Stefanie

Why is the AI backlash growing? Outside of coding (where there is clear value), and a handful of other domains (e.g. brainstorming), Generative AI has been a net negative for society. GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession. Simultaneously it has empowered a bunch of people who want to privatize almost all the gains while leave all the downsides to society, taking almost zero responsibility. I don’t think we are better off than we were four years ago. Some of this is technical (LLMs aren’t reliable), some of it is political/economic (such as the utter lack of responsible regulation). Most of this was predictable. Almost none of it is good. All that said, I honestly believes some future form of AI might be great. But Generative AI has hurt more than it has helped, and been managed irresponsibly. It’s no wonder many people have had enough.