Please stop saying this.

There’s jobs you can do on a day of training, and there’s jobs that need six years of higher education to not kill people.

Same creator.

‘People have legitimate criticism’ won’t change when they also have illegitimate criticism.

Compare GMO foods. Monsanto was a hideous corporation. The loudest condemnation of the underlying technology was still factually and morally wrong. People sneering ‘is this ham processed?!’ are not engaged in results-oriented consideration of complex and ambiguous research. They learned some no-no words and they’re gonna posture about how smart they are.

Some people are overtly prejudiced against AI. Any pushback on the scope or relevance of their absolute condemnation sees them pivot to some unrelated thing they half-remember, that barely stands up to consideration.

It’s a Gish gallop. It’s the same tired pattern of behavior used to demonize anything mundane. It read the library and it doesn’t magically say only good things and it buys electricity, so if you don’t perform the two minutes hate with us, you’re a big meanie who must be cast out from society.

Fuck’s sake.

Well, that’s the soundtrack of my brain for the next week.

One million Americans is 0.3% of Americans. Millions is not the point to fixate on, when broadly discussing the people developing negative reactions to the bullshit foisted upon them. Insisting it was foisted gently is equally missing the point. This is an ongoing impact from every goddamn angle. Search is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). E-mail is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Messages are worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Social media is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Fucking porn is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out).

Repeatedly insisting ‘I don’t think it’s that big a deal’ is not an argument. This frustration and annoyance is REAL. It’s strong enough and widespread enough that some people assume it’s universal! At what point do you at least consider it a user experience pitfall?

Oh sure, because unless you quit Google forever, you can’t possibly be pissed off about some new bullshit. If you’ll tolerate abuse then it’s not real.

We agree about the underlying tech - which is why it’s baffling that you’d deny people had a bad reaction to this rollout. No amount of ‘well they shouldn’t!’ will change that they did. Predictably, repeatedly, and in my opinion justifiably. If explaining why, at length and in detail, just sees glib variations on ‘but but but they shouldn’t,’ why do you bother to speak? What do you hope to accomplish, through words? You won’t change how millions felt. I think you’re wrong to expect they should shut up and take it.

Neat.

These are still 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people’s eyeballs, as often as they’ll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?

The car, a famously uncontroversial invention. Never killed anyone, poisoned anything, or changed any climate.

What you’re doing here is tantamount to telling early hit-and-run victims ‘I woulda just dodged. How hard is it to move out the way?’

These are 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people’s eyeballs, as often as they’ll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?

A lot of people’s threshold differ from yours. You’re just filtering out a wide swath of shit that people vocally detest.

People’s hate-on for AI developed because this shit happened to them! The fact you don’t see it as a big deal does not change other people’s experience. You can internalize how the average person takes to being prodded, in this way - or you can live in denial of it. But nothing you say will change their experience.

You can for sure be prejudiced against technology. You can engage in bad-faith condemnation of any subject, from a dogmatic belief set, in ways that are not meaningfully distinguished from the practice of bigotry.

Starting from a conclusion and working backwards might be every human vice, at its core. A lot of people are working backwards from the idea that ‘AI bad.’ This is hard to miss in grand philosophical declarations about art, as if there’s only one definition or only one motivation. It’s more subtle, and therefore more dangerous, when people start shuffling cards after the word ‘because.’

There’s programs that generate porn just by describing it, and y’all are wondering if the interest in that is made-up?

Being inured to the shit these companies keep pulling is not disproof that they keep pulling shit. You’re just shrugging about the awful scenario because they still let you opt out… sometimes. They didn’t stop training on your private fucking messages, just because you never click the cluster-of-stars button. There’s maybe a checkbox for that, buried deep in the settings, in a file cabinet labeled “beward the leopard.” They might even honor it! But you can’t really stop them, any more than you can revert to the versions of search engines that worked, five years ago.

What do you think people are talking about, if not the bullshit you blithely weather? Bing’s not gonna put a gun to someone’s head and tell them to render a video. But millions of people every day (okay well it’s Bing) thousands of people every day are pestered about some bullshit capability. Getting cajoled is bad, actually. It’s unpleasant. Especially when people wind up trying it, and it’s… okay, at best. And then they get the same come-ons for the same bullshit, for every goddamn website people actually use. Gmail wants to know if you’re interested in AI. Facebook wants to know if you’re interested-- Twitter wants to know-- Google Search-- your own goddamn phone starts hassling you about this, and people go from tired of it to angry at it.

Justifiably so.

THE MOON

My guy - your counterexamples are the fucking examples.

Android telling me ‘hey guess what we’re gonna scan your messages and constantly offer to pretend to be you’ almost had me snap my phone in half. And I like this technology. I am a routine defender of the concept, on Lemmy. But the skeeze factor on these forced constant additions you seem to view as gentle are giving people the creeps. Justifiably so.

Big companies spending money is not the part we’re talking about. The schemes people hate are where this tech gets shoved into everyone’s face, everywhere, and makes software and websites less reliable. If ChatGPT was still just a website you could go to, by choice, a lot of people would be happier.

The haters are so mad you got the robot to do some of the things it’s for. Anything beyond ‘I click the button and it draws a pretty lady! I’m a artist!’ really fucks with their absolutism. That’s a threat to ingroup solidarity for the ones who’ve made opposition part of their identity.

Text generation is the least you can do. You can still fire up Photoshop and feed in a half-finished image. Diffusion turns whatever you have into whatever you describe. If it does decent scratches on metal, but won’t put them exactly where you want, then select them and move them, and the robot will smooth it over.

The very first article I read about Stable Diffusion, three years ago, had the author doodling mountains and flipping a spaceship. All the image-to-video stuff demands you provide art, as an input. Prompts alone are just a tech demo gone feral.

The industry finally embraces procedural textures, in the dumbest way possible.

Pretty much this. Any local use is neat. Corporate schemes can fuck a rake.

I’m hoping local video catches up before the bubble pops, because describing footage into existence is cool as shit. I want the internet where fanfiction can be as real as the movie.

We may never know.