The sentiment disconnect on 'AI' between tech and the public [Baldur Bjarnason]
The sentiment disconnect on 'AI' between tech and the public [Baldur Bjarnason]
I took a bit of break from work last week and tried my hardest to get away from the “tech context”. I went on photography exhibits, took walks, and gave clearing my head a good shot.
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.
Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.
babe wake up the butlerian jihad is coming
It doesn't help that the people pushing the public and the C suite executives to destroy everyone's livelihood in favor of AI were the exact same people scamming everyone with crypto and NFTs, and the same people breaking online privacy and enshittifying everything online with ad herpes.
The idea of this actively chasing decent developers away from the field is honestly scary. On one hand it probably means good job security for my ops-adjacent position since I swear a solid third of the customers I work with are trying to work around some nonsense app design or behavior. On the other hand I loathe those cases and everyone involved seems actively miserable, even compared to the people who are actively on fire.
It also scares away some artists of both old and new. Yes, some actually get into "real" art after those crappy AI generators, others that already struggle with "but I haven't born talented" will have even bigger problem moving forward. I've seen some giving up on learning laguages when the first mediocre machine translators came out, and they were awful at best.
Yes, some actually get into “real” art after those crappy AI generators
I legitimately picked up drawing again a year or so back after some complete asshat at work made me listen to him talk for half an hour about how Midjourney was the art of the future and how finally the art world would not be gatekept by those entitled artsy types anymore.
I mean, I'm still shit at it, but I'm petty enough to do it just so I can stick it to that guy at some point by telling him that I don't use or need spicy chatbots for dev work or art.