The growing AI backlash
Nobody should be surprised
Practically every day I see new signs that the backlash against AI is growing. The above example is just one example of many. Others like this aren’t hard to find, either:
There’s also the QuitGPT movement:
Fortune was one of the first major media outlets to catch on, last summer:
But it’s been a long time to coming.
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Indeed, about year ago I predicted that the backlash against AI would grow so much that it would be a major factor in the 2028 Presidential elections.
That prediction very seems to be on track. Frustration with AI may even factor into the midterms. It’s already splitting both parties.
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Here’s my theory about what’s going on, slightly edited from a post which has gone viral on X.
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 these downsides were predictable. (I warned of most of it in my 2023 Senate testimony, in fact, and so did many other folks working in AI ethics over the years. But even more striking is that OpenAI did too, even earlier, in 2019.)
On net, things don’t look good.
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All that said, I honestly believe 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.
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and other CEOs regularly claim that AI is going to put everyone out of work.
Who could ever have guessed that people might not like that?
The AI CEOs are their own worst enemy.
Futility. Substitute "social media" for "AI" in this piece and it could have been published in 2002. Wisdom, caution, and foresight do not win over greed in our system.