Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by frantathefranta 165 days ago
This is obviously anecdata but I was back home in Central Europe over Christmas and a staggering amount of people use ChatGPT (in public). Most usage I've seen was on public transit and in restaurants. My mom has replaced her Google usage with ChatGPT. Meanwhile in the US, my friend group makes it a point of pride to not use "AI" for anything, and 90% are not in tech. I had a feeling that us Americans are being forced to use Copilot/Gemini/whatever more than Europeans and have slightly more animosity towards it.
3 comments

It’s economic anxiety. The average American wants jobs to come back (look at the election data), and seeing AI shoehorned into every service is not an indicator that industry is going to start hiring lower level positions anytime soon.

The EU has strong worker protections and a robust social safety net. It’s not surprising to hear they are less antagonistic towards AI

EU has the same problems, and those 1-3 months of notice periods aren't helping that much when the whole world is in recession. Whole segments of IT are getting selectively laid off, like QAs for example, while LLMs are being shoved in everywhere.
One can use LLMs and at the same time dislike them and fear the long term consequences of mass proliferation. I sometimes use them, either to answer a multi-item question or to generate three paragraphs of business-speak spam if that is the only way. I don't like either of these things, spam especially. But even when LLMs are genuinely useful, it's only because normal search engines has failed me. Had they been more powerful, I wouldn't need to ask a random character generator.
It's not even that, everyone feels like it does not work well and its results are wonky/unreliable. I live in central Europe, for what it's worth.