machine.
An email from an AI is the same. Yeah, it put words on the paper. But there's nobody there, and it comes through somehow. There's no heart in in.
AI may be a useful technology. I still don't want to talk to it.
I'm seeing the opposite in the gaming community. People seem tired of the anti AI witch hunts and accusations after the recent Larian and Clair Obscur debacles. A lot more "if the end result is good I don't care", "the cat is out of the bag", "all devs are using AI" and "there's a difference between AI and AI" than just a couple of months ago.
Fortunately, the PR situation will handle itself. Someone will create a superhuman persuasion engine, AGI will handle it itself, and/or those who don't adapt will fade away into irrelevance.
You either surf this wave or get drowned by it, and a whole lot of people seem to think throwing tantrums is the appropriate response.
Figure out how to surf, and fast. You don't even need to be good, you just have to stay on the board.
This holiday season, hearing my parents rant about AI features unnaturally forced onto their daily gadgets warmed my heart.