[TechyLuddite]

The messaging around AI seems generally very negative to anyone without considerable capital. The idea it can complete lots of tasks that people do to pay their bills doesn't really encourage trust. The two extremes seem to be "it's a fad" or "it is exceptional and will put you out of a job". Neither encourages trust.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

The fact that there are a bunch of egomaniacs involved like Musk and Altman doesn't help either. The DeepMind guys (Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg) put a better face on it, but in the end they are all rushing to develop this ASAP and it's not at all obvious it'll be a net positive for society.

[nonrandomstring]

A lot has gone wrong with the public perception of "AI" in the last year. But who is to blame?

OpenAI touted themselves as a truly open, not for profit organisation and made big claims about the "good of all humanity" yet within a year shamelessly transformed into a closed, proprietary, for-profit organisation in bed wuth Microsoft.

Although models are merely reflections of training data put into them and are essentially a "mirror" held up to humanity, the rush to add "guardrails" and bury everything uncomfortable or distasteful rapidly twisted toward the censorial and political, yet simultaneously proved ineffective.

AI has been turned, in almost every place that it can be, not toward Intelligence Amplification (IA) to create new and interesting jobs, but into a direct replacement for human labour. Not even drudge work and bullshit jobs, but the few remaining things that people enjoy doing. This early taste of what the ruling classes would do with a more powerful or general AI has rightly raised people's hackles.

Overall I think that recent ML advances, and the hype around them, has provided a window of insight. It's exposed the intentions of the powerful, the inevitability of criminal application, the inefficacy of governments and legislators and the helplessness of the general population in the face of abusive technology.

The fact that it might be immensely useful, save lives, cure diseases and provide research insights into cheap energy has been kicked into the long grass by the greed and selfishness of the usual bunch of megalomaniacs.

The problem isn't that machine learning is an amazing and clever thing, but that humans just aren't ready for it and can't handle it.

[ImHereToVote]

The fundamental problem is that politicians are essentially impotent to the influence of NGO's. You can only have a democracy that is informed. NGO's break this fundamental principle. Which makes the hysteria about misinformation laughable. The threat is coming from inside the house.

[pjc50]

What does this mean? "NGO" covers absolutely every organization that isn't the government. Churches and bowling clubs count as NGOs as well as political organizations and labour unions. The only places without NGOs are totalitarian, because you can't do liberal democratic politics without NGOs.

> You can only have a democracy that is informed. NGO's break this fundamental principle.

Maybe you meant to write "for profit media" or "Fox News" or something there instead?

[ImHereToVote]

It isn't really a problem with profit. More like a problem of the commons. The Molochization of creating an informed society.

[nonrandomstring]

If you're saying that the commercial world has more to gain from telling lies than telling the truth, then yes I agree.

[ImHereToVote]

Absolutely.