As a millenial all I see is my generation being repulsed by AI slop. Boomers and zoomers though have a large presence of consumption. It was easy to see this with your own family over the holidays.
They will tell you they are repulsed by it if asked but its a toss up if they can identify it. Look at any thread on Reddit/IG/Tiktok whatever and I personally would guess I could manage to identify AI output 20% of the time.
Boomers might be out there consuming those AI youtube videos that are just tiktok voice over with a generated slide show but Millennials think since they can identify this as slop that they are not affected. That is incorrect, and just as bad.
Nah, it's fueled by huge misinformation campaigns. It's going to kill art, put us all out of the job, uses 1.5 million gallons per query, pollutes water, will kill the electric grid, etc. These seem to be the most popular uninformed lines of thinking.
I agree several of the commonly repeated critiques are really poor in quality and can be emotionally driven/simply parroted TikTok nonsense, but at the other end of the spectrum we have AI evangelists who get surprisingly aggressive if you say anything remotely negative about GenAI or suggest maybe we should be having a discussion about the ethical ramifications of these tools. Particularly how they are trained and deployed and who should be guiding that process.
I find it very odd when people proudly proclaim they used, say, Grok to answer a question. Their identity is so tied up in it that if you start talking about the quality of the information they get incredibly defensive. In contrast: I have never felt protective of my Google search results, which is basically the same thing given how most people use these tools currently.
It’s kind of wild how hostile some people get if you attempt to open the discussion up at all.
I live near the Great Lakes. Data center proposals are popping up and people think they are going to drain lake michigan. They think they will consume more power than the entire state consumes right now. Idiot yokels are chasing away what could be an absolute boon for our economy. But they'd rather have papermills and make cardboard boxes.
I don’t know the specifics of your region’s deal but the massive AI center deal Louisiana negotiated with facebook is absolutely awful. All it’s going to do is drive up energy costs for the residents and give very little in return, and that’s under the ideal situation in which it actually pans out like they’re expecting it to.
Ya we seem to live in the the place where the firehose of falsehood is filling the lake of bullshit asymmetry. The problem with this is uninformed lines of thinking eventually lead to policy.
I'm not blaming them. It's really frustrating that old people are taken advantage of. We shouldn't need to be so cynical. This isn't the star trek future we were promised.
Edit: It's similarly frustrating about the zoomers. Parents are derelict of duty by not defending their kids and preparing them for the world they are in.
Sci-fi will never materialize. But the ones passionate about it are so desperate for the faux future that they won't be able to tell when they're being duped.
Just wait until the next great collapse, a disaster big enough to force change. Hopefully we'll have the right ideas lying around at the time to restructure our social communication system.
