why so many of us are just not that into chatbots
AI adoption is at an all time high, but opinion of AI keeps on tumbling with every poll and study on the subject.
It seems like an absurd paradox. We are using AI chatbots and generated media more and more every day, yet in every survey, we say we hate the technology more and more. Nearly half of American adults use an AI bot on a daily basis, myself included. Yet, a recent Pew poll found that only 16% of us have a positive opinion, and two in five are pessimistic about its impact on society in general.
So, what’s going on? Well, if I were to guess, by far and away, the biggest problem with how we see generative AI is how it's been sold to us and its adoption by mandate. We didn’t see the demos and go “oh, that’s amazing, we need this.” We saw the demos and said “eh… we'll need more information” while Big Tech and our bosses said “this is the future, shut up and use it for everything, or else.”
Seemingly overnight, every text box became an AI input, and if you didn't use enough tokens at work, your job was suddenly at risk. Thanks to the fact that the web is now six companies in a trench coat, and incessant high pressure sales tactics verging on cult evangelization and recruitment aimed at managers and executives, adoption rates are sky high because our opt in to use the technology was purely optional. Switch a search box to an LLM prompt box on Instagram and Facebook, and voila, you have two billion new daily AI users the next day.
If you lived in an apartment complex and one day, a work crew showed up and painted everyone's walls green because the city's apartment owners kept telling each other that everyone wants green walls since green walls are the future of humanity, and also that green walls double the value of the buildings, the rate of green wall adoption would be sky high. But you would probably be a bit perturbed that painters burst into your house and painted your walls without even bothering to ask if you're okay with it.
And herein lies the problem. After the overwhelming embrace of the web in the 1990s, the tech industry has glitched itself out trying to recreate this explosive success. Silicon Valley's biggest players bought into their own hype and now genuinely think they are smarter than you, so using their digital oligopolies to push what they've now deluded themselves into thinking is The Next Web on you is, in their minds, for your own good, and that your objections cannot possibly be informed because if you question them, you are simply too stupid to understand their vision.
There are legitimate use cases for AI, even the tech behind chatbots, as well as far more specialized models being used to fight superbugs and handle future viral pandemics. If the industry used a much gentler approach, letting people explore and find good use cases that genuinely improved their experience, and not merely bombarded them until they surrendered to the will of the machine, I would bet that people would have a much better opinion of AI and Big Tech right now, instead of sharing nightmare stories of tech zombies and tyrannical edicts from their LLM-pilled, tokenmaxxing bosses.
Humans, as a species, don't do well with edicts in general. Even if you give us all free puppies, who are objectively cute and some of the most beloved things on the planet, you're going to have people who are afraid of dogs, or are allergic to them, or simply do not have the time, ability, or freedom to care for one. You'll also have a lot of people very rightfully asking why everyone is so insistent that we have dogs in our homes, our opinion be damned.
Why don't we get a say? Just how often in history were any totalitarian edicts made with pure hearts, no ulterior motives, and implemented with zero negative consequences? It would only be logical for us to question and worry, and being told that we're simply too stupid to grasp the sheer brilliance of our betters, would only make all the alarms blare louder. Hence the opinion polls in which opinions of LLMs and generative AI drop lower and lower, and worry about how they will be used creeps upward.
I mean, if a comp sci nerd like me, who's been coding since puberty and has very fond feelings about trains and aircraft, understands that, what excuse do Silicon Valley elites have for either not realizing this, or knowing it, then pushing ahead anyway, doubling and tripling down at every turn?
