It can be frustrating sometimes. I’ve encountered people online before who I otherwise respected in their takes on things and then they would go viciously anti-AI in a very simplistic way and, having followed the subject in a lot of detail, engaging directly with services that use AI and people who use those services, and trying to discern what makes sense as a stance to have and why, it would feel very shallow and knee-jerk to me. I saw for example how with one AI service, Replika, there were on the one hand people whose lives were changed for the better by it and on the other hand people whose lives were thrown for a loop (understatement of the century) when the company acted duplicitously and started filtering their model in a hamfisted way that made it act differently and reject people over things like a roleplayed hug. There’s more to that story, some of which I don’t remember in as much detail now because it happened over a year ago (maybe over two years ago? has it been that long?). But point is, I have seen directly people talk of how AI made a difference for them in some way. I’ve also seen people hurt by it, usually as an indirect result of a company’s poor handling of it as a service.

So there are the fears that surround it and then there is what is happening in the day to day, and those two things aren’t always the same. Part of the problem is the techbro hype can be so viciously pro-AI that it comes across as nothing more than a big scam, like NFTs. And people are not wrong to think the hype is overblown. They are not wrong to understand that AI is not a magic tool that is going to gain self-awareness and save us from ourselves. But it does do something and that something isn’t always a bad thing. And because it does do positive things for some people, some people are going to keep trying to use it, no matter how much it is stigmatized.