[Closi]

> Not only is the populace primed to treat artificial intelligence tools as living peers, they’ve been trained to hate or dismiss anyone who doesn’t

This doesn’t meet my personal experience, but curious to hear if others see something different! The prevailing opinion in the UK at least seems to be that it’s some non-living magical tool assistant.

As this assumption seems to be the basis of the article, I’m not sure on its validity.

[palmotea]

I think the article makes a bit of a leap. The "priming" in the passage you're quoting is the depiction of robots in mass-media, cherry-picking the highly anthropomorphized hero-robots (e.g. WALL-E, Lt. Cmdr. Data, the good-guy Terminator in all the sequels).

I think it's an open question if that pre-LLM "priming" will survive actual contact with LLMs or if modern media depictions of robots will change in response.

[stvltvs]

The priming didn't prepare us to sympathize with robots that were built to plagiarize our art and literature and take our jobs.

Robocop is an interesting example where we sympathize with a cyborg but not the greedy corporate executives. Blade Runner has the same outlook. The Matrix and Ex Machina don't present AI as entirely sympathetic. Etc.

The priming has been a lot more nuanced than simply AI = sympathetic lifeform.

[Closi]

I mean the first point in the article was also:

> “Robots are actually more alive than we are” is a core belief in our society

I absolutely do not think this is a core belief - If anything, the core belief is that 'being a human is special' and that robot's aren't really alive in the same way, because they don't feel human emotion.