It is not at all my experience working in local government (that is, in close contact with everybody else paying attention to local government) that non-tech people hate AI. It seems rather the opposite.
Managers everywhere love the idea of AI because it means they can replace expensive and inefficient human workers with cheap automation.
Among actual people (i.e. not managers) there seems to be a bit of a generation gap - my younger friends (Gen Z) are almost disturbingly enthusiastic about entrusting their every thought and action to ChatGPT; my older friends (young millennials and up) find it odious.
The median age of people working local politics is probably 55, and I've met more people (non-family, that is) over 70 doing this than in anything else, and all of them are (a) using AI for stuff and (b) psyched to see any new application of AI being put to use (for instance, a year or so ago, I used 4o to classify every minute spent in our village meetings according to broad subjects).
Or, drive through Worth and Bridgeview in IL, where all the middle eastern people in Chicago live, and notice all the AI billboards. Not billboards for AI, just, billboards obviously made with GenAI.
I think it's just not true that non-tech people are especially opposed to AI.
> The median age of people working local politics is probably 55, and I've met more people (non-family, that is) over 70 doing this than in anything else, and all of them are (a) using AI for stuff and (b) psyched to see any new application of AI being put to use
That seems more like a canary than anything. This is the demographic that doesn't even know which tech company they're talking to in congress. That's not the demographic in touch with tech. They have gotten more excited about even dumber stuff.
For people under 50, it's a wildly common insult to say something seems AI generated. They are disillusioned with the content slop filling the internet, the fact that 50% of the internet is bots, and their future job prospects.
The only people I've seen liking AI art, like fake cat videos, are people over 50. Not that they don't matter, but they are not the driver of what's popular or sustainable.
Mangers should realize that the thing AI might be best at is to replace them. Most of my managers don't understand the people they are managing and don't understand what the people they are managing are actually building. They job is to get a question from management that their reports can answer, format that answer for their boss and send the email. They job is to be the leader in a meeting to make sure it stays on track, not understand the content. AI can do all that shit without a problem.
I live in a medium-sized British town of 100,000 people or so. It may be a slightly more creative town than most — lots of arts and music and a really surprisingly cool music scene — but I can tell you that AI pleases (almost) nobody.
I think actually a lot about it is the sort of crass, unthinking, default-American-college-student manner about the way ChatGPT speaks. It's so American and we can feel it. But AI generated art and music is hugely unpopular, AI chatbots replacing real customer service is something we loathe.
Generally speaking I would say that AI feels like something that is being done to us by a handful of powerful Americans we profoundly distrust (and for good reason: they are untrustworthy and we can see through their bullshit).
I can tell you that this is so different to the way the internet was initially received even by older people. But again, perhaps this is in part due to our changing perspectives on America. It felt like an exciting thing to be part of, and it helped in the media that the Web was the brainchild of a British person (even if twenty years later that same media would have liked to pretend he wasn't at a European research institution when he did it).
The feeling about AI is more like the feeling we have about what the internet eventually did to our culture: destroying our high streets. We know what is coming will not be good for what makes us us.
I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a biased sample of people who don't really try to make productive use of AI.
I can imagine reasons why non-tech people in SF would hate all tech. I work in tech and living in the middle of that was a big part of why I was in such a hurry to get out of there.
Frankly, tech deserves its bad reputation in SF (and worldwide, really).
One look at the dystopian billboards bragging about trying to replace humans with AI should make any sane human angry at what tech has done. Or the rising rents due to an influx of people working on mostly useless AI startups, 90% of which won't be around in 5 years. Or even how poorly many in tech behave in public and how poorly they treat service workers. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and just in SF alone.
I say all this as someone living in SF and working in tech. As a whole, we've brought the hate upon ourselves, and we deserve it.
There's a long list of things that have "replaced" humans all the way back to the ox drawn plow. It's not sane to be angry at any of those steps along the way. GenAI will likely not be any different.
It is absolutely sane to be angry at people's livelihoods being destroyed and most aspects of life being worsened just so a handful of multi-billionaires that already control society can become even richer.
Non-technical people that I know have rapidly embraced it as "better google where i don't have to do as much work to answer questions." This is in a non-work context so i don't know how much those people are using it to do their day job writing emails or whatever. A lot of these people are tech-using boomers - they already adjusted to Google/the internet, they don't know how it works, they just are like "oh, the internet got even better."
There's maybe a slow trend towards "that's not true, you should know better than to trust AI for that sort of question" in discussions when someone says something like "I asked AI how [xyz was done]" but it's definitely not enough yet to keep anyone from going to it as their first option for answering a question.
Anyone involved in government procurement loves AI, irrespective of what it even is, for the simple fact that they get to pointedly ask every single tech vendor for evidence that they have "leveraged efficiency gains from AI" in the form of a lower bid.
At least, that's my wife's experience working on a contract with a state government at a big tech vendor.
EDIT: Removed part of my post that pissed people off for some reason. shrug
It makes a lot of sense that someone casually coming in to use chatgpt for 30 minutes a week doesn't have any reason to think more deeply about what using that tool 'means' or where it came from. Honestly, they shouldn't have to think about it.
Among actual people (i.e. not managers) there seems to be a bit of a generation gap - my younger friends (Gen Z) are almost disturbingly enthusiastic about entrusting their every thought and action to ChatGPT; my older friends (young millennials and up) find it odious.