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by customguy 6 days ago
What's the argument here? People don't like spit in their food, how many people can tell their food got spat in? Does that mean they're somehow wrong or to be belittled for not liking spit in their food?
1 comments

It's not an argument, it's an open question: do people who express a dislike of AI know when they see a poster that was generated with assistance from AI?
I meant to ask what the point of the question is basically. What would change, what would it matter for, if the answer was yes or no?

Besides it being so general a question to really be useless as anything but an insinuation IMO, which is why I'm trying to tease that insinuation out. E.g. are people who use Apple left-handed? Are they gay? The answer is "yes, some of them, of course, but also many aren't... why are you asking?"

There is no thing as "just a question, nothing in mind really". That does not exist. The mind that can ask a question cannot arrive at it in a vacuum.

OK, my point here is that a YouGov poll about people's attitude to AI may not tell us anything actionable about how people feel about AI posters - it depends on how good they are at detecting them.
So how would either answer inform any "action"?
I'm sure many/most don't know that specifically. But as a sibling poster pointed out, people do have a strong sense for "bullshit"--defined here as fairly crass and/or greedy, low-effort marketing or design. Plenty of people detected bullshit before (correctly or not). I suspect that they often detect it more often or more potently now, both as a result of more desperate non-AI marketing/UX and as a result of increasing corporate use of AI. When they identify bullshit, they're able to map that through the current zeitgeist to "this might be AI", or "I am going to call it AI because I don't like it".

I suspect this cohort is a lot larger than the cohort that directly, independently identifies "that was made with AI". But that's just, like, my opinion, man--take it with a grain.

If true, this phenomenon is conflating years of increasingly invasive/desperate marketing spends, widespread product enshittification, and AI usage, but is simultaneously a genuine indication of a big segment of people's distaste.

All that is separate from revealed preference--however disliked, both past and AI-generated-present marketing of the SALE SALE SALE BUY NOW OR YOU'RE INADEQUATE variety works on a lot of people. So whether "dislike of AI" translates into meaningful behavior changes is anyone's guess. But I think there is a phenomenon being identified here, whether or not it's just AI or something more nebulous.