Don't worry, it's a shiny tool at the moment. The electric screwdriver had its wow moment too.
I still haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie. If it wasn't made by a person, there is no 'personal'-ity to it. It's just bland.
Eventually things will slow and slide back to thoughtful first, crapload second.
AI is making some degree of growth in Spotify IIRC.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music. It's like a hodgepodge of popular songs with little rhyme or reason. Very 'sloppy' but if they like it....
It's hard for me to confirm if they really are AI or not. But I'm willing to bet that (random Roblox game they're interested in today) == heavily AI made. Maybe there's some real human effort here or there but I have heavy suspicions.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music.
Didn't we all start as kids listening to music that is so formulaic that it could as well be AI-generated? A subset of people iteratively refines their music tastes and starts listening everything from bebop to obscure Canadian hardcore bands and will recognize quality in music.
But I am of the opinion that AI slop is displacing a lot of would-be beginner musicians and making it even harder for them to break out.
For better or worse, a lot of beginner artists were relying upon my nieces and their classmates) clicking on their music and sharing them for Spotify $$$.
Have you seen any recent mainstream movie made by "a person"? "Human made" is not the quality brand most people are looking for today. If authors are mentaly ill and have shitty personality, AI slop will be better.
Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.
I think this time is different. I’m not Gen Z, yet once my kids are out of school, I’m planning to leave tech behind as much as possible.
When I started in tech, at the dawn of the internet, it was an exciting field full of hope and the promise to empower and enrich the lives of people. Tech now is largely the opposite.
Enshitification is making things progressively worse. tech companies are creating systems and tools with dark patterns abound to ensure you no longer own anything, are under constant surveillance, and populations at large are manipulated through the magic of propaganda and illusory truth. Even the productivity gains are perversely used to not give people more time through fewer work days/hours but to instead give them more work. People are losing their connection to others and the world around them.
Everyone tends to focus on Orwell’s 1984, but I find Fahrenheit 451 to be the more prescient book. I used to be annoyed by the book people’s choice to leave society and wait for it to collapse so they could help rebuild. In my mind, they should have been mounting an resistance. Fair to say I understand the book people’s perspective so much more now.
You frame this as if all technology is inherently good and anyone who opposes it is just dumb and wasting their time. People used to think Segways were dumb. They used to think 3D TVs were dumb. They used to think lobotomies were dumb. They used to think Xray shoe sizing was dumb. They used to think uranium in household appliances and toys was dumb.
I hear that attitude about AI is much more positive in China. So people like him, in aggregate, could potentially be a danger and cause the US to give up the lead for the rest of century. Takes one bad election..
People who reject AI are a danger? Wow. This just sounds like setting up the foundation of narrative for having the government bail out these AI companies when bill finally comes due.
The narratives around the pressure to blindly accept AI is crazy. They try every angle from "you are a communist", to "you are too stupid".
I speculate it has a lot to do with surveillance capitalism. It's the same type of tactics that have been used for things like the banning of marijuana, or the health merits of cigarettes. Fear mongering and lying so a few robber Barron's can profiteer.
I think AI is useful. I think it was rolled out haphazardly similar to how people used to gargle radioactive isotopes or slather them on as after shave to profit quickly. There are so many issues with the technology that the press won't even cover yet because we all have to play stupid until trends emerge to report on otherwise billionaire defense contractors will send their figurative or possibly literal hit squads after us. We have to wait for the tumors to grow, the jaws to fall off before society will remember "maybe we shouldn't be slapping radioactive stuff all over ourselves so some wealthy white dude gets wealthier"
The future of ai is in small local models people pay 0 dollars to upgrade or use. Anything else is meritless exploitation and destruction. That's why the US will lose. Reality has a liberal bias. Tough pill for ai libertarians to swallow
We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario.
I love the cognitive dissonance.
Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?
Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.
And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life.
Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
Token cost started increasing exponentially for frontier LLMs, and they improved mostly on coding tasks incredibly over the last half year while staying behind in non-verifiable tasks.
The main social problem with automation in general was that less intelligent people have been left behind as only boring physical tasks are left for them to do, and people don't generally want to go back destroying their body from the prospects of an office job.
At some point frontier AI will only getting only worthwile to use for only super highly intelligent and motivated AI researchers which is a tiny part of the population.
May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence.
I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs.
In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own.
People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.
Incredibly sad how many people have no concept of collective achievement, or an understanding of what technological progress buys all of humanity. It always comes at a cost, and it's the reason we aren't dying of starvation and plague in a cold winter field at the age of 45.
Out of curiosity. How can you explain to a Gen z fresh graduate with 50k in student loans, 5 dollar gasoline (and rising), no healthcare, housing prices at an all time high, and competing with their entire age group for the honor of holding multiple minimum wage jobs that are below the survivability wage that they should feel a collective sense of achievement? UBI isn't coming and we have multiple individuals who own measurable percentages of all of the worlds wealth. Those same people are investing heavily in automating all work these young people could hope to provide while waxing poetic about changing laws and owning media companies with cold hard cash.
It's not an anomalous sense of cynicism, hundreds of thousands of people are looking at their options and feeling hopeless. I'm glad I am not in that camp. The reason I'm not is because I was born sooner than they were. I don't blame them at all, it's looking a lot like the generation after them is cannon fodder if things trend the way they are now.
This is actually a solid comment because ideally it would be the case. I think it's the opposite though. The problem with LLMs is they are marketed not as a collective achievement. They are at their heart a tool which should belong to collective humanity. We should all be getting dividends from them and they should be collectively owned. But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.
Of course no one sees it as a collective achievement when the announcements are aimed at either scaring people about how even the team behind them is worried about releasing it or for CEOs to replace workers.
Artemis II, at least in the states, was an example of people genuinely feeling collective achievement. There is absolutely no reason this AI moment couldn't be that. Instead though the companies involved have explicitly chosen fear and capital as their marketing tools. We should be seeing this as an incredible time but those involved do not want us to and plan to keep the spoils for themselves so we shouldn't.
Technology is not value-less. There is technology with good effects on society and technology with bad effects on society. I think very few people who are against, say, surveillance capitalism are against antibiotics.
It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI.
You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.
AI is fundamentally automation of labor, and to be opposed to AI instead of preparing our systems for a post-labor world is dangerously misguided - especially with historical context on what automation of labor has done for humanity.
This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."
Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.
> While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment.
> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology...
31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".
Think about the anger toward Clippy. Now think about Clippy, but where feeding Clippy is a significant part of GDP, and there's a religious fervor around Clippy, especially among the older and wealthy.
That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.
It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.
I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.
Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.
"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.
But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.
There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.
> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"
Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.
> Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both.
Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill.
Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now.
* xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.
I just wish we would stop calling LLMs AI.
The actual study doesn’t compare between generations. So I’ve know way of knowing if GenZs attitudes are much different comparatively.
Interesting results regardless when they compare the shift of 2025 to 2026
I want the world to go back to the way it was before, so I’m going to boycott it.
Sue me, I have that right.
Don't worry, it's a shiny tool at the moment. The electric screwdriver had its wow moment too.
I still haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie. If it wasn't made by a person, there is no 'personal'-ity to it. It's just bland.
Eventually things will slow and slide back to thoughtful first, crapload second.
> haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie
The last 27 marvel movies might as well have been written by ai, plenty of people have been to see those.
And they've been financially failing as well lately.
AI is making some degree of growth in Spotify IIRC.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music. It's like a hodgepodge of popular songs with little rhyme or reason. Very 'sloppy' but if they like it....
It's hard for me to confirm if they really are AI or not. But I'm willing to bet that (random Roblox game they're interested in today) == heavily AI made. Maybe there's some real human effort here or there but I have heavy suspicions.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music.
Didn't we all start as kids listening to music that is so formulaic that it could as well be AI-generated? A subset of people iteratively refines their music tastes and starts listening everything from bebop to obscure Canadian hardcore bands and will recognize quality in music.
I'm not of the opinion that art is dead.
But I am of the opinion that AI slop is displacing a lot of would-be beginner musicians and making it even harder for them to break out.
For better or worse, a lot of beginner artists were relying upon my nieces and their classmates) clicking on their music and sharing them for Spotify $$$.
Have you seen any recent mainstream movie made by "a person"? "Human made" is not the quality brand most people are looking for today. If authors are mentaly ill and have shitty personality, AI slop will be better.
Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.
I think this time is different. I’m not Gen Z, yet once my kids are out of school, I’m planning to leave tech behind as much as possible.
When I started in tech, at the dawn of the internet, it was an exciting field full of hope and the promise to empower and enrich the lives of people. Tech now is largely the opposite.
Enshitification is making things progressively worse. tech companies are creating systems and tools with dark patterns abound to ensure you no longer own anything, are under constant surveillance, and populations at large are manipulated through the magic of propaganda and illusory truth. Even the productivity gains are perversely used to not give people more time through fewer work days/hours but to instead give them more work. People are losing their connection to others and the world around them.
Everyone tends to focus on Orwell’s 1984, but I find Fahrenheit 451 to be the more prescient book. I used to be annoyed by the book people’s choice to leave society and wait for it to collapse so they could help rebuild. In my mind, they should have been mounting an resistance. Fair to say I understand the book people’s perspective so much more now.
The amish seem to be quite happy.
You mean "OK". Or did you see evidence that they are specifically quite happy?
Seasonality of mood and behavior in the Old Order Amish (Raheja & al), shows reduced rates of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Amish population.
So at least they are quite happy during winter.
You frame this as if all technology is inherently good and anyone who opposes it is just dumb and wasting their time. People used to think Segways were dumb. They used to think 3D TVs were dumb. They used to think lobotomies were dumb. They used to think Xray shoe sizing was dumb. They used to think uranium in household appliances and toys was dumb.
And they were all right.
I hear that attitude about AI is much more positive in China. So people like him, in aggregate, could potentially be a danger and cause the US to give up the lead for the rest of century. Takes one bad election..
People who reject AI are a danger? Wow. This just sounds like setting up the foundation of narrative for having the government bail out these AI companies when bill finally comes due.
The narratives around the pressure to blindly accept AI is crazy. They try every angle from "you are a communist", to "you are too stupid".
I speculate it has a lot to do with surveillance capitalism. It's the same type of tactics that have been used for things like the banning of marijuana, or the health merits of cigarettes. Fear mongering and lying so a few robber Barron's can profiteer.
I think AI is useful. I think it was rolled out haphazardly similar to how people used to gargle radioactive isotopes or slather them on as after shave to profit quickly. There are so many issues with the technology that the press won't even cover yet because we all have to play stupid until trends emerge to report on otherwise billionaire defense contractors will send their figurative or possibly literal hit squads after us. We have to wait for the tumors to grow, the jaws to fall off before society will remember "maybe we shouldn't be slapping radioactive stuff all over ourselves so some wealthy white dude gets wealthier"
The future of ai is in small local models people pay 0 dollars to upgrade or use. Anything else is meritless exploitation and destruction. That's why the US will lose. Reality has a liberal bias. Tough pill for ai libertarians to swallow
We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario.
I love the cognitive dissonance.
Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?
Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.
And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life.
Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
Token cost started increasing exponentially for frontier LLMs, and they improved mostly on coding tasks incredibly over the last half year while staying behind in non-verifiable tasks.
The main social problem with automation in general was that less intelligent people have been left behind as only boring physical tasks are left for them to do, and people don't generally want to go back destroying their body from the prospects of an office job.
At some point frontier AI will only getting only worthwile to use for only super highly intelligent and motivated AI researchers which is a tiny part of the population.
> less intelligent people have been left behind
May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence.
I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs.
In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own.
People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.
Token cost or token demand?
Incredibly sad how many people have no concept of collective achievement, or an understanding of what technological progress buys all of humanity. It always comes at a cost, and it's the reason we aren't dying of starvation and plague in a cold winter field at the age of 45.
I guess cynicism is trendy.
Out of curiosity. How can you explain to a Gen z fresh graduate with 50k in student loans, 5 dollar gasoline (and rising), no healthcare, housing prices at an all time high, and competing with their entire age group for the honor of holding multiple minimum wage jobs that are below the survivability wage that they should feel a collective sense of achievement? UBI isn't coming and we have multiple individuals who own measurable percentages of all of the worlds wealth. Those same people are investing heavily in automating all work these young people could hope to provide while waxing poetic about changing laws and owning media companies with cold hard cash.
It's not an anomalous sense of cynicism, hundreds of thousands of people are looking at their options and feeling hopeless. I'm glad I am not in that camp. The reason I'm not is because I was born sooner than they were. I don't blame them at all, it's looking a lot like the generation after them is cannon fodder if things trend the way they are now.
This is actually a solid comment because ideally it would be the case. I think it's the opposite though. The problem with LLMs is they are marketed not as a collective achievement. They are at their heart a tool which should belong to collective humanity. We should all be getting dividends from them and they should be collectively owned. But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.
Of course no one sees it as a collective achievement when the announcements are aimed at either scaring people about how even the team behind them is worried about releasing it or for CEOs to replace workers.
Artemis II, at least in the states, was an example of people genuinely feeling collective achievement. There is absolutely no reason this AI moment couldn't be that. Instead though the companies involved have explicitly chosen fear and capital as their marketing tools. We should be seeing this as an incredible time but those involved do not want us to and plan to keep the spoils for themselves so we shouldn't.
Technology is not value-less. There is technology with good effects on society and technology with bad effects on society. I think very few people who are against, say, surveillance capitalism are against antibiotics.
It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI.
You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.
AI is fundamentally automation of labor, and to be opposed to AI instead of preparing our systems for a post-labor world is dangerously misguided - especially with historical context on what automation of labor has done for humanity.
They can still do gig works for training AI until AI replaces all the gig workers.
This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."
No one cares about GenZ or any others, the AI is for the billionaires.
Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.
Too big to fail. If big tech fails, America goes down with it so it will never happen. Other people will pay the price.
But Sam Altman told me that AI is about to replace most of the employees, so the data center GPUs will just be funding themselves.
This is AGI.
Care to explain?
> While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment.
Sell NVIDIA!!!
> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology...
31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".
Think about the anger toward Clippy. Now think about Clippy, but where feeding Clippy is a significant part of GDP, and there's a religious fervor around Clippy, especially among the older and wealthy.
That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.
It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.
I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.
Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.
"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.
But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.
There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.
> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"
Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.
> Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both.
Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill.
Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now.
* xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.
> Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit.
Where did you get this notion? Did you hallucinate it?